Chương 131: Stream Hostage

The third attempt started with Meno treating the Prisoner like solved information. The chains broke, [Escape] appeared, and he was already halfway through his first Desync launch before the ruined priest had properly stood up. No more looking at it. Immune body, instant-kill heart smoke, and every second wasted at the bottom stolen from the timer upstairs.

Meno cleared several turns of the spiral staircase with each two-legged jump, using Jet Lag only when the huge jump power threatened to waste distance or slam him into the underside of another section. The movement was already cleaner than the last attempt. Desync supplied far more height than the dungeon wanted him to have, while Jet Lag let him cut the arc the moment he passed over a useful landing instead of waiting to come down naturally.

By the time he reached the Pale Confessor's study, the Prisoner's dragging chains were still far below. Meno did not attack. He spent the first few seconds routing the room while the Confessor threw spectral junk at him. The Mercy of Chains was high on the left shelf. A Hymn for the Drowned sat near the desk. He mapped the other titles the same way, tying each one to a landmark instead of trying to remember the shelves as one giant wall of books. The last run had made the real problem obvious.

Picking up a called book was fast. Searching for it was not. Once the room was mapped, Meno stopped moving and used Pyronucleosis. The Confessor immediately pelted his stunned character with books and pieces of spectral furniture, but the damage barely dented his four-times-normal HP pool before the 3 seconds ended. Reactor triggered exactly as expected, refilled him to 100% HP, and increased the next Unstable multiplier. [Reactor 1 | Unstable 110x] Meno used Pyronucleosis again almost immediately.

That was when Aurelia somehow stunned him in real life too.

"Amazing gameplay," her voice came through the stream.

"Look at that, chat. Rank one streamer sitting in a full stun abusing broken gear. Clap with me." Meno froze for half a second, opened his own stream overlay, and discovered that she had actually done it. A camera feed occupied the bottom-left corner of his stream. Aurelia sat in his chair with her blond hair tied into a bun, wearing a white blouse and skirt, perfectly comfortable, as though hijacking somebody else's seven-million-viewer broadcast was a normal Sunday night activity. Chat was already exploding.

WHO IS THAT who is in his room lmao WIFE IS BACK NO WAY new employee??? PBG HAS A COHOST maximum drama no evade"Have you lost it? What are you doing?! Vivi, why are you letting her do this?" Vivi's orange hair appeared in frame for half a second.

"Good content." Then she was gone. TWO WOMEN!!! who is orange hair??? THIS STREAM HAS LORE NOW pbg explain immediately THEY ARE BOTH IN HIS HOUSE LMAOOOO EXPLAIN IT COWARD"Guys, I'm being sabotaged. Tell Thorn to get on a private jet, come to Vernova, and save me IRL." Meno could shut the camera off from inside the capsule, but nothing stopped them from turning it straight back on.

Fighting over his own stream controls while speedrunning the dungeon would be a clown show, so he forced himself back into dungeon brain and self-stunned again. That became the entire opening strategy. No False Blink, because even 1 Lag would shorten Pyronucleosis and break the 3-second Reactor trigger. No weak early Engulf windows either.

Every 3 seconds, Meno voluntarily gave up control, let the Confessor throw whatever she wanted at him, snapped back to full HP, and increased the multiplier for the damage phase that actually mattered. [Reactor 4 | Unstable 140x] A few cycles later, he was still doing nothing except stunning himself on cooldown. [Reactor 7 | Unstable 170x] It looked stupid. It was also correct. The previous attempt had proven that weak 100x contact windows were inefficient while the Confessor healed herself through the embrace.

Spending the opening minute ramping was faster than grinding her down while constantly disengaging to refill. The first book call finally interrupted the loop.

"The Mercy of Chains." Meno moved the instant the title left her mouth. He jumped directly toward the high left shelf, grabbed the correct book, then used Jet Lag to cut the extra height and drop onto a clean return line. One projectile passed under him during the jump, another forced a small correction on the way back, and within a few seconds the book was already in the Confessor's hands. Meno immediately stunned himself again. Every later title worked the same way.

The boss called a book, Meno went straight to the memorized location, returned it, then resumed stacking. He was no longer trying to make the encounter look active or interesting. He was optimizing it. [Reactor 10 | Unstable 200x]"Look at that, guys. Such skill. I bet nobody in the top ten could stun themselves with such finesse. Do nothing, then still kill the boss. Clearly the classic case of broken class over skill." Meno came out of the next refill already annoyed.

"What do you know about skill? What level are you, thirty? I had to teach you how to play your class in the first place. Did you forget?" Aurelia answered with painfully fake enthusiasm.

