When Triss and Murphy returned, the town of Plaguebane was already in a state of jubilation.
Just minutes earlier, the Bonechewer King, whom the players had kept running around with ranged kiting tactics, had finally fallen. But rather than saying the players had used their "wisdom and courage" to defeat the desecrated remains of that legendary figure, it would be more accurate to say that the Bonechewer King had "died of exhaustion" all by himself.
After all, with the players' current strength and weapon levels, they couldn't even pierce its defenses if they all attacked at once.
They had led the Bonechewer King on a chase around the ruins of Plaguebane, searching for sunlight. The sunlight that Femis precisely directed down upon it steadily depleted the last remnants of midnight power in those bones, and in the end, they managed to wear it down to death.
During this process, another batch of the small players who had luckily survived the grueling fight earlier had died. But the good news was that they had finally chewed through this instance!
Their victory might not have been dazzling, their own losses might have been severe, and every guild's reserve members might have been wiped out, but a win was a win!
They hadn't allowed any powerful NPC vanguard forces to enter the town and join the battle. That meant they had completed an utterly wild "zero-lamp mode" run!
Although Murphy and Triss had been wandering around the Land of Creation deep in the swamp, Murphy's eyes—namely, the griffin Raveno—had been observing the battlefield the whole time. So the instant the Bonechewer King fell, a "server-wide announcement" appeared simultaneously on the player interfaces of every player still alive on the battlefield at Plaguebane:
``` Congratulations to the players on successfully completing Team Instance No.