Chapter 52: A Legendary Kill, and a Guild of One

"Little more pressure, right there. That’s good."

Kael let his eyes close, shoulders finally easing under Elara’s hands, and allowed himself a rare flicker of quiet satisfaction.

Whatever else came with keeping a princess as a bonded companion, this particular perk was hard to argue with.

The King of Northvale himself probably doesn’t get treatment this good.

Out across every forum thread on the server, players were still tearing themselves apart trying to make sense of Void Behemoth, Wraithlord, and Thunder Roc three companions that had already broken half the assumptions anyone had about what a Beastlord’s ceiling looked like.

None of them had any idea there was a fourth.

If word ever got out that the stunning, untouchable Third Princess of Frostwatch a woman the entire royal court treated with the kind of distant reverence usually reserved for statues spent her free hours quietly looking after the man behind that mask, it would break the server in half all over again.

The court itself would take it even harder. Half of Northvale’s nobility still tiptoed around Elara like she might turn to ice if approached wrong.

None of them would ever guess what she was doing behind a locked door and a sound ward, right now, of her own choosing.

Elara kept working the knots out of his shoulders in silence for another minute before finally speaking, her tone careful, testing the water.

"My lord. I’ve spent my whole life inside these palace walls. I have no real experience beyond them."

"I’d like to petition my father for a posting with the army somewhere I can actually learn something. If it pleases you."

Kael’s eyes opened, though nothing in his expression shifted. He’d been expecting this.

In the life he remembered, Elara’s path had bent hard the moment she clawed her way out of a buried tomb no one else had thought to search grief and fury over what the Hollow Legion had done to her family curdling into something colder and far more useful.

She’d taken a military posting not long after, and the war had finished the job the tomb started.

Turned a sheltered princess into someone soldiers actually followed, someone with enough earned authority behind her name to eventually stand a real chance at the throne.

That single decision was the hinge her entire arc swung on. Everything after it the succession fight, the crown itself traced straight back to this one request.

It was also the opening move of The Frostbound Throne, an SS-rank main quest line Kael had no intention of walking away from.

"Go ahead. You have my blessing."

He held her gaze a moment longer, voice dropping into something firmer.

"But watch yourself out there. If a mission gets ugly, you pull back. Don’t be a hero about it."

"Your life isn’t just yours to spend anymore. Remember that."

Something in Elara’s chest fluttered at the weight behind that, though her voice stayed composed. "Thank you for your concern, my lord. I’ll remember."

Kael didn’t linger after that. With the merge only hours old, there was too much ground to cover and too little time to spend any more of it sitting still.

He said his goodbyes, slipped out of the palace, and logged out from a quiet corner of the city.

Back in his own body, Kael pulled up the real-world extraction panel without wasting a second.

A hundred thousand gold bought him the transfer of a full defensive loadout he’d set aside earlier, plus the three items Elara had just handed him.

Extraction worked one direction only for most items pull something into reality, and it stopped existing in the game entirely. He’d chosen carefully, then.

This wasn’t the armor he actually fought in. It was a second set, built purely to keep one specific body breathing while its mind was somewhere else entirely.

Solid defense. A healthy pool of bonus HP. A handful of shielding and recovery effects layered on top.

Paired with the Stormglass Talisman’s thirty-second reactive barrier, the whole setup turned him into something close to a fortress.

Even the ten most dangerous assassins on the server, working together, would need the better part of a day to crack it open and half a day was more than enough time for his mind to make the trip back from the game and handle whatever had gone wrong in person.

The moment the gear settled into place, power rolled through him, dense and immediate.

He rolled one shoulder experimentally and had the distinct impression he could put a fist through a load-bearing wall without much trouble, assuming his neighbors didn’t mind the renovation.

Satisfied, he drew the Nightveil Scroll and crushed it in one motion. Runes flared, light rippled outward in a wash of pale blue, and his outline dissolved from view entirely.

His current address wasn’t exactly a secret Ironclad Esports, among others, still had it on file.

Nobody had connected that address to Unrivaled yet, but being the server’s top-ranked melee player in his own right made him a target all on his own, merge or no merge.

Better to relocate somewhere nobody would think to look, at least for a few days.

Still cloaked, he slipped out and headed west on foot, covering ground fast toward the edge of the city and the empty land beyond it.

Hours into the merge now, the news had spread everywhere it was going to spread.

Streets that should have been full sat nearly empty half the population of the city had already logged in and gone somewhere else entirely.

Kael avoided vehicles on principle, unwilling to leave any trail behind him, but it barely slowed him down.

Extracted attributes had already pushed his body well past anything ordinary muscle and bone should be capable of. Half an hour of hard travel put him deep into the hill country outside the city.

He found what he needed in a narrow valley a broad slab of rock that would break the wind, tucked out of easy sight.

He planted the Farsight Banner in the dirt and activated it, watching the detection field ripple outward to cover the whole clearing.

Not comfortable. Serviceable.

He’d slept in worse places, in a life that felt further away every day he spent living this one. A few nights under open sky wouldn’t put a dent in him.

With the perimeter secured, Kael settled against the rock and let his mind sink back into the game.

He restocked at the nearest general store the moment he logged in, then headed straight back out through the gates with a single, specific goal in mind.

A Legendary-tier boss kill, first on the server. A third class advancement to go with it.

And somewhere in that same kill, a chance at something even more valuable the first guild-founding token anyone on the server had seen drop.

Kael had no interest in banners, in members, in running a guild the way most people meant it. What he wanted was the headquarters that came bundled with one.

Under Ascension’s rules, only a founded guild could claim a stronghold and a stronghold, once extracted into reality, became the single best answer to the exact problem he’d just spent an hour solving with borrowed gear and a stolen hour in the hills.

There was one particular stronghold inside the Kingdom of Northvale he already had his eye on.

In his first life, that base had been the single most contested piece of real estate on the entire server fought over in guild wars bloody enough to end alliances, envied by every major power on the map for what it eventually became.

Claim it first this time, and none of that history would repeat the way it had before.

But first, the token.

And founding tokens only dropped from bosses ranked Legendary or higher.

He already knew exactly where to find one.

Summoning Thunder Roc, he swung up onto its back, fingers curling into feathers grown thick and strong enough to anchor a rider now, and gave the command to climb.

Ten minutes of flight later, they touched down before a black scar in the hillside an abandoned mineshaft, its entrance yawning open into darkness, cold air rolling out of it thick with something that felt distinctly, deliberately wrong.