"Thank you for the lessons. I cherish them to this day. In return, I taught you how to kiss. Was that insufficient?" Meno almost missed the next Pyronucleosis timing. EXCUSE ME???? what what what CLIP IT CLIP IT CLIP IT PBG LORE DROP teach me too please BRO JUST LOST MORE HP IRL THAN INGAME"Everyone in chat getting banned. For sure." He refused to say anything else and kept stacking.

[Reactor 14 | Unstable 240x] About a minute into the encounter, book handling had cost enough time that Meno reached roughly seventeen full self-stuns instead of a clean theoretical twenty. [Reactor 17 | Unstable 270x] That was plenty. The Confessor called for another book, and Meno recognized the timing immediately. He fulfilled the request as fast as before, but instead of restarting Pyronucleosis, he used the short window after the mechanic to begin the actual damage phase.

Another book should not come immediately, and every extra 3 seconds spent stacking now risked wasting the lead he had bought on the Prisoner. Meno launched directly into the Confessor and activated Engulf just before contact. Sticky locked him against her torso, and the Pale Confessor responded with the same ghostly embrace as before. Last run, Meno had treated the life-drain as another problem. This time he wanted it.

If she was hugging him, she was stationary, and if she was stationary, continuous contact required no effort. The first 270x tick ripped through her HP, and the small amount she healed through the embrace barely mattered anymore. Another second passed, then another, with Meno's health falling to the normal 10% maximum HP burn plus her drain. He did not disengage, because that was the entire point of the setup.

The Confessor dropped through 80% HP, then 60% HP, while Meno let his own bar collapse much faster than he would have tolerated on the previous attempt. Then she started crying. Meno deliberately did nothing. The 5-second Disorient landed while he remained attached. His controls became useless, but Engulf did not end because Disorient was not a stun, and Sticky meant he did not need control to maintain contact anyway. The Confessor kept holding him while the damage ticks continued. Meno's HP dropped toward empty.

At the third second of Disorient, Reactor Titan fired, restoring him to 100% HP without interrupting the burn. [Reactor 18 | Unstable 280x] Two seconds of Disorient remained, but they were irrelevant. Meno could not control himself and did not need to. The boss was still hugging him, his feet were still attached, and 280x contact damage kept landing every full second. The Confessor fell below 20% HP before control returned. By the time Meno could move again, leaving would have been stupid.

He stayed attached until the Pale Confessor dropped below 10% HP, then kicked off with both legs. Titan execute triggered. The Pale Confessor disintegrated around the missing last sliver of her health. The entire damage phase had taken less than eighteen seconds. A boss that had survived almost the full 5-minute timer on the previous run had just died after roughly a minute of setup and one short burn window.

Meno finally understood the real False Hero boss pattern: do not waste time using weak Engulf cycles if the boss could not punish Pyronucleosis hard enough. Build Reactor first, then cash the multiplier into one compressed damage phase.

"And that," Aurelia said, "is a world first. Hard boss. Very challenging. Really strong display of how to hug a boss to death." Meno did not take the bait. He waited for loot instead, but nothing dropped. There was no XP notification either. Meno checked around the room in case some chest had spawned somewhere stupid, but the study was completely empty apart from the staircase continuing upward.

"What? Where's my stuff?" The answer became obvious a few seconds later when he remembered the actual dungeon prompt. [Escape] This was not a normal chain of independent boss encounters. The entire prison was one run, and the bosses were checkpoints inside it. Rewards probably came after escaping, which was annoying but made sense. It also stopped players from repeatedly killing the easiest boss for XP without ever finishing the dungeon. Solar had apparently learned something.

What annoyed Meno more was watching all eighteen Reactor stacks vanish as soon as combat ended. There would be no carrying a giant multiplier from one boss into the next. Every fresh encounter started him back at 100x. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

"That part is garbage." Meno headed up the staircase anyway. The first trash wave came out of the walls a few turns later. Five ghost soldiers formed below him, and rather than fight them separately, Meno kept climbing until all five had fully aggroed and compressed into the same section of stairs. Then he jumped above them. Meno rotated belly-down before activating Engulf, waited until the pack was directly underneath, and used Jet Lag. He dropped at 500% base Movement Speed and landed across the entire cluster.

His feet caught on one soldier while the rest of his body sprawled over the others, letting Sticky prevent the group from throwing him off. Arms, torso, and legs remained in physical contact with multiple targets at once, so Engulf began ticking across the pack instead of forcing him to kill them individually. Five seconds was enough. The soldiers attacked the entire time, and between their damage and his own burn Meno finished around 20% HP, but all five died almost together.

