Chapter 71: A Brand-New Skill Grim Harvest

A final, furious roar tore loose from the Hollowgale Tyrant’s throat, and then it simply stopped.

Kael’s storm of strikes had finally burned through the last of its reserves.

The eerie, writhing wind around its body guttered out, scalding blood pouring freely from the wound in its chest, and the whole towering mass of it crashed to the canyon floor like a felled monument.

A wave of experience rolled off the corpse and washed over the whole party at once Kael and all three companions leveling up in the same golden flare of light.

A second wave followed close behind, this one made of coin and steel. Gold and gear crashed down in a glittering avalanche, piling up around the fallen Tyrant until the wreckage nearly buried half its own body.

Between the berserk phase’s two-hundred-percent drop bonus and the Ring of Infinite Fortune quietly rigging every roll underneath it, the haul sitting in front of them now was staggering even by Kael’s increasingly numb standards.

Somewhere behind him, the rest of the party had already gone quiet, staring at the pile the way most players stared at a number too large to fully process.

Nobody moved to touch any of it yet not while the boss’s corpse still lay smoking at the center of the wreckage, and not while the man who’d just soloed the back half of the fight hadn’t said a word about splitting it.

He let himself grin at the sight before tossing the crimson longsword skyward, releasing Warden’s Mandate with a flick of his wrist.

Clang.

Crimson light flared, and Alexis dropped back into her own body, the sword dissolving away into nothing.

She hit the ground on unsteady legs, a soft, involuntary sound escaping her before she could catch it.

Sweat clung to her skin, breath coming hard and fast, her whole frame trembling faintly with the aftershock of everything that fight had demanded of her. Standing upright at all seemed to be taking real effort.

Being wielded hadn’t felt like this. Something about the return to her own body had left her running on empty in a way she hadn’t braced for.

Kael’s eyebrow rose at the sight. "You good?"

Of course I’m not good. You used me like a weapon in a fight against a berserk Legendary boss what did you expect?

Pride wouldn’t let her say any of that out loud. She straightened herself by sheer will, forcing her voice level.

"...Fine. That barely even registered."

Stubborn woman. Kael’s gaze flicked briefly to the way her legs still refused to hold perfectly still, and he let it go without comment, declining to call out the obvious lie.

He crouched instead and got to work sorting through what the Tyrant had left behind, pushing aside slabs of broken carapace to get at the gear buried underneath.

Once the full count was in, eighteen separate pieces of gear sat waiting for inspection every one of them Legendary-grade.

No single piece quite matched the rarity of his own Beastsoul Relic the kind of item that only ever came from a milestone reward, never from ordinary combat, no matter how good the odds got.

That outcome tracked with everything Kael already understood about the game’s drop logic; items this far above a boss’s own level simply didn’t surface from regular kills, no matter how berserk, how lucky, or how generous the multiplier running underneath it all.

Even without that ceiling-tier exception, eighteen pieces of Legendary-grade gear off a single kill was an absurd number.

Posted publicly, a haul like this would reset the entire server’s equipment rankings overnight and send half the top guilds into a bidding war.

Three skill tomes sat among the pile as well Wyrmwind Strike and Galeshadow Cone, both B-rank, and Ruinous Gale, a full A-rank.

This early into the game, with class skill tomes still desperately scarce across the board, a haul like that alone could build an entire top-tier mage from the ground up.

Beneath the rest of the pile, two items in particular caught Kael’s eye immediately a pair of small, gleaming metal tokens.

Guild-founding tokens. A second pair, on top of the one he’d already claimed.

Tokens like these turned common eventually, once the server matured and guild formation stopped being a race.

Right now, days into launch, a single token still carried enough weight to build a lasting first-mover advantage for whoever claimed it recruiting rights to the server’s best unaffiliated talent, locked in before any other organization had the chance.

Put one up for public auction today, and it would ignite a bidding war serious enough to make headlines on its own.

Finding two of them bundled into a single kill bordered on absurd luck, even for a night already soaked in it.

Kael turned the second token over once in his palm, weighing it against everything else the night had already handed him, and decided almost immediately what he wanted to do with it.

Alexis’s eyes went wide the moment she spotted them, swallowing hard, a flicker of open longing crossing her face before she could smooth it over.

"...Master. Those tokens"

"Want one?" Kael glanced her way and tossed it into her arms without ceremony. "Here. You earned a real share of this kill."

"Thank you, LORD!"

She caught it against her chest, delight breaking across her face before she’d fully registered the word that had slipped out of her again, as easy and unthinking as if she’d been saying it her whole life.

Two further items sat beneath where the tokens had rested a dense, glittering Hollowgale Gem, useful for crafting or formation work, and a second stone that drew Kael’s attention far more sharply: a deep crimson gem pulsing faintly with trapped, ancient energy.

[BLOODWAKEN CORE]

Grade: Legendary

A gem formed from the condensed life-essence of a powerful creature, gathered over centuries beyond counting.

Used on a companion, it awakens a dormant fragment of their bloodline, unlocking a new A-rank skill.

The Hollowgale Gem, he set aside without a second thought sellable, but not worth his attention beyond that.

The Bloodwaken Core was a different matter entirely.His gaze went straight to Wraithlord.

No question which companion deserved it.

He pressed the gem into Wraithlord’s chest, and it dissolved on contact, a deep red glow spreading outward through the armor plating and sinking in without resistance.

"Notification: Bloodwaken Core (Legendary) successfully consumed. Your companion [Wraithlord] (Legendary) has awakened a new A-rank skill [Grim Harvest]."

Kael pulled up the skill’s description with open interest, already running through where a fresh A-rank tool might slot into the rotation he’d been building all night.

Whatever it turned out to do, one thing was already certain nothing dropped by a kill this generous was going to be disappointing, and a berserk Legendary boss going down this cleanly was exactly the kind of night that made every grind leading up to it feel worth the time, debts and threats and everything else waiting back in the real world notwithstanding, at least for the length of this one good night, deep inside an instance nobody else on the server even knew existed yet.