The thunder of hooves against the earth was like a war drum driving the pulse of the night faster.
The Elite Lunar Boar crossed the meadow like a missile of silver fur.
[Yul1_087: Watch out!]
[T0m-54: MOVE, rookie! That thing is gonna split you in half!]
[0n_Kn15T: Too late.]
Just as Sora tensed to dodge, the boar's red eyes flashed.
[Intimidation].
A shockwave soaked in a red, chaotic aura swept across the meadow. Sora felt the air turn to lead. A paralyzing cold crawled up his spine, nailing his feet to the ground. A signal screamed through his entire nervous system, locking him in place like stone.
The impact was brutal.
The boar's head, hard as granite, slammed into Sora's side.
The sound of bones cracking beneath his coat was sharp and sickening. He was launched several meters, rolling through the grass like a ragdoll until a tree stopped him cold.
[Hunted_99: Called it. You can't afford to get distracted at night. The Spiritual Realm isn't a game.]
[K1ra_X8: His luck just ran out. That's an elite monster. They're in a completely different league from regular ones.]
[C3lestL1ght: What a shame... he was genuinely promising.]
Sora spat blood, but the agonizing pain had one side effect: it shattered the grip of the intimidation.
With a strained grunt, his trembling fingers pinched a card out of the air.
[Basic Heal — F Rank].
"[Heal]," he forced out.
A golden luminescence, like tongues of liquid energy, wrapped around his wounds, seeping through the black fabric of his coat.
His HP, which had plummeted to below twenty-five, began climbing slowly until it steadied at roughly half.
[St3llar_M4g3: Healing now?? Okay, this guy is definitely not running a normal class.]
[T4mal_07: Doesn't matter how much he heals. That elite monster is gonna trample him the second it turns around.]
But the boar couldn't finish him off right away.
Larry, the skeleton, had taken advantage of the chaos to clamber up onto the beast's hindquarters.
He was now perched on its back, pressing his bony fingers around its tusks and pulling with everything he had.
The boar shrieked with rage, shaking its entire body and kicking at the air in a desperate attempt to throw off its bony rider.
[T0m-54: YEEHAW! Was that skeleton a cowboy before he died or something?]
[C3lestL1ght: Not bad for a low-rank summon. He's buying time.]
Sora pushed himself to his feet, one hand braced against the tree to keep from stumbling. His violet eyes burned with cold determination behind the mask. He stashed his dagger in the inventory to free his right hand and extended it forward.
"[Fireball]," he said, his voice steady.
The oxygen around his hand was consumed in an instant. Tongues of fire spun violently inward until a sphere of scarlet plasma formed, flooding the meadow with light bright as midday.
At that exact moment the boar finally managed to hurl Larry to the ground, but when it turned around, all it found was the blazing sphere coming straight for it.
Its shadow stretched monstrous across the grass before the explosion swallowed it whole, bathing its white coat in a sea of scarlet flame.
Sora ignored the stabbing pain in his broken ribs and charged toward the beast. The fireball wasn't meant to be the finishing blow; it was a curtain of smoke and light to mask what came next.
The Lunar Boar, fur singed and fury redoubled, charged again, the ground trembling beneath it.
At the last moment, Sora bent his knees and launched himself upward in an acrobatic leap. Mid-air, his body rotated and the dagger materialized between his fingers.
"[Stab]," he said.
The blade punched through skin and flesh right between the boar's red eyes, but the density of elite bone stopped it from reaching the skull.
Without touching the ground, in a motion executed instantly after the first, Sora extended his other hand just inches from the embedded weapon.
"[Stone Bullet]," he conjured.
The stone projectile left his palm and struck the pommel of the dagger with the force of a hydraulic press.
The metal drove deep into the boar's skull with a dull crack, though not all the way through the thick bone.
Sora landed badly behind the animal, not even registering the danger until a brutal kick caught him square in the back and sent him rolling through the grass again.
[T0m-54: INSANE combo!! Using a spell to drive a physical weapon deeper. That's actually genius.]
[Hunted_99: Creative, sure, but his HP must be hanging by a thread. One more hit and it's over.]
[Yul1_087: I'm scared to watch. I don't think he can take another hit.]
The boar, badly wounded but kept upright by frenzy, tried to turn, but Larry wasn't done. He threw himself at the beast's head on pure protective instinct, locking his hands around its horns with desperate strength.
The boar, nothing but a blurry shape in front of it, charged blindly toward the same tree that had stopped Sora.
Larry didn't let go. In one last desperate move, he drove his bony fingers into the animal's empty eye sockets, pulling a shriek of agony out of it.
The impact against the tree was deafening. Wood splintered, the trunk gave way, and Larry's skeletal frame was crushed in an instant.
[Yul1_087: NOOOOO! LARRY!!]
[4inz_Sam4-67: He died a hero... gave his bones for his summoner.]
[T0m-54: F for Larry. Your sacrifice will never be forgotten, cowboy.]
[T4mal_07: Larry didn't lose his life. Life lost Larry.]
The skeleton's remains dissolved into drifting blue-green particles that the wind quietly carried away.
Meanwhile, the boar stumbled out of the wreckage of the tree, completely blind, the dagger still buried in its forehead.
Sora tried to stand, but his legs gave out and he dropped to one knee. His HP blinked at a critical five units. The edges of his vision were going soft.
The beast began sniffing the air, its nostrils flaring wide with each breath, filtering the scent of blood from the surroundings. After a moment's hesitation, it found Sora's position and launched one final charge, desperate and erratic.
Sora raised his right hand.
The [Fireball] cooldown had just finished, but he made a different call. He snatched a new card from the Records.
[Water Jet — F Rank].
The flames consumed the card, equipping the skill.
"[Water Jet]," he murmured, throat dry.
A churning mass of water conjured itself in front of him, gathering into an unstable sphere that caught the silver light of the moon and scattered reflections through the grass.
Sora brought his palms together in a sharp clap, compressing the liquid mass. A high-pressure stream shot forward with a sharp whistle, striking directly against the exposed pommel of the dagger still protruding from the boar's forehead.
The water acted like a continuous battering ram, pushing the metal millimeter by millimeter deeper through the boar's skull.
But the beast's weight was too much. It kept coming, breaking through the resistance of the stream, water spraying out to either side.
In a blink, the creature's bloodied snout was inches from Sora's face.
If that hit connected, his HP would hit zero instantly.
Time seemed to freeze beneath the moonlight as he waited for the final blow.