He rolled off the dissolving bodies, used 0-Lag Pyronucleosis, and sat stunned on the staircase until the heal returned him to full. Combat ended before the trigger completed, so the recovery worked without granting a lasting Reactor stack. Aurelia sounded delighted.

"The new PBG special. Belly flop onto trash pack and watch them die. Secret tech, don't try it at home. Probably won't work with your non-streamer F-tier class." F-TIER CLASS LMAO true actually true PBG PLEASE DEFEND YOURSELF the trash blanket strat is actually cracked though 500% movement speed into lying down THIS IS THE BEST COHOST EVER he looks so tired"Can you just shut up?" Aurelia did not respond, which somehow annoyed him more.

Meno used the same solution on the next two soldier waves: gather all five, get above them, drop onto the pack with Jet Lag, maintain as much contact as possible, then spend 3 seconds on the post-combat refill. It was much faster than fighting fifteen Level 65 enemies normally, but the dungeon timer still mattered. Each pack cost several seconds of burn plus the mandatory recovery, and the Prisoner never stopped climbing in the background.

The second boss room appeared before the dragging chains became dangerously close. An old soldier waited in the center with one eyepatch and a thin rapier held casually at his side. [Jailer — Level 66] Something about the way he stood already looked too quick. Meno tested the obvious solution anyway and launched straight at him, feet aimed for contact. The Jailer stepped aside, and Meno flew past.

"Epic fail," Aurelia said. He tried again from another angle and got the same result. A Jet Lag drop from directly overhead missed because the Jailer moved before he landed. The boss was not just stacking Evasion. He was auto-evading everything. The rapier, meanwhile, had no problem finding Meno. The Jailer stayed on him through the room, stabbing during landings and forcing Meno into huge diagonal Desync jumps just to create enough space to test anything. Then a haunting ghost drifted out of the wall.

Meno treated it like another enemy at first, avoiding both threats with wide jumps while the Jailer chased underneath and the ghost followed more slowly. During one reposition, Meno used Jet Lag to drop behind the boss. The ghost kept following the same line. It collided with the Jailer. The boss froze, and Meno understood immediately. He was already launching back.

Engulf came online just before he reached the Jailer, Sticky attached cleanly, and almost the entire 5-second window became uninterrupted contact damage. Without the Confessor healing through the damage, the boss lost a serious chunk of HP. The stun ended. Five huge pulses rolled through the entire room over roughly 3 seconds. Meno False Blinked one cleanly and caught another later when the cooldown returned, but there were too many pulses to avoid them all.

The remaining hits ripped through his 0-Defense build and left him bruised despite the huge health pool. His first instinct was to do exactly what had worked against the Confessor. Clear Lag. Full Pyronucleosis. Trigger Reactor. The Jailer immediately proved why that was dangerous. The moment Meno stunned himself, the boss resumed attacking. Rapier strikes landed over and over while Meno stood helpless, and his health bar vanished far faster than the Confessor's books had ever managed.

Meno dropped to 2% HP before the third second completed. Then Reactor triggered and his HP snapped back to 100% just before another strike arrived. [Reactor 1 | Unstable 110x]"That was way too close. It ramps damage the more hit it lands." The difference between the bosses was obvious. The Confessor's normal attacks were weak enough that Meno could turn every 3-second stun into free scaling.

The Jailer had near-constant offensive uptime and enough damage to kill him inside the same window if the timing was even slightly off. Reactor farming was not free here. He needed actual safe windows. Chains descended from the ceiling soon after. Several shackles hung around the arena with enough emphasis that Meno knew they were important, but his first reaction was still to avoid them. This was a prison dungeon. Nobody voluntarily put themselves in restraints. The Jailer enraged.

His next hit made the mistake obvious. Incoming damage tripled while Meno's own damage dropped to roughly one-third normal, recreating the same failure state he had seen when ignoring the Confessor's books.

"Okay. So apparently we do voluntarily get chained." The problem was that he had learned that too late. Meno started moving aggressively, chaining wide Desync jumps with sudden Jet Lag drops while False Blink erased selected rapier thrusts. The Jailer stayed too active for a safe 3-second self-stun, another haunting ghost had not reached useful position yet, and one bad landing was enough for the boss to catch him. The rapier went through his chest. [Death Penalty: 1, 000g]"That was lame," Aurelia said.

"Have you considered just killing the boss? The chains were obviously there for a reason." Meno answered before thinking.

