The third arena opened like the throat of a cathedral.

  Reiji stood at the threshold with the others, staring up at a ceiling that dissolved into shadows. The space was twice the size of the Stage 2 arena. Pillars of white stone rose from a floor of polished granite, their edges sharp enough to cut. Above, something vast moved—or perhaps the light simply shifted wrong, making the darkness above look thick.

  The air was colder here. Not the false chill of the Tutorial's climate control, but something that came from the stone itself. Reiji's breath came out in thin wisps. He could feel the weight of the system's attention pressing down on him—this place was watching, measuring, preparing to judge them. The Tutorial didn't just test combat ability. It tested resolve.

  Tomoe entered last, her bow held loose at her side. Her eyes were already scanning the pillars, finding sightlines, mapping the terrain. The scout's mind was never at rest. Ryu moved to the center of the arena, testing his footing, nodding as if he approved of the stone. Hana stood beside Reiji, her staff unsheathed, magic already pooling at her fingertips—a soft amber glow that made the shadows around them jump.

  Taiga stepped forward without hesitation.

  "This is it," the warrior said. "The Guardian."

  The five of them had survived the Constructed Sentinel through raw necessity. Reiji had coordinated every strike, every heal, every retreat. Tomoe's arrows had found the gaps in the Sentinel's armor. Ryu had anchored the defense while Hana burned through her mana reserves. It had been clean, almost—as victories went in the Tutorial.

  But this felt different.

  The System notification materialized in Reiji's vision:

  [TUTORIAL STAGE 3 [FINAL]. Defeat the Tutorial Guardian.]

  [WARNING: Casualties possible. Retreat available until combat begins.]

  "How long do we have?" Hana asked. Her voice was steady, but her mana bar sat at sixty percent. She hadn't recovered fully from Stage 2.

  "Until he shows himself," Reiji said.

  The System knows what we are. It puts us in a shape that fits. Four strangers in the Tutorial, and they were already a party. Five people, all from different classes, all fighting in sync. The coordination ability Reiji had unlocked after the Sentinel fight had activated without warning—his vision had expanded suddenly, and he could see not just his own status but all of theirs simultaneously. A support-class skill. Perfect for a regressor who was supposed to carry a full team through a dungeon.

  Five years he had trained for this. Training alone in that other loop, reading guides and grinding solo. Testing tactics on low-level monsters, studying video guides from streamers who'd made it further, memorizing every stat formula and damage calculation until his eyes burned. Learning to coordinate with NPCs who had rudimentary AI, never truly learning to work with real people who had their own instincts and fears.

  And here he was, doing it with strangers.

  Taiga had trust in his eyes. Ryu was trying not to show his fear. Tomoe was already thinking three moves ahead. Hana was holding the line between confidence and terror. They didn't know that Reiji had done this before. They didn't know he had failed before. They were fighting because the Tutorial demanded it, and he had to keep them alive because that was what support classes did.

  Taiga's hand rested on his sword hilt. "When he comes, we hold position. No one advances without my call."

  "Noted," Ryu said. The second warrior was younger than Taiga—maybe twenty to Taiga's twenty-five—and he had a tendency to trust first and think later. He'd nearly died twice fighting the Sentinel. Reiji had used a low-rank heal skill to pull him back.

  Tomoe stood on the northern pillar, bow already nocked. Her eyes tracked the shadows above. "There. Third pillar from the left."

  The movement was subtle at first. A shift in the texture of the air. Then a sound like metal scraping stone.

  The Tutorial Guardian descended.

  It was three meters tall, maybe more. Its body was constructed from interlocking plates of crystalline stone and black metal, segments that didn't quite align with any recognizable anatomy. Four limbs, but they moved wrong—each joint bent in directions that made Reiji's eyes water if he stared too long. Its head was a pyramid of angular facets, and at the base of the pyramid burned light like molten gold.

  [TUTORIAL GUARDIAN - LVL 15]

  [HP: 1200/1200]

  The notification appeared.

  Reiji's coordination skill activated automatically, showing him the status of every party member in his peripheral vision:

  Taiga: 240/240 HP | 185/200 Stamina

  Ryu: 180/180 HP | 160/180 Stamina

  Tomoe: 130/130 HP | 140/150 Stamina

  Hana: 160/160 HP | 95/160 Mana

  Reiji: 200/200 HP | 120/140 Mana

  The Guardian didn't charge. It surveyed the arena slowly, its pyramidal head rotating to take in each of them. When its golden eyes—if they were eyes—settled on Reiji, something cold went through his chest.

  "It knows what I am," he said quietly.

  "They always do," Taiga replied. "Ready?"

  No one answered. There was nothing left to say.

  The Guardian struck.

