By the time Ash Valor touched down within the Skystrider Guild grounds, the horizon beyond the ramparts was already choked with Crimson Bats. The Worldborn’s approach to warfare had evolved; they weren't the mindless fodder of the early days. The swarm hovered just outside the arrow towers' maximum range, a shifting carpet of leathery wings and glowing red eyes waiting for their numbers to reach a critical mass.
Ash moved to the edge of the battlements. With a sharp exhale, he loosed a volley, capitalizing on his superior range to thin the nearest cluster. The bats shrieked, their formation rippling as they retreated another few hundred meters, safely out of reach.
Ash lowered his bow, a grim smile tugging at his lips. Part of him missed the old sieges—the chaotic, relentless waves that battered the walls day and night. Those monsters were exhausting, but they were stupid. They didn’t coordinate. They didn’t time their strikes. And they certainly didn’t have health pools this massive.
"At least they aren't all Level 200," Ash muttered, squinting at the mass. More than half were hovering around Level 100, though the sheer density made the defense pressure exponentially higher than anything they had faced before.
"Where’s the Lord of Crimspire?" Ash scanned the distance. He had rushed back, expecting to find the Voidlord leading the charge, yet the guild grounds remained eerily calm. Perhaps the Skystriders weren't the main course.
A guild territory was a tactical prize, but Southhaven was a strategic necessity. If Southhaven fell, the southern pillar of Azure Prime would be shattered. His suspicions were confirmed moments later as reports flooded the guild channel: Southhaven was under simultaneous assault from four different Voidlord armies. Even the Lord of Crimspire had diverted there, leaving only a vanguard of ten thousand bats to pin the guild in place.
Southhaven was strong, anchored by the Stellar Pact and reinforced by the city’s powerful noble houses and independent freelancers. It wouldn't fall in a day.
I haven't set foot in Southhaven in years, Ash thought, looking toward the distant silhouette of the city. But my place is here. He wasn't about to abandon the guild’s home for a siege he wasn't yet strong enough to tip. Let the heavy hitters of the Stellar Pact hold the line. Every hour he spent here was an hour spent closing the gap between him and the top ten of Azure Prime.
Survival was his greatest asset.
A few more years of playing it safe, and I’ll be ready for the ramparts of Southhaven, he told himself. Then I’ll deal with those Crimson Vow bastards.
He needed gear—better refinements, gemstones, and enchantments. While standard weapons had four sockets, his Soulbound bow boasted six. The Exchange was currently empty of high-tier gems, and the War Merit shop was a joke; a single Level 1 gemstone cost a staggering 100,000 points.
"Time to see what the old man gave me," Ash said, pulling the Universal Skill book from his inventory.
[Ding! You have awakened the skill: Stormwing.]
Stormwing (Epic-Tier):
Manifest a pair of spectral, translucent wings.
Flight Speed: Scaled with Agility.
Active Effect: Enables short-range atmospheric displacement (Blink).
Mana Consumption: 1,000 per hour.
Ash stared at the prompt. The mana cost was negligible—his natural regeneration already outpaced it. Compared to the massive drains of his ultimate abilities, this felt like a gift. More importantly, it solved his greatest weakness: mobility.
With a thought, the wings erupted from his back, shimmering like heat haze. He leaped from the rampart, catching the wind.
"If I can get a stealth skill to pair with this, I’ll be a ghost," he chuckled, circling the battlements and sniping a few stray bats to test his aerial stability.
"Grant!" Ash shouted down to the courtyard. "Summon Blackwing. Let's see how this thing moves."
Grant Fang looked up, his jaw dropping as he saw Ash hovering mid-air. "Since when did you become a birdman, Captain?"
"Less talk, more flying. Get up here."
Grant chuckled, summoning his Level 185 Epic mount. "Alright, Blackwing, show him what real speed looks like! Don't let a human outfly you!"
The massive bird screeched, launching into the sky. Ash leaned forward, the Stormwing responding to his intent with a surge of lightning-flecked speed. He wasn't just fast; he felt weightless. He pushed his Agility to the limit, staying neck-and-neck with the summon.
"Holy shit," Grant yelled over the wind. "You're actually keeping up!"
"Watch it, Grant, or I'll drop you from ten thousand feet," Ash joked. He was elated. The flight manuals on the Exchange offered barely half this speed.
Caught in the thrill, Ash banked upward, climbing higher and higher. The guild grounds shrank until they were nothing more than a child’s toy box. Southhaven appeared as a larger square on the horizon, and the jagged peaks of the Southreach Range loomed to the south.
