[Ti Remaining: 05:44:09]
[HP Drain: ACCELERATED — Boss proximity multiplier active]
[Blizzard King: LOCATED — 40m]
[Divine Match x3 — UNUSED]
[Active Climbers: 89]
The Blizzard King stood forty ters ahead, and at forty ters it looked like a weather event that had decided to take a shape.
Twelve ters tall. Ford from compressed ice and what looked like frozen storm — layers of it, translucent grey-white, built up over centuries of the floor cycling. Its limbs were slow, deliberate, the movent of sothing that had all the ti available to it because cold was patient. The blue pulse in its chest sat behind three or four layers of ice-armor, deep in the torso, small and steady as a pilot light.
Getting to it ant getting through the outer layers. Getting through the outer layers ant sustained close-range combat in the kill zone of sothing that emitted cold as a passive field. The HP drain at forty ters was already doubled. At ten ters, it would be worse. Inside the arm reach of a twelve-ter entity, it would be the kind of cold that dropped HP in chunks rather than ticks.
I ran the math in my head and shared the result with the group: "We’re going in close. Stay tight. Push through the cold."
Junho looked at the Blizzard King. Then at . "Define close."
"Striking distance."
"Of that."
"Yes."
He was quiet for a mont. Then: "Right."
Commander had already started restructuring the formation. They weren’t the type to ask questions that didn’t change the plan — they had assessed the situation, reached the sa conclusion I had about the lack of an alternative, and moved on to execution. Their team spread wide, preparing for a multi-vector approach. Not surrounding the boss — you never surrounded a boss on a cold floor because the radial cold field would catch you in an overlapping kill zone — but approaching from a forward arc, concentrated enough to draw its attention and spread enough that a single arm sweep couldn’t catch everyone.
The wraith at our six o’clock ca in the mont the formation shifted.
It targeted Grey.
I was not in a position to intercept it. Plate was.
He turned at the frequency — he had been listening, I noted, the sa way I had, learning the sound — and got his arm up in a block that was more instinct than timing. The wraith hit his forearm and he made a sound low in his chest, the sound of soone absorbing a hit they expected and still didn’t enjoy. His HP dropped. He swung his axe through the dispersing form on reflex and connected with enough force that the wraith dissolved without a sound.
He looked at his arm. A frost burn across the forearm, skin pale and unhappy. He rolled the joint, confird it worked, and turned back toward the Blizzard King.
"Wraith’s dealt with," he said.
Grey checked his arm quickly while walking. "I can patch that."
"Later," he said.
We covered the forty ters in less than a minute. The cold intensified in a clear progression — at twenty ters the drain rate nearly tripled from the floor baseline, and at ten ters several people were losing HP fast enough that it was visible as a rapid decrease rather than a slow bleed.
The Blizzard King reacted to proximity the way large, confident things reacted to small things getting close: it turned, with the unhurried certainty of sothing that had no reason to rush.
Its arm ca down.
The sweep covered about fifteen ters of horizontal arc at approximately head height. Commander’s team had spread wide enough that three people on the outer edge had to roll or duck rather than simply stand clear. One climber — a woman from the central mass, reliable in a fight, soone whose na I kept almost learning — took a glancing hit on the shoulder that launched her four ters sideways into the snow. She got up. Slower than usual.
The cold field at this range was imdiate and physical. Breathing hurt. The air going into the lungs was too cold for the body to handle without complaint, and the complaint was a specific burning sensation in the chest that worsened with exertion.
We were exerting.
The fighting quality dropped. It was noticeable even in the first exchange. Movents that should have been clean and fast beca slightly lagged, decisions that should have been instinctive required a half-second of conscious processing. Cold did that. The Tower modeled it accurately and rcilessly.
The chat had gone tense.
💬 KangMinFanatic77: everyone’s hp is tanking
💬 SeoulTowerFan: they have THREE HUNDRED MATCHES between them
💬 GhostClimber_: and he’s not using any of them
💬 Watchdog_KR: two people are below 30% hp from the drain alone
💬 TowerWatchKR: Kang Min himself is at what... 58%
💬 RealMvpStream: 54 now
💬 KangMinFanatic77: please
💬 user_29441: the matches would fix this instantly
💬 RealMvpStream: and end the floor wrong. he knows sothing
💬 user_48821: what if he’s wrong this ti
💬 RealMvpStream: ...
💬 GhostClimber_: bold silence from RealMvp there
The Blizzard King’s second arm ca down vertical — a hamr strike rather than a sweep, targeting the center of our formation. The impact point was where Junho had been standing. He wasn’t there when it landed. He had read the wind change that preceded the arm drop and stepped left by three paces, which looked like luck from a distance and was the opposite.
The impact cratered the snow. Ice fragnts scattered outward in a ten-ter radius. Two climbers took fragnt hits. Grey was already moving toward them.
I was moving toward the boss.
The arm that had just struck was still depressed, the hand buried to the wrist in the impact crater. For three seconds it was a fixed point, a stable surface. I ran up it.
