Chapter 49: The Venomwing Swarm

Word of what had just happened to the last few volunteers spread through the crowd faster than the loot itself, and most of the players nearby took the hint immediately, dropping their eyes rather than risk meeting his.

Not everyone took it that quietly. A few voices rose up from deeper in the pack, bold enough behind the anonymity of a crowd.

"Everyone fought this event together! The monsters belong to all of us!"

"Why does he get to hoard every drop and lock the rest of us out?"

Kael’s mouth curled, cold and unbothered. "I put in over ninety percent of the damage on this stretch of wall by myself. That’s why."

"And half of what’s dropping is spilling well past the line I actually marked. I haven’t stopped a single one of you from picking that up."

His gaze swept the crowd once, flat and final. "You’ve already gotten more out of this than you earned. Don’t push your luck."

More than a few heads nodded at that, because it was true, and everyone standing close enough to see the actual spread of loot knew it.

He’d claimed a patch of ground, not the whole battlefield and with a drop rate juiced hard enough by the Ring of Infinite Fortune to bury the marked zone in more gear than it could hold, plenty had already spilled loose onto ground nobody was fighting him for.

For three full waves, nobody near that wall had said a word about it, quietly benefiting off the overflow without complaint.

It was only now, with the whole server freshly aware that gold bought years of life, that the complaining started. Envy dressed up as principle.

Two voices in particular kept pushing, safely tucked behind a wall of other bodies, trying to whip the crowd into something with enough numbers to matter.

"Unrivaled, first place on the Ascendant Rankings or not, this is still overreach!"

"Yeah can you even carry all of that by yourself, or are you just being greedy for the sake of it?"

Kael’s eyes found them both without hesitation, cutting straight through the crowd like the anonymity had never existed at all.

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

Behind him, all sixteen Bonecaster Mages lifted their staves as one, and a concentrated volley of necrotic fire Soulscorch punched clean through both instigators before either finished their next sentence.

Two respawn timers started ticking somewhere back at the nearest checkpoint.

His gaze swept the rest of the crowd, unhurried.

"If I can’t carry it, I’ll let the servers eat it on refresh. That’s my problem, not yours." A beat. "Anyone else want to make it theirs?"

Nobody did.

Two examples had been more than enough, and not one remaining face on that stretch of wall could hold his gaze for longer than a second.

With the crowd sufficiently reminded of its place, Kael dropped back down and got to work, sweeping gear, gold, coin, and skill tomes off the ground in a steady, mechanical rhythm before the next wave had a chance to bury it under fresh bodies.

Up on the wall, envy curdled into something almost physical.

"Look at all that high-grade gear. That’s a full windfall right there."

"Where’s he even storing all of it? Has to be running out of space by now."

"It’d take me a week to fill a bag that fast."

"Quit staring and start grabbing there’s still plenty left down there!"

"Not me. No flying companion means no ride back up if I go down now. I’ll wait a couple more waves, bank the points, and sweep what’s left once this whole thing’s over."

"Good call. Later waves drop better gear anyway."

They weren’t wrong about the storage, either the Ring of Infinite Fortune’s hundred-thousand-slot capacity was the only reason Kael could keep pace with his own drop rate at all, and even then he didn’t manage to clear everything before the horizon lit up again.

Far out past the plain, the old wound in the sky split wide once more, crimson light boiling upward in a fresh column, and a deep, rolling roar rattled across the ground as the fifth wave broke loose and surged toward Highwatch Bastion.

Kael didn’t have Void Behemoth’s bulk or Wraithlord’s frame to absorb a direct hit like that.

Getting caught on open ground under that many claws would end badly no matter how strong his numbers were on paper.

He called Thunder Roc down instead, swung up onto its back, and let it carry him back to the safety of the battlement before drawing his bow again for another round.

The waves kept coming after that, each one a full tier harder than the last, and somewhere around the seventh, wings started appearing in the mix airborne threats picking off anyone who thought the wall alone kept them safe. Casualties climbed fast.

Archers and mages who’d spent the whole event confident in their positioning found themselves falling just as hard as anyone else.

By the tenth and final wave, what came pouring out of that rift wasn’t Hollow Legion fodder anymore.

It was a level-twenty-five Silver-tier quasi-boss swarm Venomwing Drakes, low-tier wyrmkin with rot-slick hides weeping caustic green sludge, wings dark enough in number to blot out what was left of the daylight.

They screamed as they dove, spitting arcs of corrosive venom that ate through armor as fast as flesh.

What remained on that wall by then had thinned down to almost nothing. Kael held his ground.

So did Evertide Studios, Alexis’s full roster still standing thanks to a lineup deep enough to cover every role the fight demanded.

Everyone else’s post got quietly absorbed by the garrison’s NPC line, held in reserve since the horn first sounded, and not one Venomwing Drake made it past that final wall of steel.

Through it all, three companions tore into the swarm with a combined output that made the rest of the leaderboard look like it was standing still. Kael’s event-point total didn’t just lead it lapped.

By the time the last drake dropped, his score alone outweighed every player from second place through tenth combined, and somewhere below him on that ranking, an entire server’s worth of ambition quietly gave up trying to close the gap.

Blood ran the length of the battlement by the time the last drake fell, the ground beneath it a ruin of broken bodies and spent arrows. Then, all at once, the horde stopped coming.

A deep chime rolled across the sky, loud enough to feel in the chest.

"Server-Wide Announcement: Through the combined efforts of every player, Highwatch Bastion has withstood the Strange Tide. The event has concluded successfully. Rewards have been distributed please check your inventory."

A second chime followed on its heels, gold letters unrolling wide enough to be read from every corner of the battlement.

"Server-Wide Announcement: Congratulations to player Unrivaled for an outstanding performance this event 125,743 event points earned, MVP title awarded.

Rewards: Level +2, Luck +3, Reputation +500, and the Wyrmscale Serpentlash (Legendary-grade)."

Somewhere out across a hundred thousand screens at once, an entire server went quiet in exactly the way a number that large tends to make people go quiet.