Chapter 108: The Officials Come Asking

"It suits you." Kael gave a short nod, and he meant it.

"Thank you." Alexis smiled, plainly pleased. "If anything else this good ever turns up in your inventory, I’d better be first in line."

"Fair enough." Kael shrugged, easy and unhurried. "Hand me someone worth trusting, and they’ll always come out ahead for it."

"Then I’ll keep making myself useful." They traded a satisfied look, and the arrangement settled between them like a lock turning cleanly in its cylinder. It worked for both sides, and neither of them needed to say so.

They talked a while longer, until Alexis finally said her goodbyes and headed off to level up.

Once she had gone, Kael checked his inventory and remembered the haul from Ironclad’s two-thousand-strong wipeout. It was still sitting there, unprocessed, heavy with the weight of what it was.

A pile of high-tier gear that size stood out across the whole server. Beyond official channels, nothing on the market could realistically absorb all of it in one sitting.

His relationship with that particular channel was still uncomfortably fresh, though, and he had no wish to steer serious business its way just now.

He walked to Frostwatch’s auction house instead and listed the entire haul for open sale, item after item sliding into the ledger until the clerk stopped asking questions.

By the time he finished, the clock read close to eight in the evening. He logged off for dinner, came back for a short, unfocused grinding session afterward, and called it a night at ten.

It had been a good day, all told. Ironclad’s score was finally settled. Ashley had been dealt with in the same stroke. The Astral Spire stood cleared, and it had paid out so many rewards that it would take him time to sort through them.

He rewarded himself with an early night, and he slept better than he had in longer than he cared to admit.

The rest of the server showed no sign of slowing down while he rested.

The forums stayed lit well past midnight, with two topics dominating every front page at once.

The first was the Astral Spire itself. Everyone wanted to know what that map actually was, when clearing it could trigger a world announcement and hand out a confirmed Mythic reward.

The second was heavier. It was Kael’s solo demolition of Ironclad’s two thousand, with the footage still pinned at the top of every major board and the discussion spiraling by the hour. People had already started calling it the server’s first true massacre since launch.

Somewhere in the middle of that noise, a new thread began to catch fire.

Several of Ironclad’s ranking officers had gone dark since the fight, logged off without warning and never reconnected. By evening, the whispers had hardened into something closer to fact.

Multiple sources inside the guild, pressed by enough people from enough directions, had quietly admitted the truth.

Every one of those missing officers was dead. In the real world.

Disbelief hit first.

> Wait. Multiple core Ironclad officers, dead, on the same day? That can’t be real."

> Has to be a fake rumor. No way that’s confirmed.

> "Ironclad’s one of the top organizations on the server. Who has the resources to pull off something like that?"

>"Use your head. Who do you think?"

>"He wiped their entire guild at noon. Officers turn up dead hours later. You really need it spelled out?"

> Okay, when you put it that way.

>"This is genuinely terrifying. The day the merge hit, I knew it would get ugly eventually."

>"Murder in broad daylight and nobody can touch him. What’s the ceiling on what he’ll do next?"

>The authorities need to deal with this directly. If this goes unanswered, what’s stopping the next person?

>"You think punishing him fixes anything? The real world’s already a mess underneath the surface. This is just the first crack showing.

>Heard there are already operations quietly running people as forced gold farmers in hidden facilities. Those people deserve the harsh treatment a hundred times more than he does.

> "Even if the authorities wanted to move on him, do they actually have the ability to?"

The thread kept climbing, and the pressure on the official structure mounted whether anyone inside it wanted that or not.

In truth, the authorities had known before most of the server had even caught wind of it. An active search for Kael’s location had been running quietly since the moment the first body turned up.

It had come up empty.

Every thread they pulled traced back to a coordinated strike by assassin-type NPCs. The targets had been caught mid-grind, struck fast, and left without a trace.

They had combed every camera feed within range of the incidents and found nothing usable.

As for Kael himself, every traceable device had been stripped away days ago. The Lord’s Hall hung invisible above a city that had no idea it was there, cloaked so thoroughly that not even orbital surveillance could lock onto it.

Every available method had been exhausted, and there was nothing to show for any of them.

With force and surveillance both off the table, negotiation was the only avenue left.

Kael woke the next morning, ate breakfast, and logged in not long after. A message was already waiting the moment he came online.

> Marcus Webb: Would you have time to meet right now?

The corner of Kael’s mouth curved. He knew exactly what this was about. He sent back a meeting point without a word of comment.

A few minutes later, three figures arrived: Webb, Doyle, and Derek, every face set grim. The air in the square seemed to tighten when they crossed it.

Pleasantries stayed brief. Webb went straight to the point, his eyes locked on Kael.

"Yesterday’s business with Ironclad. That was you."

"It was." Kael’s answer came flat and unbothered. "Are you here to interrogate me on behalf of the official team?"

"Not exactly." Doyle’s brow creased. "But the fallout from this is substantial. Whatever history you have with Ironclad, a heads-up before something this size would have gone a long way."

"This puts us in a difficult position."

"Difficult." Kael’s mouth twisted into something cold. "You know I settled a score with a few of them yesterday."

"Did you know that the night before, their people nearly caught and killed me in my sleep?"

He let the silence hang for a beat, and his gaze swept slowly across all three of them.

"They pulled my exact coordinates off satellite tracking."