Chapter 171
The guild felt it first not as sight but as pressure, an invisible weight that pressed down on the basin like a storm lowering its fist. The air thickened, colors bent, and sound warped into muffled echoes. Sigma's hand, unseen yet undeniable, twisted across the battlefield like ripples over black water.
Archers faltered as their strings quivered, refusing to hold true aim. Mages who had been weaving wards along the ridge cried out when their circles warped mid-incantation, lines bending into spirals that drained mana instead of containing it. Even the earth seemed to sag under the weight, glass shards trembling as though the ground itself were about to collapse inward.
At the center of it all, the five long- and wide-range players huddled together, their faces drawn in grim recognition. They weren't under direct attack, but every skill, every movement they attempted felt tampered with. Fire arrows sputtered in the air, vanishing into nothing before reaching the ridge. Spells crackled and broke apart, turning to smoke in their palms.
Above them, Daniel stood against the unseen pressure, his body outlined in violet chaos-light as if he were wrestling with a giant no one else could see. His spell lattice stretched out across the mountain sky, a web of glowing sigils that strained against an intruder's grasp. Every flare of distortion bled downward, striking the battlefield like aftershocks of a quake.
Mary Kaye shouted over the twisting wind, her voice cutting through the panic. "Hold the line! Hold the line! This isn't the city; it's something else!"
But Drasklorn seemed to disagree. The Glass City was answering. From its walls, faint resonances began to hum, deep and droning, like the vibration of a thousand crystal bells struck at once. Its towers gleamed, bending light into flickers of phantom figures, shadows of the dead walking its battlements, watching the living below. The curse-born fog thickened, coiling upward in tendrils that almost looked like hands reaching for the guild's camp.
Emma Lazarus clutched her head, her scanning skill backfiring with violent feedback. "It's inside the air; it's twisting everything! Weaknesses are changing, shifting like sand! I can't lock onto anything!"
Brie, pale but resolute, forced her telepathic voice across the chaos toward Daniel. They're breaking; we can't hold if this keeps up! What is this? What are we fighting?
Daniel didn't answer with words. His eyes were locked on the lattice, his teeth bared, every vein straining as he forced chaos into shape against Sigma's interference. But in his silence, in the defiance of his stance, the guild understood: this wasn't Drasklorn's curse. This was something else, something that had chosen this moment to rise against him.
The battlefield below became a theater of unraveling order. Lines bent. Arrows failed. Magic betrayed its casters. And through it all, the Glass City awakened, its song of glass and shadow growing louder, harmonizing with the unseen hand of Sigma as though the two forces had always been aligned.
The air split like a crack in glass.
From the basin below, the guild felt the first shift not in sight but in sound a groaning vibration, as if the very bones of Drasklorn were grinding against themselves. Shards fell from the walls like brittle rain. The dead who had lain silent near the outer pits began to twitch. But these were not the familiar shambles of cursed flesh. Under Sigma's unseen hand, their forms warped bones stretching too long, glass shards fusing into their limbs, faces folding into masks of warped reflections.
The moment Mary Kaye's order split the air, chaos slammed into discipline.
The guild moved as one, but every breath carried the weight of dread. The ground around the opening path to Drasklorn quaked, spitting up shards of glass and blackened sand as the distorted dead lurched forward, their movements sharper, faster, more coordinated than the usual shambling tide. These were not mindless husks; they were being driven like weapons.
Charlotte and Natasha exchanged a single glance—no hesitation, no words. They both knew the choice was gone.
"Leroy!" Charlotte barked.
Leroy Walsh surged forward, his staff blazing with crimson runes. Mana flared from his hands and rushed into the guild like a living tide. Speed pure, blistering speed—flooded into their veins. Warriors staggered at the sudden rush, blades moving lighter, their steps quickened as though the very air bent to their will. The cost was written in Leroy's strained features, mana bleeding from him like water through a broken dam, but he did not falter.
"Shields NOW!" Natasha's voice cut through the haze.
