Gorges of Spirits. Inside the Tacet Field.
The Crownless knelt on the colorless earth, one arm gone, its pale body riddled with slash marks and fractures. The menace it had radiated at the start of the fight was a distant memory. It looked like a knight who'd lost everything but the armor on its back.
If anyone had been willing to listen, the Crownless had grievances to air.
Who could possibly understand? It had clawed its way back into existence, a second chance at life, only to run headlong into the same Rover who'd once charged in alone... well, alone plus one Sentinel, and carved its previous body into mincemeat.
This time, at least, the Sentinel wasn't at her side. And she'd clearly only just reawakened, operating at maybe a ten-thousandth of her peak. By all rights, this should have been winnable. A golden opportunity for revenge.
WIll I lose? Nah, I'd win.
And then reality happened.
No Sentinel, sure. But there was him instead. Two Rovers. Two of them.
Even weakened beyond measure, their coordination was tight enough to crew a spaceship through an asteroid field. In some ways, this duo was more terrifying than the original had ever been alone.
At first, the Crownless had managed to put up a fight. But the two of them had adapted to its patterns with horrifying speed, then flipped the script and started beating it into the ground.
And they hit every bit as hard as she always had.
Now they approached, step by measured step, moving in unison. Both raised an arm and wiped their blades clean against their sleeves in the same motion, eyes fixed on the Crownless without a flicker of mercy. The final blow was coming.
Despair clawed through the Crownless's shattered frame. Its body trembled. Instinct took over.
"Can't die. Can't lose...!"
Both Rovers leapt back at the same instant. The Crownless slammed its remaining fist into the ground and violet energy erupted outward, splitting the earth in every direction.
The attack didn't touch either of them.
That was never the point.
The Crownless ran.
"What?!"
All five of them stared in disbelief. Rover, the other Rover, Baizhi, Yangyang, Chixia, every one of them blindsided by the sight of an Overlord Class Tacet Discord turning tail and fleeing.
For the three girls, this shattered everything they'd been taught. Tacet Discords didn't run. That was doctrine. Instructors drilled it into every recruit: living creatures feel pain, feel fear, show openings when wounded. But Tacet Discords... those things don't have feelings like that. Composed of chaotic Frequency, they possessed nothing but the primal drive to devour other Frequencies, other lives. They'd keep coming until they were destroyed. They never stopped.
Yet the Crownless had stopped. And bolted.
"Are you kidding me? It runs?!"
Rover was equally floored. His knowledge of Tacet Discord biology might've been limited, but in the game, bosses never fled mid-fight. This was unprecedented.
Then it clicked.
The Crownless's lore entry described it as a high-tier Whisperin that had absorbed enormous quantities of human Frequency, developing excitement at the prospect of victory and dread at the thought of defeat. An Overlord Class creature that had learned to feel.
Already a Whisperin, already predisposed to mimicking humanity. And on top of that, it had acquired an emotion like fear.
Faced with the certainty of execution at two Rovers' hands, that fear had finally overridden everything else.
And it wasn't content to flee empty-handed.
"Must... replenish Frequency!"
Its body was on the verge of dissolution. The wounds the Rovers had inflicted were fatal. Even a clean escape would only delay the inevitable. It would scatter into nothing.
So the Crownless turned its gaze on Baizhi and the other two.
Instinct told it exactly what to do. Kill these three. Devour their Frequencies to patch itself together. Baizhi especially. A Resonator with healing abilities was practically a full-course meal for something this badly wounded.
"No!"
"It's coming this way!"
"Baizhi, watch out! You're the target!"
The barrier enclosing the Tacet Field dissolved as the Crownless dropped it. A dark violet lance materialized in its remaining hand, its point aimed squarely at Baizhi.
These three weren't Rovers. They couldn't match it. And at the speed its wings provided, the two Rovers could be the strongest fighters alive and still not close the gap in time.
One thrust. Kill the healer. Then the redhead and the girl in the blue hat. Absorb their Frequencies and disappear. Simple.
"Like hell you will!"
The snarl ripped out of him before he could think. If the Crownless slaughtered those three right in front of him, he'd never live it down.
The enemy had thrown out the playbook. Fine. So would he. Until now, both Rovers had been using their Resonance the way the game taught them: activate, deploy, wait for cooldown. But in this moment, with three lives hanging in the balance, something deeper stirred.
Understanding struck like lightning. His body moved on instinct.
The Temporal Mandate had already been used. The cooldown wasn't finished.
He activated it anyway.
Not to freeze time around a target. The opposite. He turned the power inward, accelerating his own personal timeline. A technique borrowed from a man in another life, a man who'd wanted nothing more than to be a hero of justice.
"Time alter... triple accel!"
One heartbeat, he was beside her. The next, he was gone.
Not vanished. Moving. Faster than the eye could follow.
A Rover's body was already built to withstand the impossible. Getting clipped by a motorcycle at highway speed would barely scuff the jacket. Now, with the Temporal Mandate pouring acceleration into every fiber, that explosive physicality tripled.
He closed the distance to the Crownless in an instant and planted himself between its lance and Baizhi with less than a breath to spare.
"What?!"
"I said... like hell you will."
A black silhouette, materialized from nowhere. One hand locked around the tip of the lance, halting the thrust cold. The Crownless felt as if it were staring at a ghost.
But what the creature felt was terror.
What Baizhi felt was something else entirely.
She stared at his back. Again. In the moment she'd been most certain death had found her, he'd appeared, placing himself between her and the pale reaper bearing down on her.
Something she couldn't name swelled in her chest.
Across from her, the Crownless had abandoned all thought of killing Baizhi or anyone else. Those golden eyes gripping its lance, blazing with murderous intent... the creature was done. Fear had won completely.
Wings spread. It would run again. Even without replenishing its Frequency, even knowing it meant dissolution, it had to get away from here. Now. Immediately.
Too late.
"Did you think you'd get a second chance?"
In the handful of seconds Rover had bought by holding the Crownless in place, the other Rover hadn't been idle. She'd watched his technique once and understood it completely. The Temporal Mandate surged through her own body, accelerating her timeline to match, and she closed the gap in a flash.
Resonance flooded the Originite: Type II. The blade blazed gold. She brought it down without hesitation and severed both wings.
"GAAAAAAH!"
Speed gone. Escape gone. And with them, the last thread of hope the Crownless had was gone aswell.
The two Rovers raised their swords together, one in front and one behind, and delivered the killing blow. Both blades punched through the Crownless's chest from opposite sides.
Its body dissolved into a golden shimmer.
"Whew. Dropped an Echo. That's a wrap." He sheathed his sword, watching the fading light with a long exhale.
"Mm. And a little something extra." She knelt and picked up what had fallen to the ground: a palm-sized Whisperin Core.
Loot acquired.
The Overlord Class Tacet Discord, the Crownless, had been defeated.
The tension drained from both of them at once. They turned to each other, and every trace of the cold killing focus they'd worn through the fight was gone, replaced by warmth, admiration, and absolute trust. The same words left their lips at the same time.
"I'm glad you were here."
Having a teammate this good was one of the greatest strokes of luck in any lifetime.
Having one this good? That was a once-in-three-lifetimes miracle.