Chapter 45: Army Of The Damned

"Holy did Unrivaled seriously just throw his companion off the wall?"

"Throw it off? Look at how many of those things are down there. That’s not a drop, that’s a sacrifice."

"Maybe it’s tankier than it looks. Thick hide, deep pool, who knows."

"Doesn’t matter how thick your hide is against that many claws at once."

"He’s what, level twenty? There’s no pet at level twenty surviving that."

"Exactly. Strongest tiger on the mountain still goes down to enough wolves. And those things down there aren’t small level sixteen and hitting like trucks."

"Whatever stats it’s rocking, numbers like that just grind you down eventually."

"Guy’s been on top of the leaderboard so long he’s forgotten what ’careful’ means. This is just a flex that’s about to backfire spectacularly."

"Give it thirty seconds. We’ll be watching a corpse."

"I’ll jump off this wall myself if that thing survives five minutes down there."

Nobody could blame the crowd for assuming the worst. Kael Mercer had spent the last several weeks parked at the top of every leaderboard the server tracked.

And a spectacle like this the server’s most-watched player launching his own companion into a horde was exactly the kind of thing that pulled every idle eye on the wall toward one spot at once. Void Behemoth alone made that easy.

Something that size didn’t need an announcement. It was visible from half the battlement.

Then it hit the ground.

The impact came down like a dropped mountain no showmanship, no windup, just mass and velocity meeting flesh and bone in one single, bone-flattening instant.

Three Hollowfang Hounds simply ceased to exist under the landing, crushed flat before they’d even registered the shadow falling over them.

Void Behemoth’s own health bar dipped hard, a third of its pool gone in the same instant, and around it the horde reacted the way starving things always did teeth first, thought later, the whole writhing mass of them turning toward the new arrival with a hunger indistinguishable from rage.

Against an ordinary level-twenty Silver-tier companion, that reaction alone might have been a death sentence. Too many claws, too little room to breathe.

But Kael’s Beastlord passive didn’t play by ordinary math. A flat fifty percent boost to every stat his companions carried meant Void Behemoth wasn’t actually fighting like a level twenty at all its real numbers sat comfortably in Gold-boss territory, two tiers above what its display level suggested.

Add two straight days of grinding that had pushed every one of its active skills up to B-rank, and what dropped into that horde wasn’t a companion anymore. It was a wrecking ball with a kill list.

Claws raked across Void Behemoth’s hide and found nothing but resistance the Voidwoven Carapace shrugging off blow after blow, turning what should have been serious damage into single-digit scratches that barely registered on the log.

The hounds hit it like waves against a seawall, and the seawall didn’t care.

Then it answered back.

Void Behemoth’s jaw split open, and the sound that came out of it wasn’t a roar so much as a wrongness a distorted shriek that bent the air itself, rippling outward in a widening cone.

Every Hollowfang Hound caught inside it staggered, health bars collapsing to half in an instant, and before they’d even finished stumbling, a volley of jagged bone spikes erupted from the same gaping maw.

Voidspike Barrage a dozen serrated shards, each one whistling out at killing speed, punching clean through already-weakened bodies and ending them where they stood.

One hound leapt anyway, desperate or stupid or both, and Void Behemoth simply opened wide and swallowed it out of the air.

A green healing number bloomed above its head a heartbeat later Voidrend, doing exactly what it was built to do, converting the kill into recovered vitality and quietly refilling the third of its health pool the fall had cost it.

Then it started walking. Not charging walking, unhurried, a moving wall shouldering straight through the horde like the horde was the thing in its way.

On the wall above, the running commentary died somewhere around the third impossible thing in a row.

"Okay, what is that companion?"

"Sixteen damage against level-sixteen mobs? What kind of defense stat is that even running?"

"And it just ate one. Whole. That’s not just tanky, that thing hits like a truck too."

"AoE, sustain, a bite that heals it back up that’s not a pet, that’s a whole raid comp in one body."

"Somebody explain to me why Unrivaled gets the one companion that breaks the entire event’s balance."

"Wasn’t somebody betting on this thing dying in five minutes? How’s that going?"

Kael heard none of it, or heard all of it and simply didn’t care, which amounted to the same thing.

His attention had already moved past Void Behemoth entirely.

With a flick of two fingers he opened a second summon gate, and Wraithlord came through it at a dead run the fire-wreathed skeletal charger beneath it hammering down out of the rift, a crimson spear leveled and already hungry for use.

The wall reacted to that arrival almost as loudly as it had to the first. A Legendary-tier companion wasn’t something most of this crowd had ever laid eyes on outside a kill-cam.

But Kael didn’t send Wraithlord over the wall. Not yet.

Instead he pulled up its attribute panel, scanning a resource pool that had been quietly stacking for the better part of two days well past two thousand evolution points, saved originally toward pushing Void Behemoth’s bloodline rank a full tier higher.

That had been the plan. The plan hadn’t accounted for standing in the middle of a ten-wave siege with every point sitting unspent in a bank account nobody was giving out interest on. ℴ

Plans changed.

He found what he wanted almost immediately Legion of the Damned, Wraithlord’s B-rank summoning skill, sitting there fully leveled and waiting. Six hundred and twenty-five points bought the next tier without hesitation.

Ding 625 evolution points spent.

[Legion of the Damned] upgraded: B-rank → A-rank

[Army of the Damned]!

Army of the Damned: Summons 6–8 undead servants, ranging from common to elite tier, none exceeding the caster’s own level.

Mana Cost: 800.

Cooldown: 30 minutes.

Not just two more bodies than the old version a full tier jump in what those bodies were capable of.

Common-grade fodder had just become elite-grade muscle, and the difference between those two words, on a battlefield like this one, was the difference between a distraction and a second front.

Kael’s mouth curved. Six hundred and twenty-five points, well spent.

Without wasting the momentum, he layered a second skill on top of the first Spectral Aspect and watched crimson light bloom around Wraithlord’s frame, condensing a heartbeat later into a translucent, blood-toned copy of the same warrior, whole and armed and entirely his to command.

Two Wraithlords raised their gauntleted hands together and called out in the same breath.

The stone beneath them cracked open like dry earth splitting under drought.

Sixteen figures rose out of the fracture lines undead spellcasters in rotted grey robes, each one gripping a staff of bleached bone, each one radiating a cold that had nothing to do with the weather.

The battlement had gone from doubting whether one pet would survive five minutes to watching a small army climb out of the ground in front of them, and for the first time since the tide had broken over the plain, the wall went completely, uniformly silent.