The General's enrage phase rewrote the fight.
Its movement speed doubled. The stone staff's attacks left after-images -- not the decoy copies of Iron Cloud Step, but actual residual force imprints that dealt damage independently. Swing the staff once, and the after-image followed a half-second later with 50% of the original hit's force. Every attack became two attacks.
Joss stopped counting damage. Stopped tracking HP percentages. The trader's eye tried to activate -- calculate, evaluate, optimize -- and he shut it down. The mirror's lesson. The mountain's demand.
He fought.
Berserker Rage was burning. Thirty-second timer. The red edge-vision merged with the General's red aura, creating a world of crimson and gold and violence. Chain Attack. Five hits. The finisher struck the General's right arm at the elbow joint, where the stone armor was thinnest. The impact sent hairline cracks radiating up the arm.
Damage: 74,000 on the finisher. Rage-boosted, peach-enhanced, substrate-amplified. The General's HP dropped a visible chunk.
The General's counter came instant. The staff swung horizontal, the after-image trailing. Joss Iron Cloud Stepped vertically -- straight up, ten meters, landing on the General's shoulder. He drove the Serpent's Coil down into the cracked arm joint.
The arm broke.
Not game-system break -- the kind where a limb goes translucent and the mob gets a debuff. The stone arm shattered from elbow to wrist, fragments clattering to the floor. The General's right hand, still gripping the staff, fell separately, stone fingers locked in a death grip around the weapon.
The General screamed. Rage incarnate, wounded for the first time in three years. Its remaining left hand grabbed Joss off its shoulder and hurled him across the chamber.
He hit the wall at forty miles an hour. The Night Stalker armor took the structural damage. His spine took everything else. HP: 31%.
Blood Price: +34.5% bonus damage.
Joss peeled himself off the wall. His back was a single continuous bruise from neck to waist. His left shoulder, already injured from the earlier hit, screamed with a pain that the game system translated as a debuff: -15% left arm effectiveness.
The General had lost its weapon but not its fight. It came at him one-armed, using the remaining hand as a battering ram, the stone fist swinging in arcs that compressed the air into concussive blasts. Without the staff's reach, it had to close the distance. Close distance was where Berserkers thrived.
Joss met it. Serpent's Coil whip form. The segments wrapped the General's wrist mid-swing, diverting the fist's path. Staff form. He jabbed the point into the General's chest, into the largest crack in its stone armor. Twisted.
The General's HP dropped. Dropped again. The cracks in its body were spreading, each hit widening the fractures, the stone armor losing integrity. The enrage phase was burning the General's reserves as fast as Berserker Rage was burning Joss's -- two entities pushing past their limits, each one getting weaker and stronger at the same time.
Berserker Rage expired. The red edge-vision cleared. Joss's stats dropped to normal. Five-minute cooldown.
The General's fist caught him in the ribs. The impact launched him ten meters. He used Iron Cloud Step mid-flight to redirect his trajectory, landing on his feet instead of his spine. The cloud-image absorbed the follow-up concussive blast.
HP: 14%.
No Rage. No stat boost. No fury multiplier. Just a level 55 Berserker with cracked armor, a damaged arm, and a mythic staff against a level 70+ boss with one arm and murder in its eyes.
Five minutes. He had to survive five minutes.
---
He ran.
Not retreat. Tactical repositioning. Iron Cloud Step to the chamber's edge. The General pursued. Joss whip-formed the staff and lashed the General's legs, tangling them, buying two seconds. Staff form. Crippling Strike. One second of debuff -- the General's level advantage ate the duration.
Potions. He drank two in rapid succession. HP climbed to 28%. Not enough for the damage he was taking, but enough to survive one more hit.
The General caught him at the three-minute mark. A backhand from the remaining arm that hit his wounded left shoulder. The pauldron, already cracked, shattered completely. The arm beneath took the full force. Something tore. His grip on the Serpent's Coil weakened.
HP: 8%.
Joss switched the staff to his right hand.
It felt wrong. He was left-handed. The right hand lacked the instinct, the precision, the years of practice that his left hand carried. Chain Attack's rhythm stuttered. The combo broke twice in three seconds.
The General pressed. Another swing. Joss ducked, too slow. The fist grazed his back. HP: 3%.
Three percent. Berserker Rage in two minutes. Blood Price at +48.5% bonus damage. The most powerful he'd ever be, if he could survive 120 seconds at 3% health against a boss that could kill him with a touch.
He didn't think about it. Didn't calculate. Didn't weigh the odds or price the risk.
He attacked.
Unstoppable Charge. The ability launched him forward at maximum speed, straight into the General's torso. The collision sent them both staggering. Joss grabbed the General's remaining arm, the broken one, the stump that still bled golden light. He pulled himself up the General's body like climbing a cliff face.
The General thrashed. Its hand scrabbled at its own chest, trying to dislodge the human climbing its body. Joss held on. His right hand drove the Serpent's Coil into every crack he could find -- chest, neck, the joint between head and shoulders. Quick, stabbing attacks that weren't Chain Attack's measured rhythm but the desperate violence of the corrupted mine, the underground fights where technique meant nothing and survival meant everything.
The General's HP dropped. Fast. The cracks were everywhere now, the stone body failing, the substrate energy leaking from a dozen wounds. The rage in its red eyes was dimming, not from defeat but from exhaustion. Three years of isolated fury, burning down to embers.
Berserker Rage refreshed.
The timer hit zero. The Rage activated. Not through the system's HP threshold -- through pure, substrate-driven intent, the fury of a boy who'd decided to stop holding back.
The red edge-vision returned. Blood Price maxed out: +48.5% at 3% health. Berserker Rage: +50% all stats. The Peach of Immortality's substrate boost. The Crown's dual-layer perception.
Everything stacked. Everything amplified. Game mechanics and pre-Merge magic converging into a single moment of absolute output.
Joss pulled the Serpent's Coil from the General's neck joint. Transformed to whip form. Wrapped the General's head three times. Staff form.
The segments locked tight around the General's skull. Joss pulled. The staff's leverage, amplified by Rage, amplified by Blood Price, amplified by intent so focused it burned -- applied force to the weakest point.
The General's head separated from its body.
---
The Stone Monkey General collapsed.
The body fell in pieces. Stone limbs and stone torso and stone fragments, clattering on the inscribed floor, the red glow fading from each piece as the substrate energy dissipated. The head, still wrapped in the Serpent's Coil's segments, hit the ground and rolled once.
The red eyes looked at Joss. Still alive. Still aware. But the fury was gone, replaced by something quieter.
*You fight like he did.* The General's voice, transmitted through the substrate from the severed head. *Not the technique. The stubbornness. He was stubborn too.*
"Who?"
*The Sage. My other half. The one who put his wisdom in the walls and his peace in the garden and left me with nothing but the fight.* A pause. *I'm tired. I've been tired for three years. Thank you for ending it.*
The head dissolved. Golden particles, rising from the stone, floating upward into the chamber's shadowed ceiling. The General's essence, released from the prison of rage, returning to the mountain that had contained it.
Joss stood in the empty throne room. Berserker Rage fading. HP at 3%. Left arm hanging. Right hand trembling around a staff wrapped in stone fragments.
Loot notifications filled his vision. He ignored them. Sat down on the floor. Looked at the empty throne where the General had waited for three years, alone, raging against a cage it couldn't break.
*Thank you for ending it.*
The mountain hummed. The floor's inscriptions brightened. The room was warm.
Joss sat in the warmth and breathed and did not calculate the value of what had just happened.