  It moved like nothing Reiji had ever seen, all four limbs firing in sequence, its body folding and unfolding in ways that didn't respect geometry. The entire arena contracted around it—or perhaps Reiji's perception just compressed everything else to make room for the construct's speed. Taiga raised his shield and caught the first blow. The impact threw him backward three meters, his boots scraping stone. He didn't fall. Just braced, reset, and prepared for the next strike.

  Ryu stepped in, sword flashing to block the second strike. His timing was good. His instinct was sound. But the Guardian's limb was faster—it bent around Ryu's blade in a way that made Reiji's eyes hurt, and caught the younger warrior across the chest.

  Ryu screamed. It was the sound of air being crushed out of lungs.

  "Shield him!" Reiji called out, and even as he spoke he was casting, a low-rank heal flooding into Ryu's status bar. The wound was deep. The Guardian's limb had cracked his breastplate. Blood was already seeping from the edges. Reiji's mana dropped from 120 to 110. Not enough. Never enough. But it was something.

  Tomoe's arrow buried itself in the Guardian's shoulder joint. The stone cracked slightly but held. The construct rotated toward her, its pyramid head shifting smoothly. It was fast. That was the nightmare of this fight—it didn't attack like a beast that relied on raw speed and power. It attacked like something that had calculated a thousand scenarios and chosen the optimal one.

  The Guardian pivoted to face the archer, and Taiga capitalized. He bellowed—not a scream but a pure war cry—and his sword came up in a vertical arc that caught the Guardian's upper-left limb and cut deep into the crystalline material. Blue light leaked from the wound like the construct was bleeding electricity. A chip of stone fell to the arena floor, bounced once, twice, and rolled toward the southern pillar.

  The Guardian's damaged limb came around in a retaliatory strike.

  The fight exploded into motion.

  Reiji had coordinated before—in the Stage 2 fight, he had been a support class in truth, standing back and casting heals, calling out targets, managing resources. A support class doing what support classes were supposed to do. But the Guardian was different. It was faster. Its strikes were more deliberate. More directed. It fought four enemies at once and didn't seem bothered by the workload. Every time Ryu got close, it struck at him specifically, as if recognizing that he was the weakest offensively. Every time Tomoe fired from the pillar, the Guardian tracked her position and adjusted its next movement, angling its body to present a narrower target. It was learning in real time. Learning from each exchange. Learning meant it was designed to adapt. Learning meant fifteen minutes might be optimistic.

  Reiji's coordination overlay painted the arena in his mind—data and space merging. Taiga was holding the center. Ryu was flanking left. Tomoe was on the north pillar. Hana was mid-arena, her mana casting into the Guardian's joints, looking for cracks in the stone.

  And Reiji was burning through his reserves to keep them functional.

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  Five minutes in, Hana's mana dropped to 40.

  "I need a break," she said. Her voice had tightened. Mana depletion did that—made the caster's thoughts brittle, made their movements stuttering.

  The Guardian pivoted toward her and launched one of its lower limbs like a spear. Not a strike. A throw. The limb separated from its body, spinning through the air with enough force to drill through three people.

  Reiji didn't think. He stepped forward and cast [Veil of Interference]—a support-class skill that created a buffer between an ally and incoming damage. The skill materialized as a shimmer of blue light, a wall of force that shouldn't exist but did. The Guardian's limb struck it with the force of a meteor. The invisible barrier cracked, splintering through multiple dimensions at once, and the energy dissipated into the arena's stone floor.

  Reiji's mana bottomed out at 5 points. The sudden drain made his vision stutter. Black spots appeared at the edges. His legs wanted to give out, but he locked them instead.

  "Fall back to the southern pillar," Taiga ordered. His shield was cracked now. Actual damage seeping through, fractures spreading like spiderwebs across the metal. "Ryu, on me. Tomoe, keep pressure. Reiji—can you cast while retreating?"

  "No," Reiji said. His mana was empty. Recovery would take minutes, and the fight had been going for seven minutes already. At this pace, they had ten minutes before someone died. Maybe less. The Guardian wasn't tiring. Its movements were just as sharp, just as coordinated. It could fight all day, could fight forever, could endlessly optimize its strikes until five people became four became three became nothing.

  The stone beneath their feet was already dark with blood. Not just spots. A trail. The Guardian was methodical about where it painted the arena.

  Reiji backed toward the pillar, his eyes tracking party status bars instead of his own feet. One step at a time. Another. The Guardian's attention was on Taiga still, but the warrior was slowing. His stamina bar was dropping faster than it should—adrenaline was feeding pure exhaustion now.

