Five minutes felt like five seconds.
I spent the time staring at my new skill description, reading it over and over like the words might change and reveal some secret cheat code.
**[OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING]**
**[AFTER OBSERVING A SKILL MULTIPLE TIMES, GAIN BASIC UNDERSTANDING. SUFFICIENT UNDERSTANDING ALLOWS REPLICATION AT REDUCED EFFECTIVENESS.]**
"Reduced effectiveness" could mean anything. Fifty percent power? Ten percent? Would I embarrass myself trying to shoot ice and producing a sad ice cube?
Only one way to find out, and I had a feeling the boss fight was going to force my hand.
Around me, people were preparing. Min-soo was distributing the injured into the back lines, organizing people with even basic combat ability into a formation. Yuna was meditating, recovering mana. Someone had found health potions on the goblin corpses—actual video game loot drops—and was distributing them to the wounded.
I walked over to where Yuna sat cross-legged, eyes closed.
"Hey," I said quietly, not wanting to startle her.
She opened one eye. "Observer guy. Jae-sung, right?"
"Yeah. Can I ask you something about your Ice Bolt spell?"
Both eyes open now, curious. "Sure?"
"When you cast it, you gather mana in your hands first, right? There's like a two-second charge before it fires?"
"Yeah, that's the casting time. Why?"
"Does it feel like... I don't know, pulling energy from somewhere? Or creating it?"
She thought about it. "Both? I pull mana from inside me—here," she touched her stomach, "and then shape it into ice. The shaping is the hard part. Mana wants to be formless. You have to force it into structure."
I filed that away. Pull from core, force into shape. I could work with that.
"Thanks," I said. "Good luck with the boss."
"You too. Keep calling out those patterns. You saved lives today."
The compliment hit harder than I expected. Maybe I wasn't completely useless after all.
**[BOSS MONSTER SPAWNING IN: 00:30]**
Everyone tensed. Weapons raised. Spells charged. I moved to the back, surrounded by the non-combatants, and tried not to feel like a coward.
**[00:10]**
The ground shook. Trees at the forest's edge bent and cracked.
**[00:05]**
Something massive moved through the darkness between the trees.
**[00:00]**
**[BOSS MONSTER: GOBLIN CHIEF - LEVEL 10]**
It stepped into the clearing, and my stomach dropped.
Ten feet tall. Muscles like corded steel under grey-green skin. It wore actual armor—crude but effective—made from what looked like monster hide and bone. In one hand it carried a massive spiked club that looked like it could pulverize a car.
And worst of all, it had intelligence in its eyes. Not the animal cunning of the smaller goblins. Real, calculating intelligence.
**[GOBLIN CHIEF - LEVEL 10]**
**[BOSS MONSTER]**
**[SKILLS: ???]**
**[WARNING: BOSS MECHANICS ACTIVE]**
My Identify skill couldn't fully penetrate it. The information was blocked, showing only question marks where the skill list should be.
"Level 10," Min-soo said quietly. "We're mostly level 2, maybe level 3. This is bad."
"We don't have a choice," someone said. "The Tutorial won't let us leave until we clear it."
The Goblin Chief raised its club and roared—not the fear-inducing Battle Roar from the Warrior, but a challenge. A declaration.
Then it charged.
For something that big, it moved with terrifying speed. It targeted the front line, the combat classes, and swung its club in a wide horizontal arc.
Three people got hit. I watched in horror as they flew backward like ragdolls, their HP bars—which I could see now, another Observer ability?—dropping to critical levels instantly.
**[ANALYZING BOSS PATTERN...]**
**[PATTERN RECOGNITION INSUFFICIENT]**
**[REQUIRES MORE DATA]**
Of course. I needed to watch it fight more before I could predict its moves.
Min-soo's swords shot forward, all six of them, targeting the Chief's head and chest. The Chief raised its free hand and swatted them aside like annoying flies. The swords clattered to the ground.
"What?!" Min-soo shouted. "How—"
The Chief had armor, but more than that, it had strength. Raw physical power that made our attacks look pitiful.
Yuna fired Ice Bolt. The spell hit the Chief's chest and... froze a small patch of skin. That was it. The Chief looked down at the ice, almost curious, then brushed it off.
We were outclassed. Completely, utterly outclassed.
The Chief swung again, this time vertically. A Warrior with a shield tried to block. The shield shattered. The Warrior crumpled.
**[PARTICIPANT DOWN: 246/247 REMAINING]**
First death. The notification was cold, clinical. A person had just died and the System announced it like a score update.
People started panicking. Some ran—not that there was anywhere to go, the Tutorial zone was enclosed. Others attacked desperately, their skills barely scratching the Chief.
I watched it all, my Pattern Recognition skill working overtime, trying to find something, anything useful.
**[ANALYZING... 15%]**
The Chief targeted a Spear user next. The woman tried to dodge but wasn't fast enough. The club came down—
—and missed.
Not because the Chief's aim was bad, but because someone had pulled her out of the way. A guy with a movement skill, some kind of short-range teleport.
The club hit the ground where she'd been, and I saw it: a brief moment where the Chief struggled to pull the club free from the dirt. Maybe half a second, maybe less.
