Rimelion: The Exploiter

This was it. The all-in. The last play.

He’d seen the odds. He knew what happened when you pushed your luck too far, when you bet everything on a hand that couldn’t win.

And just like at The Riker’s Luck, just like with Pearl’s warnings, just like every single time before…

He played anyway.

Lucas closed his eyes, wind still curling around him in soft, satisfied spirals, and spoke the words that felt less like a command and more like sealing a contract he hadn’t fully read.

“Time To Face The Villain.”

The world didn’t shift so much as replace itself, the scorched clearing and gentle forest canopy dissolving into stone with the finality of a door slamming shut. When Lucas opened his eyes, he stood inside a temple that had never seen sunlight, walls carved from seamless granite that swallowed sound and warmth alike, pressing in with the weight of centuries compressed into silence.

The space was vast but suffocating, columns rising into shadow-drowned heights, the ceiling lost somewhere above in darkness.

Torches burned along the walls with flames that gave light but no heat, their glow painting everything in shades of amber and ash, and the air tasted of dust and something older than any code he knew.

Lucas’s ribbons hung limp, the wind from outside unable to follow him here, choked off by stone.

At the far end of the temple, coiled around a raised dais like a sleeping god, the Stone Serpent waited.

It was massive in a way that made the Fire Bears feel like a warm-up, its body thick as ancient tree trunks, scales carved from granite and obsidian, each one catching the torchlight with edges sharp enough to draw blood from his air itself. The creature’s head rose slowly, eyes opening to reveal pits of molten amber that fixed on Lucas with the patient interest of a something that had waited centuries and could wait centuries more.

[Stone Serpent Lv.30]

Type: 5-epic Boss | HP: 1935/1935

Lucas felt his stomach drop, the numbers sinking in even as his mind scrambled for solutions that refused to materialize, because wind didn’t move stone, and cutting didn’t work on something that was the mountain, and somewhere in the back of his thoughts, Pearl’s voice echoed with perfect, damning clarity.

“Lucas, don’t push your luck.”

…yet he had already done.

The Serpent’s coils shifted, stone grinding against stone, and Lucas didn’t hesitate.

The moment the Stone Serpent’s amber eyes fixed on him, he raised his hand and shouted, “Kiss of the wind!” because waiting meant thinking, and thinking meant recognizing how badly the odds were stacked, and he’d gotten this far by moving first and adjusting later.

The runes snapped into existence around his palm, pale blue and rotating in perfect synchrony, and he felt the familiar tug of intent as the curved blade of compressed air tore free and screamed across the temple toward the Serpent’s head.

It struck clean.

Stone scales cracked, obsidian shards scattering across the floor with satisfying clinks, and Lucas saw the HP bar dip. Forty points, then fifty!

…before the wound began to close.

Stone dust swirled around the gash, reforming, knitting together with the slow certainty of geological time compressed into heartbeats, and within seconds the scales were whole again, seamless, as if Lucas had never touched it at all.

The HP bar crept back up. 1925. 1930. 1935.

Lucas stared, his breath catching in his chest. “No.”

The Serpent’s head tilted slightly, almost curious, and then it moved with a speed that betrayed its size, coils unraveling as it lunged forward, jaws opening wide enough to swallow him whole.

“Flutter—go!”

Petals exploded outward as Lucas displaced, the world streaking into motion as wind carried him sideways in a tight arc… straight into a pillar.

The impact drove the air from his lungs, his shoulder flaring with pain as he bounced off the stone and hit the ground hard, skirts tangling around his legs. The temple was too small, too confined, every direction offering maybe ten meters of space before another column or wall cut off escape.

The Serpent didn’t rush. It simply turned, patient, stone grinding against stone as it repositioned itself between Lucas and the only clear path.

Lucas scrambled to his feet, ribs protesting, and forced himself to breathe through the pain. “Okay,” he muttered, watching the creature’s slow, methodical approach. “Different plan.”

He raised both hands, wind curling around him in response, and spoke clearly into the temple’s oppressive silence. “Wind, favor me.”

