Chapter 129: The Aether Descent Begins, Falling Islands
The 100,000 points of Lifesteal instantly flooded his system. His health bar violently shot from 92,234 straight back to a perfect 115,180.
He was healing for a hundred thousand health every single time he clicked the attack button.
"I’m completely unkillable," Levi said, spinning the scythe like a propeller.
He went absolutely wild. He didn’t even care about dodging anymore. With his 1,636 Speed, he was landing four basic attacks a second. He was literally deleting a million health points off the golem every single second.
[-250,000] [-250,000] [-250,000]
The Aether-Golem desperately tried to smash him, landing two more massive 22,000-damage hits, but Levi’s Lifesteal erased the damage the exact millisecond he took it. His health bar just vibrated rapidly at 115,180.
"Hollow’s Guillotine!" Levi shouted.
He dumped 100 Mana. The skill counted as a weapon attack, meaning it also triggered the True Damage passive. The massive dark-gold cone ripped upward, smashing into the golem’s chest.
[-250,000 True Damage]
The golem’s health bar plummeted.
4 million. 3 million. 1 million.
It took less than five seconds of combat to drop the massive, Level 80 Elite down to its execution threshold.
The health bar hit exactly 990,000 HP. It was below the 20% mark.
Levi didn’t even swing again. He took a step back, letting the massive stone fists crash into the dirt in front of him.
"Soul Harvest."
Levi spent 50 Mana. The pitch-black spectral guillotine blade materialized out of the dusty air. It dropped flawlessly, completely ignoring the 15,000 Defense and the 90% suppression wall.
The spectral scythe cleanly decapitated the thirty-foot-tall golem.
The Aether-Golem froze, the blue energy binding its rocks together violently fizzling out. The massive boulders collapsed into a pile of rubble before shattering entirely into glowing blue polygons.
[Target Executed. Movement skill cooldowns reset.]
Levi rested the Diamond scythe on his shoulder and looked up at the rim of the crater. Isolde was standing there, her staff lowered. She hadn’t fired a single Anomaly blast. She hadn’t needed to.
"Target eliminated," Isolde stated, her voice broadcasting clearly. "Time to kill was four point eight seconds. Your True Damage output is scaling beyond the server’s intended defensive parameters."
"Yeah, the developers definitely didn’t plan for a Level 62 player getting their hands on this," Levi smirked, walking over to vacuum up the massive pile of high-tier loot the golem dropped.
A dense, thick crimson aura ripped out of the rubble and slammed into his chest.
[Supreme Harvester triggered.]
[Aether-Golem’s primary stat is VIT (5,000).]
[You have plundered 3% of its core stat.]
[Gained +150 VIT permanently!]
Levi felt his health pool expand again as the raw Vitality injected into his stats. He didn’t even flinch. He was getting used to the constant influx of power.
The XP dropped a second later.
[System Notification: Slain Level 80 Elite Aether-Golem. Gained 80,000,000 XP.]
The 80 million XP hit his progression bar, pushing him to 80,000,000 out of the 260,000,000 needed for Level 63. He didn’t level up, but he didn’t care. The grind was basically over. He didn’t need levels to deal damage anymore. The Diamond scythe had completely equalized the playing field.
Levi walked up the rocky incline, rejoining Isolde at the top of the crater.
"Alright," Levi said, looking out over the dusty, barren floating island. There were dozens more Aether-Golems lumbering around in the distance. "The weapon works perfectly. We have seven days before the Aether Descent event drops these islands onto the real world. Let’s spend that time getting as fat on stats as we possibly can."
Isolde raised her wooden staff, her gray eyes locking onto the nearest pack of golems.
"Acquiring targets," Isolde said.
Levi grinned and gripped the Scythe of the Shattered Heavens. It was time to break the game.
The massive digital clock hovering in the upper right corner of Levi’s UI finally ticked down to all zeros.
00:00:00.
Levi stood on the observation balcony of his Keep, leaning casually against the stone railing. Beside him, Isolde held her wooden staff, her untextured gray cloak completely still in the high-altitude breeze.
The moment the timer expired, the sky broke.
The pristine, endless blue expanse of the Aether Skies violently shifted. It didn’t just turn dark; it bled. A thick, aggressive crimson color washed over the clouds, turning the entire atmosphere into a sprawling, apocalyptic sunset.
