[Death Painting (Rank-F):] Born from a deep-rooted fear of death and an obsessive desire for control, this ability grants a fragmented glimpse of your own end. Not a literal vision, but a cryptic, symbolic painting, an abstract portrait of your final moment. Understanding it requires intuition, interpretation, and a willingness to face truths hidden in metaphor. Deciphering the work may offer a chance to rewrite fate and avoid the inevitable.

Bartholomew was being driven back by the knight. She raised her fist. The Death Painting flickered, a bullseye with a hole blown through its center. He understood too late. Her punch crushed his hand, cutting off the gesture. Pain lanced through him, sharp and instant.

His eyes went wide as he tried to wrench his hand free. With the other he poured out another wave of sickly green mist, thicker and sharper than before. The cloud rolled over her helmet, seeping through the vents, but nothing happened.

"What?!"

Impossible. Why isn't she backing off?

She raised her arm again, fist clenched, the fire around her swelling until it cast her in molten light. Panic clawed at him. He triggered the crown's enchantment. An arc of lightning snapped across the space, crawling over both of them, the smell of ozone filling the air. She shuddered but didn't stop. Coughing, he retreated and called up another mana drill, swinging it toward her. Blue energy cracked against her living flames, the chamber ringing like a storm trapped under stone. He packed even more of the disease cloud into the air, saturating every inch with green miasma.

Ronan charged in for the finishing blow, but Iron Skin was disintegrating before their eyes. His flesh had turned a pale, grayish blue, blistered and leaking. He staggered, coughing blood. Bartholomew realized with a sick twist that the man was dissolving under the accumulated effects, while the knight stayed untouched.

"Bartholomew…" Ronan tried to speak, his voice breaking.

Bartholomew moved fast, raising fresh barriers while driving the mana drill to spin and strike again. The Death Painting flashed, a punctured punching bag spilling sand. He slipped aside just in time from one of the knight's arcing swings. She shot past him like a meteor wrapped in fire, striking without pause.

He focused hard and conjured a massive dome of force. With a sharp motion he slammed the knight into the wall and pinned her there. At the same time he spread his poisonous mist toward Ronan. The warrior lurched, coughing convulsively. The mana drill speared him in the head, hurling him backward. The impact cracked through the chamber and Ronan hit the ground unconscious, his body crashing down with a dull, heavy thud.

Arrows rained in from the far end of the hall. A few punched through his shoulder and thigh. He screamed, ripping them out as the fog knit his wounds. Then he turned back to the knight, raising both hands. Another dome of mana crushed her against the stone. The archer kept shooting, but Bartholomew shielded himself with barriers rising like panes of spectral glass.

The dome shuddered and cracked. The knight tore free and came charging again, her body blazing with a fire that seemed to devour the room's light. Bartholomew's eyes went wide. No poison. No disease. Nothing slowed her down. She was the living contradiction of everything he had built.

He invoked his healer's scan, the skill that revealed hidden sickness. He had to know. A cold spike ran down his spine.

"No poison? Nothing?!" His voice cracked into desperation. "Why are you still healthy?!"

High resistance to poison or disease was one thing. Luck could grant that. But this was something else entirely. She had immunity. True immunity. That shouldn't be possible. No one was supposed to be this strong. He had chosen his path precisely because disease and poison were invisible killers, by the time you noticed, it was already too late.

"What are you?!" he shouted, his voice ragged, the question echoing through the poisoned hall.

The Death Painting convulsed inside his mind, flickering through images. The panther dissolved, replaced by a flaming bat wearing a gas mask, crouched over the corpse of a plague doctor rat. The message was unmistakable: the bat was her, the mask was her immunity. This was how he would die. This was how she would hunt him.

He threw up barrier after barrier as she advanced, shattering each one with her fists. Every strike was an earthquake, mana walls splitting under her blows. As a last resort he hurled his mana drill at her. She met it with her blade, the clash bursting into blue sparks across the chamber.

Staggering backward, Bartholomew felt the Death Painting burn behind his eyes. A cracked frame. A bat in flames. A gas mask. His own hand splintering like porcelain. Destiny tightening like a rope around his neck.

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The knight smashed through his final barrier as if it were paper. With one sweep of her sword she carved a corridor through the miasma, the flames around her roaring like a silent dragon. Bartholomew countered with another drill, aiming for her chest. The spinning blade of blue energy missed as she deflected, stepped inside his guard, and kept coming.

