Chapter 83: The Apocalyptic Archer (1/2)

While Logan was receiving the sword art, Alice was dominating her match.

CRACKLE! CRACKLE!

Lightning thundered in the sky, casting light over an apocalypse.

The Hollow King’s army stretched across the entire valley floor, thousands of undead soldiers packed shoulder to shoulder beneath a sky gone the color of old bone.

Alice had been chasing this particular World Quest for the better part of a day. The March of the Hollow King. Five Mythic-rank Bosses commanding an undead horde large enough to swallow a small country whole. Most players who’d stumbled across it took one look at the numbers and turned around.

Alice wasn’t most players. She’d spent days before this raiding every dungeon she could find, hitting player bases along the way, summoning well over a thousand units in total, and gearing herself with the best Mythic-rank gears she found or crafted by her one and only Mythic-rank production unit that she summoned recently with luck in her level 5 Summoning Circle.

She was more than ready to destroy everything in front of her with nothing but her own arrows, and the Mythics, and the army of summons she had just made it easier.

"Thistlemaw. Front line." She didn’t look away from the horde as she gave the order. "Emberlynx, flanks. Skyveil, keep everyone buffed."

Thistlemaw Grovekeeper lumbered forward first, a hulking shape of bark and stone that looked like a small forest had decided to stand up and start walking, roots trailing thick behind each step. Emberlynx Sentinel split into two blurs of orange light, peeling off toward opposite ends of the undead line. Skyveil Cantor hung back near Alice’s own position, wind gathering soft around her in a slow, constant hum.

The undead horde surged forward the instant Thistlemaw crossed some invisible threshold, thousands of rotted limbs closing the distance in a single heaving wave.

Thistlemaw met it head-on without slowing down at all. Roots erupted from the ground in a wide arc, dragging the front three ranks under the earth before they’d even raised a weapon.

Alice didn’t wait for the rest of the horde to catch up. She stayed well back from the front line on purpose, exactly where an archer belonged, and let the ground troops earn their keep while she hunted for better targets.

Comet Step!

It carried her clean over the heads of the front line instead of into it, dropping her onto a rise overlooking the whole battlefield where the real threats were gathering.

Five shapes rose out of the horde to meet her gaze. Each one radiated the kind of presence that made the ordinary dead around them look like scenery.

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[ Ashen Wraithlord ]

[ Bonecrown Revenant ]

[ Grave-Touched Harbinger ]

[ Sepulcher Colossus ]

[ The Hollow King ]

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Alice grinned, already drawing back her first shot. "Five for the price of one quest. I’ll take it."

Starpiercer Volley!

Three arrows split the air toward the Wraithlord from a hundred meters out, and it barely got a decayed arm up in time to catch two of them. The third punched clean through what was left of its shoulder.

Emberlynx tore into the Revenant from one side, twin blurs of claws and fire opening gashes across bone gone brittle enough to crack on contact. The Harbinger answered by summoning a fresh wave of skeletal archers straight out of the ground, and Skyveil’s own winds caught the whole volley mid-flight, sending every arrow straight back the way it came.

The Colossus proved to be the real problem, a mountain of fused bone and rusted armor that shrugged off her first three shots without slowing down at all.

Meteor Nock!

The shot took it square in the chest, and this time it actually staggered, cracks spreading wide across its own armored hide.

That was when the Hollow King finally moved.

He didn’t rush. He didn’t need to. A crown of black iron sat crooked on a skull too old to have a name left, and the ground itself answered the moment he raised one hand, a wave of dark energy rolling out from his position and swallowing half the battlefield in creeping frost.

A lance of black bone tore free of that frost a heartbeat later, hurtling straight at Alice’s chest faster than anything the rest of the horde had thrown all fight.

She twisted aside a fraction too late. The lance grazed her ribs on the way past, a thin line of blood already soaking through her side before she’d even fully registered the pain.

"That one actually hurt." She grinned through it anyway, adrenaline burning hotter than the wound itself.

The King pressed the opening immediately, a second lance already forming, aimed to catch her mid-draw before she could loose anything back at him at all.

Skyveil’s winds caught it a meter short of her chest, deflecting the strike just enough to keep it from finishing what the first one had started.

"Thanks for that." Alice didn’t slow down for it. She was already drawing again, farther back now, putting distance between herself and the King the way an archer was always supposed to.

Comet Step!

She blinked clear across the battlefield entirely, reappearing high above everything with her bow already drawn to its absolute limit.

Horizon’s Requiem!

Starlight gathered thick and heavy around the arrowhead, the same look settling on her face that had once ended Shard in a single shot, and she loosed it straight down at the Hollow King’s exposed crown.

The shot punched through the crown, through the skull beneath it, and kept going until it buried itself somewhere deep in the earth below. The Hollow King’s whole form crumbled to ash before the light even finished fading.

Whatever had been holding the rest of the horde together went with him. The Wraithlord, the Revenant, the Harbinger, and the badly cracked Colossus all dropped within seconds of each other, the undead army around them collapsing into inert bone and dust in one long, rolling wave.

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[ World Quest: The March of the Hollow King. Complete. ]

[ Reward: +20,000 Tower Points. Random Legendary or Mythic Artifact Box. ]

[ Match Announcement. The one and only World Quest of this match has been completed by Ruby Starviel. ]

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Alice landed back on solid ground, bow already lowering, and let out a satisfied breath. The cut across her ribs had already stopped bleeding, one of Skyveil’s own buffs quietly closing it while she wasn’t paying attention.

’That’s the last of the big ones, I think.’ She checked her own Overall Score without much urgency, already fairly confident about what she’d find there. ’Just players and Territory Cores left. But I should still use Fortune Mole and have him find secret dungeons and challenges. I have to beat my darling’s score.’

...

The first base she raided on the way didn’t even get a chance to raise its own defenses properly.

Alice caught sight of it from three kilometers out with her passive skill that enhanced her vision significantly, Territory Core glowing faint blue behind a ring of half-finished walls, and didn’t bother closing the distance at all.

Starpiercer Volley!

Three arrows crossed the whole gap in under a second, and the Core cracked wide open on the first hit, the base’s owner surrendering before the second and third arrows even landed.

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[ You have eliminated Player Zorvin Dael. +4310 Tower Points. ]

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