Chapter 122: The Mutated Vanguard
Because of the Mythic tether, she physically felt the 10,000 damage hit their shared health bar. But she didn’t panic. She just aimed her wooden staff down at the fleet.
"Gravity Well," Isolde commanded.
She didn’t target the players. She targeted the ships.
Massive, glowing red spheres of Anomaly energy materialized in the air around the dreadnought Levi was standing on. The gravity snares expanded, completely catching three adjacent galleons in their area of effect.
The heavy wooden ships instantly groaned. Their movement speed was artificially locked to zero. They couldn’t turn. They couldn’t sail away on the Aether currents. They were perfectly frozen in mid-air, sitting ducks for the monster on their deck.
Levi glanced up at the red gravity fields and grinned.
"Thanks for the lock-down," Levi said.
He blurred into motion again. With his Overdrive speed, the remaining mages didn’t even have time to start their next cast bars.
Levi dashed right into their backline. He didn’t even use a skill. He just swung basic physical attacks.
[-18,660] [-18,660] [-18,660]
The 2.5x multiplier applied to his base swings turned every single hit into a lethal execution. He was dealing 18,000 damage per strike. The mages were physically cut in half. The 25% Lifesteal from his basic swings instantly healed the 10,000 magic damage he had just taken, pushing his Shared HP right back to 105,980.
He didn’t just kill the players. He was treating the Mortal Coalition like a massive farm of walking health potions.
He cleared the dreadnought in less than ten seconds.
He didn’t stop to loot. The 60-second timer on Abyssal Overdrive was ticking down in the corner of his eye.
Levi jumped. He launched himself off the railing of the dreadnought, crossing the fifty-foot gap in the air, and crashed down onto the deck of a Solar Lance galleon caught in Isolde’s gravity snare.
"He’s on our ship!" players screamed.
Levi didn’t say a word. He swung his scythe directly at the ship’s massive wooden mast. The 58,000 damage Guillotine strike didn’t just kill the players standing near it; it completely severed the thick wooden pole.
The mast groaned and collapsed, crushing a dozen players beneath heavy rigging and sails.
Levi dashed through the chaos, executing anyone stupid enough to try and block him. He was a black smear of fire bouncing from ship to ship.
He jumped again. Landed on a Crimson Aegis cruiser. Guillotine. Jumped again.
He was completely dismantling their formation. Ships were catching fire from stray spells. Players were actively trying to log out, their avatars freezing with the 10-second combat-log timer, only to get instantly deleted by Levi’s scythe before they could escape.
The game system filled his combat log with endless lines of text, but there was no XP granted for killing players.
[System: Player ’Rylan’ killed. 0 XP gained.]
[System: Player ’Kael’ killed. 0 XP gained.]
He didn’t care about the experience. He cared about sending a message.
In fifty seconds, Levi had physically boarded and wiped out the crews of over thirty ships. Without their players to steer them or manage their Aether-cores, the abandoned ships started drifting aimlessly, crashing into each other.
The air was filled with the sound of splintering wood, screaming players, and roaring black fire.
The timer in the corner of his eye finally ticked down to zero.
The towering aura of black flames surrounding his Obsidian Carapace armor instantly vanished. His Speed physically dropped in half, snapping back from 3,272 down to his normal 1,636. His damage modifier evaporated.
Abyssal Overdrive was over. It was on cooldown for the next 24 hours.
Levi stood in the center of a burning Solar Lance galleon. The deck was completely painted in dropped loot boxes and floating blue polygons.
He let out a heavy breath, resting his Platinum scythe on his shoulder. He checked his Shared HP bar.
[Shared HP: 105,980 / 105,980]
He hadn’t lost a single point of health.
He looked around the sky. The mighty 500-ship armada of the Mortal Coalition was in absolute shambles. Nearly three hundred ships were either actively burning, crashing into the floating islands, or plummeting out of the sky entirely. The remaining two hundred ships were desperately turning their sails, completely abandoning the blockade and fleeing back toward the central hub.
Levi looked up toward the biggest ship in the distance. Ovidia’s flagship was rapidly retreating, its massive engines burning bright blue Aether.
"Run," Levi smirked. "I’ll catch you later."
**
The massive Aether-Sky armada was in absolute shambles.
