(—Below!)
—A piercing chill coursed straight through his entire body.
Takeo Samejima saw a pillar of red light erupt from right beneath his feet.
It was a warning from Danger Sense.
He leaped backward. The split second he cleared the crimson pillar, the ground where he had stood moments prior exploded.
Kicking up an immense cloud of sand, a thick, pillar-like mass burst out from underground. Naturally, it was no pillar. It was a Worm Drake. Moving through the sand, the Worm Drake had surged from directly beneath Takeo's feet, aiming to swallow him whole.
The warning from Danger Sense had alerted him to the incoming attack. The persistent tremors vibrating beneath his feet had also told him the creature was traveling subterranean. That was why he had managed to comfortably evade that initial blow, despite it being practically a complete ambush.
However, he had no time to mount a counterattack.
The moment Takeo leaped back to evade the Worm Drake's assault, a Road Killer barreling down the sand dune at ferocious speed bore down on him, intent on crushing him flat.
Naturally, he was aware. Danger Sense warned Takeo of the Road Killer's charge.
Riding the momentum of his backward leap, he bounded back once more. The Road Killer's massive frame ripped through the air right beside him.
Yet the onslaught was far from over.
There was more than one Road Killer. It was a pack. Several more of the same beasts came thundering down the dunes to claim Takeo's life.
(—!?)
Running, leaping, leaping again, throwing himself into a roll across the ground—he dodged, dodged, and dodged again.
Fortunately, the Road Killers moved in straight lines. While they could curve slightly toward their target, their trajectory traced only the gentlest of arcs.
Evading them in itself was not difficult.
Even so, every dodge was a hair's-breadth escape. The culprit was the terrain. This was a desert. A sea of sand.
(It's so damn hard to run—!!)
The sand gave way beneath his feet, sapping all the force from his push-offs. He could not move the way he normally did. A frustrating friction formed between his intended movements and reality, chipping away at the margin of error he should have had.
Takeo rolled across the ground to avoid another Road Killer's rush and immediately sprang to his feet with the momentum.
Right then, a storm of aura arrows and magic bolts loosed by the Lamias rained down upon him.
A merciless downpour of shafts.
He scrambled frantically across the treacherous sand. His body felt dreadfully sluggish compared to what he expected. Still, he managed to scramble to the outer edge of the volley's kill zone.
(I won't make it—!!)
Even so, several unavoidable arrows flew straight toward him on trajectories meant to pierce his flesh.
There was no helping it. He had no time left to dodge.
Planting his feet, he swung his sword. Danger Sense mapped out the exact paths of the arrows—as well as the minuscule fractions of a second separating their arrivals.
One, two, three. His longsword knocked the aura and magic arrows out of the air in rapid succession.
(—hk!!)
Instantly, he twisted his torso violently.
The talons of an Assassin Falcon swooping down in a high-speed dive tore through the empty air where Takeo's neck had been a fraction of a second before. The moment its strike missed, it surged straight back toward the heavens.
Twisting so violently threw him completely off balance.
Right behind him, a massive wolf opened its maw bristling with razor-sharp fangs, pouncing without making a sound.
Absolute silence.
Not just its footsteps—the Invisible Death used Wind Magic to reduce air resistance, masterfully dampening even the faint displacement of air caused by its massive frame.
However, calling Danger Sense the ultimate hard counter to Hide-type Skills was hardly an exaggeration.
Takeo had already noticed the Invisible Deaths fanning out across the dunes, slipping into his blind spots and waiting for the perfect chance to strike. Their positions had been clearly illuminated by the crimson light the entire time.
Even so—with his current posture, there was no way to dodge.
His balance was wrecked; he could not shift his footing. At this rate, the Invisible Death would sink its massive fangs right into his torso. If that happened, it was game over.
(—Tch!!)
Clicking his tongue in his mind, Takeo made the call to burn what little HP he had left.
He pushed off the ground with a light kick, as much as his broken posture allowed. His feet left the earth, leaving him facing upward midair. Gravity began pulling him downward—and right before he fell, Takeo kicked the empty air.
—Footing Creation.
Expending 5 of his precious HP, a translucent plate of aura manifested beneath the sole of his kicking foot.
Using the plate anchored in midair as a launchpad, Takeo kicked off horizontally, parallel to the ground.
The Invisible Death's fangs clamped down from above and below, snapping shut on the empty space Takeo had occupied a split second earlier.
Meanwhile, having leaped sideways, Takeo tumbled violently across the sand, used the rolling momentum to right his posture, and landed on his feet.
Yet he was still far from out of the woods.
"Phew... haaah..."
Without giving him a breath of respite, the monsters swarmed Takeo, fixated entirely on tearing him apart.