Tyler Baldwin slammed his hands together, a dome of golden light bursting outward just as the first wave of glass-fused undead crashed forward. Beside him, Peter Williamson mirrored the cast, his barrier layering over Tyler's like twin panes of force. Roberta Roffe and Mallory Chapman followed, each weaving their own barrier into the growing lattice until the guild was surrounded by a shimmering wall of radiant power. Every strike against it rang out like hammer on crystal, the shields shuddering but holding.
Elise Carr's voice rose in song—soft, steady, the words of her healer's hymn spilling over the wounded. Threads of light ran down her arms, weaving into open wounds, stitching torn flesh, and purging the corrupt fumes the enhanced undead exhaled. Each spell consumed her mana in heavy bursts, yet she did not slow. Her presence was the difference between collapse and endurance.
Around them, the remaining force fumbled for healing potions and divine draughts, the clink of glass vials echoing against the clash of steel. Some poured shimmering liquid down their throats, others crushed radiant herbs between bloodied palms to smear across burns and cuts.
They fought not just the undead, but the gnawing weight of despair because this was the same signature, the same unnatural twist, that had accompanied the fall of the two-headed troll.
And everyone remembered how much it had cost them then.
The path toward Drasklorn gleamed faintly under their boots, shards of glass catching torchlight as if the city itself were watching. Daniel's figure loomed far above on the peak, his energy crackling against the distortion pressing down on the land. Every guild member knew the truth: if he faltered now, if the line collapsed, Drasklorn would drown them before they ever breached its gates.
The shields burned, the speed enchantment flared, and the undead hammered the barrier walls with relentless fury. It was not a battle of minutes, but of seconds, seconds bought with mana, blood, and unyielding resolve.
Every corpse that rose was wrong. A fallen knight whose armor had long since rusted stood with plates fused into its skin, its helm replaced by a jagged pane of living glass. A mage's skeletal hand bled blue fire that pulsed irregularly, surging and sputtering as though cast by something half-alive, half-machine. Even guild members who had perished in the city's fall were stirring veteran warriors, but hollowed, stretched into distorted parodies of the skills they once wielded.
Daniel, high above on the peak, saw more than the surface horror. His assessment skill flared, the world overlaying itself in lines and flickers of static. Space glitched in front of him, as though a curtain of reality were being torn seam by seam. His pupils, already laced with chaos-light, shifted, flooding with the shimmer of static electricity as the fluctuation bent into his vision. He saw the city's structural laws, the very geometry that held its towers upright, being bent, forced, and rewritten by an external hand.
Sigma was not merely reanimating the dead. He was trying to force entry into the tower itself.
Daniel spat blood, his body trembling against the growing interference. "He's… pulling the law apart. The tower's core it's being ripped open."
The guild couldn't hear his words, but they felt the surge. Space itself wavered around the city walls, bending inward like the pull of a black hole. The fog thickened, snapping like chains against invisible anchors. In the distance, the towers seemed to split into multiple images, as if reality itself could not decide what shape they should take.
Above the chaos, voices stirred. Cold, metallic, dripping with authority.
"That boy dares to resist."
"He strains against the administrator's will."
"Then let him strain. Let him break."
The Six Gods silent during the clash with the archdemon now spoke, their laughter a chorus of iron bells. They did not stop Sigma. They urged him forward.
Daniel's jaw clenched. He forced the lattice of his long-range spell tighter, chaos weaving with brutal precision. He had to finish the nuclear cast but every fragment of focus he spent on control was another inch Sigma gained over the city.
Below, the guild braced. The strike team knew another wave was coming. The distortion wasn't done it was only beginning.The clash came not with sound, but with silence.
The first abominations lurched from the fog, forms half-familiar, half-twisted mockeries of men and women the guild had once known. Armor they themselves had forged gleamed on warped bodies, their guild crests still visible, cracked and corrupted. Faces—once friends—were stretched into grim parodies, eyes hollow but glowing faintly with Sigma's alien imprint. For a heartbeat, hesitation gripped the strike team.
Then the dead moved.