Then, Ash saw them.
Far beyond the Southreach Range, shrouded in a veil of atmospheric distortion, nine gargantuan silhouettes pierced the clouds.
"What the hell are those?" Ash whispered. They were so massive he initially mistook them for mountains, but mountains didn't have limbs. They weren't peaks; they were statues. Monoliths of impossible scale that made the highest mountains look like foothills.
He pushed higher, his lungs burning in the thin air, his Willpower straining to pierce the haze.
There was an Undying Skeleton, its empty sockets staring into the void. A colossal insectoid horror. A Crimson Bat the size of a province. Nine statues for nine invading worlds, standing like silent gods overlooking the carcass of Azure Prime.
Was this why Evan Valor had turned back at the Southreach Range? Had he seen these titans and realized the true scale of the enemy?
Ash felt a primal shiver crawl down his spine. As he stared, he felt a flicker of recognition—a heavy, oppressive gaze meeting his own. It was the feeling of an ant looking up at a boot.
Don't look back, he told himself, his heart hammering against his ribs. If I keep looking, something is going to look into me.
"Captain! What the hell are you doing up there?" Grant’s voice drifted up, muffled by the altitude.
Ash snapped out of the trance and dived, leveling out beside Grant.
"You didn't see that?" Ash asked, his voice tight.
"See what? There’s nothing up here but thin air and frostbite. I thought you ran out of mana and were about to crater."
Ash realized then that it wasn't just height. It was his Eye of Clarity and his massive Willpower score. He was seeing things the world wasn't ready for.
"Never mind," Ash said, descending toward the walls. "Forget flying this high, Grant. It’s dangerous. Go hit the dungeons. We need every stat point we can get."
For the next two weeks, Ash became a fixture of the sky. He patrolled the guild perimeter, sniping elites and thinning the swarm. But he wasn't just defending; he was experimenting.
He locked eyes with a Level 330 Elite Undying Skeleton pacing the treeline.
"Mindshackle!"
The skill fizzled. The skeleton paused, tilting its skull as if mocking him. Ash growled. He had dumped every Attribute Fruit into his Willpower recently, yet the elite creatures were still resisting.
"You think this is funny?" Ash muttered. He spent his next 10,000 War Merit points on Willpower fruits, feeling the mental pressure within his mind sharpen into a needle.
He tried again. "Mindshackle!"
This time, the connection snapped into place. The Skeleton Champion halted, its glowing eyes turning a dull, subservient blue.
"Take your friends and charge," Ash commanded.
The elite turned and sprinted toward the ramparts, a thousand lesser undead following its lead with mechanical precision. As they entered the kill zone, Ash signaled his archers.
"Fire at will! But leave the last hits to me!"
[Kill Count +300. War Merit +300. Random Stats +300.]
[Kill Count +412...]
The efficiency was intoxicating. When the Skeleton Champion finally reached the wall, confused and breaking free of the trance, Ash put an arrow through its nasal cavity.
[You have obtained: Luminary Necklace (Gold-Tier).]
"Finally, a drop," Ash sighed, checking the stats before tossing it into the guild warehouse. He still owed the treasury for his recent upgrades.
The monsters weren't stupid, though. After he turned several more elites into suicide bombers, the Voidlords' commanders grew wary. The high-level monsters began staying two kilometers back, weaving mental warding spells that caused Ash’s Mindshackle to slide off their consciousness.
"Fine," Ash said, hovering above the battlements. "If I can't take the big ones, I'll take the swarm."
He targeted a cluster of five Crimson Bats. "Charge the Dreadworms. Five-fold detonation—Go!"
The bats dove like kamikazes into a mass of Abyssal Dreadworms.
"Meteor Volley!" Ash roared, loosed a rain of fire that turned the blast zone into a crater.
[Kill Count +236. War Merit +236.]
He was a one-man army, his Meteor Volley now covering nearly eight hundred square meters thanks to his astronomical Willpower. The monsters were beginning to notice. Groups of bats were actively avoiding the Skystrider territory, whispering in their guttural tongue about the "Human Archer" who turned their own kin into bombs.
"Orion, we need a permanent solution," Ash said, landing next to the guild leader. "I can hold them for a month, but eventually, they’ll just drown us in numbers."
Orion leaned against a crenelation, looking exhausted. "Call her."
"Who?"
"Sera Ashford. Tell her the guild is falling. Tell her we’re all going to die. She’s the only one with the AoE to clear the horizon."