But it was something.
**[ANALYZING... 34%]**
The Chief roared in frustration and swung again, a wild horizontal sweep. People scattered. The club smashed into a tree, splintering it.
Another moment of recovery. Longer this time. A full second as it pulled the club free from the tree trunk.
**[ANALYZING... 58%]**
Pattern forming. When the Chief missed and hit something solid, it needed time to recover. The bigger the object, the longer the recovery.
"MIN-SOO!" I shouted. "Make it hit something big! Trees, the ground—anything! It gets stuck for a second!"
"We can't make it do anything!" he shouted back, dodging another swing.
"BAIT IT! Use yourselves as bait and dodge at the last second!"
It was a terrible plan. It relied on people risking their lives as decoys. But it was all I had.
To my surprise, someone actually tried it. The guy with the teleport skill—he flickered in front of the Chief, shouted something insulting in Korean, then teleported away as the club came down.
The club buried itself in the ground.
One second of recovery.
"NOW!" I screamed.
Every ranged attacker fired at once. Arrows, magic bolts, thrown weapons—all of it converging on the Chief while it was stuck.
The Chief roared in pain as attacks actually landed, actually hurt it.
**[ANALYZING... 79%]**
It pulled the club free and this time it didn't swing wildly. It turned, calculated, and threw the club.
I didn't even have time to shout a warning. The massive weapon spun end over end and caught the teleport guy in the chest. He went down hard.
**[PARTICIPANT DOWN: 245/247 REMAINING]**
But the Chief was now unarmed. That had to be an advantage, right?
Wrong.
The Chief reached down and grabbed a nearby boulder—an actual boulder, the size of a beach ball—and hurled it at the ranged attackers.
**[NEW SKILL DETECTED: IMPROVISED WEAPONRY]**
**[ANALYZING... 91%]**
The boulder crushed someone. Another death. But I barely noticed because my Pattern Recognition had finally completed.
**[ANALYSIS COMPLETE: GOBLIN CHIEF]**
**[PATTERN IDENTIFIED]**
**[ATTACK PATTERN: AGGRESSIVE, CALCULATED, ADAPTIVE]**
**[WEAKNESS: OVERCONFIDENT, FOCUSES ON ARMED OPPONENTS FIRST]**
**[STRATEGY: EXPLOIT RECOVERY TIMES, TARGET WHILE UNARMED, AVOID GRABBING RANGE]**
The information flooded my mind. I could see it now—the way the Chief prioritized targets, the slight tell before it threw something, the recovery time after each major action.
But knowing the pattern and doing something about it were different things.
The Chief was retrieving its club now, walking calmly toward where it had thrown it. We had maybe ten seconds before it was fully armed again.
An idea formed. Stupid. Risky. Probably going to get me killed.
I looked at my hands. I'd observed Yuna's Ice Bolt dozens of times now during the waves. I'd asked her about the mechanics. I'd watched the mana flow, the shaping, the release.
Could I copy it?
**[OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING AVAILABLE]**
**[SKILL: ICE BOLT - UNDERSTANDING: 45%]**
**[REPLICATION POSSIBLE AT REDUCED EFFECTIVENESS]**
**[WARNING: FIRST ATTEMPT MAY FAIL OR PRODUCE UNEXPECTED RESULTS]**
Forty-five percent understanding. That meant my copy would be... what, half as strong? A quarter? Didn't matter. I had to try.
I closed my eyes, trying to remember what Yuna had said. Pull mana from the core. I reached inside myself, searching for that energy she'd described.
There. A warmth in my chest, my stomach. Not much—my Spiritual stat was only C+ rank—but it was there.
I grabbed it mentally and pulled.
Pain. Sharp and immediate, like pulling a muscle I didn't know I had. The mana resisted, not wanting to move.
I forced it anyway, dragging it up through my body to my hands.
Shape it. Force it into structure.
Ice. Cold. Solid. Crystalline.
The mana fought me. It wanted to be formless, like Yuna said. I pictured ice, thought about cold, imagined the structure of frozen water.
Something formed in my hands. Cold. Growing.
I opened my eyes.
In my hands was the saddest ice bolt I'd ever seen. It was small, maybe the size of a pencil, and it looked less like a bolt and more like a slightly pointy icicle.
"Are you kidding me?" I muttered.
But it was ice. It was magic. I'd done it.
The Goblin Chief had retrieved its club and was turning back toward the combat classes.
I raised my hands, aimed at its back, and threw my pathetic ice bolt with all the mental force I could muster.
It flew about ten feet and hit the Chief in the lower back.
The Chief stopped.
Slowly, it turned around.
It looked at me. Really looked at me for the first time.
Then it started walking toward me.
"Oh no," I said.
"OH NO," I said louder.
Everyone was staring now. At me. At the boss monster I'd just made very, very angry.
"STOP ATTRACTING ITS ATTENTION!" Min-soo screamed.
"I WAS TRYING TO HELP!" I screamed back, backing away as the Chief advanced.
My tiny ice bolt had done exactly one point of damage, I was sure. But it had accomplished something worse: it had made me interesting.
The Chief raised its club.
I did the only thing I could think of.
I ran.