The arm’s surface was rough ice — the sa compressed storm-layers as the body, footholds present if you committed to them. I ran the length of the forearm in four steps, reached the elbow joint, and assessed the remaining climb. The chest was eight ters above the elbow. The ice-armor layers over the core were visible at this range: three distinct strata, each a different shade of grey-blue, the innermost one slightly more translucent where the core’s pulse shone through.
I got four ters up the torso before the Blizzard King registered what was happening.
The cold field at this distance was a different category of experience. The HP drain at the body surface wasn’t a tick — it was a sustained pressure, the kind that doesn’t give you ti to adapt between hits because there’s no interval. My HP was dropping continuously, visibly, the bar in my peripheral vision scrolling down in real ti.
The boss tried to brush off. The arm that ca up for the sweep was too slow for the angle — I was inside the elbow’s pivot radius, which ant the arm couldn’t generate force against in that direction. Basic geotry. The King would have to rotate its whole torso to dislodge , and torso rotation on sothing that size took ti.
I had ti proportional to how much HP I could afford to lose.
The matches were in my inventory. The orange pulse of them sat at the edge of my vision. Three. One would restore my HP right now. It would buy the group below thirty minutes of warmth and visibility.
I kept climbing.
Six ters up. The innermost ice-armor layer was close enough to touch. I pressed my hand against it. The surface was dense — years of accumulated cold compressed into sothing close to structural steel. My blade would go through it eventually, but the Blizzard King would dislodge long before eventually arrived.
I needed the mana-core exposed, and I needed to get the match to it while it was exposed.
Which ant I needed the core to co to .
I looked at the ice-armor. The three strata layers weren’t uniform — there was a seam running vertically through all three, a line where the compression had been imperfect, where the cold-construction had a fault. The Tower built bosses with internal logic, and the internal logic of sothing made from frozen storms was that it had been assembled, and assembly always left seams.
I drove my blade into the seam.
The Blizzard King moved then — not a brush, a full torso rotation, and I went with it, holding the blade handle as an anchor, my body swinging outward as it turned. The rotation generated centrifugal force against my grip. My hands held. The seam in the ice-armor widened under the rotational stress, fracturing along the fault line.
I heard the core.
That was the only way to describe it — heard it. The pulse that had been visible as faint blue light was now audible at this range, a deep, rhythmic sound below the wind frequency, the heartbeat of sothing that had been frozen in place for longer than the floor had existed. The sound ca through the widening seam in the ice-armor.
The armor fractured. A section fell. Cold air poured out of the gap — colder than the external blizzard, the internal temperature of a thing that ran on absolute cold as its fuel source.
The core was exposed. A compressed sphere of blue-white mana, pulsing, roughly the size of my fist, embedded in the ice at the center of the Blizzard King’s chest cavity.
I reached into my inventory.
Match one.
I held it against the ice-armor’s surface. To strike it I needed friction — specifically the striking surface from the match box, which I had in my belt pouch because the System had given us the matches in a box. The cold at this range made my hands slow. Slow hands on a match strike ant the head dragged instead of catching.
I struck it twice before it lit.
The fla was small — one match fla in an open blizzard should have gone out imdiately. It didn’t. The word divine in the item label was apparently descriptive. The fla stayed, tiny and orange, in the gap of my cupped hands, burning with the specific stubbornness of sothing that had been told what it was supposed to do.
I put it against the core.
The core resisted. The blue-white pulse dimd and the cold pushed back against the fla — not physically, magnetically, the way opposing forces push. The match fla bent toward it and the core’s pulse pushed outward against the fla. A standoff asured in milliters.
The match was burning down. I could feel the heat reaching my fingers.
The core pulsed once, hard — a defensive response, the way a frozen thing contracts when heat is applied. The contraction brought the surface of the core into contact with the fla.
A sound like ice cracking at the center of a frozen lake: a single deep report that traveled through the boss’s body and out into the blizzard and down through the snow beneath us. A fracture line appeared in the core’s surface.
Match one burned out.
I held the position, blade still in the seam, body pressed against the exposed chest cavity, HP bleeding from cold contact. Below the group was still fighting — I could hear the sounds of the engagent without looking, Commander coordinating the defensive arc, Junho’s light column firing in short bursts to keep the King’s attention divided.
Two matches left. Two fractures needed.
[LiveStream Viewers: 4,102,887]
💬 KangMinFanatic77: THE CORE IS CRACKING
💬 SeoulTowerFan: ONE MATCH DOWN TWO LEFT
💬 GhostClimber_: he’s hanging on the boss’s chest at 38% hp
💬 Watchdog_KR: 38%???
💬 TowerWatchKR: Grey can’t reach him up there
💬 RealMvpStream: he knows what he’s doing
💬 user_83421: RealMvp has been saying that for three floors
💬 RealMvpStream: and I’ve been right for three floors
💬 KangMinFanatic77: please be right again
💬 user_48821: Kang Min if you can read this we believe in you
💬 GhostClimber_: he can’t read it he’s ON A BOSS
💬 user_48821: I KNOW I just wanted to say it
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