Chapter 50: A Haul Fit for a King

The announcement rang out across the entire server, and not one player who heard it blinked twice at the name attached to it. Kael taking MVP wasn’t a surprise.

At this point it would have been stranger if anyone else had.

Across every corner of the battlefield, players tore open their event rewards with the kind of excitement that made the whole plain feel less like a battlefield and more like a holiday morning.

Kael did the same, palm flaring with soft light as his own reward materialized into his hand.

What settled into his grip was a whip well over ten feet long, its handle capped in a cast dragon’s head rendered down to individual scales, the braided length itself patterned in overlapping serpent-scale ridges that caught the light with a faint, unsettling shimmer.

[Wyrmscale Serpentlash] (Legendary-grade)

Attack Power: 161–178

Constitution: +51

Strength: +58

Agility: +45

Spirit: +49

Special Effect: Striking a companion with the whip grants it +7% to all attributes for 60 seconds.

Equipment Skill — Serpent’s Reach: A brutal forward lash dealing 170% attack damage to every enemy caught in a straight line.

Mana Cost: 200.

Cooldown: 120 seconds.

Equipment Level: 25

Whips were the Beastlord class’s signature weapon, carrying a built-in ten percent damage bonus that most low-tier versions never came close to justifying.

Kael’s own preference had always leaned toward the bow anyway faster attack speed, better range, more raw output per second than a melee-range weapon could usually offer a ranged-focused build.

This one was different. A hundred and seventy-eight points of base attack alone put it well past anything he’d seen at this level, and the companion-buffing special effect turned every strike into a small tactical decision punish an enemy, or spend the swing empowering Void Behemoth or Wraithlord instead.

Add a straight-line AoE skill on top of that, and there was no honest argument against it: top of the current equipment meta, full stop. In the right hands, it could turn an average Beastlord into something the leaderboard had to take seriously.

Kael had crossed level twenty-four during the grind, and the event’s flat two-level reward pushed him to twenty-six comfortably clear of the whip’s requirement.

He checked the rest of the haul next, and the number alone was enough to make even him pause. Over two hundred thousand gold sat in his balance.

Beyond that, the inventory read like a small nation’s armory twenty-seven Gold-tier pieces on their own, three hundred and twelve Silver, twelve hundred and seventy-five Bronze, over two thousand Iron, and more than seventy skill tomes spanning half the classes in the game.

It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that right now, across the entire server, close to a third of every piece of Silver-grade equipment or better sat inside the Ring of Infinite Fortune’s storage. If he ever posted a screenshot of that inventory to the forums, it would break the site.

Guilds were already reaching out, half-desperate, offering absurd numbers just for a shot at buying pieces of it off him.

Kael let the weight of that sink in for a moment, quietly satisfied, before a familiar shape crossed the field toward him.

Alexis approached with Frostbloom trailing a step behind, both of them fresh off the tail end of the fighting.

Her armor had taken real damage scorched, torn in more than one place, the white cloak at her back stained dark with someone else’s blood, or maybe her own.

She looked like exactly what she was: someone who’d earned every point of that final leaderboard position the hard way.

She stopped in front of him, expression caught somewhere between resolve and open reluctance, and held out a longsword its blade inscribed edge to edge with faint, glowing runework.

"Here." The word came out clipped, like it cost her something to say. "A bet’s a bet. This is what I won. It’s yours now."

Kael remembered the final standings well enough third place, behind only himself and the server’s top-ranked mage, a specialist who went by Wintersong.

Third place still carried a solid reward: a Level 25 Gold-tier longsword, easily worth more than most players would see all month.

He grinned and reached for the hilt without hesitation, tugging and it didn’t move.

He raised an eyebrow at her.

Alexis’s mouth pressed into a thin, unhappy line, fingers still curled tight around the grip like her hand had made the decision without consulting the rest of her.

Watching her fight her own hand for possession of a sword she’d already agreed to hand over was somehow more satisfying than the weapon itself.

Kael tightened his grip and worked her fingers loose one at a time, patient about it, until the blade finally came free.

She hissed through her teeth at the loss but didn’t argue couldn’t, really, not without going back on a bet she’d made publicly and lost even more publicly.

Somewhere under the irritation, she was clearly regretting ever opening that particular chat window in the first place.

She shook it off fast, though, and squared her shoulders like she’d remembered the actual reason she’d walked over.

"You were the first player on the entire server to hit second advancement. Which means you knew about the reality merge before any of us did." Her voice steadied, all business now.

"If this goes where I think it’s going, the world’s about to see change on a scale nobody alive has ever dealt with. No one really knows what’s coming next."

"A solo player, no matter how strong, is still one person against everyone else who isn’t. That’s the part that worries me." She met his eyes directly.

"Join Evertide Studios. For real this time. With real cooperation behind you, there’s a place for both of us in whatever this turns into."

Kael let out a slow breath, more amused than annoyed at this point. She really didn’t know when to stop.

"And what exactly are you offering," he said, arms folding, "that I don’t already have?"

"Gold? I’m not exactly hurting for it."

Alexis shook her head. Obviously not not anymore, not with the reality-merge putting his account balance somewhere in the stratosphere.

"Protection, then? Someone stronger than me watching my back?"

Another shake of her head. There wasn’t anyone stronger than him currently logged in, and they both knew it.

"So walk me through it. What’s actually on the table?"

"Then why would I join at all?"

Her face colored fast. "Nobody said you owed us anything for free. It’s a partnership offer. Turn it down if you want."

Kael didn’t push further. He waved a hand instead, done with the subject. "I’m not joining anyone’s banner. Let that go."

"That said cooperation’s a different conversation." He tilted his head toward his own interface. "I walked away from that event with more gear than I know what to do with. Interested?"

Her expression shifted instantly. "Yes. Obviously yes."

Without another word, he opened a shared trade window and dropped the entire haul into view. "It’s all there. Name a price."

She’d braced herself for something impressive. What she got instead made her go still, eyes widening, lips parting on a breath that never quite turned into words.

It took her a solid few seconds to remember how to swallow.

"This is" She stared at the sheer scale of it, voice dropping to something close to a whisper. "This is too much. I can’t take all of this."

High above them both, something shifted against the clouds small at first, easy to miss unless you were already looking up.

Neither of them was looking up yet.