"So we must do sothing else. Or we pack our bags."
A devilish glint appeared in Kaiden’s eyes. He already had a plan.
The girls saw it. Every single one of them recognized the shift, the way his posture loosened, the way the fury in his jaw settled into the cold architecture of a man who’d found the answer and was already three steps past it.
"We need sothing bigger," he said. "Sothing New Dawn won’t dare fight with a squad like this."
Luna’s grin died.
Calypso’s tail went still.
Aria opened her mouth, closed it, then looked at Kaiden more carefully.
He wasn’t reckless. He was never reckless. Reckless was Ash throwing himself at monsters he hadn’t scouted because his ego demanded it. Kaiden threw himself at monsters he’d spent hours studying, because the math said he could win.
There was a difference.
A few of the girls smiled inwardly while keeping the facade of concern up, because they knew. Wherever he was going, they were going. The question was never whether. Only when.
Kaiden pulled up the tactical overlay again.
He studied it differently this ti. Before, he’d been filtering for targets his team could safely engage. Isolated. Manageable. The kind of monster a coordinated group of level fifties with their prowess could grind down with good positioning and no mistakes.
Now he was looking for sothing else entirely.
His eyes moved past the level seventy-sixes. Past the seventy-sevens. Past the markers he’d already been denied.
He stopped on a cluster of red deep in the northern corridor. Level eighty. Solitary. A Deepvein Colossus, according to the Association’s notes. Massive subterranean predator. Thick mineral-encrusted hide, devastating ground-pound attacks, and a territorial rage response that made it chase intruders for over a kiloter before giving up.
The veteran reports flagged it as a "do not engage without S-tier support" threat.
’Perfect.’
"Found it. Let’s move."
He dismissed the overlay and started walking. Faster than before. The careful navigation from earlier, the wide berths around migration routes, the constant cross-referencing of patrol patterns, all of it was gone. He moved with purpose and visibility, cutting straight lines through terrain he’d previously circled.
"Girls, this will be a brutal battle. We might sustain injuries. But we must push through, or else we’ll never be able to fight a battle of our own. The only solution is to fight sothing New Dawn doesn’t dare."
...
The plateau ca into view. A broad shelf of dark stone overlooking a basin where the Deepvein Colossus had carved itself a nest in the mountain’s root system. The creature was partially visible, an enormous bulk of mineral-crusted hide shifting in the shadows of its den, each breath sending small rockslides cascading down the walls.
It was massive. Five tis the size of the Borer Queen.
Kaiden stopped at the edge. His girls ford up around him. Below them, the Colossus shifted in its sleep, and the ground trembled.
Aria’s eyes went wide as she took in the scale.
Luna whispered, "That thing is huge."
"Yep."
"And we’re fighting it?"
"We are."
Luna blinked. Before she could ask what the fuck he was thinking, the sound of boots on stone reached them from the south.
Ash and Chinedu’s squad crested the ridge.
"What? They dare fight a monster at level 80?!" Kaiden grumbled with disbelief.
They’d arrived fast, which ant the scout had flagged Kaiden’s trajectory from the ti he took off. Perhaps even from the ti he started discussing their next target.
The squad moved in disciplined formation, more than a dozen fighters spreading across the southern approach with the practiced ease of people who’d been doing this all day.
Ash was at the front. His grin was enormous, the cara-ready one, the one that showed every tooth and none of his actual feelings. Except right now, the feelings were showing too. Petty, open, gleeful hostility. The look of a man who’d been kicked in the teeth all week and just found out he could kick back.
Chinedu stood beside him, spear resting on his shoulder, posture as relaxed as a man waiting for coffee. His smile was different, warm and playful. The smile of soone enjoying a ga that had nothing to do with him personally.
"Oh, would you look at that!" Ash called up, loud enough for his stream and Kaiden’s dead one both. "Kaiden Grey, camping a monster he doesn’t dare fight! What’s wrong, buddy? Run out of targets in your league?"
By the end he truly got into it because he ended his statent with a "Go back to the starter area, fag!"
Chinedu waved. "Hey again!"
He wasn’t even pretending this was coincidence.
Kaiden looked down at them from the plateau’s edge.
His jaw was tight. His fists hung at his sides, and the tendons in his forearms stood out like cables, and when he t Ash’s eyes, the fury in his expression was raw enough to make Ash’s grin flicker.
Good. Let them see it. Let the stream see it. Let them all see Kaiden Grey, cornered and furious and out of options.
The New Dawn squad fanned out around the basin with Chinedu coordinating through hand signals. Professional. Efficient. They began setting up positions around the Colossus’s den, preparing for an engagent that would earn them 250 competition points and deny Kaiden yet another target.
Ash planted himself on a rock overlooking the basin and spread his arms wide.
"Hey, Grey! Why don’t you join us? We could tackle this threat together!" He winked at his cara drone. "Chat, look at this. The great Kaiden Grey, just standing there watching real fighters work. Anyone else getting flashbacks to his whole competition? All hype, no..."
Kaiden stopped listening.
Below, New Dawn’s buffer was already working. A woman in Chinedu’s squad raised her staff, and golden sigils traced themselves across his armor, his spear, his boots. Attack amplification. Speed enhancent. Barrier coating. Three layered buffs applied in under two seconds, the kind of precision that ca from hundreds of hours of paired combat drilling.
Standard practice. When a high-level monster was still dormant, you let your strongest fighter open with a fully buffed alpha strike. Catch it sleeping, wound it before it could establish aggression patterns, and force it into a reactive fight instead of a proactive one. Every veteran squad in the world ran the sa playbook.
Chinedu stepped to the basin’s edge. His posture shifted for the first ti since Kaiden had seen him. The casual lean, the easy smile, the man-who-was-always-relaxed act, all of it fell away. What remained was an S-tier combatant with a spear and a clear target.
He raised the weapon overhead with one hand. The tip ignited with compressed force, white-hot, vibrating at a frequency that made the air around it scream.
"[Horizon Breaker]!"
The thrust crossed forty ters of open air in a fraction of a second. A beam of concentrated kinetic force erupted from the spear tip and slamd into the Colossus’s exposed flank with the sound of a mountain breaking. The mineral crust around the impact point shattered outward in a spray of stone fragnts. A wound the size of a car door opened in the creature’s hide, dark blood spraying from ruptured tissue beneath.
The Colossus lurched awake.
Its roar was physical. A wall of sound and displaced air that flattened loose stone across the basin floor and forced two of Chinedu’s fighters to brace against it. The creature heaved itself from its den, and the scale of it beca imdiately clear. A body like a fortress wrapped in stone and mineral plating, each step cratering the ground beneath it. Six eyes, all of them open, all of them furious, locked onto the fourteen fighters that had woken it with violence.
Chinedu’s opening strike had carved a wound that would have killed most monsters outright.
On the Colossus, it was a scratch. Deep enough to bleed, shallow enough to enrage. The mineral crust was thickest along the creature’s spine and shoulders, and the wound Chinedu had opened was already being compressed by the shifting plates around it, stone grinding against stone as the creature’s body tried to seal itself.
The Deepvein Colossus charged.
New Dawn t it head-on.
Fourteen fighters against a level eighty Colossus. Two S-tiers directing traffic. A coordinated, brutal, competent engagent that would grind the creature down through sustained pressure and disciplined rotations over the next couple dozen minutes.
Exactly the kind of fight that kept everyone locked in place and unable to disengage.
Kaiden watched it all from the plateau’s edge, his girls surrounding him.
Then he turned to Luna.
"Luna."
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