Burning wood and shredded sails rained down through the clouds. Dozens of galleons were currently drifting sideways, violently smashing into the floating islands because Levi had just executed their entire steering crews.
Standing on the command deck of the Solar Lance flagship, Ovidia watched the destruction in sheer horror. The Guild Master gripped the railing so hard her knuckles turned white.
"Cannons are useless!" one of her officers screamed, running up the wooden stairs. "He’s too fast! The targeting arrays can’t track a player moving at three thousand Speed!"
"Then flood the decks with AoE magic!" Ovidia yelled back.
"We tried!" the officer panicked, pointing at a burning dreadnought drifting nearby. "He just lifesteals through it! We hit him for ten thousand damage and he heals it back in one swing. He’s functionally immortal!"
Ovidia gritted her teeth. She looked up at the sky. The swirling purple Aether currents were thick and violent. The mega-guilds had given up their entire surface empires for this. They had sold out the rest of the player base, accepted the Pantheon’s terms, and moved up here to survive the apocalypse. They were supposed to be safe.
But one guy with a scythe was tearing their entire sanctuary apart.
Ovidia pulled out her server-wide megaphone item. Her hands were shaking.
"Deploy the God-Shards!" Ovidia’s voice boomed across the sky, echoing off the floating islands. "All Coalition leaders! Use them now!"
On the deck of a nearby Ironclad dreadnought, Levi paused. He rested his Platinum Scythe of the Eclipse on his shoulder and looked over.
"God-Shards?" Levi muttered. "What kind of black-market garbage is that?"
He got his answer immediately.
On Ovidia’s flagship, Gideon, the towering Guild Master of Ironclad, stepped forward. He didn’t pull out a potion or a scroll. He reached into his inventory and pulled out a jagged, violently glitching piece of pure white light. It looked like a broken shard of glass ripped straight out of the game’s code.
It was a fragment of the Pantheon’s actual data.
Gideon didn’t throw it. He slammed the jagged shard of light directly into his own chest plate.
The reaction was instantaneous, and it was absolutely disgusting.
Gideon didn’t glow with holy light. He didn’t sprout angelic wings. He screamed. It was a horrible, tearing sound that clipped the audio engine. His avatar literally fractured.
The heavy iron armor he was wearing melted straight into his digital skin. His character model bloated, expanding rapidly until he was a massive, fifteen-foot-tall monstrosity. His flesh turned into bubbling, liquid metal. Jagged spikes of iron ripped through his back. His right arm morphed completely, fusing with his weapon until it formed a massive, molten axe.
This wasn’t a divine ascension. It was a digital tumor. The Pantheon didn’t elevate humanity; they just corrupted them into mindless meat-shields.
The system threw up a glowing red nameplate over the monster’s head.
[Gideon, the Iron Mutation]
[Level: 72 | Elite]
[HP: 5,000,000 | ATK: 25,000 | DEF: 8,000]
"Five million health," Levi read the stats, his eyes narrowing. "And twenty-five thousand attack. They literally turned themselves into boss mobs."
The mutated Gideon let out a hollow, metallic roar. He didn’t even look at Ovidia or his own guild members. He just turned his burning, featureless face toward Levi.
The monster bent its massive liquid-metal legs and jumped.
The kinetic force of the leap actually shattered the wooden deck of the flagship. Gideon flew across the gap between the ships and crashed down directly onto the burning dreadnought where Levi was standing. The impact buckled the hull, sending wooden splinters flying into the air.
Levi didn’t back up. He just stood there and ran the math.
He was Level 60. The mutant was Level 72. That was exactly a twelve-level gap. In Starfall, that meant he was staring down a brutal 60% Level Suppression penalty.
’Alright, break the armor down,’ Levi calculated rapidly. ’Gideon’s Defense is 8,000. My Platinum scythe ignores 30% of that. Thirty percent of 8,000 is 2,400. That drops his effective Defense down to 5,600.’
He checked his permanent Total Attack. It was sitting at 7,464.
But then the system applied the penalty. Against a mutant Elite of this caliber, the 60% suppression penalty acted like a hard wall. The game engine checked his low raw damage against the massive level gap and simply flat-lined the output.
Levi swung his Platinum scythe anyway, testing the waters.