Chapter 687 Highest In history
Moon stayed silent for a moment, weighing it, then signaled his team to follow.
"Let's get closer, stay hidden, stay low. The fight hasn't peaked yet, the hordes haven't even clashed, and once they do, the chaos will pull the commanders' focus off their surroundings. We use that to close the distance. We don't commit to anything until I know what we're walking into."
The team moved.
They crossed roughly three hundred meters, keeping low to the snow, Moon at the forefront with Camouflage active. Despite his powerful concealment skill, Moon kept himself pressed to the ground, because the northern elf was stronger now than it had ever been, and a transformation like that would sharpen its senses along with everything else.
The fighting would dull its awareness of the periphery, yes, but Moon didn't gamble when he didn't have to. Better to stay flat and slow than to trust the concealment alone against something that had just eaten a true elf's heart. It wasn't like he was in a rush, the battle had just started, and it would take some time before things got really heated.
They pushed to five hundred meters.
Moon raised his right hand, and the team stopped. From here on, they could no longer speak, only using hand signals as communication.
The battle broke open as the southern commander threw back its head and released a war cry, and its horde surged forward, roughly thirty beasts rushing toward the archer.
The northern commander answered with its own war cry, and its horde rushed to meet the charge. The two forces crashed toward each other across the snow.
The southern swordsman knew the harsh reality of his situation. Its horde was smaller, weakened, outnumbered by the northern force even after everything the enemy had bled from both sides. In a straight clash, its beasts would lose. So it didn't fight a straight clash.
It committed to a sacrifice.
It hurled its entire horde at the archer itself rather than at the enemy beasts, ordering its creatures to swarm the commander, to bury it under sheer numbers, even knowing that most of them would die doing it, cut down by the archer's arrows or torn apart by the northern horde before they ever reached their target.
But that didn't matter. Its beasts were going to die regardless, and if throwing them all at the archer bought a chance to seriously wound or kill the transformed commander, the swordsman considered every one of those deaths worth spending.
Moon watched the sacrificial charge unfold, and decided it was time to take action.
Through the Curse link, he sent his signal to the Arctic Fire-Prowler and his Arctic Grizzlers.
Attack the archer's horde. Focus on surviving.
His cursed beasts surged into the northern horde's flank, the Fire-Prowler's flame melting their ice-armored hides, the Grizzlers slamming into the pack, and the archer's beasts turned to meet this new threat coming from the side.
Moon wanted to ease the pressure on the southern commander, to give its sacrificial charge a better chance of landing. And he wasn't worried about either elf sensing his involvement.
The chaos had reached its peak, the battlefield a churning mass of beasts and weapons. More than that, he was fairly certain the commanders could only detect his control over a beast if that beast belonged to their own horde, the way the northern archer had felt the Curse on its own Snow Creeper. His beasts weren't horde members. They were stragglers he'd bound out in the open wasteland, unclaimed by either spire, invisible to whatever sense let the elves police their own horse.
His beasts tore into the northern horde, and the balance of the battlefield shifted, the archer suddenly beset from two directions at once.
The balance didn't favor the southern commander for long.
The archer's aura surged one final time, and the transformation that had been building since the moment it swallowed the heart reached its completion. The crimson had fully blended with the white, and the pressure climbed to a new peak before stabilizing.
Moon watched, and his face darkened immensely...
This level of power. It's a Surpasser.
A lesser elf, degraded from its ancestral bloodline, had consumed the heart of a true elf and used it to ascend past the ceiling of its own kind. It stood on the battlefield as a Surpasser, an entire rank above everything else in the gate, above every fighter on Moon's team, above what a B-Rank gate should contain.
Outside, in the evacuated district, the gate erupted.
A massive wave of power surged out, and a gust of wind tore across the plaza in its wake. The command tent's canvas struggled to remain in place. Loose items tumbled across the ground, barrier panels blew away, and the news crews staggered, several cameras knocked from their tripods, reporters throwing up their arms against the blast.
Halvern shielded his face against the wind and immediately turned to the Threshold Gauge, and the moment he read it, his expression went cold.
A second Surpasser, dispatched by the Association after the earlier readings, rushed to his side.
"What happened?"
Halvern didn't answer right away. He ran the measurement again, and again, as if the numbers might change.
"This level of power," he said finally, his voice grim, "is the highest we have ever recorded for a B-Rank gate. By a wide margin, nothing ever comes close."
The news broadcast didn't hesitate to spread the news.
"The gate's power has spiked to unprecedented levels," the reporter said, the wind still tugging at her hair as she steadied herself before the camera. "Association officials confirm this is the strongest reading ever recorded for a gate of this rank. Sources on-site indicate the instruments now suggest that an entity of Surpasser-level strength has emerged inside the gate. To be clear, the seven fighters currently within are all Evolvers. Five-star, and Four-star elites, among the best in the kingdom. But an Evolver, by definition, stands a rank beneath a Surpasser."
She paused, and the gravity of it showed on her face.
"What this means, plainly, is that the team inside is now facing an enemy they are not, on paper, capable of defeating. The power gap between an Evolver and a Surpasser is not a matter of skill or numbers. Association analysts extrapolating from the current readings and the fate of the previous team give the exploration party very slim odds of survival. They would need something extraordinary...a miracle."
The broadcast cut to footage of the earlier entry, the team crossing into the gate with their faces obscured.
"We will keep you guys updates...pray for those inside, they will need it."