Another Road Killer came rolling in. Perhaps wishing to avoid getting caught in the friendly fire of their allies' charges, the Lamias had shifted to pure ranged bombardment. The Assassin Falcons timed their predatory dives to thread the narrow gaps between ground assaults with maddening precision. The Invisible Deaths struck from beyond his visual and mental blind spots, targeting only the most lethal openings. Before he knew it, the Worm Drakes were gone from sight. Every last one of them had burrowed beneath the sand, converging directly under Takeo. The subterranean rumbles and ground-shaking tremors echoed low across the battlefield, heralding the moment they erupted alongside the other monsters to swallow him whole. A razor-thin evasion. The Road Killer that had just been charging straight at Takeo was launched high into the sky by the erupting drake.
Takeo dodged, dodged, and kept on dodging every single strike.
"Phew... haaah..."
There was no room to counterattack. He had to pour every ounce of focus into evasion. Even so, it was a losing battle of attrition. Sweat soaked him from head to toe. His body burned feverishly. Eventually, they would catch him. Eventually, a blow would land. Takeo's stamina was not bottomless. The moment his concentration slipped, the end would come.
Yet Takeo kept dodging.
He continued to slip through the chaotic barrage of attacks raining down from every conceivable angle.
"Phew... haaah..."
He took deliberate, deep breaths, striving to keep his breathing locked into a steady, controlled rhythm.
Dodge, dodge, dodge. A seemingly futile cycle of evasion, existing purely to buy a few fleeting seconds of life. Every single viewer watching through the drone camera's feed understood the grim reality.
There was no way Sage Saito and the others would make it in time. Takeo's stamina would give out long before help arrived.
"This is insane...!! How can anyone survive this...!?"
"There are way too many of them!!"
"What the hell is he supposed to do!?"
"Hang in there! Leveling Junkie Bro, hang in there!!"
"Dammit, isn't there anyone who can go help him...!?"
"At this rate, he's totally...!!"
"Somebody! Somebody save Leveling Junkie Bro!!"
—He's going to die.
Leveling Junkie Bro is going to die.
That was the unspoken certainty shared by every viewer. Deep down, they were all but convinced the outcome was set in stone.
Faced with the relentless onslaught of monsters, Takeo was dodging, yes. But he had not mounted a single counterattack, and every evasion was by a razor's edge. He was barely scraping by on sheer luck and reaction time.
The battle dragged on.
One minute, two minutes, three minutes—the agonizing, tightrope-walking battle for survival pressed on—until someone in the chat noticed.
"Wait... Is it just me, or is Leveling Junkie Bro getting better at dodging...?"
The Road Killers' charges, the Assassin Falcons' dives from above, the downpour of arrows from the Lamias, the stealth ambushes from the Invisible Deaths, even the Worm Drakes bursting from the sand—he dodged, dodged, and dodged them all.
Every evasion was still paper-thin.
That part had not changed since the battle began.
However—
"Leveling Junkie Bro's movements are..."
"Is he getting tired...!?"
"No, look closely. That's not it...!!"
Takeo's movements had become distinctly more compact.
In the beginning, his motions had been far wider—exaggerated, to put it bluntly. On awful footing like loose sand, making desperate, sweeping movements had been his only way to avoid the chaotic barrage pouring in from all directions.
Yet now, more than four minutes into the fight, Takeo had grown "accustomed" to moving on the sand.
At least, that was what the viewers watching the battle believed—and perhaps Takeo felt the same.
The discrepancy between ideal movement and reality caused by the unstable footing: he had corrected it, fine-tuned it, and learned how to navigate the sand with maximum efficiency.
It was entirely possible.
A high Dexterity stat enabled the rapid acquisition of physical technique in an astonishingly short window. The simpler and more fundamental the movement, the faster it could be mastered—even in a matter of minutes.
"He's actually getting better at dodging!!?"
"Watching him dodge everything by a millimeter is giving me a heart attack!!"
"Wait, doesn't he look way more relaxed than he did a minute ago!?"
"He's giving off total master vibes right now!!"
"If he just focuses entirely on dodging, couldn't he stall for a ton of time!?"
And that was not the only evolution in Takeo's movements.
He had adapted to the treacherous footing and refined his footwork. That alone made evasion slightly easier. But what Takeo had been absorbing in those frantic minutes went far beyond learning how to walk on sand.
"Phew... haaah..."
Breathing steadily without breaking rhythm, he coolly assessed his surroundings.
The attack patterns, the reach, the timing of these monsters he was facing for the first time—he etched every detail into his muscle memory with every dodge.
He was reading their movements.
At the same time, though he never articulated it in thought, Takeo was beginning to see the ceiling.
Not his own, but the monsters'.
The battlefield was vast. Though dunes rose and fell, there were virtually no real obstacles, allowing the horde to swarm from all directions.
