The air on the second floor of the First Labyrinth was colder, wetter, and carried the heavy, metallic tang of rust and decay.
The pathways were narrower, and the darkness was absolute, relieved only by the small glow of their starter lamps.
The Pioneer buff felt like a cruel joke, encouraging them to walk faster toward their inevitable doom.
Hayabusa's confidence remained, but his movements were showing strain.
The Grave Grunts had been replaced by Rusted Reavers, skeletal warriors armored with scraps of ancient, corroded plate.
They were slower than the Grunts but possessed devastatingly powerful, sweeping attacks that Hayabusa and Ryo had to perfectly time and block.
The party continued their pattern: Zanshin, would lure the Reavers from their patrol routes. Hayabusa and Ryo would engage, trading blows and health.
Zanshin, however, was becoming increasingly erratic.
The sight of Hayabusa's HP bar frequently dipping into the yellow zone—a state of critical danger—spiked his anxiety.
He pulled the mobs too quickly, or sometimes, too close.
He was desperate to keep them away from his friend, but his panic only made his movements sloppy and inefficient.
"Zanshin! You pulled three this time!" Ryo gasped, struggling to hold off a Reaver with his basic axe block.
He winced as his HP dropped further. "Stick to two! We can't handle this many!"
Zanshin could only shake his head, the terror rendering him mute.
He felt utterly exposed, a flickering ghost on the edge of the fight, watching his friends bleed because he was too afraid to swing.
They rounded a bend into a large, circular chamber—a subterranean crypt lined with empty stone sarcophagi.
Before Hayabusa could even raise his sword to check for an ambush, a dozen pairs of glowing red eyes materialized from the shadows of the ceiling and the walls.
They were surrounded.
"Contact! Front and back!" Hayabusa yelled, instantly moving to intercept the closest Reavers.
"Zanshin! Ryo! Back to back! Don't let them surround you!"
The Reavers didn't charge; they closed in, slow and methodical, filling every exit and cutting off any line of retreat.
The sheer number of red health bars was paralyzing.
These were Level 5-6 mobs, and they were facing them twelve-to-three.
Ryo, his face streaming with nervous sweat, planted his feet and raised his axe defensively.
"Okay, okay, we got this! Hayabusa, focus fire! Zanshin, please! Give us a stagger, anything!"
Hayabusa parried a heavy blow, the system warning him of an impending Break.
"Zanshin! Now! Use the Glaive! I don't care if you miss! We need the AOE!"
Zanshin saw the Reaver directly behind Ryo raise its sword for a fatal, slow arc—a move that would one-shot Ryo.
He felt the cold pressure on his mind telling him: Move. Swing. Commit.
He grasped the Glaive's shaft with both hands, muscles tensing, attempting to trigger a basic Horizontal Arc.
But the moment the fear of the original accident flooded his mind—the memory of the uncontrollable, destructive force—the tremor seized him.
His hands did not move smoothly into the attack motion; they violently vibrated, garbling the command.
[System Error: Skill Cue Failed. Cooldown: 5s.]
The message flashed uselessly in his vision, and the Glaive remained motionless.
"Zanshin!" Hayabusa screamed, lunging to deflect the Reaver behind Ryo, leaving his own flank wide open.
Seeing Hayabusa exposed and Zanshin frozen, Ryo realized the horrifying truth: Zanshin wasn't saving his strength; he was paralyzed. In that single, desperate moment, Ryo made his choice.
Ryo yelled a primal, desperate sound that the system recognized as a battle cry, and he triggered the only aggressive skill he had: Berserker's Leap.
Ignoring the Reaver he was facing, Ryo pivoted and hurled himself at the main wave of mobs cutting off their retreat.
His low-level skill was weak, but the impact was shocking.
Ryo crashed into the center of the mob line, forcing three Reavers to stagger and break formation, momentarily creating a small, open window.
"Go! Go! Run now!" Ryo bellowed, his voice filled with adrenaline and terror.
He took a heavy blow to the side, his health bar dropping catastrophically into the red.
Hayabusa didn't hesitate.
He grabbed Zanshin, who was still frozen by the Skill Cue failure.
"Ryo, fall back!"
"No! I can't move! Go!" Ryo screamed, raising his axe one last time to intercept the Reavers that were now converging on him.
Hayabusa dragged Zanshin backward, sprinting through the gap Ryo had created.
As they fled, Zanshin's terrified eyes were glued to Ryo's avatar.
He watched, in a sickening, slow-motion horror, as Ryo's final, valiant axe swing connected with nothing, followed by the sickening cascade of hits from four different Rusted Reavers.
Ryo's HP bar vanished, not in slow erosion, but in a devastating, instantaneous collapse.
[Player Ryo has been defeated.]
The chilling, emerald-green particles of Ryo's avatar erupted into the cold, damp air of the labyrinth, shimmering for a moment before dissolving entirely.
The space Ryo had occupied was now empty, filled only by the ominous shuffling of the Grave Reavers.
Hayabusa didn't stop running until they had vaulted the spiral staircase and burst out into the forgotten storehouse, collapsing in the dusty silence.
His chest heaved, tears blurring his vision as he registered the agonizing truth of Ryo's death.
Zanshin lay gasping, his body still trembling violently, but the shock had finally broken through the internal walls of his mind.
He stared at the empty space on the party list where Ryo's name had just been, replaced by the grim "Offline" status.
A wave of crushing despair hit him, instantly replaced by a searing, white-hot thought, delivered with the cold, undeniable clarity of judgment.
He died because of you.
This was not the familiar, paralyzing guilt. This was a brutal self-assessment that tore through his self-pity and revealed the lie beneath.
I convinced myself that I was so dangerous, so powerful, that I had to contain myself to protect others.
He had been hiding behind his trauma, using his paralyzing guilt as a shield—a way to absolve himself from ever having to try again.
He hadn't been afraid of making a mistake; he had been afraid of trying and failing to live up to the standard he held himself to.
He was terrified of the incompetence his trauma caused.
And the reason he was so terrified of incompetence? Because he secretly believed he was the only one capable of preventing catastrophe.
He was the one who controlled the world, the one who bore the ultimate responsibility.
Arrogance.
It wasn't humble guilt. It was the crushing arrogance of believing that only his failure could matter, that only his power was relevant, and that only his self-sacrifice could fix the past.
He had retreated into a shell of uselessness, maximizing the risk for his friends while maintaining his own illusion of control.
He, Zanshin, the one who feared being responsible for death, had just caused a death by being utterly and deliberately useless.
"Ryo…" Hayabusa whispered, his face buried in his hands, his body shaking with silent sobs.
"Ryo died because of me. I pushed us too hard. I knew the risk."
Zanshin sat up, the tremor in his hands briefly intensifying, then abruptly fading to a dull ache.
He reached out and touched the dirt-stained stone floor, the reality of the consequence grounding him with a horrifying finality.
"No," Zanshin rasped, his voice raw. "He died because of me.
Not because I made a mistake, but because I was too arrogant to fight. I was too afraid of my own weakness to protect you."
The cold realization settled: he hadn't been protecting them from his strength; he had been protecting himself from his fear of failure, and Ryo had paid the price for Zanshin's cowardice.
They sat there in the gloom, two broken players, one shattered by grief, the other by the crushing weight of a guilt that had finally revealed itself as the purest form of self-centered pride.
Ryo's sacrifice had stripped Zanshin's self-pity bare.
Now, the question was what to do with the blinding, terrible truth.