Chương 26: The Dungeon Boss: A Copier of Curses

At the center of the raging spatial storm, the Void Weaver rose more than twenty meters tall. Its body was a dense, ever-shifting mass of shadow. Hundreds of silver crystal tentacles coiled around it, their surfaces smooth as mirrors, throwing back warped, fractured reflections of Lucian and Sylvia. A massive eye split open at the top of its form, radiating a cold silver light that froze the mana currents around it in place. A suffocating pressure bore down on the entire hall. The System v2.

0 warning panel flared up, its edges pulsing red without pause. [NATIONAL-LEVEL THREAT ALERT: INVERTED VOID WEAVER (RANK B).] [Combat Power: 32, 500, 000] [Recommendation: Evacuate the combat zone.] [Updated recommendation: Run. Fast.] Thirty-two and a half million. The stone floor beneath them shuddered violently. Spatial fractures spread out from the abyss below — the dungeon had entered collapse, its core seal broken. Lucian ran the mental clock.

He had less than two minutes before this entire chamber ground itself into spatial dust. Three hundred thousand gold's worth of ancient books, safely tucked in his ring — if he died here, that fortune went with him. Total bankruptcy.

"Master, be careful!" Sylvia grabbed Lucian's sleeve, her voice cracking with urgency.

"This is an ancient spatial weaving construct! Its core defense mechanism is an Absolute Mirror! It's programmed to automatically copy and re-cast whatever spell drained the most mana from its opponent, at double the power! Do not use a forbidden art — if you unleash a great spell, it will use that exact same technique to crush us!" Lucian looked up at the towering boss, eyes narrowing.

"It copies whichever of my spells burns the most mana?"

"Exactly!" Sylvia nodded frantically.

"It doesn't measure power by raw destructive force — mana expenditure is the only metric it registers."

"And it pours all its own mana into recasting that spell at double scale?"

"Precisely that!" Lucian's mouth slowly curved into a smile. A pure, entirely fearless smile — one that made Sylvia's spine crawl involuntarily.

"Perfect," Lucian said, stepping forward calmly, standing face to face with the boss's hundreds of reflecting eyes.

"Let me teach this machine a lesson in the risks of copying garbage code off the internet." The Inverted Void Weaver raised its hundreds of tentacles high, spatial mana condensing around its body into razor-sharp blades, ready to react to any surge of energy the instant it appeared. Lucian drew a deep breath. He spread his arms wide, puffed out his chest, and tilted his head up toward the endless void above.

In a voice thick with tragic flourish, dripping with the melodrama of a two-bit stage play, Lucian began chanting in High Elvish.

"O flame born of a lone soul's deepest agony! Blaze through the night of betrayal, and turn my spirit to ash that lights the path of salvation!" Behind him, Sylvia's jaw dropped, her ears standing bolt upright in shock. What horrifying poetry is this?! It was the technique Lucian had made up at seven years old, in Volume One of his garbage novel:'The Fire Dragon Blazing in the Darkness of Sorrow.' Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

A spell designed with such needlessly bloated grammar it burned ninety percent of the caster's total mana pool just to sustain a bit of sparkly light — and whose actual damage output was... weaker than a struck match. Lucian poured a full 350, 000 mana points straight into the incantation. Whoosh! His mana reserves plummeted off a cliff.

At the tip of Lucian's index finger, after a barrage of gaudy fake lightning and the roar of an imaginary dragon, a single spark of orange flame — the size of a pea — puffed to life. A faint breeze drifted up from the abyss. The spark went out. Sylvia: "..." The entire tomb chamber fell into exactly one second of dead silence. The instant Lucian's spark died, the Inverted Void Weaver's massive eye flared to blinding brightness. Its ancient magical processor registered the trigger instantly.

[Spell detected: consumed 90% of opponent's total energy reserve!] [Mechanism triggered: Absolute Mirror!] [Automatically copying and recasting at 200% of own mana capacity!] BOOM! All thirty-two and a half million points of the boss's mana drained out in an instant. Space around its twenty-meter frame erupted with thousands of silver lightning bolts, its tentacles thrashing wildly, a thunderous roar echoing through the dungeon as if it were about to flatten half the continent. One second passed.

Two seconds passed. Three seconds passed. At the tip of the boss's largest tentacle, a tiny flame, the size of a ping-pong ball, sputtered to life. Puff. The flame died out in a wisp of smoke. And that was it. Thirty-two and a half million mana — enough raw power to level a corner of a kingdom — had just been burned to nothing, all to light up a ping-pong-ball-sized flame for three-tenths of a second. [SYSTEM ALERT: TOTAL MANA BURNOUT (100%).] [TARGET LOCKED IN COMPLETE PARALYSIS FOR 60 SECONDS.] The Inverted Void Weaver froze solid in midair. Its hundreds of silver crystal eyes flickered erratically, like a monitor losing power. Its colossal twenty-meter frame stiffened, lost its grip on reversed gravity entirely, and crashed straight down onto the stone floor like a collapsing tower. BOOM! Dust exploded across the hall. The national-tier boss lay face-down and motionless, its tentacles gone slack as wet rags, not a single one twitching.

Lucian calmly drew the silver dagger from his hip and walked, step by unhurried step, toward the creature's head. He raised the blade, aimed it squarely at its dazed crystal eye socket, and drove it down in one decisive strike. Crack! The central energy core shattered. The Inverted Void Weaver's massive form disintegrated into millions of drifting motes of dark violet dust, swept up in a swirling wind before vanishing entirely into the void. Combat duration: twelve seconds. Stamina consumed: zero.

Behind him, Sylvia stared at the empty floor where a thirty-two-million-combat-power boss had just ceased to exist. Then she looked at Lucian. Then at the tiny dead flame still fading from the air.

"You weaponized a bad spell." Lucian sheathed his dagger.

"Technically, the boss weaponized it. I merely supplied the bad investment." Sylvia slowly covered her face with one hand.

"My ancestors built a national-tier guardian that just died to mana-budget fraud."

"Then today was educational for everyone." Ting! Ting! Ting! A blinding surge of golden light burst across his entire field of vision. The System v2. 0 panel materialized at a scale he'd never seen before. [BOSS DEFEATED: INVERTED VOID WEAVER (RANK B).] [FIRST CLEAR ACHIEVED: VAEL-KHARAS DUNGEON (RANK C — MONSTER)!] [SPECIAL CONDITION MET: DEFEATED A TARGET FAR ABOVE HOST'S COMBAT RATING!] [SELECT ONE OF THREE FIRST-CLEAR REWARDS:] OPTION A: Physical Strength ×3 (Stable growth).

OPTION B: Mana ×3 (Capacity growth). OPTION C: EXTREME RANDOM VOLATILITY REWARD (Range: ×0. 1 to STAT²)! Lucian stared at the final line. His dark eyes lit up bright, as if he'd just spotted a bet with unlimited expected returns.