Chapter 37: What the Ring Can’t Buy

[VOIDBLADE ASSASSIN]

Bloodline Tier: Gold

Constitution ★★★★★★

Strength ★★★★★★★★

Agility ★★★★★★★★★

Spirit ★★★★★★

Skills: Wraithform, Umbral Veil, Shadowwind Strike, Phantom Blade Throw, Silent Execution

A temporary tool, same as the Frostwraith had been Kael had no intention of investing long-term in its growth curve.

What mattered was the kit, and the kit delivered exactly what he needed a companion built entirely around disappearing.

Satisfied, he cracked a return scroll and made his way back to Frostwatch to wait on Alexis.

She found him not long after, striding through the plaza with the kind of presence that turned heads without trying crimson longsword wreathed in faint flame at her hip, a pale cloak snapping behind her in the wind.

The trade went exactly as smoothly as both of them had hoped. Gear changed hands, gold flowed the other direction, and everyone walked away satisfied.

"Pleasure doing business." Alexis flashed him a quick, genuine smile, already turning to go clearly eager to get the new gear distributed across her roster before the night got any later.

Kael watched her go, then wound his way through the city’s back streets until he found a stretch of alley quiet enough to log off in peace.

The moment the rig came off, he rolled up his left sleeve on instinct.

Faint blue text hovered just above his skin, glowing soft against the dark.

Remaining Lifespan: 2 years, 6 months.

The mark of full integration every player now carried a literal countdown, a real number ticking down toward zero.

Hit it, and the game stopped being a game. The only way to buy more time was to spend in-game gold directly against it one coin bought an hour, straightforward and merciless in equal measure.

Kael’s clock still had plenty of runway. No reason to burn currency topping it off tonight.

He focused inward instead, and a translucent blue panel bloomed into existence in front of him, dense with line after line of text.

"Select game resources to extract into reality:"

Attribute Points: 10 gold / point

Elara Winters (Legendary): 320,000 gold

Wraithlord (Legendary): 300,000 gold

Voidblade Assassin (Gold): 70,000 gold

Void Behemoth (Silver): 40,000 gold

Extraction wasn’t free-form, and it definitely wasn’t cheap.

The system gated every withdrawal behind gold, and the prices scaled hard with tier.

Even with the ring quietly rigging his drop rates in his favor for two straight days of nonstop grinding, his total sat just over 140,000 gold.

Most players will never see a tenth of this number, and even I can’t afford my own roster.

Elara and the Wraithlord were both well out of reach tonight the kind of numbers that made even a lucky, snowballing run like his look thin by comparison. Voidblade and the Behemoth, though, sat comfortably within budget.

He didn’t linger over the decision. Attributes first, then the Warden’s Mandate skill itself, then the Assassin.

"4,850 gold spent. 485 attribute points withdrawn."

"50,000 gold spent. SS-Rank skill [Warden’s Mandate] withdrawn."

"70,000 gold spent. Level 30 Gold-Tier companion [Voidblade Assassin] withdrawn."

Power surged through him with each confirmation, something dense and real settling into muscle and bone that hadn’t been there a moment before.

His whole body felt sharper, denser, like it had finally caught up to numbers that had only existed on a panel until now.

A dark seam split open in the air in front of him, spinning slow and silent, and the Assassin drifted out of it half-formed, wreathed in a cold that had nothing to do with the season, carrying an unmistakable weight of intent.

Kael already knew exactly how tonight was going to go.He triggered Warden’s Mandate without a flicker of hesitation.

Light swallowed the Assassin whole, its shifting form collapsing down into a pair of twin blades short, wickedly curved, humming faintly with the same cold that had clung to their owner a moment before.

Spectral Twinblades.

He closed his hands around them, and the world tilted sideways.

Cold flooded up through his arms first, then his chest, then everywhere at once his solid, physical body thinning out, edges going soft and translucent, until what stood in the alley wasn’t quite flesh anymore.

A shape. A suggestion of a man, more shadow than substance.

Wraithform. The Assassin’s first passive, now his to wear a body with no real volume left to collide with anything. Walls meant nothing.

Doors meant nothing. Wherever he needed to go tonight, nothing built to keep people out was going to slow him down.

He tested the sensation for a second, watching his own half-transparent hand flex in the dark, and allowed himself a slow, satisfied breath.

Then he layered Umbral Veil on top of it.

What little was visible of him simply stopped being visible at all. No shimmer, no distortion. Gone.

Across the city, Ironclad’s headquarters buzzed with its usual late-night energy most of the active roster still grinding, chasing whatever ground they could recover after last night’s disaster.

One room, though, sat apart from the rest. The private office adjoining Cynthia’s own, lights still burning well past midnight.

Ryan lay bound to a chair inside it, wrists cinched tight, the fight long since drained out of his posture.

Across the room, Cynthia paced in front of him, arms crossed, her expression carrying none of the composure she usually wore in front of the rest of the org.

"Do you have any idea what tonight cost me?" Her voice stayed low, controlled, which somehow made it worse. "An entire elite roster. Gear replacement. Every ounce of credibility I had left with the board."

"And you promised me you could handle it."

Ryan’s throat worked, but nothing came out. There was nothing left to say that wouldn’t make this worse.

"I built you up." Cynthia crouched in front of him, voice dropping to something quiet and razor-edged.

"I put everything into you the second I cut Kael loose. Do you understand what happens to both of us if the board decides that was the wrong call?" ℴ

She let the silence stretch, watching him flinch under the weight of it.

"You’re going to fix this," she said finally. "Starting tomorrow. And if you can’t"

She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.

Ryan swallowed hard, color draining another shade further from his face, and said nothing at all.