"Still less lame than having your father's employees play tank and healer for you, I guess."

"True. But being mentally stuck in high school at twenty-seven is even worse." CRITICAL DAMAGE aurelia is farming him for content now MENTALLY STUCK IN HIGH SCHOOL LMAOOOO bro cannot false blink verbal damage THIS IS BETTER THAN THE DUNGEON Meno could already imagine the clips spreading across Connect. The fourth attempt started almost immediately, and now the early dungeon looked completely different.

Meno skipped the Prisoner without hesitation, climbed the shaft faster, reached the Confessor, and began Pyronucleosis stacking almost before her opening animation finished. Every shelf location was already memorized, so book calls turned into instant movement instead of searches. He started each self-stun within fractions of a second of regaining control and stopped wasting time between cycles.

[Reactor 6 | Unstable 160x] [Reactor 12 | Unstable 220x] Once Meno reached the timing he wanted, he fulfilled a book request, entered the Confessor's embrace immediately, and intentionally took the first useful Cry to refill without ending Engulf. [Reactor 17 | Unstable 270x] The Confessor died cleanly long before the Prisoner reached the room. Solved. The soldier waves were just as compressed.

Meno already knew how tightly they needed to gather, so he pulled each five-pack into one patch of staircase, jumped, rotated before Jet Lag instead of trying to fix his body during the drop, landed across the group correctly on the first attempt, and burned for only the number of ticks required. Three waves disappeared with almost no wasted movement. At the Jailer, Meno did not attempt a single direct attack.

He immediately started moving in long, controlled arcs around the arena, keeping the boss chasing him while he watched the walls for the haunting ghost. The fight had stopped being about landing a hit on the Jailer. Now it was patience and full evade. Desync let him cut diagonally across the room instead of running the perimeter, while Jet Lag let him cancel bad vertical commitment the moment the positions went wrong. The ghost followed Meno. The Jailer followed Meno.

All he needed was to keep changing the line until they crossed. When the first haunting ghost approached correctly, Meno cut behind the Jailer. The ghost hit. The 5-second stun began, and Meno was already airborne before the collision fully finished. He landed against the boss, activated Engulf, and turned nearly the whole vulnerability window into damage instead of wasting the first second reacting. This time, he disengaged before the Jailer woke and pre-stunned himself.

He would still eat the AOE pulses, but the boss would not be awake to ramp damage off every hit that landed. When the shackles descended, he moved toward them.

"Can't believe I'm doing this." Meno put one hand into a restraint. The shackle snapped around his wrist and lifted him from the floor. The Jailer never enraged. Meno hung from the chain as the Jailer carved into him. The restraint released naturally once his HP dropped below 50%.

"Okay. That's actually not bad." The Reactor strategy changed too. Meno could not farm stacks here, so he stopped trying. If his HP was healthy during a 5-second Jailer stun, every second went into Engulf. If his health was becoming dangerous, he sacrificed part of one vulnerability window instead: roughly two seconds of contact damage, disengage, then Pyronucleosis for the remaining three seconds while the Jailer was still safely disabled.

The numbers looked tiny compared with the Confessor, but every stack represented a real trade between damage uptime and survival. The rest of the second Jailer fight became pure execution. Meno pulled haunting ghosts through changing lines, forced the boss into predictable chase routes with huge jumps, dropped with Jet Lag whenever he needed the ghost to approach from the opposite side, accepted the shackles instead of triggering enrage, and prepositioned for every pulse sequence after a stun.

There was no one broken interaction solving the room. He was simply playing it better. A later ghost hit the Jailer while the boss was already close to critical health. Meno had positioned for the collision in advance, so the moment the five-second stun started he was already landing with Engulf active. At 10% HP, Meno kicked off with both legs and Titan executed the boss instantly.

"Cool boss," Aurelia said, "but once again overcome by broken Ban Evader class with infinite HP, self-heal, and 10% execute. Normal players should pack it up. Normal content is clearly too easy for streamers, and if the AI makes it challenging enough for you, nobody else will be able to do it."

"You're trying too hard. I get what you're doing, trying to cause a revolt, but I didn't pick this class, so that's that. Send all complaints to Thorn. This is all his fault." Aurelia immediately accepted the new target.

"Heard it here first. Thorn, the GM of Stormhold, is the secret hidden mastermind behind all of PBG's exploits. He should also get banned. Then the two of you can go to the gym together. You definitely need it."

