The massive stone rubble from the blown-out fortress wall was still suspended in mid-air when the dark silhouette slammed into the open courtyard before Obsidian Castle's gates. Valor's landing triggered a concussive shockwave of glowing red fractures that snaked wildly across the earth, sending thousands of frontline players tumbling backward.

Beneath his draconian form, Valor's body was cloaked in a humming, violet-black cosmic aura. Shadow wings unfurled wide across his back, while his eyes—a pair of reptilian orbs burning with golden fire—scanned the human sea blanketing the valley with a chilling, vengeful glare.

"He... he's the boss! The Final Boss Valor has taken the field himself!" shrieked an Archer-class player in the front ranks, his voice pitching high with raw panic. "Take him down before he attacks first!"

Marcus, guild master of Crimson Fang, swung his plasma blade high into the air with a furious snarl. "Don't flinch! He's just a single NPC! Zerg him together! Unleash every top-tier DPS skill you have right now!"

At that command, thousands of players across the international alliance moved as one. The once-cacophony of the battlefield instantly morphed into a lethal killing floor. Thousands of high-tier attacks were launched in the exact same second: lightning-fast futuristic laser fire, hellfire spheres scorching the air, plasma-charged sword arcs, and ice-imbued magic arrows tearing up the earth.

The strikes converged into a multi-colored ocean hammering straight toward Valor, creating a destructive spectacle capable of leveling a small city in a heartbeat.

Up on the remaining tower, the Shadow Knight Commander held his breath, clenching his iron-plated fists until they groaned. "Your Majesty... they're blanketing him with thousands of strikes at once!" he cried out in anxiety.

Yet Valor made no move to evade.

Instead of taking damage or raising a standard defensive barrier, Valor threw both arms wide. The red programming lines beneath his dragon scales flared blindingly bright. The digital core within his body gaped open—not to defend, but to devour.

ZRRR-ZZZT!

The thousands of magical spells and futuristic projectiles struck Valor dead-center. A blinding white flash of light detonated violently, swallowing the Dragon King in a billowing shroud of smoke and fire spiraling toward the heavens.

"Got him!" screamed a Mage-class player in triumphant glee. "His HP pool has got to be totally wiped out by our combined magic combo!"

That cry of victory choked in the player's throat in less than a second.

The thick smoke suddenly vacuumed straight into Valor's body like a ferocious vortex. Any minor scratch scored across his scales instantly healed over. Deep within the Dragon King's internal systems, the data from thousands of attacks had been parsed, copied, and wildly duplicated straight into his boundless core capacity.

Valor lowered his arms, flashing a sharp, predatory grin toward the sea of humanity before him.

"You thought your attacks were a threat?" Valor's voice rumbled like thunder, rattling the eardrums of millions across the battlefield. "They are fuel."

Valor swept his right arm outward in a graceful yet lethal motion.

BOOM! KABOM! SHAZAM!

Instantly, the laws of physics and magical limits within Chronos Online turned completely upside down. From the sweep of Valor's arm, a hellfire storm ten times larger than the original swept across the vanguard. House-sized cosmic meteors rained down from the blood-red sky, smashing straight into the alliance's artillery redoubts. Simultaneously, thousands of purple lightning shockwaves whipped wildly in every direction, crawling across thousands of players' armor in an instant.

"W-What the hell is this?!" shrieked Elena, the European Mage guild leader, her eyes widening in horror as she watched their own giant fireball turn to devour her troops. "He's reflecting our entire arsenal simultaneously?!"

"Run! Our defenses are breached!" Marcus screamed hysterically, leaping from his mechanical riding beast as it instantly atomized under a bolt of duplicate lightning.

The visual choreography of the reprisal was as magnificent as it was horrifying. In under a second, thousands of frontline players vanished entirely, converted into drifting data motes swept away by the storm winds. Consecutive explosions carved gargantuan craters across the Obsidian Castle flats.

The human ocean that had marched forward moments before in absolute confidence was now thrown into total mass panic. Screams of terror, the roar of explosions, and death notifications rang out overlapping and uninterrupted.

"Impossible... this makes no sense!" ranted a Tank-class player crawling backward in scorched, smoking armor. "How can a single boss output damage that exceeds our entire alliance's capacity?"

Amidst the chaos of players fleeing for their lives and trampling one another across the valley, the atmosphere abruptly froze for a heartbeat.

Every single user interface (UI) screen belonging to the millions of surviving players on the battlefield suddenly flashed a brilliant red in unison. A high-pitched system warning tone shrieked sharply in their ears, accompanied by a massive, rigid blood-red text dialog box popping up dead-center in everyone's field of view.

Even top streamers broadcasting the engagement from the air stared stunned at the text plastered across their screens:

“WARNING: Boss Defense Multiplier Exceeded 500%. System Anomaly Level: Omega.”

Back in the Apex Interactive control room, Marcus and Leo jolted out of their chairs, staring at the main monitor as Valor's defense graph punched straight through the system's maximum scale limits.

"His defense stat just broke five hundred percent?!" Leo panicked, grabbing his own head. "Sir, his power scales exponentially every single time he takes a hit! If this keeps up, he's mathematically unkillable by any known means!"

Marcus swallowed hard, cold sweat soaking his collar as he watched millions of green player nodes drop like flies across the tactical map.

"God... what kind of monster have we created..."

Back on the digital battlefield, Valor stepped forward slowly over the scorching earth. All around him, millions of players stood paralyzed in absolute terror, realizing they were no longer hunters chasing prey, but mere sheep walking willingly into the butcher's pen.