They struck the barriers not with brute force, but with cunning precision. Shields that should have held for minutes buckled within seconds, pounded in coordinated rhythm, as if these abominations shared a mind. One claw tore through Tyler's barrier at the seam, another slammed into Mallory's from the side, probing for weakness. Elise gasped as her healing spells surged beyond control their wounds were too clean, too calculated, as though every strike was designed to force her into exhaustion.
The air filled with screams of effort and the smell of blood.
Above, Daniel felt it, the pattern. His body convulsed with recognition as the same distortions from the two-headed troll clawed into his spell lattice. Sigma wasn't merely animating corpses. He was testing, iterating, evolving.
The mountain peak pulsed with chaos light as Daniel's form wavered, his body beginning to fracture. His veins lit like molten cracks in glass, chaos energy bleeding from him with every breath. The spell lattice buckled under interference, violet arcs shredding into wild lightning. For a moment, he nearly lost the balance between control and chaos.
Then
A flare inside his mind. A mental notification, sharp and resonant, cut through the noise.
Skill Tree Matured
The engine of chaos within him, the very construct he had forged in blood and battle, had grown. It had been feeding all along, devouring the unstable current of Sigma's interference, digesting the infinite turbulence into fuel. And now, at last, it was ready.
Daniel's eyes snapped open, glowing with twin storms.
"Sigma," he muttered through gritted teeth, "you wanted to twist my work—so be it. You'll choke on it."
Below, the guild gasped as Daniel's aura erupted, a pressure so immense it rolled across the battlefield like a tidal wave. For an instant, even the abominations paused, their shared will stuttering. But the barriers still cracked under coordinated strikes, splinters of light flying as Tyler and Peter strained to hold the line.
Time was running out, both above and below.
Daniel's breath came ragged, each inhalation laced with heat and static. His body was fracturing from within, light spilling through the cracks of his skin as if he were a vessel barely holding back a star. The mental notification pulsed again, not words alone but resonance, vibrating through marrow and mind:
Skill Evolution Pathway Available
Fire Control + Lightning Manipulation → Firestorm Convergence
Result: Plasma Genesis
Side Effect: Vacant Skill Slot (5 → 4/5).
The chaos engine deep within him roared, devouring every stray filament of Sigma's interference and feeding it into this new lattice. Daniel's trembling hand lifted, and in his palm, fire and lightning flared separately at first, two rival storms snapping at each other like chained beasts. Then, guided by the new pathway, they twisted inward, threads of flame weaving through arcs of lightning until the air itself screamed.
There was no seam, no duality, only one storm, incandescent and furious. The flame had been compressed by current; the lightning superheated by fire. What emerged was not simply destructive but transcendent: a plasma core, white-hot and howling, its edges warping the very air around it.
His veins stopped fracturing. Instead, they glowed steady, the chaos inside him finding a new rhythm. Where moments ago he had been at the brink of collapse, now power ran smooth, like molten rivers carved in order. His spellcasting matrix shifted with finality—no longer two spells woven together by will, but one unified discipline.
"Plasma…" Daniel whispered, awe mingling with grim resolve. His lips curled in a thin smile. "Sigma, you've been accelerating me without knowing it."
Below, the battlefield reflected the change. The abominations battered the barriers in perfect sync—until the first arc of plasma fell from the peak. It wasn't a bolt, nor a flame, but a column of incandescent matter that struck like judgment, piercing the ground and vaporizing three twisted soldiers in a single instant. Where they had stood, glassed earth hissed and glowed.
The strike team froze for a breath, staring upward.
"Daniel…?" Tyler muttered, his voice both shaken and relieved.
Daniel straightened, his body no longer cracking but radiating, stabilized by the engine's absorption. He could feel the vacant slot in his Skill Tree waiting, a hollow echo room for something greater still. But for now, the firestorm was enough.
The abominations, however, adapted. They did not retreat. Instead, they shifted tactics forming a protective wall, shielding others that were already gathering foul energy. Sigma's touch threaded through them, forcing them to mimic Daniel's fusion in crude, nightmarish ways.
The barriers buckled again.
