She didn't argue further. Her jaw clenched, but she stepped back, turning to face the defenders who needed her.
Jonah vaulted the Line B fortifications.
The drop was twelve feet. He landed hard, rolling to absorb impact, and came up with his blade ready. The killing ground stretched before him, corpses and scorched earth and the massive shape of the Warboss standing in the crater it had created.
The creature turned to face him. Yellow eyes studied this single human who'd emerged from the fortifications. The Warboss's expression shifted from predatory satisfaction to something approaching curiosity. A lone fighter approaching when the smart choice was obviously to hide. It considered him nothing more than interesting prey.
Jonah walked toward it.
He could feel the call of mana within the air–a remnant feeling of what had been the strongest archmage humanity had ever given birth to. It rumbled and cracked as he prepared for the battle.
It would not be easy, but he had a plan and a single opportunity with how weak his body was currently. He could not handle more than one attempt to truly kill it.
His Mana Blade hummed with energy he couldn't afford to waste.
Behind him, he heard the ripple of reaction from the defenders. Whispers spreading, eyes finding him, and fingers pointing. The man who'd led them through three waves now walking alone toward the monster that had just killed four fighters in seconds.
The Warboss grinned.
It was an ugly expression on an ugly face. Too many teeth, all of them sharp, arranged in a mockery of human amusement, and covered in rot and filth. The creature hefted its club, testing the weight and preparing for another devastating strike.
Jonah stopped fifty meters from the Warboss, close enough to see the intelligence in those yellow eyes, and far enough that he had a few seconds to react when it moved.
He raised his voice, letting it carry across the battlefield. "You think you've won."
The Warboss tilted its head, looking down its chin at him in a show of superiority. Whether it understood the words or just the tone, something in the statement caught its attention.
"You think crushing a few people makes you powerful, makes you unstoppable." Jonah's blade came up, pointed at the creature's chest. He could feel his anger boiling at John’s death. This thing had killed a member of his team. The first death within days of the system arrival out of the tutorial. It felt like a failure on his part to have suffered such a thing when he was so focused on keeping as many people alive as possible. "You're wrong–"
It's grin widened. The Warboss took a step forward.
"–I've faced things that make you nothing more than an insect. Creatures that could destroy this entire floor alone without breaking a sweat. Armies that blotted out the sky. You're nothing. A minor obstacle for humanity to learn clear and obvious lessons."
All of his words were truth from a future that would never happen the same way. Jonah refused to allow it to end up the same way.
The Warboss roared.
The sound pressed against Jonah like physical force. His ears rang. His teeth ached. The Danger Sense from his trait screamed warning as the creature's muscles tensed.
He moved. Circling around it. His footwork carried him away from the direct line of attack as the Warboss lunged. The massive club swept through the space he'd occupied, close enough that he felt the wind of its passage.
The Warboss was fast.
Faster than something that size had any right to be. But Jonah had fought fast before and had developed instincts for reading attacks that telegraphed through weight shifts and muscle movements. The tell was always in the shoulders and hips.
He circled around it as he dodged attack after attack.
The Warboss tracked him, club resetting for another strike. Its eyes showed calculation now, reassessing this human who'd avoided so many attacks. Interesting prey becoming concerning prey.
Jonah pressed the advantage.
His Mana Blade lashed out, not at the creature's center mass but at its hands. The energy-enhanced edge scored a line across green knuckles and down its wrist, drawing blood that steamed in the corrupted air.
The Warboss roared and tried to squash him. The next attack was faster.
A combination strike of club sweeping low to force a jump, then reversing high to catch him in the air. Standard anti-evasion pattern, something the creature had used before against faster opponents.
Jonah didn't jump.
He dropped flat against the scorched earth, the low sweep passing over him, then rolled as the high reverse came down, the club cratering the ground where he'd been lying.
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Jonah jumped back on his feet as he continued to kite it. Another strike at the creature's fingers, this one deeper, drawing a curse in the guttural goblin tongue and severing three of its digits.
Once he was sure it could no longer dodge or fight back, then he could risk it all. If he died, so did everyone behind him.
On the other hand, he needed vengeance for John. What he was about to cast would not be pleasant.
He knew him little, but they had fought shoulder to shoulder and survived.
The battle behind him had resumed. He could hear the sounds of combat. The defenders were shouting as they clashed against the goblin forces.
But the Warboss wasn't looking at Line B anymore. Its entire attention was fixed on the human who'd drawn its blood.
Good. Its passive skills are being disconnected from the main army to help itself.
The creature changed tactics. Instead of massive swings, it started using shorter, faster strikes. Jabs with the club's end and sweeping kicks that its bulk made devastating. Grabs with its free hand could crush armor like paper.
Jonah adapted as well.
He had faced thousands of different tactics and styles.
One thing stood out between everything else. At the end of the day, nothing could beat overwhelming power. He had learned that the hard way after the WyrmKin taught him that painful lesson. Jonah was saving his true capabilities for the end.
