The Cerberus hadn't moved.
All three heads remained low, resting — if something like this rested — their chins angled toward the basin floor, six eyes on each skull closed or nearly so, the slow pulse of the crimson veins across its body the only indication that anything inside it was still running. The lava channels around the basin edge threw heat in long, shimmering waves across the rock, distorting the air between Draven and the creature. The crimson crystals embedded in the surrounding rock glowed steadily in the lava light, some of them clustered in dense formations along the basin walls, others jutting from the floor in isolated spires at irregular intervals throughout the open ground.
He stood at the basin's edge and studied the terrain the way his old captain had taught him to study every battlefield — not the enemy first, but the ground. Where the lava channels ran, where the rock was solid and where the crystal formations broke it into uneven footing, which directions offered lateral movement and which ended at a channel's edge. He mapped it in thirty seconds and filed it away.
Then he looked at the Cerberus properly.
Three heads. Each neck long enough that the heads could operate with significant independence — different angles, different targets, overlapping fields without interfering with each other. The crystal formations in the mane ran heaviest along the first neck, dense and sharp. The second neck's veins pulsed differently from the others, the mana current inside them cycling in a slower, broader rhythm that resonated with the lava channels in a way he could feel through his Mana Sense even from here. The third neck was the thinnest of the three but the most saturated with corruption, the crimson veins beneath the black hide burning brightest, and where it rested its chin on the basin floor, spider lilies had grown in a ring around the contact point — drawn there, he realized, the way iron filings are drawn to a lodestone.
He understood then that whatever this creature had been before the dungeon's corruption found it, it had been inside long enough that the corruption had specialized. Each head had taken a different aspect of what the dungeon offered and made it its own.
Three threats, he thought. Manage them separately or they'll kill you together.
His mana sat at eleven. His right forearm had an arrow hole through it. His left forearm was wrapped in soaked cloth. His rib made itself known every time he breathed too deeply.
He stepped into the basin.
The first head woke before his second footfall landed.
Its six eyes opened in sequence — top pair, middle pair, bottom pair — each one igniting from the center outward like a coal catching light. The other two heads followed immediately, and the sound the Cerberus made as it rose from its resting position was not a roar. It was deeper than that, a resonance that he felt in his sternum and in the rock beneath his feet simultaneously, the sound of something enormous recalibrating its attention.
All three heads oriented toward him.
He activated the First Technique immediately — mana into the blade, edge sharpened, bleeding effect primed. He had eleven mana. He would spend it like it was his last coin and get full value from every point.
The first head moved first.
The crystal formations in its mane flared simultaneously, and the spires along the basin floor answered — a sympathetic resonance running through the crimson crystals embedded in the rock, the whole network lighting up in a single bright pulse. Then the projectiles came. Not one. Not a handful. A volley — dozens of crystal shards launching from the mane formations in a tight, radiating spread, their trajectories flat and fast, covering the space between them in less than a second.
He triggered the Fourth Technique.
The triangular dash burned three mana points and carried him out of the volley's path entirely, the crystals hitting the rock where he'd stood and shattering against it in bursts of corrupted red light. He landed at a different angle to the creature and immediately read the first head's next charge — the mane crystals were rebuilding, pulling mana from the network in the floor, the recharge interval roughly twelve seconds.
Twelve seconds. Remember that.
The second head had been building while the first attacked. He felt the mana shift before he saw the result — the lava channel nearest him lurching, its flow reversing against its own current, the viscous red liquid rising slightly at the banks as something redirected the pressure from below. Then a tendril of lava arced upward from the channel's surface — not a splash, not a natural movement, but a controlled extension, whip-like, curling toward him with deliberate aim.
He moved laterally, staying on solid rock, and the lava tendril crashed down where he'd been and spread across the basin floor in a cooling sheet that cut off one of his retreat angles. He noted the new geography and adjusted.
It's rewriting the terrain, he thought. Every attack changes the ground.
The third head lowered itself toward the spider lilies ringing the basin edge, and he saw what it was doing a half-second before it happened — the six eyes fixing on him, the mouth opening, and a fine cloud of pale crimson pollen releasing in a slow, billowing wave that the heat currents in the biome caught and pushed directly toward him.
He held his position and let it reach him.
