Chapter 123: Twenty Against One

Clad in shifting, violet-hued plate armor, with a fused blade gripped tight in his gauntleted hand, Kael tore across the fractured expanse of the battlefield at a dead sprint.

He cut through the chaos of the front lines like a falling scythe, his momentum absolute and unyielding.He had simply not reached the Thunder Roc in time.

Having dispersed his full roster earlier to maximize coverage across the wider theater, the cruel geometry of distance now worked violently against him.

Beastlord mechanics offered no magical, emergency recall button mid-combat no instant ticket to yank a companion back into the safety of the Rest Sanctum the second the tide turned sour.

All he could do was watch from afar as the Thunder Roc was peppered with concentrated fire, dragged down out of the dark sky, and instantly shackled beneath the exact same inescapable control chain that had claimed the Wraithlord moments before.

The catastrophic sequence played out with agonizing familiarity. Health bars evaporated, a pillar of white dissolution swallowed the beast, and a second legendary companion was ruthlessly excised from the board.

"Thunder Roc is down too!"

"Two companions wiped out back-to-back. He’s got to be boiling with absolute fury right now."

"Those four five-man squads are operating on an entirely different plane of tactical execution."

"Half the disruption skills they’re throwing out

I’ve literally never seen them in the game files before. Secret progression paths, guaranteed."

"The real question is whether they actually outclass Unrivaled himself, or just his auxiliary roster."

"The server’s undisputed melee sovereign versus black-ops operatives secretly groomed by the state. This is the match of the entire campaign."

"I literally cannot tear my eyes away from the feed."Every active stream locked their tracking lenses forward as Kael bridged the final stretch, the collective tension thick enough to suffocate a man through a glass screen.

The twenty elite operatives clocked his relentless approach without a flicker of genuine alarm.

"If he had just stayed cowering behind that NPC legion, we wouldn’t have had an opening," a voice muttered with a thin, mocking smile.

"Absolute perfection that he decided to feed himself right to us."

"A solo player actually believing he’s invincible.

"

"Do they genuinely think we’re the washed-up, casual scrubs the forums love to mock?"

"Let’s educate him on what a real tactical disparity looks like."

Every single one of them had already mentally signed the death warrant of the encounter.

A Beastlord’s entire identity was anchored to their summoned arsenal and two of his absolute heaviest hitters had already folded without landing a single significant counter-blow.

Whatever mythical reputation had coalesced around the moniker Unrivaled, it clearly lacked the hardware to survive actual, organized military opposition.

He must have coasted through soft targets this entire expansion run. The rumor mills had simply done the rest.

Granted, he had once legitimately earned the server’s premier melee ranking, wielding blade-work dense enough to command baseline respect.

But an archetype like the Beastlord carried hard, systemic ceilings that no amount of flashy human swordplay could ever completely bypass.

And twenty hand-picked specialists, culled from millions of applicants, simply were not going to fall to one man’s isolated blade work, pedigree be damned.

"Unrivaled remains a dangerous variable, regardless of what happens to his zoo," Ashworth, the squad lead for Raven, murmured evenly, his tone level despite the adrenaline singing in his veins.

"Close-quarters lethality of that caliber doesn’t just evaporate overnight."

"High command is monitoring this feed in real time. Absolute discipline. No sloppy errors. Stay sharp."

Ashworth’s eyes remained steady, though nothing in his expression betrayed even a hint of genuine panic.

Twenty against one. The sheer numerical reality made the final outcome feel like a mathematical certainty.

In his strategic read of tonight’s engagement, this entire skirmish existed for one singular purpose.

Four classified tactical units that had spent the war hiding in the shadow of Unrivaled’s manufactured fame finally stepping out into the burning limelight, systematically dismantling the server’s greatest titan live in front of millions.

Kael breached effective engagement range before the thought had even settled into the cold air.

An archer clad in aggressive crimson leather drew his recurve to the ear and loosed in a single, blurring motion.

The projectile traced a lethal, hissing arc through the gloom, dead-centered on Kael’s exposed chest plate.

Kael instinctively twisted his footwork, shifting his weight to slip the trajectory.

Instead, a glaring system warning burned across his field of vision guaranteed-hit, entirely immune to physical evasion.

No amount of mortal reflexes or agile footwork was going to alter the destination of that flight path.

The arrow struck home with a wet, heavy crack, biting square into the center of the dark chest plate.

It never penetrated an inch further. The dense, violet-tinged aura of the armor shrugged off the kinetic force entirely, a blinding flash of tactical sparks marking the point of impact before the shaft bounced harmlessly away into the mud, spent and useless.

-5

The lingering stun effect tied directly to the mark fared no better, violently negated upon contact with the heavy fusion layer.

"That that is physically impossible!"

Viper-3, the crimson-armored sharpshooter who had loosed the bolt, stared at the floating damage indicator in absolute, paralyzing disbelief, his apex specialty reduced to a negligible rounding error.

A sharp ripple of visceral unease coursed silently through the tightly packed ranks of the surrounding squads.

Ashworth’s voice sliced through the tension, cold, measured, and absolute. "Do not let a single anomaly rattle your focus."

"Recon intel verified he is currently running an SS-grade fusion protocol Warden’s Mandate. It grafts a massive percentage of a bonded entity’s core statistical baseline directly onto the host user."

"That violet monstrosity of his was engineered around astronomical baseline defense. It logically follows that his armor scaling spikes through the roof once it wears him instead of the other way around."

"His raw offensive output and agility parameters do not inherit those inflated defensive margins.

Maintain your discipline, execute the crowd-control rotation properly, and we drop him without breaking a sweat."

The psychological reassurance hit its mark, the collective expressions across the group settling back into their initial, unshakable arrogance.

Kael was already surging forward by the time the tactical breakdown concluded, his fused blade held high, driving like a spearhead straight into the heart of the clustered formation without a single word of warning.

A hulking, broad-shouldered operative encased in blackened heavy plate detached from the defensive wedge to intercept him.

A massive steel tower shield slammed into the frozen earth, a faint, mountain-shaped phantom rippling menacingly into view beneath the glowing aura of a high-tier defensive skill.

He charged forward like an armored engine of war, closing the gap at breakneck speed.

"Let us witness precisely how razor-sharp the server’s self-proclaimed apex swordsman truly is!"

"Try carving through this iron wall, if you think your blade has the weight!"