Even so, there was a physical limit to how many could strike him at the exact same moment. That meant there was an absolute cap on the number and density of incoming attacks per second.
He saw right through their limits.
Having adapted to the sand, decoded the monsters' attack patterns, and mapped out their maximum offensive threshold, all that remained was to strip away every wasted motion and optimize his body.
"Phew... haaah..."
Takeo had done this exact process once before, during the incident in the monster room on Floor 4 of the Shinjuku Dungeon that had culminated in the appearance of the Goblin Divine Knight. He was used to this.
Just like back then, he shrank the margin of his evasions. He tightened his movements, striving for ever-greater, microscopic precision in his razor-thin dodges.
And then—five minutes after the battle began, the moment finally arrived.
"Wha!?"
"Leveling Junkie Bro!?"
"Did he just counterattack!?"
"Is it really safe for him to do that!?"
Predicting the claw swipe of an Invisible Death ambushing him from his blind spot with precision bordering on precognition, Takeo slipped past it by a hair's breadth and, for the first time in this battle, swung his sword in retaliation.
His blade scored a shallow slash across the giant wolf's right front leg, sending a brief spray of fresh blood into the air.
Granted, the blow was weak. Even with Unrivaled Lv. 2 active alongside Increased Damage with Bladed Weapons, his damage multiplier was only 2.8 times.
It was a feeble strike, far from inflicting a fatal wound.
Even so.
"Again!!?"
"He countered again!?"
"No way!?"
"What is happening!?"
It was not just once. Nor was it twice. Three times, four times—Takeo unleashed sharp counterstrikes with his blade in the brief windows between dodges.
The frequency of his sword swings increased at a visible pace.
By this point, the viewers were beginning to grasp what was happening.
"No way..."
"Wait, is Leveling Junkie Bro getting stronger...?"
"How??? Did he level up???"
"No, leveling up doesn't make you stronger until you allocate your stat points."
"Which means..."
"His actual player skill is evolving...!? I mean, this isn't a game, but still!"
"That has to be it. God, please let that be it!!"
"Powering up in the middle of a fight? Is he a battle manga protagonist!?"
"Keep it up! Go get 'em! Grow even more, Leveling Junkie Bro!!"
"Whoaaaaaa!! He's literally moving like a grandmaster!!"
"Counter-slashing at the exact moment he dodges? What kind of high-tier boss is he!?"
"Grandmaster vibes as usual."
"He's moving like a legit sword saint...!!"
"Wait, could he actually... pull this off!?"
"Even if he can't kill them, it feels like he can easily survive until Saito and the others arrive!!"
"EZ! Too EZ!!"
"Hold on, hold on! Sure, he's growing, but..."
"Against this many high-level monsters, his stamina is still gonna run out...!!"
Takeo, who had been completely on the defensive, had begun to strike back.
He had grown enough in the crucible of battle to make it possible. In fact, he was continuing to evolve with every passing second.
Even so—it had merely bought him a few more grains of sand in the hourglass.
Most viewers understood that grim truth.
However—here, perhaps, an inevitability unfolded.
At that exact moment, the concurrent viewer count for Hinata Channel had surged to unprecedented heights. There were many reasons. It was the live broadcast of the conquest of the Sendai Castle Ruins Dungeon, a special dungeon announced by the Dungeon Master himself. The looming threat of a stampede had drawn massive public attention. And immediately after conquering Floor 1, Sakura and Jackson's betrayal had plunged Takeo, Hinata, and the others into a desperate crisis.
A meteoric spike in viewership was only natural.
An unprecedented audience was watching Takeo's struggle.
Their impressions of Takeo's battle, their collective perception of him, and the raw emotions directed toward him were converted into "power" through that mysterious system known as the Status.
[Title] Swordmaster -> Sword Saint
Title Evolution.
Along with this transformation, Takeo acquired a new skill.
Yet Takeo himself noticed neither the evolution of his title nor the acquisition of his new power.
He simply slipped past the massive frame of a Road Killer hurtling toward him at breakneck speed with minimal movement, and almost simultaneously, lashed out with a counterstrike.
Normally, that would have been a catastrophic mistake.
Swinging a sword against the hardened carapace of a spinning Road Killer with his current attack power—deprived of almost all his active skills—would only result in his blade bouncing off, forcing him to drop his weapon or lose his balance entirely.
That was why Takeo had not attempted a single counterattack against the Road Killers until now.
Yet he swung anyway.
Pure instinct commanded him to do so.
—A massive torrent of fresh blood erupted from the Road Killer as it continued to roll across the sand.
"Huh?"
"Wait, what?"
"Wha!?"
"The damage went through!!?"
"Did he use a skill!?"
At this moment, not a single soul—including Takeo himself—had yet realized that he had acquired a brand-new skill.