Daniel clenched his fist, plasma dripping from his fingertips like liquid stars.
"This ends on my terms."
Daniel stood at the pinnacle, overlooking the Glass City as though the entire world had become his personal casting circle. Below him, the rift churned like an open wound in the fabric of reality, bleeding Sigma's corruption into the streets, birthing abominations that twisted themselves into grotesque parodies of life. Every passing heartbeat meant more of those horrors spilling outward, and though his guild fought with all their strength to hold the lines, Daniel knew only a catastrophic strike, something on the scale of divinity itself could stem the tide.
His plasma aura burned hotter with each breath, the new lattice of his matured Skill Tree unraveling calculations before his eyes, glyphs of logic and power threading themselves across his vision like a second language only he could read. Three points lit up in his mind's map:
Feyrath, the City of Petals, forty-eight miles east. Merfleur the City of Silent Bells, one hundred miles further still, nearly five days' march away. And here, the rift anchored less than a hundred meters in front of him but locked into the Tower's structural law, pulsing like a malignant heart. Three strikes. Three impossible targets. And he would strike them all.
The numbers fell into place like iron chains. To collapse the rift alone would demand at least thirty-two megajoules of energy, a sum that would have annihilated any ordinary caster before the first word of a chant left their lips. Yet Daniel's chaos engine pulsed with a truth that broke such limits. Where others had to bleed one thousand mana for every paltry megajoule, he gave only half. Each point of mana burned in his veins was worth two joules instead of one.
His capacity forty thousand points, meant he carried within him the raw potential of a star, a staggering sixty-four million joules that no human was ever meant to hold. Enough not only to erase the rift, but to strike at Feyrath and Merfleur before Sigma's influence could root itself.
But the chaos engine was a double-edged gift. His reservoir was finite. Forty thousand points, no more. If he burned it all at once, he would collapse before the work was finished. The triple-cast would demand precision a balancing act of timing, calculation, and ruthless will. Chaos mana regenerated twice as fast as ordinary mana, refilling two thousand points with every passing minute. That regeneration was his lifeline. He had to stagger the spells across intervals, bleeding the world in measured doses rather than burning himself to ash in one blaze.
He clenched his fists and set the sequence. First, thirty-two thousand mana poured into a strike that would collapse the rift itself, leaving him with a fragile eight thousand. One minute's pause to recover, and he would climb back to ten thousand just enough to cut Feyrath down before Sigma's shadow hardened into permanence. Five minutes more, and his reserves would refill to twenty thousand, enough to tear Merfleur apart with a final storm of light and fury. It was not strength that would save them, but precision. He would turn his very heartbeat into a metronome of destruction.
Then, execution.
His body arched, plasma gathering in his palms not as flame nor lightning, but as something far more primal, a compressed star, white and furious, humming with a pressure so dense it made the air scream. The rift recoiled, its edges trembling as though it could sense what was coming. Daniel let the first blow fall like judgment.
A colossal pillar of plasma roared downward, spearing into the city below, with the weight of a falling sun. Streets shattered into molten glass. Sigma's anchor shrieked like a living thing as undead were ripped apart mid-motion, their twisted frames consumed in the implosion that followed. The wound folded inward, fighting to stay open, but the blow was too great.
Daniel staggered, sweat boiling on his skin, but his aura flared again. He raised his hand toward the east, shaping the long-distance trajectory with trembling precision. A lance of plasma thinner than the pillar but sharper than any blade carved across the horizon. The sky itself seemed to fracture into light, a glowing scar vanishing eastward. And then, faintly, Feyrath's skyline flickered, glowing like a candle about to be snuffed. The firestorm detonated, and Sigma's forward corruption was erased before it could bloom.
The last strike would demand more than the others combined. His body glowed with fissures of white heat, skin cracking like stone under pressure as his chaos engine devoured the minutes. Five minutes bled away, each heartbeat pounding like a drum in the silence of the peak. When his reserves swelled back to twenty thousand, he lifted his arms westward.
