The first horde ca within ten minutes of crossing the inner boundary.
Three hundred Skyspear Reavers descended in a tight diving column from the upper canopy, their bone-spear beaks humming with kinetic charge. Lyra deployed first. A flat ring of crafted weapons rose around the group at chest height, each one rotating, each one calibrated to the Reavers’ aerial profile. The ring pulsed once, and the air above filled with intercept lines.
Forty Reavers died on the first volley.
The rest broke into three sub-formations and adjusted their dive.
Aelira raised her hand, and Night Reign expanded.
It was not the do it had been before.
The Super A-rank rune had reshaped it. The radius pushed outward in a smooth, sustained expansion that did not stop at a hundred ters, or two hundred. It settled at almost three hundred and fifty, swallowing the entire sky above the group and bending the perception of every Reaver inside it. Their dive pattern collapsed almost imdiately. The lead Reavers lost their bearings, the middle layer overshot their angle, and the rear formation began turning into each other.
Inside the do, Rudrean and Aelira moved with their perception sharpened to surgical clarity.
"Cleanup," Rudrean said.
He didn’t activate the Combat Art. He didn’t need to.
He used Voidante’s Drive instead. The Super A-rank version of his teleport now allowed chained jumps in rapid succession, each one costing slightly less mana than the original ten percent due to recovery scaling. He blinked through the disoriented Reavers in a flowing sequence, the Cerulean Inferno shifting between bow and blade with each appearance, every kill clean, every position chosen to disrupt the Reavers behind it.
Aelira fired in spread patterns from the ground, her revolver carrying boosted Vina charges that punched through the toughest of the Reavers in single shots. Rivera kept the group’s circulation moving with Starlight Stream. Ryzen swept the lowest layer with ice and lightning walls that finished anything Rudrean’s path missed.
Two minutes.
Three hundred Reavers, gone.
The do dissolved.
"Keep moving," Lyra said.
The second horde ca forty kiloters later.
Two hundred Magmaback Tortoises, shells layered with active volcanic plating that radiated heat in waves visible from kiloters away. They opened with a synchronized molten volley before the group had spotted the bulk of the formation.
Aelira’s Voidandi’s Halo Magic Flux activated, restoring forty percent of her mana from the ambient fla in the air. She raised her hand.
"Pyrus Vale Fort. Potency boost active."
The defensive construct erupted around the group with the hundred percent potency multiplier layered into its core. The do caught the molten volley and turned the energy back outward in a counter-burst that was nearly twice the strength it would have managed at standard output. Sixty Tortoises died to their own returned projectiles.
Rudrean activated the Combat Art for forty seconds.
The ribbons of crimson and cyan wrapped around him. The halo ford. He pulled mana through Hungry Void at its full Super A-rank rate, his pool refilling almost as fast as he spent it, allowing him to layer ten Nihil Fury Blades into each strike without ever feeling the cost. Each blade now carried significantly higher omni-defense ignore than before, and ten of them stacked into a single attack made armor mostly theoretical.
He swept the Tortoise formation in seven precise passes.
Each Tortoise died to a single strike between the head and front shoulder, exactly where Lyra had identified the structural weakness. The omni-defense ignore tore through their volcanic plating as if it were paper. Aelira flipped the heavier ones with Heavenfall Wind pressure cones, exposing their underbellies, and Ryzen finished them with lightning-threaded ice spears.
Three minutes.
Two hundred Tortoises, gone.
The third horde was different.
They felt it before they saw it. The temperature dropped. The ground turned to dark, glassy stone. The air thickened with the particular pressure of sothing that didn’t move physically until it had already arrived sowhere else.
"Voidstalkers," Isalyn said through Rudrean’s link. "Watch the body and you’ll miss them."
"How many?" Rudrean asked.
"Roughly a hundred and fifty," Lyra answered.
Aelira flexed her fingers. Her revolver dissolved and reford as a heavier dual setup.
"Night Reign again," she said. "Full radius."
The do expanded outward to three hundred and fifty ters once more. Inside, the Voidstalkers’ phase pattern broke imdiately. Their movent beca fully visible to the team as flickering streaks across the ambient darkness. Their disruption was not partial. Inside Night Reign at Super A-rank, their phase ability collapsed entirely, leaving them stuck in the position where the do had caught them.
Rudrean used Spirit Nexus.
The blood drawn from earlier fights had filled his Spark count well past the threshold. He spent six hundred Spirit Sparks at once, summoning six Spirit Tigers in a wide ring around the Voidstalker pack. At Super A-rank, the Tigers manifested at his full parater set, each one as strong as he was, each one calibrated to hunt rather than brawl.
They moved together.
The Voidstalkers, robbed of their phase ability and surrounded by predators that read their movent as easily as Rudrean did, lasted barely four minutes. Aelira and Rudrean handled the inner circle while the Spirit Tigers patrolled the do’s edge, taking down any stragglers that tried to slip outward.
Lyra deployed a tight cluster of tracking weapons that hunted individual Voidstalkers across the field, each weapon following one target until its kill was confird.
Four minutes.
A hundred and fifty Voidstalkers, gone.
The Spirit Tigers dissolved back into Spark light.
The do lifted.
The group stood at the edge of a wide, glassy basin that had been the Voidstalkers’ territory. Beyond it, the pillar of light from the central area was no longer distant.
It was close.
A few kiloters, no more.
The presence radiating from beneath the pillar was nothing like the bosses they had cleared. Heavier. Quieter. The kind of presence that did not announce itself because everything around it was already announcing it.
Lyra slowed the dragonfly aircraft to a hover.
"The final boss," she said.
"How long do we have?" Rivera asked.
"Eleven hours and thirty minutes," Lyra answered.
"Plenty of ti," Aelira said.
Rudrean looked toward the pillar. "Let’s take a break before breaking in there."
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