Chapter 61: An S-Rank Secret Realm

Julian Vale didn’t linger after the strike landed.

He caught Ashley’s slumping weight before it hit the floor, slung her over one shoulder without a sound, and was through the window and gone into the dark before her monitor had even finished dimming.

The whole extraction ran clean no wasted movement, no noise, nothing left behind to suggest anyone had been there at all.

She surfaced sometime later to a sharp sting across her cheek, vision swimming as the room resolved around her windowless, sparse, and cold.

Her wrists were bound. A man in an expensive suit sat across from her, patting his palm idly like he’d just finished slapping her awake himself.

Panic arrived a half-second behind the confusion.

"Where where am I? Who are you?" Her voice cracked, thin with fear. "Why would you take me?!"

Damian Sterling studied her without warmth, without wasting a single unnecessary word. He set a phone and a small card in front of her a time, a location, nothing else and spoke, flat and final.

"You have five minutes to arrange a meeting with Kael Mercer at that address."

"Do this properly, and none of this needs to go any further."

"Don’t, and you can imagine the rest yourself."

The threat landed exactly the way he’d intended. Fear won out over pride fast.

"Fine fine, I’ll message him right now." Her hands shook as she reached for the phone. "He’s still completely wrapped around my finger.

One word from me and he’ll come running, I promise you."She pulled up the chat thread and typed fast.

Why haven’t you answered me in two days? Where are you?

The message never sent. A blunt red warning flared across the screen instead.

"This contact has friend verification enabled. You are not yet connected. Send a request first the recipient must accept before messages can be exchanged."

He blocked me.

She stared at the notification like it had personally betrayed her, then snatched for the phone’s dial pad instead, jabbing at his number with mounting desperation. ℴ

Same result. Blocked there too.

Something hot and furious rose in her throat. That absolute bastard.

We argue for two days and instead of coming crawling back like he always does, he blocks me?

She never got the chance to voice any of it.

A shadow fell over her, and she looked up into Sterling’s expression, gone cold and thin with irritation.

"So you really did break up." He plucked the phone from her hands without ceremony, mouth twisting in distaste. "Wasted my time on a dead lead."

One of the men flanking him spoke low. "She’s no use to us now, boss. What do we do with her?"

Ashley went white. "Please please, don’t. He’ll come around, he always does. Give him two more days and I’ll have him exactly where you want him."

"Two days isn’t on the table." Sterling’s patience had already run out. "We’ll do this a different way."

He nodded to his men. "Hold her still."

Two of them stepped in and pinned her against the sofa before she could react, her struggling doing nothing against grips that had clearly done this kind of work before.

"What what are you going to do to me?" Her voice shook badly now.

"Relax. Nobody’s laying a hand on you beyond this." Sterling crouched to her eye level, almost gentle about it, which somehow made it worse.

"We’re just taking a few photographs. Something convincing enough to get his attention."

"For your sake, you’d better hope you actually mean something to him. Because if this doesn’t work" he let the sentence hang there, unfinished, and far more effective for it.

What followed was ugly in exactly the way fear photographs always are Ashley bound, visibly terrified, a blade held just visibly enough in frame to make the threat unmistakable, nothing more theatrical than that required.

Sterling reviewed the results with the detachment of a man checking a spreadsheet, selected the two that made the point most clearly, and attached a short, cold message before sending the whole thing off by email and text both.

Kael’s number had gone dark days ago. Old channels like these were the only ones still guaranteed to land.

In the game, Kael was deep into a grinding session with his companions, entirely unaware any of this was happening.

A chime sounded a friend message coming through.

TidalBlade: Congratulations on the guild! First on the server. Take care of us, would you?

Kael’s mouth twitched.

He answered without much thought behind it. "Sure. There’ll be room for cooperation down the line."

TidalBlade: It’s been up a while now why no recruitment drive? Every serious solo player on the server’s just sitting there waiting for an invite to the Ascendant Concord.

Kael: Not planning on hiring right now.

"Wait you’re not recruiting AT ALL?" A voice call cut in a second later, Alexis’s breathing quick, clearly agitated.

"Then what was even the point of founding it? Just the achievement reward?"

She didn’t wait for an answer.

"Boss, hear me out. If managing a guild’s more hassle than it’s worth to you sell it. Transfer the whole thing over to me. Name any price."

The offer wasn’t small talk. Ascendant Concord held first pick of every unaffiliated top-tier player left on the server.

Land it under Evertide Studios’ banner, and her organization would vault straight to the top of the food chain overnight.

The temptation in her own voice was obvious, and she clearly hated how obvious it was.

Kael shook his head, unmoved.

"Not for sale."

"...Fine." She deflated audibly, more wounded than she probably meant to sound.

Watching someone sit on that kind of leverage and simply decline to use it felt, to her, like watching real potential go to waste the first genuine flicker of envy she could remember feeling in longer than she wanted to admit.

It was his call, though. Not hers to argue.

She took a breath, reset, and got to the actual reason she’d called.

"Different topic, then. I just cleared a mission that dropped an S-rank secret realm map. Recommended party size is five." A hopeful edge crept back into her voice. "Interested in running it together?"

"Recommended party composition: 5 players."

Kael turned the offer over for a moment, weighing it against everything else currently sitting on his plate.

An S-rank map wasn’t something that came along often, and five-player recommended usually meant the kind of encounter design that punished anyone trying to solo it exactly the sort of challenge that tended to hide the best rewards behind the steepest entry cost.

"Depends what’s actually in it," he said eventually. "Walk me through what you know."

"That’s the thing nobody knows yet.

The quest text was deliberately vague. Could be a dungeon, could be a raid tier boss, could be something we’ve never seen a name for."

Alexis’s voice had already brightened considerably at the fact that he hadn’t said no outright.

"That’s half the appeal, isn’t it? Nobody on the server’s cleared it. Whoever goes in first writes the record and you know as well as I do those records never stay quiet for long."