He tried to drown her in another concentrated wave of green poison, but it slid off her as if her body rejected the very concept of sickness. In panic he triggered the crown again. Lightning erupted through the hall, leaping between the iron walls. The scent of scorched metal and ozone flooded his lungs. She trembled but didn't break. She caught his hand and crushed his fingers, cutting off the flow of mana.

Pain spiked up his arm and he screamed. "Why isn't it working?!"

She gave no answer. Her assault pressed him backward, blow after blow, forcing him toward the edge of the mechanism. Her fire blazed brighter, each step closing in like a miniature sun. Out of the corner of his eye, Ronan lay sprawled, chest barely rising. The archer had vanished into the dark, likely lining up another shot.

The Death Painting flared one final image: the burning bat above the masked corpse.

Bartholomew spun up another drill with one hand and raised a massive dome with the other, trying to trap her once and for all. The chamber shook from the impact, but she vaulted through the barrier, her sword slicing the air like a beam of light. Pain exploded in his flank as the blade punched through, fire licking at the wound.

A ragged cry tore out of him. In the same instant an arrow came from nowhere and buried itself near his heart. The double shock nearly dropped him to his knees.

She didn't stop. With brutal precision she smashed her fist into his face once, twice, three times, his skull screaming under the pressure. He threw everything he had into self-healing, flooding the room with restorative mist and layering himself in resistance buffs, but she kept hammering him, her blade twisting in his abdomen like a corkscrew.

With a guttural snarl she hoisted him by the throat. His vision tunneled as more arrows hissed from unseen angles, punching into his back. He pushed the disease cloud to its maximum, trying to suffocate her, but she didn't care. The crown flared, overloading with power.

In a last act of desperation, he unleashed the crown's full enchantment. A surge of energy roared over her body, locking her in place for a heartbeat. Lightning burst outward, throwing her back. Bartholomew crumpled to his knees, choking on his own poisoned air.

He ran, lungs burning, feeling his insides collapsing under their own weight. With a flick of mana he sealed the knight inside an improvised electric dome. One hand pressed to his gut, pumping advanced healing through the wound while the other tightened on the crown. It wasn't just a shock device. It was an amplifier, a channeling core, a mage's staff forged into a circlet. His weapon. His trump card.

Stationed at the edge of the dome, he poured mana into it with reckless focus. Lightning crawled across the barrier like veins of blue fire. The woman convulsed inside, every spasm rattling the chamber, light strobing off the stone walls. Blood streamed from Bartholomew's chin, yet his lips curled into a smile.

"It's over. I won." The words rasped out of him like broken glass.

Ronan lay motionless on the floor. The archer still fired from behind a slab of rubble, but Bartholomew sheltered behind the dome, using it as both prison and shield.

"In a few minutes Ronan will be dead," he called, his voice echoing through the haze. "Then it'll just be the two of you left. But I've already learned how to cage her. I'm always two steps ahead of my own death."

***

Luke crouched behind the heap of rubble, still stunned. How? How the hell did he see through every strategy, every distraction I set up with the Princess?

Her immunity to poison and disease had been the linchpin. She should've killed him a dozen times by now, or at least kept Bartholomew pinned long enough for Luke to finish it with an arrow. Instead, the worst-case scenario had unfolded. Ronan was down. In under a minute, the bastard had flipped the board.

Luke's eyes darted to the fallen warrior. If Ronan was still alive, the clock was ticking.

"You can still walk out of here alive," Bartholomew's voice rolled across the chamber. "Take my offer. Give up your old life. Better to live here in the tutorial than die trying to leave it."

Luke watched the man's hand tip back another mana potion. Bartholomew has planned everything. It's like playing chess against a machine.

[Health Points (HP): 1549/4340] [Mana Points (MP): 678/5100] [Arrows in Quiver: 1/20]

Get close and I've got thirty seconds before I'm dead.

He glanced at Charlie. Every time she tried to stand, the crown lashed out with lightning, frying her bones inside the electric field.

Charlie's built like iron… a walking conductor.

In the end, Bartholomew and Charlie countered each other perfectly. Luke exhaled slowly and, through the system, mentally equipped his Acolyte Assassin's Garb.

Bartholomew doesn't know I can only last thirty seconds near him.

A flick of thought, and fifteen new arrows shimmered into his quiver.

[Mana Points (MP): 603/5100] [Arrows: 16/20]

Then he burst from cover, sprinting across the hall, loosing arrow after arrow into the torches along the walls. One by one, the flames died, plunging the mechanism chamber into shadow. If Bartholomew owned the battlefield through poison and disease, Luke would claim it through darkness.

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