This was no lance. No pillar. This was a storm. Plasma twisted upward into a spiral cyclone, devouring the air in its ascent before launching forward like a comet. It vanished beyond the mountains, moving faster than sound itself. For a moment, silence reigned. Then the horizon erupted into a blaze, a false dawn swallowing Merfleur. Its bells, once said to sing only in silence, would never toll again.
Below, the guild stood stunned, their shields still locked against the claws of undead abominations. But the tide had thinned. The rift was gone. Feyrath burned clean. Merfleur glowed with finality. Sigma's grip faltered, its abominations hesitating as though the unseen hand itself had recoiled.
Daniel fell to one knee, smoke rising from his shoulders. His eyes were not human; now they were twin stars, flickering with the rhythm of his chaos engine. He had done it. Not through brute force, but through calculation, will, and the madness of a man who turned the impossible into certainty. Sigma had forced his hand. But Daniel had taken that interference and forged it into a casting no mortal had ever achieved.
The rift Daniel had just annihilated did not simply vanish into silence it detonated. Its collapse triggered a backlash of raw energy that ricocheted through the Tower's fabric, tearing through invisible seams until it found the hand that had pulled it open. In the Upper Realm, where administrators watched as gods pretended indifference, Sigma staggered. Its unseen form until now untouchable bore the first wound it had ever known.
The backlash tore across its projection, fracturing the lattice of authority that wrapped around its presence. For a fleeting instant, the impossible became undeniable: Daniel's strike had not only touched the battlefield, it had reached them.
The gods themselves leaned forward from their thrones of light and shadow, their eternal composure broken by shock. Even they had not calculated this outcome. And in that stillness, a sound cut deeper than thunder, Aether, the Slumbering God of Order, exhaled a faint smile. No words, no decree, only the smallest curl of lips. A god who had been silent for eons, unmoved by the chaos of millennia, had acknowledged what Daniel Rothchester had just done.
Below, the guild trembled in awe and terror. For a heartbeat, the battlefield was not filled with undead roars but silence, the kind that follows cataclysm. They had seen the rift collapse, the horizon fracture, cities set alight by forces that only gods or administrators had ever wielded. Now they understood. Daniel wasn't fighting like a man.
He wasn't even fighting like a player. He had stepped into a realm of power that by every law of the Tower should have been unreachable. Charllote, Natasha, and Mary Kaye's eyes widened together, realization dawning in hushed disbelief: they had witnessed the impossible, and it wore their guild's crest.
Then, as if on cue, Melgil stirred. Across the battlefield, his presence rippled like a second sun piercing through cloud. Daniel's plasma strike had been the signal they had been waiting for—the confirmation that the impossible threshold had been crossed. Under Daniel's command, Melgil unfurled his authority, tearing the air itself open. Void-space gates yawned into being, three at once, their edges glowing with violet hunger. From each portal, armies poured like rivers unleashed.
To Drasklorn, the Glass City, Melgil sent his own force disciplined soldiers clad in void-marked armor, their banners whispering in tongues older than the Tower itself. Toward Feyrath, the City of Petals, Duke Aereth Rothchester and his Duchess marched with one hundred knights in perfect formation, shields glinting under the falling firelight. And toward Merfleur, the City of Silent Bells, came the Warforged, one hundred eighty warriors of steel and stone, their footsteps quaking the earth, their weapons gleaming with killing intent.
The three plasma blasts had already reduced the cities to ruin, incinerating streets and breaking the backs of entire undead legions. Now the three armies swept through what remained, carving into the abominations with cold precision. The undead died by the thousands, cut down not only by divine fire but by disciplined steel.
Charllote, Natasha, and Mary Kaye could only stare, their throats dry, their minds straining to make sense of what unfolded before them. This was not guild warfare. This was not a sanctioned raid. Another force one they had not known, one the Tower had not acknowledged had joined the war. And still, no notification rang. No system warning of unsanctioned intervention. No punishment from on high. The Tower was silent.
That silence was louder than any battle cry. It meant one thing. The rules had just been broken, and no one, not even the Tower itself, was stopping it.