The air shifted immediately, currents stacking and braiding into purpose, pulling tight around Lucas as [Heartstorm Field] snapped into place. Dust and loose stone fragments lifted into clean spirals, the wind no longer chaotic but aligned, attentive, eager to act on his intent.

The Serpent lunged again, and this time Lucas was ready.

He sidestepped, the wind guiding him, skirts fluttering as he slipped past snapping jaws by inches. The currents pushed against the Serpent’s momentum subtly, not enough to stop it but enough to make its movements just slightly less efficient, trajectories wobbling as airflow interfered with the creature’s perfect control.

Lucas spun, arm already extending. “Kiss of the wind!”

The blade carved across the Serpent’s flank, cutting deep, and Lucas felt a surge of hope as the HP dropped further this time—seventy points, eighty—before stone dust began swirling again, sealing the wound as if mocking his effort.

He scrambled with his mana to push his wind control, to shape it into wind spears, but any spear he could muster just plonked off the serpent, dealing at most five damage; the stone was too strong.

So he attacked again with his heavy hitter before the regeneration finished. “Kiss of the wind!”

Another clean strike, this time across the creature’s neck, and the HP dipped to 1820 before crawling back upward… 1850, 1880, 1910.

Lucas’s stomach twisted as understanding settled over him with horrible clarity. He wasn’t breaking even. Every attack cost mana, cost focus, cost time, and the Serpent simply waited, regenerating faster than he could damage it, bleeding nothing while Lucas spent everything.

This wasn’t a fight. It was a math problem, and the equation didn’t balance.

The Serpent’s tail whipped around low, faster than something that size had any right to move, and Lucas barely cleared it with a desperate leap, wind catching him mid-air and carrying him over the sweeping stone. He landed lightly, spun, and kept moving because stopping meant thinking about how badly this was going.

“Come on,” he whispered, watching his mana tick downward—sixty percent now, fifty-eight—while the Serpent’s HP sat comfortably at full.

He needed an advantage. Something to tip the scales.

Lucas inhaled sharply, centering himself as wind curled tighter around his frame, and activated the skill he’d been saving. “Serein.”

The surrounding air shifted again, but differently this time, becoming charged with faint static that crawled across his skin in gentle arcs. Light drifted through the currents like suspended sparks, pale blue petals spiraling lazily as the aura settled into place, and suddenly Lucas could feel everything.

The Serpent’s next strike came as a ripple through the air before the movement itself, pressure shifting, currents disturbed, and Lucas sidestepped half a second before stone jaws snapped shut where his head had been.

Another attack—tail sweeping high—and Lucas felt it coming through the disturbance in airflow, dropping into a crouch as the appendage whistled overhead close enough to tug at his ribbons.

He moved with precision now, each dodge timed perfectly, reading the Serpent’s attacks through the charged air like a network code written in wind and static. The creature lunged, but Lucas was already gone. It coiled to crush, and Lucas slipped between the gaps with movements that looked choreographed, effortless.

The battlefield belonged to him now.

He struck during the openings, wind blades carving clean through regenerating stone, and the HP bar fluctuated wildly: 1890, 1820, 1760, before climbing again as wounds sealed, but Lucas was landing hits faster now, more efficiently, and he let himself hope that maybe, just maybe, he could outpace the regeneration if he fought perfectly enough.

Then Heartstorm Field collapsed.

The currents loosened all at once, alignment fraying, and the Serpent felt it immediately. It surged forward with renewed aggression, no longer fighting against interfering wind, and Lucas had to scramble backward, Serein still active but without the field’s support his attacks lost their edge.

He tried anyway. “Kiss of the wind!”

The blade struck true, HP dropping to 1710, and Lucas watched it regenerate back to 1730 while he caught his breath, mana sitting at thirty-two percent.

The sick realization settled into his bones. He was spending everything without mana potions, and the Serpent was spending nothing. “One big hit,” Lucas muttered, chest heaving as he backed toward the far wall, eyes never leaving the creature’s patient advance. “All at once. Before it can regenerate.”

