Chapter 270: A Global Bounty

Dante’s heavy iron boots clicked rhythmically against the pristine white marble as he descended the grand staircase of the Imperial Palace.

He didn’t use [Velocity Paradox] to phase through the crowds, and he didn’t use [Veil of the Unseen] to hide his avatar. He walked at a casual, deliberate pace through the bustling commercial district of Aethelgardia, the dark purple plating of his [Evil Spirit Armor] catching the afternoon sun.

He was making sure the tiny, pulsing red tracking spell embedded in his [Night Illusion Mask] was broadcasting a clear, stable signal to the Emperor’s scrying arrays.

As he neared the massive, heavily fortified southern gates of the city, the system interface suddenly violently hijacked the sky above the entire global server.

It wasn’t the standard gold text of a milestone, or the harsh red of an Arch-Administrator purge.

The text was a deep, aggressive, piercing silver. It was an official, system-recognized faction broadcast, authorized by an entity with massive localized cosmic weight.

[GLOBAL FACTION DECREE: THE SPIRIT SWORD SECT]

[Target: Outworlder ‘Dan’ (Aegis Vanguard)]

[Status: Enemy of the Lineage.]

[The Spirit Sword Sect formally issues a global, open-world bounty for the exact, localized coordinates of the target. Any entity that provides actionable intelligence leading to his location will be rewarded with 50,000,000 Gold Coins.]

Dante stopped walking. He stared up at the sky.

Fifty million gold coins.

It wasn’t a reward in Veridian Credits. It was raw, in-game systemic currency. Fifty million gold was an astronomical, economy-breaking sum. It was enough to fully fund a massive guild’s entire localized progression for months, buy out the highest-tier auction houses, and secure impenetrable fortresses.

The Spirit Sword Sect wasn’t asking players to fight him. They knew players couldn’t beat him.

They just wanted to know exactly where he was.

The global player base completely exploded.

Dante didn’t even need to open his regional chat interface to gauge the reaction. The crowds of players milling around the southern gates of Aethelgardia physically stopped moving. Thousands of heavily armored warriors, squishy mages, and high-tier merchants stared up at the silver text, their mouths hanging open.

“Fifty million gold,” a nearby rogue whispered, his voice trembling with sheer, unadulterated greed.

The players slowly lowered their gaze from the sky.

They looked directly at the massive, gold-and-purple armored anomaly standing casually in the middle of the street.

The hesitation lasted for exactly two seconds.

Greed completely overwrote their survival instincts. They knew Dante was a localized extinction event. They had all seen the streams of him vaporizing armies and deleting Celestial bosses. But the Sect wasn’t asking them to draw a sword. They just needed to send a message.

Hundreds of players frantically raised their hands, accessing their system interfaces, desperately trying to open direct messaging channels to the Spirit Sword Sect’s public API to report his location.

“He’s at the southern gate! I see him!” a mage screamed, completely abandoning any pretense of subtlety.

“I’m sending the coordinates! The bounty is mine!” a heavily armored tank roared, shoving another player out of the way.

Dante didn’t draw the [Dawn-Breaker Blade]. He didn’t activate [Asura’s Descent]. He didn’t care that they were reporting him. It was exactly what he wanted.

The system interface pinged. A private message from Sera.

[Sera: Dante! The entire human continent just turned into a massive hostile zone! Every single player with a pulse is trying to track your movements. You need to get back to the Emporium right now. The [Bodhi Heart Seed] will completely block their tracking pings and hide you from the Sect.]

Dante tapped a reply.

[Dan: I’m not hiding. The Emperor is trying to use the Sect to clean up his mess. I’m going to let him try.]

[Sera: Dante, Grandmaster Jian-Yu is a Level 80 Celestial entity! And he won’t come alone. He’s going to bring an entire squad of elite NPC swordmasters. Your raw stats are massive, but fighting a coordinated squad of endgame lore entities in the open world is incredibly reckless. You can’t out-heal their burst damage.]

[Dan: I won’t have to.]

Dante closed the interface.

He didn’t activate a mobility skill to escape the crowds. He deliberately, slowly walked out of the towering southern gates of Aethelgardia, stepping onto the wide, paved merchant road that led into the sprawling, dangerous wilderness of the open world.

He made sure hundreds of greedy players followed him out the gates, their datapads practically glowing as they continuously updated the Spirit Sword Sect with his exact, localized trajectory.

***

Miles away, in a secluded, highly secured private instance off the main grid, Silas watched the silver bounty broadcast fade from the sky.

The former Guild Master of Vanguard’s Legacy was sitting in a dark, empty room. His pristine white celestial armor was completely gone, replaced by standard, low-tier merchant clothes to avoid drawing attention.

His physical body in the real world was permanently trapped in a comatose state, his neural link fused to the Enforcer crystal. He was a ghost in the machine, entirely dependent on the Zenith Protocol to maintain his consciousness.

He had lost his guild, his wealth, and his real-world life.

But as he read the bounty, a slow, incredibly dark, vindictive smile spread across his pale face.

“Yes,” Silas whispered, his voice echoing in the empty room. “Hunt him.”

Silas didn’t have admin privileges anymore. The Arch-Administrator’s proxy had brutally stripped his Enforcer status after he failed to secure the Crucible milestone. But he still possessed access to the deep-lore networks and the hidden faction APIs he had utilized during his brief stint as a developer tool.

He knew exactly what the Spirit Sword Sect was capable of.

Grandmaster Jian-Yu wasn’t a standard, lumbering boss with massive, telegraphed AoE attacks. The Spirit Sword Sect utilized localized spatial severing techniques. Their attacks completely bypassed standard physical mitigation and instantly deleted health pools. They were the ultimate, mathematically precise assassins.

