Chapter 36: Akuvin the Impaler

The cloth Marcus had left behind turned out to be worth more than everything else he’d dropped combined.

Logan unfolded it across the courtyard, and it kept unfolding well past where any normal piece of fabric should have stopped, spreading out wide enough to hold every ground-based unit in the group at once.

```

[ Featherweight Shroud (Epic) ]

Expands to any size. Anything resting on it becomes weightless for the duration.

```

Billy, Bryowulf, Vex, Stitchgrin, Juggernaut, Thistle, Tide, Nova, and Maw settled onto it one after another, and the whole sheet didn’t so much as sag under nine Mythic-rank bodies stacked across it.

Blitzhawk, Solveig, and Zephyr took the corners, wind and light and storm all gathering at once as they lifted the whole thing off the ground together.

The ground blurred beneath them within seconds, forests and rivers and open plains all smearing into streaks of color as the three of them pushed harder and faster, until the wind screaming past Logan’s ears stopped sounding like wind at all and started sounding like something closer to silence.

’We’re pushing close to the sound barrier.’ He felt it in his chest more than he heard it, a pressure building behind his ears that had nothing to do with altitude. Four hundred ninety-three kilometers, and at this pace they’d cover it faster than any land route ever could.

They were maybe halfway there when Logan spotted movement on the ground below, a column of shapes marching in loose formation across an open field.

```

[ Enemy Player’s Army: 40 Summons ]

3x Epic

37x Lesser ranks

```

He watched the column’s heading for a few seconds, tracking the line of it against the map in his head, and felt his stomach drop.

’That’s pointed straight at my base.’

"Change of plans." He raised his voice over the wind. "Ground units, you’re dropping in. Flyers, hit them from above the second they land."

The Shroud dipped low without slowing down, and nine Mythic-rank bodies dropped from it in a single wave, hitting the ground in the middle of the marching column before a single one of them even registered what was falling on them.

The player at the head of the column spun around just in time to watch half his own army disappear under Juggernaut’s weight.

"Holy crap, fuck me!" He was already running before he finished the sentence, boots tearing up dirt in a full sprint away from whatever had just fallen out of the sky. "What is going on?!"

Blitzhawk, Solveig, and Zephyr didn’t give him anywhere to run to. Lightning, light, and wind all came down from above in the same three seconds it took the man to cover twenty meters, and whatever was left of his army after the ground team finished with it didn’t survive the second wave either.

’SURRENDER!’

The word tore out of him somewhere in the middle of his sprint, and the world pulled him out of the fight before he ever got a look at who or what had just erased his entire army in under ten seconds.

```

[ You have defeated player Rex-O-Meg. +3820 Tower Points. Player L now has 6 eliminations. ]

```

Collecting the loop dropped by the player, Logan continued.

The Shroud gathered everyone back up without breaking stride, and the rest of the flight passed without anything else worth stopping for.

The location the daggers had marked turned out to be a hill, unremarkable except for a single round stone sitting flat at its peak, easily ten meters across, carved with a design too deliberate to be natural.

Four slots sat spaced evenly around its edge, each one shaped exactly like the hilt of the daggers Logan had spent the better part of a day and a half collecting.

Logan climbed to the top and knelt at the first slot, sliding the dagger home. It clicked into place with a sound like a lock finally giving way after years of rust.

He did the same with the second. The third. The fourth.

The whole stone lit up at once, lines he hadn’t even noticed carved into its surface flaring gold, and the air above it began to twist.

What started as a narrow column of light climbed fast, spreading wider with every second, until it towered two hundred fifty meters overhead, a churning storm of raw magical power visible for miles in every direction.

Something reached out of the storm before the rest of it finished forming. A hand, easily the size of Juggernaut’s whole torso, scaled dark grey and sculpted like something carved rather than grown, fingers ending in claws long enough to double as blades on their own.

Light gathered in the open palm and solidified into a spear, the haft wrapped in something that looked like braided bone, the head of it a single curved length of the same dark material sharpened to an edge that caught what little sunlight made it through the storm.

The storm peeled back the rest of the way after that, and the whole shape underneath finally settled into something solid.

He stood easily fifteen meters tall, built like something meant to survive being hit by things that would end anything smaller. Scaled skin, dark as old iron, stretched over a frame more muscle than anything human should carry. Armor plated across his chest and shoulders in interlocking sheets of bone, each piece carved with patterns too precise to have grown that way naturally, like whatever made him had shaped every single plate by hand.

A crown of curved horns rose from a helm made of the same bone, framing a face that was more shadow than feature, two points of cold blue light where eyes should have been. A cloak of something dark and tattered hung from his shoulders, moving in a wind that didn’t touch anything else on the hilltop.

He planted the spear’s butt into the stone at his feet, and the ground itself seemed to flinch at the contact.

```

[ Champion Field Boss - Akuvin the Impaler, Architect of Bone Orchard ]

Rank: Special

— Stats —

HP: 90,000/90,000

MP: 70,000/70,000

Attack: 200

Speed: 100

Constitution: 900

Arcane: 700

```

Logan looked up at all fifteen meters of him, felt the weight of those stats settle into his chest, and looked back at the twelve Mythics standing at his sides.

’This is it. Everything we’ve built, all in one place, against exactly this.’

Akuvin’s cold blue eyes found him across the distance, and something that might have been the beginning of a voice rumbled up from somewhere deep in that scaled chest.