Chapter 132: Stormstep

"What in the world was that?"

"One cast, and an entire block of the horde just vanished. Is that some kind of forbidden spell?"

"Forbidden spell? That’s Unrivaled’s companion. The eagle."

"It isn’t the eagle anymore. Look at it, the shape changed. It’s bigger, heavier. Did it evolve again?"

"Again? It was already Legendary-tier."

"Which means it’s Epic now. An Epic-tier companion, on a battlefield, in front of everyone."

"Most Beastlords on this server are thrilled to land a single Legendary. I wouldn’t even let myself dream about Epic."

"Unrivaled, are you recruiting? I’ll carry your potions. I’ll carry your bags. I’ll carry anything."

Stormwing Sovereign’s strike had set the entire wall buzzing, and the commotion hadn’t died when the experience arrived.

White light poured from the shattered front ranks into the great golden bird in a continuous stream, so much of it, so fast, that its experience bar rushed to the edge and kept going.

A column of radiant gold fell out of the sky and wrapped around it.Two crisp chimes rang in Kael’s ear one after the other.

[Notification: Companion [Stormwing Sovereign] has reached level 50."

[Notification: Companion [Stormwing Sovereign] has awakened dormant bloodline potential on level-up. New A-rank skill awakened: (Stormstep).]

Kael blinked.

"That was the Genesis Heart."

He hadn’t forgotten the item’s third effect. He had simply stopped waiting for it.

In the days since he’d pulled it from the Astral Spire’s chest, not one companion had so much as flickered, and he had started to wonder whether the Mythic rating owed more to rumor than substance.

Now, finally, here was the first result, and it had landed on the companion he’d least expected.He opened the panel and read the new skill.

[STORMSTEP]

Skill Grade: A

Effect: Dissolve into pure lightning and streak through the air, instantly reappearing at any point within 50 meters. While transformed, the user cannot be targeted or attacked.

Mana Cost: 300

Cooldown: 40s

No damage, nothing flashy, but an untouchable blink with a forty-second cooldown made it exactly the kind of tool that kept a high-value striker alive in a crowded sky. A mobility skill, and a good one.

Today, Stormwing Sovereign was carrying the heaviest share of his output, so he didn’t hesitate. He called up Spectral Aspect and split the great bird in two.

The clone appeared at full strength beside the original, and without waiting for any further instruction, it threw its head back and released a second Tempest Judgment of its own.

A phantom of the thunder-bird, pale and enormous, thundered down out of the clouds and hammered a second section of the Hollow Legion’s front line into the snow.

Golden lightning swept across the whole stretch in a single brutal sweep, and another tide of white light climbed into the sky.

On the golden panel overhead, Kael’s name had already climbed to the top of the point rankings.

The gap between it and the name in second place kept widening, and no amount of effort from the rest of the field looked likely to close it.

Elara stood at the edge of the rampart, staff raised, sending down spell after spell, great spears of ice arcing over the parapet and striking the horde below.

A princess of Northvale had access to magic most mages never saw, and her gear showed it. In raw output she was no less dangerous than Lyra or the Stormwing Sovereign, and for a moment he wondered just how much of the damage on those rankings was hers.

Everyone else was pulling their weight too. Lyra’s arrows came down in steady, glittering volleys.

The Hollow Emissary was somewhere in the horde below, doing something that left little more than a trail of dissolving bodies.

Wraithlord and Void Cataclysm were not among them.

Kael had kept both at his side, and not by accident. The whole point of this battle, as far as he was concerned, was to bring Elara back off the wall alive.

If the event rules forbade him from sending her to the Rest Sanctum, then everything else had to be arranged around the idea of keeping her out of danger, and that meant two heavy, durable companions close enough to wrap around him as armor and blade the moment the situation turned.

Points were secondary. Without those two, even a perfect ranking would be worth nothing.

Wraithlord had summoned a squad of skeletal archers from Endless Legion to rake the field and add to the total, and the squad lined up along the parapet beside him, firing in disciplined rows.

Even so, no amount of firepower could stop the dead. They came on and on, wave after wave, crashing against the foot of the wall.

Ghouls with gleaming fangs. Skeleton warriors with rotted flesh hanging in strips.

Bone claws punched into the thick sheathing of ice and began to climb, dozens, then hundreds, then more than anyone could count, a pale tide rising up the face of the stone.

Hulking undead giants stood among them, snatching lesser creatures out of the crowd and flinging them upward in great arcs, so that they came crashing onto the first-gallery platform in the middle of the players, who scattered, shouting.

For a moment the first tier shook with chaos.

But the Bulwark of Ash had been standing for a thousand years, and it had not survived that long by accident.

As the first wave of climbers neared the lowest gallery, a deep, rattling grind sounded from inside the stone. Gears turned. Chains drew taut.

Then, with a sound like a hundred anvils dropping, rows of massive steel spears burst out of the wall face without warning, skewering the undead where they clung, tossing them down into the snow with high, rattling shrieks.

On the galleries, archers and mages saw their chance, and they took it. Points flashed, numbers climbed, and the whole line filled with the roar of fighters who were beginning to believe they might actually hold.

The Hollow Legion had been waiting a thousand years for this, though, and it had not brought only foot soldiers.

From somewhere beyond the swirling snow, a long, ragged wail rose into the wind, and the sound sent a chill through every defender who heard it.

Out of the blizzard came a flock of bone-birds, enormous, skeletal things with wings of green fire, thousands of them at once, so many that their wingspans blotted out the sky and cast the entire northern face of the wall into shadow. They bore down on the first gallery in a single dark cloud.

"Fliers!" someone screamed. "Incoming, fliers!"The players on the first tier froze, every face going pale. There were no walls to hold back an enemy that came from above.

Then the whole wall shuddered.

Across the ice-sheathed face of the Bulwark, great glowing sigils woke one after another, tracing long lines of brilliant light through the stone.

Bright energy surged along the grooves, threading the length of the wall, and the whole structure began to hum with a rising, grinding note that made the air itself vibrate.

Then the wall fired.

Beams of raw energy as thick as dragons burst from its face, dazzling arcs of rainbow light that tore across the heavens and swept through the flock like the stroke of a gigantic hand.

Wherever they passed, the blizzard parted. Bone-birds shattered by the hundreds, and the sky filled with falling fragments.