Chapter 133: The Skyborn Awakening

"Did you see that? Did you SEE that?"

"What kind of array hits that hard? One volley and the whole sky just cleared."

"Hit it a few more times and nothing in the world could crack this wall."

"This is a real server event. Not a side quest. A war."

"Light it up, everybody. Let’s show them what the living can do."

The great wall-arrays had fired once, and the whole defense line had come alive on the strength of it.

They weren’t a permanent solution. The arrays drew their power from stores of crystal, and once discharged, they needed time to recharge, a stretch of silence in which the wall’s guns would sit cold.

The Hollow Legion’s airborne forces, meanwhile, were not a thing that ran out.

Behind the burning-eyed bone-birds came gargoyles with hides like fieldstone, and banshees whose wailing carried over the wind and set teeth on edge, and a dozen other kinds of winged horror, all of it coming at once, a swarm dense enough to darken the dawn.

The defenders did not wait to be overrun.

Great horns sounded from the ramparts, and wings thundered overhead as elite regiments of griffin-riders and eagle-riders lifted off from the walls in tight formations, armor flashing, lances low.

They crashed into the swarm with the force of a hammer, their blades cutting blazing paths through the dark, and the sky above the wall broke into a vicious, whirling melee.

Along each gallery, heavy ballistae swung skyward under the hands of the garrison crews, loosing shafts as thick as a man’s arm, runes along their heads rippling like mercury.

They flew like falling rainbows, punching through bodies in clusters.

Above it all, the two great golden shapes of Kael’s Stormwing Sovereigns, the original and its clone, ruled the heavens like twin overlords, wings sweeping wide, lightning wrapped around every feather.

Stormcrown burned brighter than any other light on the battlefield, the pure, violent gold of it a natural enemy to everything the Hollow Legion fielded. Bolt after bolt rained down, breaking formations apart before they could close.

The dead fell in heaps.

White light climbed from the carnage into Kael’s panel, the experience bar rising steadily, half an hour of nonstop slaughter pushing it toward its limit.

Finally, with a burst of gold, it filled.

"Notification: Level 50 reached. Class Advancement complete: Beastlord Paragon."

"Attribute growth increased: Free points per level, 160 → 320."

"Companion capacity increased: 6 → 7."

"Class skill unlocked: Arcane Wellspring."

"Primordial Bloodline integration continuing current progress: 41%..."

The numbers ticked up one at a time until they stopped.

"Primordial Bloodline integration continuing current progress: 50%. The Skyborn Bloodline has advanced. Bloodline skill awakened:

[Skyborn Awakening]."

A bell tolled across the entire world at the same instant.

[Server-Wide Announcement: Congratulations to player Unrivaled for reaching level 50 and completing Fifth Class Advancement the first player on the server to do so. Rewards: Reputation +30,000, Luck +5, Gold +200,000, and Spirit Communion (SS)."]

The wall rang with voices.

"Level fifty? Already?"

"He’s going to collect every class advancement reward on this server by himself."

"Nobody on the rankings is even close."

"At this rate the gap’s only going to keep widening."

"Spirit Communion, SS-rank, and I can’t even guess what it does. Sounds amazing."

"Who cares what it does? It’s not for us regular players. Stick to farming gold."

"Prices are climbing everywhere. If we don’t keep grinding, we’ll be eating instant noodles and ducking the landlord."

"Honestly, if I had half his luck, I’d be living in a villa and eating steak every day."

Kael ignored all of it. His entire attention was already on the new options spread out in front of him, and he read through them with the same quiet appetite he’d brought to every other advancement.

Each earlier class change had come with some new passive from the Skyborn Bloodline, a quiet but constant improvement to the foundation. This one was different. For the first time, the bloodline had given him an active skill.

[SKYBORN AWAKENING]

Effect: Awaken the full power of the Skyborn Bloodline, entering an empowered state for the duration. All attributes increased by 100%.

Cost: 1 Bloodline Power per second

Bloodline Power: 1,000 / 10,000

Note: 5 Bloodline Power is restored every hour. No other method of recovery exists.

Kael’s eyes lit up reading it.

Ascension’s damage formula was nowhere near as simple as attack minus defense.

Doubling an attacker’s stat against a fixed defense produced a result three or four times as large, and the same logic ran in reverse for defense.

A flat doubling of every attribute was worth far more than the number suggested.

The cost was real. Bloodline Power regenerated at a crawl, five points an hour, and there was no other way to fill the pool.

But as a Beastlord, he rarely needed to fight personally, and the starting thousand points would stretch a long way if he spent them only when it counted.

A second new skill sat beside it.

[ARCANE WELLSPRING]

Skill Grade: S

Effect: Select a companion and open a wellspring of magic within it. For the next 60 seconds, it regenerates 2% of its maximum mana every second.

Mana Cost: 500

Cooldown: 60s

A sustained mana engine. It was exactly what Stormwing Sovereign and Elara needed, two casters who burned through their pools faster than anyone else in the roster, and the timing was almost uncanny.

But an S-rank skill no longer made his pulse jump the way it once had. He skimmed the description and moved on.

There were two more things he wanted to deal with first. He reached into his inventory and pulled out the Galewalker Boots, which had been sitting there for days waiting for exactly this.

Now the level requirement was no obstacle, and he slid them on. Windwalk would be there when he needed it.

And the Empyrean Sigil was in his inventory too. The door to the mythic map could open now. But the wall was under siege, Elara could not be recalled, and the sigil had waited this long. It could wait a little more.

At last, he pulled out the skill book the system had awarded for the advancement itself.

[SPIRIT COMMUNION] SS-rank.

He had no idea yet what it did.

But a feeling, steady and certain, told him this one was going to be something special.