Chapter 100: The Final Guardian: The Hollow Emissary

Three blood-red claw marks tore through the air, radiating cold, deliberate killing intent, and they were on Kael before he had fully registered the attack.

Instinct took over. He brought the fused longsword up in a clean, practiced guard.

Clang.

All three strikes hit the blade at once. The impact drove him back two full steps, and the shock rang up his arm to the shoulder before the force finally bled out.

He took stock of the chamber the moment his footing settled.

The thing that had struck him was a beast well over twenty feet long, a massive, two-headed wolf with fur split evenly down the middle, one half deep blue and the other crimson.

Each head bared its fangs with equal malice, and four eyes tracked him with the patience of a predator that had never once lost.

[TWINMAW HOWLER]

It wasn’t the floor’s real guardian. It was only the opening act.

The true threat hovered further back, wrapped head to foot in a heavy purple cloak, its body drifting in place as though it had never fully committed to touching the ground.

[THE HOLLOW CALLER] (Legendary) Level 52

This was Kael’s first real encounter with a high-tier Summoner boss inside the Spire, and the readout alone told him exactly what kind of fight was coming.

The Caller raised a gem-studded staff and began to chant. A wide summoning circle bloomed open on the floor beneath it, ink-black and ringed with pale fire.

A heartbeat later, a massive four-headed serpent tore free of it, deep violet scales rippling, every head fixed on Kael with the same cold, hungry stare.He knew exactly how this kind of fight went wrong.

Leave a Summoner alone for too long, and it would sit comfortably behind an ever-thickening wall of conjured threats, pumping out reinforcements faster than anyone could cut them down.

Past a certain density, that wall stopped being survivable.Don’t give it the room.

He ordered the rest of his roster to pin the Twinmaw Howler and the fresh serpent in place.

Then he broke into a dead sprint of his own, blade raised, cutting straight for the Caller.

It felt him coming. The Caller swept its staff again, and two hulking, ochre-skinned giants tore themselves up out of the stone floor to block his path.

[STONEBORN TITAN]

They planted themselves like living walls, a matched pair, each one wider than a doorway.

They badly misjudged what they were standing in front of.

Warden’s Mandate carried an eighty percent transfer from any companion fused through it.

Layer the Beastlord passive’s flat fifty percent on top of that base, and the real figure landed at a full hundred and twenty percent of whatever the companion brought to the table.

The Spire’s own rules had capped the Bloodscale Reaver’s effective level at 40 for this challenge, the same as everything else in his roster.

Even suppressed, a

hundred-and-twenty-percent transfer off a Legendary-tier companion still stacked into something genuinely absurd.

Add the Beastsoul Relic’s permanent twenty percent, courtesy of the bound soul of the Scytheclaw Tyrant, plus every stat line running through his own Legendary-grade gear, and the total glowing on Kael’s panel rivaled a full level-50 Legendary boss outright.

He met the Titans’ challenge with a cold, thin smile.One sweep of the longsword. A deep, resonant roar rolled out with it, and crimson light condensed into a single overwhelming arc.

Wyrmrend Slash.

Both Titans’ health bars collapsed past the halfway mark in the same instant, leaving a sliver standing.

Two clean follow-up strikes finished the job, and the giants came apart into drifting motes of elemental light.

Kael didn’t slow down to watch them go. He tore straight through the dissipating glow and ate up the last stretch of distance toward the Caller.

The boss recoiled, scrambling backward through its own conjured fog.

It was too late. A biting wave of frost rolled in first, courtesy of Elara’s staff, and laid a thin rime across the Caller’s cloak that bled directly into its movement speed.

A volley of starlit arrows followed right behind it, Lyra’s aim finding its mark cleanly through the haze.

Kael closed the gap and brought his greatsword down in one decisive arc.

The Hollow Caller carried genuinely formidable stats of its own.

But it had the misfortune of facing a man who simply refused to let a summoner fight play out on its own terms.

Every conjured ally it threw up bought it a few seconds at best, never enough room to settle into its usual rhythm.

Every control attempt it made landed exactly as uselessly as the last. Kael’s immunity to anything below SS-rank held firm through every lockdown spell the Caller could muster.

No stun stuck. No root slowed his pursuit by so much as a step.He stayed on it without pause, blade relentless, until the fight stopped being a fight at all.

It took under ten minutes from start to finish, and the Hollow Caller joined the growing list of things that hadn’t survived meeting him.

Floor 103, cleared.

Every floor past that point ramped harder, the bosses scaling steadily tougher the higher the climb went.

But Kael had already lived through exactly this kind of escalation once, and the experience carried him clean.

His companions worked in such tight coordination that nothing managed to land a truly dangerous hit through the rest of the ascent.

Floor followed floor, and the tower’s pale light slid past the windows without ever changing.

A little over an hour later, the final transfer carried him to the top.

Floor 108.

The chamber was silent in a way the others hadn’t been. No wind, no dripping stone, no distant sound at all.

At its center waited the Spire’s last guardian, a cloaked figure wrapped head to toe in ash-gray fabric, a blackened skull pendant hanging at its chest, a dark crimson scythe held loosely in one hand.

The scythe’s edge seemed to hold something alive inside it. Wisps of black energy curled off the blade, and distorted faces surfaced and sank within the haze, each one locked in a silent, endless scream.

The figure hung suspended in the open air, utterly still, and the whole room pressed down under a weight that had nothing to do with physical presence.

Two points of cold, blood-red light burned from beneath the hood. They fixed on Kael the moment he crossed the threshold, and they did not blink.

[THE HOLLOW EMISSARY] (Epic) Level 55