Online Game: I Turn Monsters Into Food 10,000x Buffs

Liam’s hand moved before his brain issued the instruction.

His thumb traced a slow, steady path across Elizabeth’s cheekbone, wiping away the blood that had landed there from the last Naga kill, the gesture as automatic and certain as the way he checked the temperature of a pan before committing to the heat. His eyes stayed forward, tracking the horde, his hand acting entirely independently of the part of him that was supposed to be running tactical calculations.

Elizabeth froze for a fraction of a second, which was long enough for a Naga to lunge at her from the right, which she dispatched with a movement so practised it barely registered as effort, her body running on muscle memory while her eyes stayed on his face and did something complicated that he did not look at because he was looking at the horde.

"You had blood on your face," Liam said.

"I know I had blood on my face," Elizabeth said. "We’re in a fight."

"It was bothering me."

"It was bothering YOU."

"Yeah."

She stared at him through the chaos, through the violet summoning light and the spawning elites and the thin, desperate sound of Mirra’s mana threading Noir back together behind the barricade, and her expression was the specific one she wore when she had arrived somewhere she hadn’t been before and didn’t have a prepared response for it.

"You’re unbelievable," she said.

"I get that a lot," Liam said.

Thirty seconds of Indestructible remaining.

The gold light had the quality of something that had already decided it was leaving, thinning at the edges of his skin in a way that was visible if you knew what to look for, and the Matriarch had not moved from the centre of the corridor because she did not need to move. Her staff kept cycling that violet light with the patient rhythm of something that understood the arithmetic of a war of attrition, and the elites kept materialising, and the numbers kept being wrong in the direction they had been wrong since Barbosa took his men off the eastern barricade.

Liam had noticed it between tail strikes. The Ruby Eyed soldiers had stopped fighting sometime in the last ninety seconds, which he had filed under things to deal with when the skill ran out, but the filing system was getting crowded, and the specific stillness of twelve men near an exit was starting to have a shape he recognised.

Barbosa was moving quietly and controlled, his men peeling off the barricade one by one with the practised ease of people who had discussed this beforehand, slipping through the gap between the rubble and the corridor wall toward the east passage where the dungeon branched and the deeper floors started. He was using the noise, the chaos, the fact that every Naga in the western corridor had its full attention on the golden wall of a man standing in their way.

Liam’s jaw tightened.

He could not move. If he broke position, the aggro scattered, and if the aggro scattered, the elites hit the barricade, and if the elites hit the barricade, they hit Mirra, and if they hit Mirra, her hands came off Noir, and the end of that sentence was not something he was going to allow.

"Elizabeth," he said.

"I see him," she said, and her knuckles were white on her sword grip. "I see him."

Ten seconds.

Barbosa reached the east passage. His men filed through in a quiet, orderly line. One of them glanced back at the last moment, and Liam caught the expression on his face, which was not guilt and was not shame and was the specific clean relief of a man who has found an exit and is not thinking about who he left in the room.

The eastern flank opened like a wound.

Five seconds.

Zero.

The gold light went out.

The elite that had been waiting for exactly this moment came through the eastern gap at full speed and caught him from the side, the angle he had not been braced for because he had been facing west, and the impact landed in a way that the Indestructible field would have eaten cleanly thirty seconds ago. This one had weight behind it, and teeth, and the specific momentum of something that had been patient and had now been given permission to stop being patient.

His HP bar moved.

Not much. But it moved, and the stagger was real, three steps sideways through the catacomb floor with his boots leaving marks in the stone, and for a moment the chamber tilted, and he put one hand against the wall and pushed himself back upright.

He had never done that before.

Elizabeth stopped fighting normally. She stopped measuring distance and timing windows and stamina conservation and started fighting the way people fight when the tactical part of their brain has handed control to something older and less interested in efficiency. Her blade moved in arcs wider than necessary and harder than necessary, burning stamina she did not have because the point was no longer conservation and was no longer positioning and was no longer any of the things she was good at in a measured fight.

The point was violence. The point was every Naga that had come through that gap dying as fast as her arms could make it happen, and the point was the specific look she had seen on Liam’s face in the half second before he found the wall, which was a look she had never seen from him before and did not want to see again.

"Don’t you dare go down," she said, and her voice had shed everything it usually wore, the deflection and the competence and the careful distance she kept between what she felt and what she showed, and what was left underneath was something raw and certain and not interested in being ignored. "Don’t you dare."

"I’m fine," Liam said, absorbing the next hit properly now, braced, the way he was supposed to be.

"You staggered."

"First time for everything."

"That is not funny."

"Little bit funny," he said, and she made a sound that was not a laugh and was not a laugh, her blade carving through a Naga that had made the mistake of getting between her and the eastern gap.

[TOOL TIP: THE "ALONE IN THE DARK" PROTOCOL]

Status: The Golden God has left the building.

Active Skill: [Indestructible] — Expired. Cooldown: 29 minutes, 50 seconds. Current vulnerability: 100%.

Environmental Hazard: [Structural Divorce] — The Lich Catacombs have officially separated.

East Side: One Naga Matriarch, the rest of the party, and twelve feet of obsidian rubble

West Side: Liam, Elizabeth, and the sudden, awkward realization of proximity.

Aggro Update: Liam has traded the attention of a thousand Nagas for the undivided, terrifying focus of a Warrior who just watched him stagger.