He looked up at Corvael, perched somewhere in the shadowed heights, and felt the bond between them hum with readiness. Lucas raised both arms, wind screaming to life around him as he shouted into the temple’s crushing silence. “Corvael—descend!”

The crow burst from the shadows with a cry that echoed like thunder, wings spreading wide as it ascended toward the invisible ceiling, and the air itself bowed in reverence. Wind condensed into something divine, no longer mere weather but judgment given form, and Lucas felt the domain snap into place around him, terrible and his.

The Serpent coiled, sensing danger, but it was already too late.

Lucas designated the target with a thought, intent crystallizing into command, and the wind obeyed.

With only one target, gale-force currents descended in a spiraling vortex, divine wind carving through stone as if it was paper, shredding scales and pulverizing ancient granite with the focused malice of a god who had decided something should cease existing. The temple shook, pillars cracking under the pressure, and for ten eternal seconds the Stone Serpent screamed, a sound like mountains splitting.

The HP bar plummeted.

Lucas stood at the center of the maelstrom, wind whipping his hair into a silver streamer, skirts snapping wildly, and watched the numbers fall with desperate, fragile hope burning in his chest.

The skill ended.

Silence crashed down like a fist.

The Serpent lay coiled and broken, chunks of stone missing from its body, amber eyes dimmed but not extinguished, and Lucas stared at the HP bar with his heart in his throat.

[1105/1935]

He’d done it. He’d actually—

Stone dust began to swirl.

Lucas watched, numb, as the wounds started closing. Slowly at first, then faster, regeneration accelerating as if the Serpent had simply been waiting for him to exhaust himself before bothering to heal properly.

His mana sat at eight percent. Every skill on cooldown.

The Serpent’s eyes brightened, focusing on him with something that might have been approval, or pity, or simply acknowledgment that the game was over and they both knew who had won.

It moved.

Lucas tried to run, but his legs were shaking, exhaustion crashing over him now that adrenaline had nothing left to burn, and he managed three steps before the tail swept his feet out from under him.

He hit the ground hard, and then the coils were there, wrapping around his torso, his arms, tightening with the inexorable pressure of continental drift compressed into seconds.

Lucas couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, could only watch the HP bar above the Serpent’s head creeping upward with patience.

Healing through his biggest attack like he’d never landed it at all.

He thought of Katherine waiting at the inn, grinning and confident in her new armor, ready for the dungeon. Of Frozna trusting him to return stronger, wolves at her feet. Of Lola drowning in paperwork, counting on him to help fix Charlie’s agricultural disaster.

Of Charlie herself, somewhere out there making booze and decisions in equal measure, believing he’d come through.

Of Pearl’s voice, frustrated and trying so hard to protect him from himself: “Lucas, don’t push your luck. You’ve already lost—”

The stone pressed in, ribs cracking with sounds like distant gunshots, and Lucas understood his last lesson with the clarity that only came when it was far too late to matter.

With some bets, you lose before you ever roll the dice.

The world went dark.

Lucas woke to cold.

Not the clarifying cold of winter air or morning frost, but the thin, pervasive cold of high altitude where oxygen itself felt like a luxury, and he lay there for a long moment with his eyes closed.

He was still transformed.

The knowledge settled over him slowly, filtered through the fog of consciousness returning in pieces… skirts pooled around his legs, ribbons tangled across his chest, the lightness of his frame that felt wrong now, mockingly delicate after being crushed by something that weighed more than mountains. His ribs didn’t hurt, because death had reset the damage, but the memory of cracking bone echoed in his body anyway, phantom pain that his mind insisted should still be there.

Lucas opened his eyes and stared up at the sky, and couldn’t find the energy to move.

Corvael landed nearby with a soft flutter of wings, settling onto a rock outcropping close enough that Lucas could see the iridescent sheen of its feathers catching the light, and the crow said nothing, simply watched him with eyes too intelligent to belong to any ordinary bird.

“I lost,” Lucas whispered, and his voice came out small and trembling in a way that had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with the hollow space opening up inside his chest where hope had been burning just minutes ago.

The wind died completely. “Yes,” the crow-god said gently. “You did.”

