Chapter 26: They Should Have Kept Him

Of everyone Ironclad had thrown at him tonight, the two Assassins were the only real problem.

Kael knew that math cold. Let either of them land a clean opener, chain a stun into a follow-up lockdown, and Ironclad’s coordination would do the rest a focus-fire wave with no counterplay, over before he even got a hand back on the bow.

Good thing he’d sparred against both of them more times than he could count.

Years of scrims had burned their positioning habits into his memory as deep as his own.

They’d picked hard-packed ground on purpose, avoiding footprints, staying quiet smart, but not smart enough.

Kael’s eyes tracked the faint disturbance in the grass, the barely-there shift in shadow where a body shouldn’t be, and locked both positions before either blade got within striking range.

Something sharpened behind his eyes.

He drew, and let Frost Volley loose in a wide fan.

At the same instant, he snapped a command to the Behemoth a full pivot, jaws already opening on Dread Wail.

Two area skills, launched from two separate angles, converging into a single overlapping kill zone.

No gap. No clean line out. The two Assassins had exactly one option left: eat the smaller of two disasters and pray it wasn’t fatal.

Assassins ran glass-cannon by design brutal offense, paper-thin defense. Even the "smaller" hit tore through more than half of what either of them had.

Both got knocked clean out of stealth, health bars gutted, exposed in the open with nowhere left to hide.

The General was already moving.

It planted its stance, spear rising, and unleashed Gale Thrust a howling column of wind-wrapped force screaming forward in a straight ten-meter line, punching clean through both staggered Assassins at once.

Neither of them had time to process what was happening before the light took them bodies dissolving mid-flinch, gone before either priest could even start a heal.

"No no way that’s real"

"He was managing pet positioning and skill timing WHILE fighting three of us solo?!"

"That’s not a person. That’s a machine wearing a mask."

Ironclad’s remaining fighters froze, something close to real fear settling over the graveyard.

Watching one player solve two Assassins that cleanly, without so much as a stutter in his own combat rhythm, didn’t feel like watching a fight anymore.

It felt like watching a system exploit no one had patched yet.

Kael didn’t give them time to recover.

While the shock still hung heavy over the field, he drew again a basic shot chained straight into Ice Barrage and dropped an exposed Priest before anyone thought to shield her.

He took two spell hits in the exchange. Didn’t matter. The stat gap made the damage a rounding error, and Lifechain was already routing eighty percent of whatever landed straight through to the Behemoth.

What actually reached him barely registered twenty, thirty points against a health pool that had long since crossed two thousand.

Ryan and the last of the melee fighters broke into a dead sprint, rage overriding any sense of tactics.

It didn’t matter. Their agility wasn’t in the same conversation as his. Kael kept moving, kept firing, every arrow trailing a slow that widened the gap a little further with each shot.

They chased him the length of the graveyard and never closed an inch just kept taking arrows to the face, morale bleeding out faster than their health bars.

Behind them, the players assigned to tie down the Behemoth and the General were already coming apart.

Ironclad’s plan had been sound on paper peel off a few bodies to buy time against the pets, throw everything else at Kael before the stat gap could matter. Nobody had accounted for the actual size of that gap, or for a Beastlord who fought like a dedicated Archer on the side.

With the front line stalling out, the back end unraveled fast the Behemoth and the General cutting through anyone still trying to hold ground, roars echoing off broken headstones.

Kael kept the pressure on, arrow after arrow, picking off anyone whose health dipped low enough to make worth the shot. Between the three of them, Ironclad’s numbers thinned out in minutes.

Then, all at once, the graveyard went quiet.

Kael lowered the bow and stood alone amid the wreckage cracked stone, scorched earth, and scattered across all of it, glowing piles of abandoned gear.

Dozens of pieces, easily, more than half of them Bronze-tier.

"Well. Guess I’m not walking home empty-handed."

He moved through the field methodically, scooping up every drop, his mood climbing with each piece added to his pack.

Miles away, at a respawn point on the far side of the map, the complaints started rolling in almost immediately.

"My sword’s gone. My HELMET’S gone. Everything"

"You lost two pieces? I woke up in my UNDERWEAR."

"This can’t be normal drop rates. No way."

"It’s not. Something’s boosting death-drop odds through the roof, and I’d bet money it’s tied to that Unrivaled freak."

"Whatever it is, we just got cleaned out."

Cynthia stood at the edge of the group, jaw tight, patience long gone.

"Enough."

The word cracked like a whip, and the muttering died instantly.

"A dozen of you. FULL roster. Wiped out by ONE solo player, and you’re standing here crying about loot?"

Nobody answered. Nobody dared.

She swept the group with a look that could have stripped paint.

"Someone explain to me where this went wrong. Are you telling me every credit I’ve poured into this roster bought me nothing but dead weight?"

Where did it go wrong?

More than one person bit down on the same silent answer.

it went wrong the second she decided a grudge match mattered more than the twenty-four hours everyone else on the server was spending leveling.

If she’d let this go and let her people play the game like everyone else, none of them would be standing here counting missing gear.

Nobody said it out loud. Nobody was that stupid.The silence stretched long enough to turn genuinely unbearable.

Then, from somewhere near the back of the group, a voice quiet, almost involuntary.

"...We wouldn’t be in this mess if Kael were still here."

The words landed and just sat there, ugly and undeniable, nobody willing to be the one to agree out loud.