  The Guardian advanced on Hana anyway, moving past Taiga with a sudden, smooth pivot. Ryu charged to intercept, pushing his damaged legs forward in a desperate sprint. He raised his sword, tried to angle for a block. But the construct was too coordinated, too practiced. It feinted left—not a real attack, just a shimmer of movement—and Ryu's blade cut at empty air. The Guardian's actual strike came from below, a rising blow that caught Ryu on the shoulder and sent him spinning.

  It was past him before Ryu hit the stone.

  Hana flew backward, the impact so hard that her breath came out in a violent huff. She hit the southern pillar and didn't so much as slow down—the stone exploded inward, cracks spreading from her impact like roots seeking water. She crumpled. Her health bar dropped to 60 out of 160. She didn't move. Didn't try to stand. Didn't even open her eyes.

  "Mage down!" Tomoe called out. Her voice had changed. Lost something. The acknowledgment of irreversible damage. Hana was gone from the fight. Gone from the party. Four fighters were becoming three.

  The Guardian turned toward Tomoe next, its pyramid head rotating to track the archer with perfect mechanical precision. It moved toward the northern pillar, each step a calculation. Taiga saw what was coming and bellowed—not a word, just pure sound—and charged. He drove his shield into the Guardian's central mass, and for a moment the construct staggered. Its momentum halted. Its attention split.

  But only for a moment.

  As Taiga pressed forward, trying to capitalize on the opening, the Guardian's upper limbs came down in a double hammer-blow. Both limbs, synchronized, arriving from opposite angles. Taiga had time to raise his shield but not time to angle it properly. One limb hit the shield. The other hit his shoulder.

  Taiga took the hit on his left shoulder. Blood—real blood, dark against his armor—began to seep from under the pauldron. He didn't cry out. Just reset his stance, breathing hard, and drove forward again. His shield was rising for the next strike even as his body screamed at him to stop.

  That was what separating warrior from support class meant. Warriors pushed forward when the pain told them to stop. Support classes had to think three moves ahead while their mana bar emptied.

  Reiji's mana began to regenerate. 6 points per second. A slow trickle. It wasn't fast enough. Not against something that could deal sixty damage per second if it decided to focus fire. Not against something that was learning. Not against something that had been designed by the System to measure exactly how much a human could break before they stopped being able to function.

  "Ryu, pressure the left side," Taiga said. His voice was strained, controlled. "Tomoe—the head. Keep it flinching."

  Reiji's mana reached 20. He cast a heal on Taiga. Thirty mana gone. He was at 35 now. His hands were shaking. Not from exertion but from the coordination overlay—holding five bars of information in his mind while his body moved on autopilot was burning through something deeper than mana. Some resource that didn't have a name.

  Hana still wasn't moving. That was the problem. She was supposed to be pulling her weight, adding damage, and instead she was a corpse on the stone, breathing but unconscious. Four people were becoming three. Five was barely enough. Three would break under the Guardian's weight.

  The Guardian's left limb struck Ryu again, and this time the young warrior took a real wound. Not a graze, not something that could be healed with mana and prayer. His armor crumpled inward like paper, and underneath, his body did the same. He fell, gasping, and didn't stand back up. His health bar read 40 out of 180. The Guardian pivoted toward him, its pyramid head rotating to lock on to his location. It was preparing to finish what it had started. One warrior down meant four fighters became three. Three meant the frontline collapsed.

  "No!" Reiji cast another heal. The spell erupted from his hands like he was trying to push the warrior back to his feet through sheer will. Forty more mana gone. Ryu's health rose to 80. It was barely enough to keep him breathing.

  Ryu's eyes opened. He saw the Guardian approaching. Saw the limb rising for a killing blow. Tried to roll away and only made it two meters before the construct caught up.

  They were losing.

  The Guardian had taken maybe two hundred points of total damage. That left roughly a thousand. At their current rate—and their rate was decreasing—they needed another five minutes. They wouldn't have it. Someone would break first. Someone would die. And it was going to be Reiji's fault because he wasn't strong enough, wasn't fast enough, wasn't good enough to carry four people through a dungeon that was designed specifically to measure and break everyone who tried.

  Support classes were supposed to enable victory. Right now Reiji was just extending the dying.

  The Guardian's damage output was too consistent, too accurate. Taiga was bleeding from three separate wounds. Ryu could barely move, every step a negotiation with pain. Hana was unconscious on the stone. Tomoe was calling out shots from the pillar, her voice steady even as her arrows seemed to bounce off the construct's body with less and less effect. The Guardian was adapting to her firing pattern, moving its body between shots, learning where she liked to aim.

  Every attack the Guardian made was deliberate, placed, calculated to maximize harm. This wasn't a beast fighting on instinct. This was something that had been designed to win.

  Reiji's mana regenerated to 65. Not enough.

