Chapter 65: S-Rank Secret Realm Hollowgale Canyon

"Ding You have entered the S-rank secret realm: Hollowgale Canyon. Monsters within this zone significantly exceed your current level. Proceed with caution."

Light dissolved around the party, and a long, narrow valley resolved in its place walls pressing close on either side, a cold, unnatural wind threading through the gap ahead with a sound that didn’t quite belong to ordinary weather.

It carried something underneath it, too faint to name outright but impossible to ignore a low, grinding note, almost like breathing, if stone could breathe.

As the only melee class in the group, Alexis took point without needing to be told, sword drawn, leading them single-file through the canyon’s choke point.

The others fell in behind her, Frostbloom shielded in the middle of the formation, everyone’s attention locked on the narrow walls pressing close around them.

The passage widened after a few dozen steps, the space opening into something closer to a proper chamber.

A boulder broke loose from the canyon wall without warning, crashing down and shattering on impact and from the wreckage, something hauled itself upright.

Two meters of jagged black stone, roughly humanoid, roaring low as it leveled a fist the size of a boulder and charged.

[HOLLOWGALE GOLEM] (Elite) Level 32

Farshot reacted fastest, bow already drawn, loosing an armor-piercing shot wreathed in a thin gold shimmer. The arrow struck with a sharp, metallic crack.

-107

Alexis’s expression flattened the instant that number resolved.

Farshot’s entire loadout had been commissioned at serious expense, stats optimized specifically for armor penetration and the best it had managed against this thing was barely over a hundred.

If that’s the best case, what does a normal hit even do? Scratch damage?

"This is worse than it looks." Farshot’s voice had gone tight. "Whatever’s driving this thing’s stats, it’s running at least twenty percent above anything we’ve seen at this level outside the instance."

Unease rippled through the rest of the party fast."We’re committed now," Alexis said, forcing steadiness into her voice.

"No backing out. I’ll hold aggro, Elle keeps me topped off, you two focus pure damage."

Kael watched the whole exchange with something between bemusement and mild exasperation.

It’s a single elite monster. Why is everyone bracing like this is a raid wipe in progress?

In his first life, instances graded this far above the standard curve had chewed through full raiding guilds on a regular basis, parties three times this size walking in confident and walking out considerably less so.

There was a version of tonight where that golem’s stat line genuinely mattered. This wasn’t that version.

He said nothing, simply raised a hand and summoned all three companions at once.

Wraithlord came through first mounted, spear raised, the skeletal charger beneath him already breaking into a dead run the instant its hooves cleared the portal light.

Cinder Charge.

The charger’s hooves lit with flame, closing ten meters of open ground in a blink, and the impact that followed sent hairline fractures spidering across the golem’s entire stone frame.

-987

A collective, strangled gasp went up from the rest of the party.

Farshot’s jaw actually dropped. His best possible shot, every point of gear optimized for exactly this kind of target, had barely cracked a hundred.

One casual charge from Kael’s companion had taken off nearly ten times that.

What kind of attack stat is that thing even running?

Before anyone recovered, Wraithlord’s spear came up again, driving forward in a single thrust that split into three overlapping lances of crimson light.

-1,021

-1,107

-1,092

Three consecutive four-digit hits landed inside of two seconds, and the golem’s health bar collapsed to a third of its total almost instantly.

Then the sky itself seemed to darken.

Void Leviathan dropped into the valley like a falling mountain, violet and immense, the impact of its landing rippling visibly through the canyon floor.

Its jaw split open, and a familiar word rolled out ahead of the strike.

Abyssal Hunger.It swallowed the golem whole in a single motion.

-2,352

Stone, cracks, momentum, and all gone, converted instantly into raw sustenance for something that had already eaten its way up two full bloodline tiers tonight.

Silence held the party for a long beat.

"That thing just... ate a level-32 elite. In one bite."

Alexis stared at the space where the golem had stood a moment earlier, something close to vertigo settling behind her eyes.

She’d already known, in the abstract, that Kael’s companions ran strong. Watching Farshot’s best shot get outclassed by a factor of twenty had recalibrated that knowledge into something closer to genuine alarm.

Void Leviathan’s sheer physical presence didn’t help the feeling any a wall of violet muscle and jagged bone, radiating a pressure that pulled every eye in the party upward without permission.

Before anyone fully processed what they’d just watched, a fresh cry split the air from above.

Thunder Roc swept overhead, wings crackling with restrained lightning, wingspan wide enough to throw a shadow across the whole party as it angled deeper into the canyon.

Its passage didn’t go unnoticed. All along both canyon walls, shapes that had looked like nothing more than outcroppings of rock shuddered awake, one after another dozens of them, then a full hundred, each one peeling itself free of the stone and dropping to the canyon floor with a chorus of grinding roars.

Up close, the sheer uniformity of them was its own kind of unsettling a hundred identical faces of jagged black stone, each one wearing the same low, grinding snarl, moving with the same lumbering, relentless gait.

No individual variation, no tactics to speak of beyond sheer numbers thrown at whatever stood in front of them.

That was exactly the kind of threat that had ended more than one overconfident party in Kael’s first life not cleverness, just an avalanche with enough mass behind it to bury anything that hesitated.

None of them carried anything resembling a ranged attack. Thunder Roc, circling freely overhead, sat entirely out of their reach.

Which left exactly one target for a hundred freshly woken golems to direct their fury toward the five figures standing exposed on the canyon floor below.

The valley filled with a rising wall of sound, stone grinding against stone as the entire awakened horde turned as one and began closing in.

Alexis’s grip tightened on her sword, every instinct screaming at the sheer number bearing down on them.

Beside her, Farshot had already gone pale, calculating correctly that a hundred golems hitting for triple digits apiece was not a problem their party had any business surviving unassisted.

Kael, for his part, looked almost bored by the arithmetic. A hundred golems. Three companions already warmed up.

He’d seen worse odds turn into a rounding error before the night was through.

"Hold formation," he said, voice carrying easy and unconcerned over the rising din. "This part’s not going to take long."

Nobody argued. Nobody had the breath to, with the ground itself starting to tremble under the weight of a hundred advancing golems and the narrow canyon walls offering no real room to retreat even if anyone had actually wanted to try.

There was only forward, and whatever Kael’s companions could carve out of it.