Chapter 94: Gathering

"Solveig holds the base. Billy comes with us this time." Logan ran through the plan one more time as they gathered at the shore. "Ten PsyDogs too. We’ll need the network once we get there."

"Finally, some real action." Billy cracked his knuckles, void blades already humming faintly at his hips.

Xairon’s ten Chaos PsyDogs bounced around their feet, tails wagging, clearly thrilled to be included in anything at all.

Maren’s ship form waited at the water’s edge, hull gleaming glass and captured water under the morning light.

"Supersonic speed, please." Logan climbed aboard, Alice and Billy right behind him, the pack of dogs scrambling up after.

"As you wish, my lord."

The ship tore across open water fast enough that the horizon blurred, and within what felt like minutes, a new island rose into view, a single massive pillar of light piercing the sky at its center.

---

They landed a short distance from the light itself, and the dogs scattered the moment their paws touched sand.

"Mark whatever you find. Fortune, danger, either one." Logan crouched to address the pack properly. "Then head home. We’ll open the gates from our own side once we’re ready."

The pack answered in a chorus of barking and vanished into the treeline in every direction at once.

Logan and Alice approached the pillar’s edge together, Billy trailing a step behind.

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[ Event radius: 100 meters. Summoned units may not enter. ]

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Logan stopped short. "That explains a lot."

"Guess it’s just us going in, then." Alice glanced back at Billy.

"Seriously?" Billy’s whole posture drooped. "I just got here."

"Follow the dogs. Make sure they get home safe." Logan clapped him once on the shoulder. "We’ll call if we need you."

Billy grumbled the entire way into the treeline after the pack, and Logan and Alice stepped through the barrier alone.

---

Six other players already stood scattered within the radius, three pairs keeping careful distance from each other.

Logan and Alice made four.

Nobody moved to attack anyone else, not yet, though the tension in the air made it obvious every single person present felt the itch to.

But eliminating players here would just push back the event start. Nobody wanted that.

More players trickled in over the next hour, pair by pair, and every single one of them carried gear ranked Legendary or Mythic. No way to tell what any of them could actually do underneath all that armor with their class or talents, not without watching them fight.

A pair of humans arrived partway through, Epic-rank gear standing out plain against everyone else’s, and it took them all of ten seconds looking around the gathering crowd to lose whatever confidence had brought them here in the first place.

They left the way they’d come, fast.

Two dwarves broke off from the crowd right behind them, following at a pace that had nothing to do with curiosity.

They naturally wanted to hunt those two, seemingly easy prey to increase their eliminations.

Alice’s eyes narrowed, watching them go. "They’re going to hunt those two down the second they’re clear of this radius."

"Yeah." Logan blinked and looked at her.

Alice’s own eyes lit up a moment later, something sharp and decisive settling behind them.

"I’ve got an idea."

Logan smiled. "I figured."

Her class weapon manifested in a rush of gold light, a bow taking shape across her open palm, limbs carved from something that looked like solidified nebula, deep violet shading into black, threaded through with flecks of gold that shifted slowly like distant stars caught mid-drift. The string itself glowed faintly, a single unbroken line of captured starlight strung taut between both limbs.

A quiver formed at her hip a heartbeat later, matching the bow’s own aesthetic exactly, its open mouth rippling faintly like the space inside it didn’t quite obey normal rules.

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[ Stardust Horizon Bow and Quiver (Lv.1) ]

```

"New toy." Alice grinned, testing the draw once. "Got this passive yesterday when my class hit Level Fifteen."

Unlike Grimlord’s Blade, which could hold five separate weapon effects at once, her own class weapon could only carry the complete stats and specs of a weapon- any weapon, though.

She’d fed her old Mythic-rank bow into it without hesitation, its stats folding straight into the new weapon and leaving nothing behind but the shape she was actually holding now.

"The real trick’s in the enchantments." She nocked an arrow that hadn’t existed a second earlier, conjured straight from the bow itself.

"Multiplying Enchantment splits an arrow into more without losing power. Costs a hundred MP per split. Target Lock enchantment does exactly what it sounds like, locks onto anything I can detect, and the arrow punches through at least one non-living obstacle to get there."

"And the quiver?" Logan asked, watching the whole display with real interest.

"Turns raw materials into arrows. Whatever properties the material’s got, the arrow inherits them." She patted the quiver once. "Basic shots I can just pull straight off the string. Anything fancier comes from in here."

She drew four arrows in the same motion, Multiplying Enchantment splitting each one twice over before they’d even left the string, Target Lock settling onto four separate signatures at the edge of her own detection range.

"We need the eliminations more than we need to play nice." She said it plainly, no hesitation in it at all. "We won’t get first rank by being polite."

She loosed all four at once.

Each arrow found its mark, punching clean through the two dwarves and the fleeing pair both, wounds deep enough to force an immediate choice.

Three surrendered before the pain even finished registering.

The dwarves didn’t.

One of them wrenched a small vial free and drank it down in one motion, the wound sealing shut in the same instant his own signature vanished from Alice’s detection entirely.

"Tch." Alice’s own eyes narrowed. "Some kind of escape effect from their class or talent, item, or perhaps an invention of their production unit. Anyway, they disappeared."

"Might return here." Logan chuckled.

"That’d be fun."

---

More players kept arriving over the next stretch, humans and elves and dwarves and beastfolk alike, every race represented somewhere in the growing crowd.

The two dwarves reappeared eventually, stepping back into the radius with expressions carved from pure resentment, eyes cutting straight toward Alice and Logan the moment they spotted them.

Neither Logan nor Alice looked away.

The crowd kept swelling, pair after pair filing in until the tally finally settled.

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[ 100/100 players gathered. Dark Fall Conquest begins. ]

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