The second wave ca three hours after the first ended.
It was bigger. The Doom Monarch had read the result of the first wave and decided to send more. The sensor count climbed past five hundred thousand. The siege creatures arrived in greater numbers. A new class of monster appeared at the rear of the wave, taller than the front-line creatures and harder to scan. Aryan flagged them at Tier 95.
The wave lasted five hours.
Thalmyr-Ronethis held their lead by working harder at the sa pattern. They struck command nodes. They cleared the disorganized clusters. They moved on. Their precision sharpened under the longer engagent instead of fraying.
Virexion-Kezryx changed nothing. Jaskrit committed more storm energy to the bombardnts and pushed his engagent zone half a kiloter further out. The Doom losses on the eastern front were enormous. So were the Virexion ammunition expenditures. Jaskrit did not seem to care.
Celestara-Dravokh bled. Their fleet was the smallest, and the Tier-95 monsters at the rear of the wave broke through their forward barriers more than once. Joaka had to engage personally to push them back. By the end of the wave, her radiant wings were dimr than they had been at the start.
Suryax-Regalon fought without Almond, without Lily, without Marcus, without the seven Spirit Lords, and without the ten Dreadling Monarchs. The full strength of the alliance was not on this field. It could not be.
So they fought with what they had.
Rudra anchored the lead Dreadship’s defense. Silvester and Hiroshi worked the front. Ainen held the right flank and let his flas burn at two layers for most of the engagent. He went to three only when a Tier-95 monster pushed through his line, and then only for a few seconds before pulling back. Saffa, Clovelle, and Fraisea kept the support systems running. Big D fed Rudra the cross-fleet data. Gopu kept the engines clean.
The Asura Executives carried more weight than they wanted to show. Vael, Seris, and Kaedor could each fight at the Tier-95 line if pushed. They did not. They held their displayed combat to the lower end of their actual range, and the line eased back whenever their actual range threatened to leak through.
It was an ugly engagent. The Doom Army did not care about losses, and the alliance lost ground twice before pushing it back. By the ti the wave broke, the southeastern arc was littered with dead monsters in shapes the soldiers were trying not to look at directly.
The leaderboard updated.
[Star Mayhem Mountain Defense]
[Rank 1: Thalmyr Ascendancy | Ronethis Apex Sovereignty: 218,460]
[Rank 2: Virexion Dominion | Kezryx Void Imperium: 201,930]
[Rank 3: Celestara Sanctum | Dravokh Tyrant Conclave: 132,710]
[Rank 4: Suryax Kingdom | Ananta Regalon: 119,840]
Rudra studied it without expression this ti.
"We are last because we cannot help being last," he said quietly to Big D. "Not because we are pretending."
"I know," Big D said.
"How long is the break?"
Big D checked the event read. "Ten hours."
"Rotate the line. Get the wounded back. Tell the rear platform to push the buffs harder for the recovery cycle."
The orders went out. The Suryax-Regalon line settled into its ten-hour rest, and around the Mountain, the other three alliances did the sa.
---
On the far side of the world, the expedition team had already moved.
They dived into the Suryax depth first. It was the closest. They knew the layout. The blueprint chamber had been left undisturbed since the Geneline awakening, and Almond had been carrying the genuine Suryax depth blueprint in his storage ever since the raid that had triggered the alliance’s first power surge.
They went down. Vorth’s team copied the chamber’s stored data into a fresh blueprint structure built from the original’s resonance. They sealed the duplicate into the chamber’s mounting. They left.
Almond stored the copy of the Suryax depth’s genuine blueprint in the sa vault that held the original Oblivion one.
That was the first blueprint of this run.
The second was Virexion’s depth, and Virexion’s depth was where the real work began.
The team approached from a vector Big D’s intelligence network had cleared in advance. The Tier-100 monster population in Virexion’s depth was storm-aligned, fast, and aggressive. There was no way to clear them all. So the team did not try.
They had a different plan.
Lily seeded the approach with Dreadlings before they entered the depth proper. Hundreds of them spread out in widening arcs ahead of the team, each one carrying just enough presence to register on the storm monsters’ senses. The monsters reacted exactly as she had expected. They moved toward the Dreadlings.
While the storm monsters chased the Dreadlings outward, Ainen worked.
His origin fla had absorbed storm-aligned energy during the naval engagent two months earlier. He had kept that signature in reserve. Now he released it across the team in a thin, controlled layer that wrapped each mber in a quiet storm-resonance camouflage. To any depth monster scanning for intruders, the expedition team now read as ambient depth energy. Not invisible. Just uninteresting.
Almond opened the path.
His Grimblades extended Grim Severam outward in a long, thin corridor through the depth. The corridor was not a tunnel. It was a sever in the connection between the monsters in that corridor and the rest of the depth’s energy network. Inside the corridor, the monsters’ senses thinned. Their coordination broke. The few that still drifted into the team’s actual path were either cut down cleanly by Almond’s Grimblades or knocked out by precision shots from the Discord Bloom rifles Vorth’s team kept charged at all tis.
The team moved through the corridor at speed.
Natalia ran trajectory calculations on the move. Kayla’s threads tracked the rest of the depth around the corridor and warned of approaching monsters before they could break in. Maya moved with the precision she always did, blade ready, watching the flanks. Marcus held the rear with his shield extended, swinging at any monster that drifted in.
The Spirit Lords flanked them. The Dreadling Monarchs covered the rear.
They reached the Virexion blueprint chamber in under twenty minutes.
It was beautiful inside. The walls were inscribed with storm-resonance patterns, and the blueprint at the center floated in a contained sphere of ambient lightning. Vorth’s team scanned it, copied the data, and built a duplicate blueprint structure from the storm signature Ainen had captured during the descent. They sealed the duplicate in the original’s place. The genuine went into Almond’s storage.
That was the second blueprint.
Almond raised his hand.
"Master Key. Absolute Override."
The expedition team vanished from the Virexion depth and reappeared in the sealed lab beneath the Suryax central palace.
Vorth’s team unloaded the recovered data into the developnt consoles within minutes. The team rested for two hours. Then they dived again.
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