Ash hesitated. "Why don't you call her?"
"Because she’ll kill me when she finds out I lied," Orion admitted. "I’ll go hide in a dungeon. You handle the fallout."
Twenty minutes later, a rift opened in the guild square, and a streak of crimson fire erupted from the portal. Sera Ashford, Level 306, stepped out, her eyes blazing with fury. She looked around at the peaceful courtyard, the lack of screaming, and the absence of crumbling walls.
"Orion!" she screamed, her voice echoing off the ramparts. "You miserable coward! Where are you?"
Ash flew down, landing cautiously. "Uh, welcome back, Sera."
She turned her glare on him. "Ash? Where’s the siege? Where are the dying brothers? Orion said the ramparts were breached!"
"He’s... in a dungeon," Ash said, choosing his words carefully. "But he didn't lie about the threat. Look."
He led her to the wall. The sky was black with bats, and the ground was a shifting sea of void-corrupted monstrosities.
Sera’s anger cooled into a professional chill as she surveyed the horizon. "Fine. He tricked me, but he wasn't wrong. They’re clustering for a final push." She looked at Ash, noticing his wings. "Stormwing? You got that from the Eternal Guild's stock?"
"A gift from a friend," Ash replied.
"Victor Ironheart’s legacy," she mused. "Good. You’ll need it. I’m going to drop a nuke. Can you keep the elites off my back while I channel?"
Ash notched an arrow, his expression hardening. "Nothing gets within a thousand meters of you."
Sera stepped off the wall, hovering high above the plains. She began to chant, the air around her beginning to ripple with intense heat.
"Meteor Convergence!"
The sky didn't just rain fire; it collapsed. Massive, molten boulders tore through the atmosphere, slamming into the monster ranks with the force of small tactical strikes. For fifteen miles in every direction, the earth became a furnace.
Ash watched the kill feed blur. Thousands upon thousands of monsters evaporated in seconds. Any elite that survived the initial impact and tried to charge the hovering mage was met by Ash’s Tenfold Shot, pinned down and executed before they could even scream.
When the dust settled, the plains were scorched glass.
"Ten minutes, a hundred thousand kills," Sera said, landing back on the wall, her mana bar nearly empty. "I forgot how much easier this is when you aren't fighting for space in Peerless City."
Ash looked at her, then at his own notifications. He hadn't gotten many kills, but his guild contribution points had skyrocketed.
"Sera," Ash said. "I need to get my kill count up. My talent depends on it."
She looked at him, a knowing smirk on her face. "I figured. Evan Valor had something similar—increased Intelligence per kill. It’s why he was a monster. You want kills? The Skystrider grounds are empty now. Go to the Eternal Guild. They’re being hammered, and Roland Blackwood owes me a favor. Tell him I sent you to clear his trash."
The Eternal Guild was a war zone. When Ash arrived, the monsters had already scaled the walls, and the inner sanctum was under threat.
"Roland Blackwood?" Ash hailed the guild leader amidst the chaos. "Sera sent me. I’m here to thin the herd."
Roland, a battle-scarred veteran, looked at Ash with skepticism. "She said you were worth the price. Prove it."
"I need mana batteries," Ash said. "Give me a squad of mages to feed me mana, and I’ll clear the south wall by myself."
It sounded like arrogance until Ash started firing.
With a constant stream of mana, Ash became a turret. Meteor Volley followed Meteor Volley. The Crimson Vow suicide chains erupted in the densest parts of the horde. By the end of the first day, Ash had racked up 12,000 kills.
Five days in, the south wall was so clear that the defenders were redirected to other fronts.
Eight days in, Ash’s total attribute score crossed the one million mark.
[Ding! You have slain 100,000 Worldborn. Achievement Unlocked: Defender of Azure Prime.]
[Reward: Health +200,000.]
[Talent Evolution: 'One in a Million' has reached Level 6.]
[New Effect: Gain 2 random attribute points per Worldborn kill.]
Ash stood atop the Eternal Guild’s ramparts, his bow glowing with residual energy. He felt more powerful than he ever had in his previous life. But the victory felt hollow as a global broadcast cut through the air, chilling the blood of every professional in the zone.
[Planar Broadcast: Ashvale Citadel has fallen. 20 million citizens successfully evacuated. All remaining Prime Citadels, prepare for refugees.]
[Current Status: 16 Prime Citadels have been lost.]
Azure Prime was shrinking. The nine gods beyond the mountains were watching, and the real war was only just beginning.