Mark was, quite frankly, fed up with the Dunerunner.
Taking a much-needed break from the third floor, he spent his time exploring the uncharted territories of the second floor. Yet even in the relative quiet of the unknown, a persistent thought kept itching at the back of his mind: he needed to discipline that brat.
The Dunerunner reminded him of a child. It didn't harbor any true malice; it simply wanted to play. But unlike a human child, it didn't have a sleep mode. It didn't tire out or collapse into a nap after a few hours of chaos. Instead, the more it played, the more addicted it became to the game. It was a cycle of infinite energy fueled by pure, mindless joy.
Mark realized that conventional combat was useless. You don't outrun a storm, and you don't trade blows with a hurricane. If he wanted to clear the third floor, he had to stop treating the Dunerunner as a monster to be slain and start treating it as a delinquent in need of a very firm lesson.
Every tactic he had tried over four months had failed. The creature's raw speed and reflexes were simply beyond anything he could match directly. But a new idea had finally flickered in his mind — one that made him scowl in frustration the moment it arrived.
It was a simple plan. Almost insultingly simple. To execute it, he needed to master two specific techniques. Even if the plan ultimately failed, both skills would prove useful in future encounters. The real problem was his pride: if this actually worked, Mark knew he would never forgive himself for spending four months overlooking something so fundamentally obvious.
The Dunerunner possessed Mana Sense and Aura Sense of the highest caliber. If the Hydra had possessed even a fraction of this sensitivity, Mark would never have considered fighting it — merely surviving would have been a victory. The bird could pinpoint any surge of mana or the slightest flicker of intent before either manifested into action. Speed and power were irrelevant against something that read the intention behind the movement before the movement began.
To stand a chance, Mark needed to master two forms of concealment.
Hidden Mana — suppressing his mana signature entirely, or projecting a false rank to appear non-threatening. The trade-off was absolute: in a mana-less state, casting spells was impossible. The moment he reached for magic, the concealment would shatter.
Hidden Aura — concealing intent so completely that a target registered no threat whatsoever. Not acting calm. Being calm. The mind naturally broadcasts its own goals, and a creature as perceptive as the Dunerunner read those broadcasts the way a person reads a face. Mark had to learn how to exist without projecting a single ripple of thought — to hold a plan behind his eyes without it leaking into the air around him.
Mana originates from the soul, circulating through the mana veins before radiating outward from the body. Standard concealment involved controlling that outward flow — suppressing the radiation while the energy remained inside. Effective against most opponents. Against the Dunerunner, almost certainly insufficient.
Mark's second path was less conventional. His work with the Inner World had given him fundamental insight into the soul's mechanics — he could exist within his own spiritual realm in a soul-body, which meant that was where mana truly began. If he contained his mana within the Inner World before it ever reached his physical body, his physical form would be entirely void of energy. Not suppressed. Absent.
This was Absolute Hidden Mana. Even the most skilled tracker would find nothing, because there was nothing to find. The energy simply didn't exist in the physical dimension.
The cost was severe. In this state, Mark was stripped of everything. Spells, Multi-Sense, every layer of perception he had spent two years building — all of it gone. He would be blind again. Truly blind, the way he had been in the first hours after waking up in Thaddeus's body.
He had no desire to get used to that feeling. He only needed to endure it for a few minutes.
Hidden Aura was harder in a different way. It wasn't a technique so much as a re-education of the soul. You had to genuinely not intend to kill, even while your body was already moving to strike. The contradiction had to resolve in favor of the surface — the stillness had to be real, not performed, because the Dunerunner would read the performance.
Mark practiced both. Absolute Hidden Mana came relatively quickly. Hidden Aura required a proper training environment, and there was only one place that offered both live targets and low enough stakes to experiment safely.
He returned to the first floor.
The goblin population, which had only just begun to recover from two years of his previous visits, was once again decimated.
When Mark felt ready — or as ready as he was going to get — he returned to the third floor.
He didn't harbor much hope. This was a gamble built on a faint wish and the recognition that he had run out of other options. He stepped onto the scorching sand and began walking, not far from the Gate, and waited.
He didn't wait long.
His Earth Sense picked up those familiar lightning-fast rhythmic footsteps. The Dunerunner skidded to a halt at its preferred distance, radiating what Sound of Heart translated as genuine delight. Its playmate had been absent for weeks. The game could finally resume.
It opened its beak.
Mark lunged before the screech could finish.
The chase was on. The Dunerunner dodged his spells with the ease of something that found obstacles entertaining rather than threatening, shrieking with what appeared to be increasing enthusiasm as the pursuit continued. Mark pushed hard — harder than he had in previous encounters, burning through his available mana with deliberate aggression rather than conservation.
The cycle repeated. Burst of effort, brief recovery, burst again. The Dunerunner's inner voice, filtered through Sound of Heart, was almost unbearable in its sincerity: He's really trying today. This is the best game yet.
Gradually, Mark's movements began to slow. His spells came less frequently, then stopped altogether. His steps became heavy, stumbling. The Dunerunner shrieked with renewed vigor — encouragement, or mockery, or both, it was impossible to tell. It circled closer, matching his reduced pace, unwilling to let its partner quit.
Then Mark's mana signature flickered once.
And went out entirely.
He crumpled forward onto the sand and lay still.
The Dunerunner stopped moving.
It stood over the motionless figure, watching. Through Hidden Aura, Mark projected nothing — no intent, no thought, no pulse of the goal sitting behind his stillness. Just absence. The sand was warm against his face. He focused on keeping his breathing shallow, his mind as quiet as he had ever managed to make it, and waited.
A wave of something moved through the Dunerunner — Mark couldn't see it, couldn't sense it, but he felt the shift in the air above him change. The creature's shadow fell across his back.
Then he understood the flaw in his plan.
He had known, intellectually, that Dunerunners forgot to eat during their games and then consumed their fallen partners afterward. He had read it in the Library. He had filed it under "useful information." What he had failed to fully appreciate was the timeline — specifically, how quickly "fallen partner" translated to "food source" in the Dunerunner's cognitive process.
The answer, it turned out, was: immediately.
The long neck descended. The powerful beak came within reach of his shoulders.
Mark's hands moved.
They clamped around the Dunerunner's throat with everything he had, fueled less by technique than by the very specific motivation of not wanting to be eaten alive in a desert by a giant bird.
"You damn chicken!" he roared into the sand. "Caught you at last!"