  He pulled up his skill list, let the menu expand in his vision. [Veil of Interference]. [Heal]. [Restoration]. [Sacrifice].

  [Sacrifice] was a support-class skill he'd unlocked after the Sentinel fight. The description was simple: "Transfer up to fifty percent of an ally's incoming damage to the caster for ten seconds." Perfect for protecting someone. Perfect for keeping your frontline alive when everything wanted to murder them.

  Perfectly suicidal if he was out of mana. Perfectly suicidal if he got hit multiple times. Perfectly suicidal if he was already low on health.

  Which he wasn't. He was full.

  Reiji had two hundred health points. The Guardian had been hitting for sixty to ninety damage per strike. Two strikes, and he was halved. Three strikes, and he was looking at resurrection or the respawn point.

  The Guardian went for Taiga again.

  Reiji cast [Sacrifice] on him. The skill activated smoothly, a faint purple aura appearing around the warrior's body. Fifty mana gone. Forty-five remaining. The ten-second duration began to tick down in Reiji's awareness.

  The Guardian's next strike was devastating. It came from multiple angles at once, all four limbs moving in sequence. Taiga blocked the first blow with his shield. The second caught him across the ribs. The third would have killed him—would have split him open and left him dying on the stone.

  The damage transferred to Reiji instead.

  His health dropped from 200 to 110 in a single impact. The pain was white-hot and sharp, like something important inside him had broken. His breath caught. His vision blurred. The coordination overlay flickered but held.

  Taiga staggered forward, gasping, alive. "Reiji—"

  "Again," Reiji said.

  He cast [Sacrifice] one more time. The cooldown was gone already. Thirty mana left. The Guardian went for Taiga's legs—a clean sweep meant to drop him. Reiji took that hit. His health dropped to 60. Then 50. The Guardian's limb came down again, already resetting for another strike, and Reiji took that too. The pain was building now, multiplying, turning his entire body into a warning signal.

  His health was 20.

  Reiji had trained for five years in that other loop. He had read guides and studied attack patterns and learned how to coordinate a full party through hundred-level dungeons. He had done it alone, grinding solo, fighting monsters thirty levels above him. He had done all the work because the other party members didn't exist. He had calculated every health threshold, every mana threshold, every moment where a fight could turn from victory to disaster.

  And he still died.

  The Guardian's final strike was aimed at Taiga's neck. Not a limb. The construct's central body twisted and accelerated, putting every ounce of its mass behind the blow. It was designed to finish a war—to snap the neck of a problem that wouldn't stay down. Reiji watched it come with a clarity that seemed wrong. Time shouldn't slow during a Tutorial fight. The System didn't reward that kind of mercy. But for one moment, the strike hung in the air between the Guardian and Taiga, and Reiji could count every component of the attack. The weight. The angle. The intention.

  Reiji couldn't move fast enough to block it physically. His legs wouldn't respond—something in his core was broken, or burning, or simply out of fuel. His arms were shaking. His vision was dark at the edges. He had seconds of consciousness left.

  He cast [Sacrifice] anyway, even though the skill was supposedly on cooldown. The effect burned through the last of his mana reserve. Fifteen points, gone. Zero remaining. Not even rounding error left. The skill shouldn't have worked. The cooldown wasn't expired. But Reiji had been holding the effect active on Taiga since the second cast, keeping it running, channeling mana into the duration every second it stayed alive. This wasn't a new cast. This was the old one, refusing to let go. Still burning. Still protecting.

  The attack struck Taiga anyway.

  But the Guardian's strike, meant to cleave through Taiga's neck and leave him a corpse on the stone, routed through Reiji's body instead. The massive construct's full force, all of its weight and power and manufactured cruelty, transferred directly into Reiji's frame. It felt like the arena itself was collapsing. Like gravity had become sharp.

  His health hit zero in the space between heartbeats. No sound. No flash of light. Just a sudden, complete absence of anything.

  The last thing Reiji saw was Taiga stumbling forward, screaming something inarticulate. Rage. Grief. The sound of a warrior who'd just watched his support class die protecting him. Tomoe's bow going still on the pillar, her face going white—the realization blooming like blood in water. She'd seen exactly what Reiji had done. Ryu trying to stand, failing, his legs buckling beneath him. Barely conscious. Barely alive. The Guardian turning away from Reiji's corpse, its attention already moving to the next target, its job not complete but its victory assured. Three people left. No healer. No support. No one to keep them from breaking. No one to hold the party together while everything tried to collapse.

  Five years of training for a second chance. Five years of reading guides and grinding solo and memorizing every stat formula. Five years of preparing to carry four strangers through a dungeon.

  And he still died in the Tutorial.

  Ten out of ten support-class design.