Chapter 66: Just a Routine Clear

"That’s that’s way too many!"

The Hollowgale horde kept surging forward, a hundred-strong wall of grinding stone, and Alexis felt her palms go damp despite every instinct telling her to hold her ground.

A single Hollowgale Golem already ran stats well above anything their party had faced before tonight.

Without Kael in the mix, the four of them pulling three or four at once was already pushing the edge of what they could safely manage overextend past that, and the math turned ugly fast.

A hundred of them, bearing down all at once, should have been a wipe before the fight even properly started.

Can we actually survive this?

Did we come all this way just to get wiped on the first real pull?

She’d cleared plenty of instances before tonight, led parties through fights that genuinely tested her team’s coordination.

None of them had prepared her for staring down a number this large with nothing between her and it but whatever Kael decided to do next.

Kael, for his part, looked entirely unbothered. He raised one hand and triggered a skill without a flicker of urgency.

Spectral Aspect.

Light split, and a translucent, crimson-toned duplicate of Wraithlord bloomed into existence beside the original.

Both raised their right hands together and called out in the same breath, voices overlapping into one.

The canyon floor cracked open in sixteen places at once.

Gaunt, hollow-eyed figures in tattered robes clawed their way up through the fractures, flames guttering behind empty sockets, bone staves already rising to meet the incoming horde.

Void Leviathan answered next, voice dropping into a guttural roar as a wide circular zone lit up beneath the charging front line.

Voidquake.

Jagged bone spikes erupted through the stone floor in a rolling wave, catching dozens of golems mid-stride and launching them skyward in a chaotic tangle of limbs and rubble.

Before the first wave had even finished falling, Void Leviathan’s jaw split wide again, and a second attack rolled out in a distorting, fan-shaped wall of sound catching another cluster of golems full in its path, health bars crumpling under the impact.

On either flank, the two Wraithlords spurred their skeletal mounts straight into the thinning crowd, spears weaving through golem after golem in clean, economical arcs every thrust landing exactly where it needed to, every motion carrying the unhurried confidence of something moving through empty air rather than a hundred-strong horde.

Overhead, Thunder Roc carved slow circles above the chaos, wings crackling, pouring down bolt after bolt of concentrated lightning into whatever remained standing.

No restraint to any of it just steady, relentless devastation raining down from a height nothing below could reach.

It wasn’t chaos, either that was the part that struck Alexis hardest, once she found enough composure to actually watch instead of just brace.

Every companion worked its own lane without a wasted motion, without a single overlapping target, like the whole engagement had been choreographed down to the second rather than improvised on the spot.

She’d run raids with full guild rosters that couldn’t manage coordination half this clean.

Under that combined weight, the horde didn’t just thin. It collapsed.

A hundred-plus golems, reduced to scattered wreckage inside of a minute, with barely a dozen stragglers limping close enough to matter and those, already on a sliver of health, folded instantly under a final volley from the sixteen summoned casters.

Alexis and the rest of her party simply stood there, frozen, staring at a battlefield that had been a genuine existential threat ninety seconds earlier and was now just debris.

That’s not strong. That’s a different category entirely.

Farshot broke the silence first, swallowing hard, voice coming out somewhere between disbelief and reverence.

"Over a hundred level-32 elites. Wiped. In under a minute." He shook his head slowly. "I didn’t even get a shot off."

"That’s the boss for you," he added, something close to awe bleeding into his tone. "That kind of output shouldn’t be legal."

The rest of the party murmured agreement, every face turned toward Kael like he’d just rewritten the rules of what a solo player could reasonably accomplish.

They’d known, going in, that his companions ran strong. Knowing it in the abstract and watching it happen in real time turned out to be two very different experiences entirely.

Is this just... a normal grinding session for him?No wonder his level climbs like it’s on rails. Nobody’s catching that pace. Nobody.

A heavy, complicated silence settled over the group equal parts awe and the quiet, creeping realization of just how far out of their depth they currently stood.

Somewhere underneath the awe, a less comfortable thought was taking root in more than one of them

every server-first he’d claimed, every record that had seemed almost unbelievable from a distance, suddenly made a great deal more sense standing this close to the source.

Frostbloom broke it, suddenly pointing toward the valley floor, voice sharp with excitement.

"Wait look at all of that!"

Heads snapped toward where she was pointing, and every one of them went wide-eyed in the same instant.

Across the churned remains of the battlefield, a hundred golem corpses lay scattered amid a thick carpet of silver and copper, the dull gleam of coin broken up by scattered pieces of gear bright enough to catch the eye from a distance.

The fresh shock knocked the party right back out of its stunned silence.

"Wait, seriously? A hundred elites and this is the drop?"

"Normal odds, you’d expect a piece of gear off maybe every other kill. This looks like almost every single one hit."

"At this rate the whole instance is basically a personal ATM."

"We are going to walk out of here rich."

"I take back every complaint I ever had about this run’s entry cost."

Alexis let the chatter wash over her without fully joining in, her gaze lingering on Kael a moment longer than the loot deserved.

Every record he’d set so far had sounded impressive secondhand. Watching the raw mechanism behind it up close was an entirely different kind of impressive.

Frostbloom turned to Kael, eyes bright with open curiosity. "Okay, be honest are you secretly the game’s favorite test account or something? There’s no way this is normal."

Kael only smiled, hands sliding into his pockets, entirely unbothered by the attention.

"Basic positioning. Nothing worth losing your mind over."

Up on the canyon ridge above them, unnoticed by anyone still catching their breath over the loot, a figure in pale, undyed robes stood watching the aftermath in total stillness one hand resting lightly on the hilt of a sheathed blade, eyes tracking Kael’s every movement with an interest that had nothing to do with the gold scattered across the valley floor below.

Whoever they were, they hadn’t come for the loot at all. They’d come to watch, patient and unhurried, like someone confirming a rumor before deciding what to do about it.