A blaring alarm klaxon echoed across the server. It was so loud the stone railing under Levi’s hands literally vibrated.
A massive, blood-red system warning flashed across the center of his vision.
[System Event Triggered: The Aether Descent.]
[The structural integrity of the Aether Skies has failed.]
[All unclaimed floating islands will now fall to the surface.]
"Here it comes," Levi muttered.
Across the sprawling archipelago of the Aether Skies, the massive blue Aether currents that held the islands aloft suddenly flickered and died. The thick, rusted iron chains connecting the smaller landmasses violently snapped, the links exploding into showers of sparks.
Gravity took over.
Massive, million-ton chunks of earth, stone, and glowing crystals began to slowly tilt downward. They ripped through the clouds, accelerating as they plummeted toward the unseen surface miles below.
Levi didn’t just watch the game. He swiped his left hand through the air, opening a built-in browser window on his HUD. He pulled up the real-world news feeds.
The timeline was absolute chaos.
Videos auto-played on his screen. A massive 8.5 magnitude earthquake had just ripped through the center of Tokyo, collapsing highways. In Los Angeles, the ground cracked open, swallowing entire city blocks in seconds. Panic gripped the globe. The news anchors were screaming about unprecedented tectonic shifts happening simultaneously across every major fault line on Earth.
"The impact," Isolde stated quietly, looking at the floating browser window. Her gray eyes processed the streaming data. "The game engine is no longer just overlapping with real-world topography. The kinetic force of these descending islands is physically registering on Earth’s geological plates. The reality-merge is accelerating."
"They’re just dropping rocks on us," Levi scowled, closing the browser window with a violent swipe. "The Pantheon isn’t even trying to invade properly yet. They’re just trying to crack the planet open to soften us up."
He looked out across the crimson sky.
His own floating island, The Apex Harvester, was perfectly stable. Because he had formally claimed the territory core with his Domain Edict, the island’s elevation parameters were locked. But not everyone was so lucky.
Miles away, struggling against the gravitational pull of a massive, descending Level 90 island, was the remnant fleet of the Mortal Coalition.
The mega-guilds had gotten greedy. They hadn’t just claimed small, safe islands to hide on. They had tried to anchor their flying galleons to the absolute largest, resource-heavy World-Boss islands in the zone. Because they hadn’t actually defeated the bosses to claim the cores, the system registered the islands as "unclaimed."
Levi watched Ovidia’s massive gold-and-white flagship desperately burn its blue Aether-engines. The dreadnought was tethered to a falling island by thick mooring lines.
"Cut the lines!" Levi could faintly hear the panicked screams of the players drifting across the open sky.
The flagship’s engines whined, spitting dark smoke. But it was too late. The sheer mass of the falling island dragged the entire dreadnought down with it. The massive ship tilted vertically, snapping its masts. Dozens of Level 65 players tumbled off the deck, falling screaming into the clouds.
"Their greed overrode their logic," Isolde observed, watching the flagship disappear into the blood-red clouds below. "They attempted to secure endgame resources without fulfilling the system’s ownership requirements."
"Let them fall," Levi said coldly, turning away from the railing. "We have bigger things to worry about."
He didn’t care about Ovidia or the mega-guilds. They had allied with the Pantheon to save themselves. They deserved whatever they got. Levi’s focus was entirely on the massive piece of rock that Ovidia’s ship had been tethered to.
It was the largest descending island in the sector. And according to his map, it housed a Level 85 World Boss.
"We need that boss’s core," Levi said. "If the Pantheon is trying to break the real world, we’re going to use their own monsters to scale up and stop them."
He swiped his hand and pulled out his mount token. He tossed it onto the white stone pathway of his courtyard.
The Behemoth of the Hollow materialized with a heavy, metallic roar.
Levi vaulted onto the saddle, and Isolde seamlessly hopped up behind him, wrapping her arms securely around his Obsidian Carapace armor.
"Are you ready for a drop?" Levi asked, gripping the leather reins.
"My code is anchored to yours," Isolde replied smoothly. "Gravity is a localized variable."
Levi grinned. He spurred the massive, armored beast forward. The Behemoth exploded into a dead sprint, crossing the courtyard and blowing right past the automated Platinum-tier Aether Cannons defending the walls.
The mount didn’t slow down at the edge of the island. It galloped straight off the cliff.
They plummeted into the empty, blood-red sky.