Lucas sat up slowly, hands braced against stone that felt more solid than anything in his life right now, and he couldn’t look at Corvael, couldn’t look at anything except his own small, delicate hands that had held so much power.

“The trial was fair,” Saevrin continued, his tone having neither accusation nor comfort, simply a statement of fact delivered with the patience of a stupid god. “You fought well, demonstrated mastery of what you were given, and applied every lesson with precision that would have impressed most... players.”

Lucas laughed. “But it wasn’t enough.”

“No,” Saevrin agreed. “It was not.”

The hollow feeling spread, radiating outward from his chest into his limbs until Lucas felt like he might simply dissolve into the wind that had abandoned him, and he pressed his palms harder against the stone.

“I was finally—” His feminine voice cracked, throat closing around words that refused to form properly, and he swallowed hard against the tightness. “I was finally good enough.”

Saevrin said nothing for a long moment. “You were always enough, Lucas. That was never the question being asked.”

Lucas shook his head, hair falling forward to hide his face as if that would somehow make this easier. “Then what was the point? Why give me power just to—” He gestured helplessly at nothing, at everything, at the mountain peak.

“You learned several truths today,” Saevrin said. “The first, you already know, you altered a soul without permission, accompanied the rebirth of another while pretending it was chance, and regardless of your grief or love or desperate need to say goodbye, the act itself violated the fundamental autonomy of existence.”

Lucas nodded numbly, because he’d known that since the mountain, since Saevrin had first named his sin with the clarity that came from being a god.

“But there is a second truth,” Saevrin continued, and now his voice sharpened with something that cut deeper than any wind blade Lucas had conjured. “One you have carried far longer, and one you have never truly confronted despite how many times it has cost you and those you claim to love.”

Lucas looked up finally, meeting Corvael’s gaze, and felt his stomach drop as understanding began to crystallize.

“You have a pattern,” Saevrin said quietly. “You see the odds laid before you, recognize when you are overextended, understand the risks with perfect clarity and…”

“…I play anyway,” Lucas finished for him.

“This is not about courage,” Saevrin continued. “This is not about hope or determination or the admirable human quality of refusing to give up in the face of adversity. This is about believing, deep in the part of your soul you do not examine, that you are special enough that consequences will not apply to you the way they apply to everyone else.”

Lucas’s hands were shaking again, not from cold or pain but from recognition, from the sick realization that every time Pearl had warned him, every time Charlie had looked at him, every single moment when someone had tried to pull him back from the edge… he’d smiled and stepped forward anyway, convinced that this time would be different.

“I didn’t—” he started, then stopped, because what could he say? That he didn’t mean to hurt anyone? That he’d always planned to win it back, fix it later, make everything okay through sheer force of cleverness and luck? “I thought I could win.”

“Yes,” Saevrin said. “You always do.”

The wind picked up again, colder now, and Lucas wrapped his arms around himself as if that would help, as if anything would help when the truth was laid bare and undeniable.

“You risked your friends’ lives tonight,” Saevrin said again. “Not your own, you would die and return, the trial designed to test but not truly harm. But them? They need you. The worlds are changing and the power in here affects your reality. They need you… strong.”

Lucas felt something crack inside him. “You gambled with their safety,” Saevrin continued, merciless in the way only absolute truth could be. “Bet their trust that you would return capable of standing beside them. And you lost.”

“I did it again,” Lucas whispered finally, and the words tasted like ash and old mistakes and every promise he’d ever made to change, to be better, to stop pushing his luck just once. “I ignored the risk and I did it again.”

“Yes,” Saevrin said gently. “You did.”

Lucas felt the change. He felt… his body changing back. Corvael glanced at him with a sadness in his eyes and before vanished, he let out one last: “Caw!”

The wind carried the caw away into the vast emptiness beyond the peak. “You have lost, Lucas,” Saevrin said. “The power is forfeit.”

Lucas sat there for a long time after that, small and transformed and hollow, staring at his, now bigger, hands as if they belonged to someone else, and the silence stretched. “Is there... anything I can do to get it back?” He swallowed hard, hating how his voice trembled, how desperate he sounded.

“Anything at all?”