The pollen settled across his skin, his clothing, his exposed wounds. He felt it arrive the way you feel dust arrive — present, physical, real. And then nothing else. No burn, no creeping paralysis, no wrongness spreading through his blood. His Blessing of God absorbed it without effort, the passive immunity processing the corrupted biological agent and discarding it before it could find purchase.
He almost laughed.
The pollen does nothing.
But he filed the realization carefully rather than celebrating it, because the third head was already moving to its second ability, and that one he couldn't ignore. The spider lilies at the basin's edge — the ring of them around the Cerberus's former resting spot, the clusters growing between the crystal spires, the sparse blooms pushing through cracks in the volcanic rock — all of them responded simultaneously to whatever the third head was channeling. The stems thickened and darkened, the petals hardening into something more like chitin than flower tissue, and from beneath the blooms, spikes erupted — long, sharp, fast — driving upward through the rock, and simultaneously, vines whipped outward from the lily clusters in flat, seeking arcs, moving toward him with a speed that had nothing to do with plant growth and everything to do with the mana driving them.
He used the Third Technique.
The sword planted in the rock, the vault carrying him up and over the first wave of vines, and at the apex of the spin he came down with the grounding strike onto the nearest crystal spire — not the Cerberus, but the spire, shattering it. The corrupted mana stored inside it discharged on impact, a burst of red energy that destabilized the vine network rooted near it, the third head's control over that section stuttering and loosening.
The crystals in the rock are connected to the network, he thought. Break them and you disrupt the third head's reach.
He filed that and kept moving, because all three heads were operating now simultaneously and the basin had become a problem of geometry — crystal volleys from the first, lava tendrils from the second, vines and spikes from the third, each attack covering different spatial layers and forcing him into movement patterns that one of the others was always positioned to exploit. He took the first serious hit four minutes in: a lava tendril that he read correctly but couldn't fully clear, the outer edge of it catching his left shoulder and opening a burn across the top of his arm that he felt immediately and comprehensively.
He kept moving. Assessed the damage while running. Superficial — deep enough to hurt, not deep enough to cost him the arm.
Still standing.
The pattern began to clarify through the chaos. The first head's twelve-second recharge was the metronome — he could orient every other threat around it. During the recharge phase, the second head grew more aggressive, the lava manipulation more complex, longer tendrils and wider redirects. During the volley phase, the third head pulled back slightly, conserving the mana it needed to maintain the vine network. They were coordinated. Not perfectly — there were seams between the coordination, brief windows where one head's attack cycle ended before another's began.
He needed mana to exploit those windows. He had eight points left.
He started breaking crystals.
Not randomly — deliberately, targeting the formations that the third head was drawing from most heavily, disrupting its vine network section by section, forcing it to either redraw from further formations or reduce the density of what it maintained. Each crystal spire he shattered with the Third Technique's grounding strike discharged its stored energy, and he began taking the discharge deliberately — letting the corrupted mana pulse wash over him, his Blessing absorbing the magical component while the raw kinetic force of it still knocked him back and cost him footing. A calculated exchange. The vine network thinned. The third head's control became patchier, the spikes slower, the vines reaching from fewer anchor points.
He also began bleeding the Cerberus.
Not deeply — his access to the body was limited while managing three heads — but consistently. The First Technique's bleeding effect stacked with every cut he landed, and he was landing cuts during the seam windows between attack cycles, darting inside the first head's reach during its recharge phase to open a line across the muzzle or the neck before the crystal volley rebuilt. Small cuts. Many of them. The bleed accumulated.
Six mana left. Five. Four.
The Cerberus was bleeding from eleven separate wounds. Its coordination was starting to show the strain — the seam windows widening slightly, the attack cycle timing drifting. Not much. But enough to read.
The second head sent a lava tendril that he misjudged — he'd become too focused on the third head's vine positions and read the arc wrong. It caught him across the right thigh, not the outer edge this time but the full contact, the heat searing through his trousers and into the muscle beneath. He hit the rock on one knee, the leg refusing his command for two full seconds.
Get up.
He got up.
Three mana left. The Cerberus's bleeding wounds were multiplying the cost of its own coordination — he could see it in the way the mana cycled through the veins on its body, the flow less clean than before, more effortful. The second head's lava manipulation was drawing harder on its reserves, the tendrils slightly less controlled. The first head's volley density had dropped — fewer crystals per discharge, the mane formations not fully rebuilding between cycles.
