Chapter 67: A Glimpse of Rare Fortune
Just when everyone thought Ryan and his team were finished, they held their ground through the brutal onslaught of two Guardians—and managed to bring down Isdal’s true form. Against all odds, they had done it. The Guardian was dead.
For a few stunned seconds, the crowd watching from afar was silent. Then the chat channels exploded into chaos. Questions, speculations, wild guesses. But Ryan and his team were already gone. They’d disabled their real-time IDs, slipped away through a few quick turns, and vanished into the terrain.
No one knew who had landed the killing blow—or even who the mysterious team was that had appeared just after the Alliance and Orc factions had exhausted each other.
But one thing was clear: they weren’t part of any guild.
After all, a guild would never hide its identity after taking down a Guardian. Moments like that were rare—prestige and bragging rights for years.
Still, players speculated. The most popular theory was that the Paladin had to be Featherlight—his name was frequently tied to Glorious Achievements—and that the female warrior beside him was Moonlight Beauty, who had recently gained fame fighting alongside him.
The identities of the other two remained a mystery, but those two names stuck. And that, later, would make Ryan sigh. Fame, he realized, had its downsides.
To the onlookers, the fight had looked clean, efficient—almost effortless. But from Ryan’s perspective, it had been anything but. There were moments during the battle where they had been only seconds from a full team wipe.
Even in its "normal" form, the Guardian was brutal.
Its Group Poison Arrow didn’t just hit hard—it delivered a burst of 200 damage on impact, then kept ticking for another 30-plus points of nature damage every three seconds. The cooldown was short, maybe twenty seconds at most—and it was relentless.
Riverbank’s mana bar had become a rapidly draining resource. Sustained healing was essential, but expensive. Worse, every five seconds or so, the Guardian unleashed a nature-based spell attack that cut through Ryan’s armor like it wasn’t even there. Each hit landed for a solid 300 damage—no mitigation, no resistance.
There was also Corrosive Poison, a passive aura that kicked in whenever players entered its proximity. It drained 4 points from both stamina and strength across the team—slowly, steadily weakening them.