"Please stop." Meno kept climbing. The trash after the Jailer changed. Each pack had three soldiers and two priests, all emerging from the walls along the staircase, and the priests immediately made the old belly-flop strategy more dangerous. Their DoTs kept ticking, since becoming untargetable for 0. 1 seconds did nothing to remove effects already attached to him. Normal trash still could not survive False Hero damage for long.

Meno lost some time handling the extra pressure, but three mixed packs died before the Prisoner caught him. By the time he reached the top, the dungeon had stopped feeling like exploration and started feeling like a route. The final platform sat directly in front of a gigantic exit door. Meno reached the arena well ahead of the Prisoner and had to wait while the chains slowly scraped closer from below.

When the ruined priest finally walked onto the platform, its inspect information changed and the chase mechanic became the encounter. It had 1 HP. Meno did not touch it. After being instantly deleted twice for attacking the thing, there was no universe where he trusted that number. A hulking demon materialized beside the Prisoner, human-sized with red skin and hooked claws, while black circles began appearing beneath Meno's feet and detonating about a second later.

At the same time, the massive exit door gained its own HP bar. That was enough information.

"Okay. Door." Meno jumped onto it, activated Engulf, and let Sticky hold him against the surface while contact ticks started chewing through the door's HP. A black circle formed under his position, but False Blink let him vanish through the explosion for 0. 1 seconds without interrupting the existing contact timer. That interaction was excellent. The demon made it much less comfortable. It closed the distance and clawed at him while additional circles kept forming around the door.

Meno held contact until he dropped below 50% HP, then disengaged with a huge two-legged jump toward the opposite side of the room, cleared his Lag, and used Pyronucleosis. Two black-circle detonations hit him during the stun and dropped him to 10% HP before the third second completed. Reactor restored him to full.

"Best healer in the world," Aurelia said.

"Nobody else can heal as good while stunned."

"You're embarrassing yourself."

"You embarrassed me enough already on your stream. No point holding back." Meno decided responding was losing. The demon kept interrupting clean door damage, so Meno eventually made the obvious decision and killed it. He jumped onto the add, activated Engulf, and burned it down quickly. The Prisoner enraged. A new demon appeared. This one was much larger, with huge horns and a two-handed axe almost as tall as Meno.

"Okay. Don't kill that."

"Kill it, coward," Aurelia said. LISTEN TO EXPERT she has never given bad dungeon advice BIGGER DEMON BIGGER LOOT prisoner definitely gets a THIRD demon do not kill it Meno ignored all of them and rocketed back to the exit door. He burned through the remaining HP while the stronger demon chased after him. The final damage window left Meno dangerously low, so the moment the door broke he disengaged and used Pyronucleosis. The timing was awful.

A heavy axe swing landed during the stun, followed by a black-circle explosion, and Meno dropped all the way to 3% HP before Reactor finally triggered.

"Too close." Brilliant light poured through the cracked exit. Four glowing sigils appeared across the floor: circle, square, triangle, star. They flashed in a sequence. Meno saw them, but he was also tracking the giant demon, another black circle forming beneath him, and the 1-HP Prisoner slowly walking toward the open doorway. By the time the symbols disappeared, he understood the problem. The sequence had been instructions.

"Wait." He stepped onto the circle, then hesitated. Star? Square? The demon forced him away from the next symbol with an axe swing, and Meno realized he had already lost the middle of the pattern. The Prisoner kept walking toward the light. Meno tried reconstructing the order while dodging the room mechanics, but the attempt had already failed. The ruined priest reached the doorway without being purified, and its charred heart contracted inside the open chest.

"Oh, come on." Black smoke exploded across the final arena and killed him instantly. The island returned around him with another death penalty, but for the first time since entering the dungeon, nothing ahead was completely unknown. The Confessor was solved, followed by three soldier waves. The Jailer came next, then three mixed priest-and-soldier packs.

After that, the Prisoner became the final encounter: burn down the exit door while managing the demon and black circles, leave the add alive so it did not upgrade, memorize the four-symbol order, complete the sequence before the Prisoner reached the light, and apparently repeat whatever purification step followed until the escape actually worked. That was the dungeon.

"Ah, too bad," Aurelia said.

"It was close. You only failed almost all the mechanics." Meno ignored her and replayed the final room instead. The only completely unsolved mechanic left was getting Aurelia off his stream.

"Chat, clip this and send it to Honeygrave. I need him to come to my room and save my stream. In exchange, I'll give him the dungeon. This is an emergency." Meno paused while checking the entrance for another run.

"Also tell Kestrel I'm increasing his gold debt because this is somehow his fault." Vivi's orange head appeared in the camera again.

"See? Now this is a proper event."