“Dan thinks his raw stats make him a god,” Silas muttered, pulling up a highly restricted spectator feed that tapped into the capital’s exterior security cameras. “He thinks he can just tank his way through the lore.”

Silas watched the feed. He saw Dante slowly walking down the southern road, casually dragging an entire mob of informant players behind him.

“He’s arrogant,” Silas sneered, his eyes burning with absolute, unfiltered hatred. “He’s baiting them. He wants a fight.”

Silas leaned closer to the projection, his hands trembling with anticipation.

He had tried to kill Dante with armies. He had tried to kill him with admin tools. He had failed.

But the system was finally correcting itself. The arrogant anomaly was walking directly into a mathematically impossible encounter. A Level 80 Celestial Grandmaster, backed by an elite squad of NPCs, wasn’t going to fight fair. They were going to deploy spatial locks, localized suppression arrays, and coordinated execution strikes.

“Die,” Silas whispered to the holographic projection. “Just die.”

***

Dante walked for an hour.

He didn’t leave the main road. He didn’t try to lose his pursuers in the dense, towering forests or the rocky canyons bordering the path. He maintained a steady, highly visible pace, heading steadily south.

The crowd of informant players trailing behind him had swelled to over two thousand. They stayed a safe distance back, terrified of triggering his [Aura of Despair] or a sudden [Phantom Waltz] execution, but they stubbornly refused to leave, desperate to claim the fifty million gold bounty.

The environment gradually shifted.

The paved merchant road crumbled into a muddy, overgrown track. The bright, sunny sky of the capital outskirts darkened significantly, replaced by a thick, oppressive, rolling gray fog that clung to the damp earth. The trees became twisted and petrified, completely dead.

[Zone Alert: Illusionary Mist Marsh]

[Hazard Detected: Severe Spatial Distortion.]

[Warning: Localized navigation parameters unreliable. Ambient visibility drastically reduced.]

Dante stopped at the absolute edge of the thick gray fog.

He didn’t step inside yet.

He turned around and looked at the massive crowd of two thousand players trailing him.

The players instantly froze, several of them stumbling backward in panic as his glowing red eyes swept over them.

“You guys have been following me for an hour,” Dante called out, his voice perfectly calm and flat. “You’ve successfully reported my trajectory. The Sect knows where I am. You earned your gold.”

The crowd murmured nervously, unsure if it was a trick.

Dante didn’t draw a weapon. He just pointed a dark purple gauntlet toward the safety of the capital city in the distance.

“I strongly suggest you leave now,” Dante warned them softly. “Because what’s coming isn’t going to care about friendly fire.”

The players hesitated. A few of the smarter rogues immediately turned around and activated dash skills, sprinting back toward the city. But the vast majority of the crowd stayed put, their greed overriding their common sense. They wanted to witness the execution. They wanted to record the moment the invincible anomaly finally fell.

Dante shook his head. “Suit yourselves.”

He turned back to the thick gray fog of the Illusionary Mist Marsh.

He didn’t activate [Dragon’s Insight]. He wanted to be highly visible.

He stepped into the fog.

The moment his iron boots touched the muddy ground inside the hazard zone, the ambient noise of the crowd behind him completely vanished.

The dense gray mist aggressively swallowed the sound, creating a profound, localized silence.

Dante didn’t keep walking. He stopped exactly ten feet inside the marsh, the fog swirling thickly around his dark purple armor.

He opened his inventory and pulled out the small, incredibly intricate silver hand mirror he had received from Victoria, the Fey Sovereign.

[Mirror of the Moon (Divine Emperor)]

“It’s a shame to burn a thirty-day cooldown on a glorified hit squad,” Dante murmured, running his thumb over the swirling galaxy trapped within the glass. “But the Emperor wants a show.”

Dante didn’t activate the mirror immediately. He held it loosely in his left hand, letting it hang by his side.

His Intuition stat, which had been relatively quiet during his leisurely stroll, suddenly spiked with absolutely terrifying intensity.

It wasn’t a warning of an incoming attack. It was the crushing, overwhelming realization of absolute, overwhelming cosmic weight bearing down on his exact coordinates.

The gray fog directly in front of Dante didn’t just swirl. It violently, sharply parted, sliced cleanly in half by an invisible, localized wave of pure sword intent.

A figure stepped out of the mist.

It was Grandmaster Jian-Yu.

The Level 80 Celestial NPC wore his simple gray robes, but he wasn’t holding his wooden walking stick. He held a sleek, perfectly forged longsword that radiated a blinding, intense white light.

He wasn’t alone.

Materializing silently from the fog surrounding Dante were twelve figures. They wore matching gray robes and held glowing silver swords. They didn’t possess the overwhelming cosmic weight of the Grandmaster, but their localized threat signatures were incredibly dense.

[Entity Identified: Spirit Sword Elder]

[Tier: Super-Divine]

[Level: 70]

Twelve Level 70 Super-Divine entities, led by a Level 80 Celestial.

It was an assassination squad designed to casually murder gods.

“You did not run, Outworlder,” Grandmaster Jian-Yu stated, his voice incredibly soft, but vibrating with lethal authority. “I commend your localized bravery. It will not save you.”

Dante didn’t drop into a defensive stance. He didn’t trigger [Asura’s Descent].

He casually rested his hand on the hilt of the [Dawn-Breaker Blade] and smiled.

“I’m not running, Jian-Yu,” Dante said smoothly. “Because I’m not the bait.”