He stopped managing the fight and started ending it.
The Third Technique, twice in rapid succession — the first vaulting him over a vine sweep, the grounding strike landing on the rock beside the Cerberus's front left leg, shattering the crystal formation there and disrupting the final vine anchor in the basin center. The second planting the sword directly into the joint between the first head's neck and the body, the grounding strike's force driving the blade deep into the corrupted flesh, the First Technique's bleeding effect igniting immediately in the wound.
The first head screamed.
All three mouths opened, and what came out of them was fire — not individually, not in sequence, but simultaneously, a reflexive combined discharge that lit the entire basin in an instant of pure white-red that bleached all other color from the world. He was already moving, burning the last two mana points in a Fourth Technique dash that carried him out of the fire's radius in a straight desperate line, the heat of it reaching him even at distance, the rock behind him glowing orange where it had passed.
He hit the basin wall and stayed there for a moment, chest heaving, mana at zero, and assessed.
The first head was compromised — the sword wound in its neck had opened further during the fire breath, the bleeding effect visible now as a slow, dark seeping through the corrupted hide. Its crystal volleys had stopped entirely. The second head was still functional but slower, the lava channels around the basin barely moving now, the manipulation too mana-expensive to sustain. The third head's lily network was largely dismantled, only a few isolated blooms still responding to its control.
No mana. Two burns, one of them serious. Arrow wound. Cracked rib. Both original forearm wounds reopened.
One sword.
He crossed the basin on foot — not a dash, not a technique, just running, because running was what he had left — and the Cerberus turned all three heads toward him and he was already inside their reach. He went under the second head's snap and drove the sword upward through the soft tissue beneath its jaw. He pulled it clear and rolled under the third head's descending weight, came up beside the first head's compromised neck, and drove the blade into the existing wound with both hands and every remaining gram of strength in his body.
The first head went still.
The second head's mana signature collapsed a moment later — the lava in the channels around the basin dropping back to their natural levels without the manipulation sustaining them, the surface tension releasing all at once. The third head lasted another thirty seconds, the spider lilies in the basin wilting and darkening as the mana driving them withdrew, the final vine dissolving before it fully formed.
Then the Cerberus fell.
The impact of it hitting the basin floor sent a shockwave through the rock that knocked him off his feet. He landed on his back and stayed there, staring upward at the enormous dark ceiling of the cavern he could not see, breathing in slow, deliberate pulls, his right thigh burning, his left shoulder burning, his hands shaking with the particular tremor that came after the adrenaline finished its work and left nothing behind it.
The lava channels flowed quietly in the dark. The crimson crystals in the rock pulsed on, indifferent. Somewhere above him, through hundreds of feet of stone and forest and corrupted passages, the garrison at Ashveil was sleeping.
He lay on the volcanic rock for a long time.
Then the blue light arrived, and he let it.
[LEVEL UP — LEVEL UP — LEVEL UP]
[Name: Draven Whitlock]
[Class: Unknown][Title: "Reborner"]
[Level: 28][Rank: S]
[HP: 8/95][Mana: 0/110]
[Strength: 71] ▲[Agility: 74] ▲[Intelligence: 40][Vitality: 55 (+27)][Magic Power: 45] ▲[Sense: 63] ▲
[New ability gained: Burning Will]
[Burning Will] — When HP falls below 10%, all stats increase by 20% for 60 seconds. Cooldown: 24 hours.
He dismissed the window.
HP at 8 out of 95. He hadn't even noticed crossing the threshold during the fight. Burning Will had activated somewhere in the final minute — he couldn't pinpoint when, only that there had been a moment where his legs had stopped failing him and his grip had stopped loosening, and now he understood why.
He sat up slowly.
Beyond the Cerberus's body, on the far side of the basin, the passage continued. One passage — not the maze of thousands from the forest chamber above, but a single opening in the volcanic rock, narrow and tall, the crimson veins along its walls burning brighter than anything else in the biome. The corrupted mana pouring from it registered even through his depleted Mana Sense as something beyond what the rest of the dungeon had produced.
Whatever the dungeon had been built around was through there.