His Footwork: Evasive skill worked overtime, finding angles that let him slip attacks by centimeters. His Combat Meditation kept his mind clear despite the terror of facing something so far beyond his capabilities. His Tactical Assessment fed him information about the creature's patterns, identifying tells that preceded specific attacks. The rest of his skills worked overtime to keep him alive as the Warboss pushed to catch him slipping.
Jonah kept kiting it.
The Warboss's frustration grew.
Its attacks became more aggressive and less precise. The creature was used to quick crushing opponents and dominance through overwhelming force. This dancing human who wouldn't stand still was infuriating.
Jonah kept scoring minor wounds to fatigue it.
"Getting tired? Disappointed that I won't just roll over?" Jonah said.
The Warboss roared again and charged. Full commitment without an ounce of technique. Just mass and rage and the desperate need to crush this annoying insect.
Jonah retreated.
Even if he was far more skilled and experienced than it, that thing was still a tier 4 monster to his tier 1. It could crush him with a single attack, and he would not be capable of doing anything to stop it. He used his agility and dexterity advantage to circle wide, forcing the Warboss to pivot and keeping it turning instead of advancing. Every second the creature spent chasing him was a second it wasn't attacking the walls.
More importantly, it was wasting its energy.
Jonah would kill it and shed some light on his real power when the perfect opportunity arose. Letting luck play a factor was not something he intended on doing.
The goblins still fighting at Line B began to falter.
Without their Warboss's presence and the moral boost of watching it crush humans, the assault lost momentum. Elite hobgoblins who'd been pressing hard started taking casualties they couldn't afford. Fodder goblins who'd been emboldened by their leader's advance began to hesitate.
Jonah saw it happening in his peripheral vision. The battle was turning, but not won.
Just a little longer. Keep it focused. Keep it angry.
The Warboss finally stopped chasing and dropped, chest heaving and covered in sweat. It had changed hands and held the club with its weak hand. The primary hand did not have any fingers left after he had been targeting it the entire time.
Jonah had turned it into a club.
"Tired, are we?" He stopped before it.
The Warboss's shoulders rose up and down in exaggerated motions.
Jonah stood just outside its reach, watching the creature struggle to recover. Blood dripped from a dozen minor wounds across its hands and arms. Three fingers on its secondary hand were gone, severed by precise strikes during their dance. The club now rested in its weaker grip, its devastating potential diminished.
Now is the perfect chance.
He reached deep into his mana core.
Not for Mana Blade, nor any of the basic techniques his Spellsword class had granted him, but for something far greater than anything this pathetic thing would have ever witnessed. Something that shouldn't exist in a Level 5 fighter's repertoire.
The spell matrix materialized in his mind with perfect clarity: Poliva's Touch. A Tier 3 death-attuned lightning spell he'd learned on Level 8 of his previous life. The technique had been a gift from a dying Necromancer who'd recognized Jonah's potential, a secret passed between desperate allies in the aftermath of a battle that had cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
An event on scales far larger than this little pocket could imagine.
He shouldn't have been able to cast it. His mana capacity was a fraction of what the spell demanded. His channels weren't developed enough to handle the energy throughput. His core lacked the density to stabilize the death attunement. Not even his class should have allowed a skill this far down the mage classes. Nothing about him should have made it possible.
None of that mattered though.
Knowledge trumped limitations. He heard the system screech and error notifications appeared in his peripheral. He ignored them.
Jonah began constructing the matrix from nothing but mana, relying on nothing but his own memory. Energy gathered in his palm, crackling with potential that made his arm shake. The spell's core structure was complex, layers of intent woven through channels that screamed in protest as power forced through pathways too narrow to contain it. All within seconds.
His meridians burned as it came to life.
The sensation was familiar from his first life, the grinding pain of pushing beyond safe limits. But this was worse. His current body had none of the conditioning or the necessary reinforcements he would build in due time, none of the accumulated tolerance for magical stress either.
Every second he held the spell felt like glass shards scraping through his veins.
Lightning screamed in his hand. Not normal lightning either, it was darker and malevolent—death personified. The bolts that crackled between his fingers carried a sickly purple-black tinge, death energy woven through electrical discharge. Where normal lightning burned, Poliva's Touch consumed.
It ate life force and drained vitality, leaving nothing but withered husks in its wake.
Jonah's knee buckled.
He dropped, one hand bracing against scorched earth, the other still raised with the spell building toward critical mass. Blood vessels in his eyes burst from the strain. His vision blurred red at the edges. His mana core pulsed erratically, struggling to maintain stability under demands it was never designed to handle.
The Warboss saw him fall.
The creature's exhaustion vanished, replaced by predatory recognition. Weakness. Finally, weakness. The annoying human who'd danced around its attacks had overreached, had tried something beyond its capabilities, and was now vulnerable.
The Warboss charged.
Its footsteps shook the ground. The club rose, held awkwardly in its damaged grip but still more than enough to crush a kneeling human into paste. Yellow eyes blazed with triumph. The roar that erupted from its throat was victory made sound.
Jonah looked up through blood-hazed vision.
The creature was close now.
Ten meters.
Eight.
Six.
The club began its descent, the killing blow that would end this annoying resistance and break human morale forever.
Jonah released the spell.
12
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