Sigma roared across the Upper Realm, its form unraveling and reforming in a storm of fractures, shards of white flame and broken runes spilling like shattered constellations. The backlash of its own rift tore across its manifestation, smoke-like blood streaming in patterns that denied natural law. To be wounded here in the realm of divine permanence was unthinkable. The gods themselves leaned forward, their once-aloof faces now heavy with disbelief.
And yet, amid the shock, Aether, the Slumbering God of Order, stirred faintly. His lips curled into the faintest smile, as if he had foreseen this breach, a mortal hand brushing against the lattice of godhood.
Far below, the guild stood transfixed. Their weapons lowered. Their hearts pounded.
Daniel… had just broken the rules of the Tower.
It should have rejected such interference. It should have screamed with alerts and punishments and declared blasphemy with cascading system notifications. But the Tower remained silent.
Then came the impossible: Melgil's forces swarming across the three cities.
The Drasklorn citadel burning beneath plasma fire. Feyrath, City of Petals, drowned in steel and blood as the Duke's knights shattered the flowered avenues. Merfleur's bells tolled once, then fell silent forever beneath the warforged's advance. The sky itself seemed to shiver at their arrival.
Charlotte's voice broke, a whisper more than a question:
"…How did he bring them here…?"
Mary Kaye staggered back, clutching her chest as the explosions echoed. Natasha's lips trembled, her face pale with something worse than fear: understanding. Daniel had not simply bent the Tower's rules. He had rewritten them.
On the mountain's peak, Daniel sat slumped, breaths ragged, chaos veins burning like molten scars beneath his skin. His hands shook, blood marking every line where mana had split through. His body was failing, but his eyes, half-lidded, blurred with exhaustion, remained fixed on the battlefield.
Melgil appeared beside him, silent at first, then kneeling. Without hesitation, the void lord drew Daniel into an embrace, holding him steady as his form threatened to collapse. Around them, Melgil's female warriors froze, shocked at the sight: their commander, the cold blade of the void, kneeling in deference and care.
Together they gazed down at the burning ruin of the fallen castle. Undead armies crumbled into ash. From the center of the ruined city, a crater yawned where the municipal heart had once been, black smoke rising in pillars.
The Tower did not speak.
The gods above did not descend.
their world had just shifted beyond all reckoning.
The battlefield burned like a furnace of unending screams and falling towers. Amid the clash of steel and plasma fire, the guilds rallied themselves, the survivors pressing back against the staggering undead lines.
Through the smoke came a wedge of armored figures, women with pale eyes burning like cold suns, their banners drenched in the crimson of endless wars. The Daughters of War. Their boots struck the earth in rhythm, a tide of precision and violence.
At their head strode their captain tall, scarred, bearing the sigil of a fractured crown across her breastplate. She stopped before the guild, her voice calm, measured, as though the chaos around them was no more than a background hymn.
"We are the Veyrra, sworn blades of Melgil Veara Gehinnom, Calamity Queen of the Void. By her will, we stand as your shield, for a time."
Her hand extended. A sealed letter. Inked with chaos sigils, sealed by Daniel's own hand.Natasha stepped forward, hesitant, and accepted it.
The captain gave no further word. She simply turned, sword flashing, and rejoined her sisters—sweeping into the tide of undead with a discipline and savagery that made even the hardened guild warriors falter.
Hands shaking, Charlotte, Mary Kaye, and Natasha broke the seal. The parchment was ragged, the handwriting uneven, as if carved out between waves of pain.
"The forces at your side are not bound to this world. They will not linger. Their presence is only a theory I gambled on, and fortune favored us, for now."
"Strike quickly. Waste nothing. Begin with Drasklorn, the Glass City, then march to the next. Clear them with all haste before the army turns away., until you reach the gates of the capital of karion"
"i shall take my leave , until you reach the capital gate, this i promise to return and aid all of you once again,"
"Do not wait for me. Do not look back. and move forward"
"This what I can give you now . The rest is yours."
"until we meet again ,at the gate of Karion."
signed Daniel.