Roar!
The hobgoblin let out a gravelly, agonizing growl as Henry's blade darted past its guard, shaving yet another shallow cut across its midsection.
The fight had devolved into a methodical death by a thousand cuts. Henry constantly backpedaled, using his superior footwork to dance just out of range of the monster's desperate, sweeping strikes.
He almost felt a twinge of pity for the beast. The hobgoblin was covered head to toe in bleeding lacerations, the damage heavily concentrated across its forearms, back, and stomach.
As the fight dragged on, Henry's cuts grew increasingly more severe. The cumulative blood loss was severely degrading the hobgoblin's performance. Its swings grew sluggish, its footwork clumsy and heavy.
Finally, as the hobgoblin tried to step forward to press the attack, its leg simply gave out. It crashed down heavily onto one knee. Henry watched as it planted its heavy sword against the stone, its muscles trembling violently as it tried to push off the fallen knee to stand back up.
It couldn't. A second later, its other leg gave way, and it collapsed onto both knees, utterly spent.
Witnessing its total physical failure, Henry decided it was time to move in for the kill.
He walked up to the kneeling hobgoblin, raised his arming sword, and slowly angled the blood-slicked blade toward the monster's neck. But at the final moment, just as Henry looked down into the creature's eyes, he froze.
He didn't see despair. He didn't see the hollow, broken eyes of a creature that had accepted hopelessness. He saw burning, concentrated resolve.
A cold spike of dread hit Henry's gut, but his momentum was already committed; he was mid-swing.
Suddenly, the hobgoblin exploded upward. Channeling the absolute last dregs of its fading life force, the monster threw a desperate punch straight into Henry's chest.
Crack!
Henry violently coughed up blood as the force of the punch lifted him entirely off his feet. He was sent flying backward through the air, slamming into the hard stone of the cavern wall. The back of his head cracked against the rock, and his vision instantly swam with black spots.
For a long few seconds, Henry didn't know where he was. The wind had been completely knocked out of his lungs.
As his senses slowly returned to reality, his first instinct was survival. He frantically looked around for the hobgoblin's follow-up attack, certain the monster had tricked him into lowering his guard.
But as Henry peeled himself off the cavern wall, fighting through the pain, he didn't see a body.
There was no hobgoblin. All that remained was a pool of dark blood, as well as sporadic spots of blood around a faint dusting of ash where the creature had knelt.
Henry realized he hadn't been tricked. The punch hadn't been a trap to turn the tide of the fight; it was a spiteful, last-ditch effort to take Henry to the grave with it.
"Fuckkk!" Henry hissed through clenched teeth, clutching his chest as he took a step forward.
The pain was excruciating. Anything deeper than a shallow breath sent a white-hot spike of agony through his chest, and a dull, agonizing soreness radiated through his shoulders with every slight movement of his arms. Henry carefully pressed his free hand against his chest piece.
He winced, but as he ran his fingers over his ribs, he didn't feel the sharp grinding of broken bones. Just deep, severe bruising.
'If it hadn't been so weakened from the blood loss, that one blow would have instantly caved in my chest and killed me,' Henry concluded, a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead.
He knew immediately that with his chest in this condition, he wouldn't be able to handle fighting another hobgoblin, never mind whatever nightmare the dungeon had queued up next.
Despite knowing he was functionally out of the fight, his curiosity pushed him forward. He needed to know if the next room held the dungeon boss.
Gritting his teeth against the pain, Henry slowly limped past the bloody battleground and continued down the right-hand passageway.
This section of the tunnel stretched on for significantly longer than the last. Eventually, the narrow corridor widened into another massive cavern.
Henry peered carefully around the corner of the wall.
Standing in the center of the room was another hobgoblin, this one standing at his own height, definitely a few inches taller than the last, the white F glowing steadily above its head. But this time, it wasn't alone. Standing in a tight defensive formation directly in front of the hobgoblin were five regular, spear-wielding goblins, all sporting white 10s.
Henry didn't even hesitate.
"System Restart."
The familiar flash of blue light consumed the cavern, and Henry found himself standing safely back at the dungeon entrance, the pain in his chest still hindering his breathing.
He slumped against the cool stone wall and let out a short exhale.
He thought about the room he had just seen. Even with a day or two of rest, he might be able to flawlessly clear the first round of goblins, but the first hobgoblin duel would always be a massive drain on his stamina and probably need closer to a weak before he could tackle it.
To fight a second hobgoblin with five spear-wielding grunts right after?
'I wouldn't be able to defeat that room even if I went in fully healthy,' Henry realized, his pragmatic mind doing the reasoning.
'I need to get stronger.'
The urgent, burning desire to finish the trial quickly, to rush back home to Mia, and to claim his new combat technique began to fade into the background.
A new realization washed over him. The dungeon, with its endless resets and isolated environment, was the perfect opportunity to aggressively grind his experience in a controlled setting.
With his new priority firmly set, Henry sat down on the cavern floor and pulled the basket toward him. He unwrapped the remaining three ham-and-cheese sandwiches and ate them one after the other, washing them down with long pulls from his waterskin despite the discomfort of the water and food going down.
Once his stomach was full, he called up his interface. "System stats."
Name: Henry Sinclair
Rank: F-
Rank Progress: [ 8 / 100 ]
Strength: 40
Speed: 45
Agility: 44
Stamina: 52
Vitality: 30
Henry scrutinized the blue numbers. His stats had definitely improved since his trial in the Hope Forest. The way the numbers had naturally distributed kept him established as a highly versatile, well-rounded knight, slightly favoring speed and stamina over pure brute force.
He did some quick mental math. He had gained four points of rank progression from killing the hobgoblin run through of the dungeon, bringing him to 8/100. Looking at his attribute increases, he realized the system's scaling ratio for his rank was receiving two attribute points to distribute across his stats for every single point of Rank Progress he earned.
Seeing the sheer potential for growth staring back at him, Henry let his shoulders drop, relaxing as much as his tense muscles would allow.
He was going to be in this dungeon a lot longer than he had initially thought.