The air grew heavy, thick with the stench of decay and overheated parasites. The Flesh Puppet, a grotesque tapestry of stolen limbs and torsos, lumbered towards us. Its movements were jerky and unnatural, yet it covered ground with unnerving speed.
"This is not a standard floor boss," Valen hissed, his body coiled like a spring. "The system shouldn't have spawned a Guardian-class puppet on a low-level floor."
"The system thinks I'm an SS-Rank threat,"
I stated, my mind racing, parsing terabytes of observational data. "It has adjusted the threat assessment accordingly. This is a direct response to my presence."
The puppet's stolen vocal cords mimicked the last words of its victims, creating a horrifying symphony of pleas and screams. It was adaptive, learning from its previous victims' combat patterns. Rika learned this the hard way when she launched a fireball, and the creature contorted its body into a shape that perfectly dissipated the heat, a maneuver it must have learned from another fire-type Hunter.
"Conventional attacks are inefficient," I called out, sidestepping a lashing limb made of three arms fused at the elbow. "It anticipates. The weakness is unpredictability."
"And what's your genius plan for that?" Rika shot back, dodging a spray of acidic fluid.
"You will be the distraction. Valen will be the weapon. I will be the guide."
My brain was already mapping the creature's attack vectors, predicting its movements down to the microsecond. "Rika, attack its left knee. You will miss. It will counter with a downward slam using its heaviest appendage. Valen, the moment it commits to that motion, its primary parasite cluster will be exposed on its upper back for exactly 0.8 seconds. That's your window."
They exchanged a look of disbelief, but the creature was upon them. Rika, trusting the bizarrely specific instruction, launched a fiery kick. As predicted, the puppet twisted away with contemptuous ease and raised a massive, fleshy hammer-arm to crush her.
In that instant, Valen became a silver streak. He used the puppet's own rising arm as a ramp, his blades flashing. He was aiming for the cluster of pulsating, glowing parasites on its back.
But the tower had other plans.
Just as Valen's blades were about to strike, the very air around me shimmered. A wave of force, a glitch in the floor's reality, washed over us. It felt like my atoms were being pulled apart and reassembled. For a horrifying second, the skin on my hand turned a slick, iridescent grey, and my fingers elongated into thin, alien digits. The change was gone as quickly as it came, but Rika saw it. Her eyes widened, her focus broken for a critical moment.
The Flesh Puppet, detecting the hesitation, altered its attack, swatting Valen out of the air. He crashed into a crystal tree with a sickening crunch.
"Valen!" Rika screamed.
The puppet turned its full attention to her. It was too fast, too close. It had learned her patterns. She was going to die.
Suddenly, a small, green-skinned creature with wide, terrified eyes scrambled out from behind a pile of rubble. It held a discarded piece of sharpened metal like a dagger. A goblin, barely F-Rank. A scavenger.
"Hey! Ugly!" the goblin squeaked, waving its makeshift blade.
The Flesh Puppet, momentarily distracted by the new target, swiped at the goblin. It was a half-hearted, dismissive attack. But it was the opening we needed. While the monster's attention was diverted, I did the only unpredictable thing I could: I ran. Not away, but directly toward it, grabbing a shard of glass from the ground.
My fragile body screamed in protest, but my logic was sound. The puppet was programmed to counter Hunter tactics. It wasn't programmed for a non-powered entity attempting a suicidal charge.
My feint drew its attention back for a split second, long enough for the goblin to do something utterly illogical. Instead of running, it scurried past the monster's legs and threw itself in front of the injured Valen, spreading its spindly arms wide as if to shield him.
Rika, seeing her chance, unleashed a desperate, point-blank explosion of fire, not at the creature's body, but at the ground beneath it. The crystalline floor superheated and shattered, sending the unstable puppet crashing to its knees. Before it could recover, I was there, plunging the glass shard into the now-exposed parasite cluster.
The creature shuddered, a final, collective scream escaping its many mouths before it collapsed into a pile of inert flesh and metal.
Silence returned to the floor. Rika rushed to Valen's side, who was groaning but conscious. I stood, my breath ragged, my body aching. But my attention was on the small green creature that was now shakily getting to its feet. It looked from the fallen monster to Valen, then to me, its large, black eyes filled with a desperate, hopeful query.
"Did I… friend right?"
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