Chapter 72: Legendary Bloodline The Void Colossus

[Grim Harvest] (Passive)

Every instance of damage dealt automatically triggers Blood Drain, converting 10% of the total into health for the user.

Kael’s eyes lit up the moment the full description resolved. He hadn’t expected this.

Lifesteal was one of the rarest, most coveted attributes any melee-focused build could ask for the kind of stat that quietly transformed survivability without costing a single point of offense.

Ten percent didn’t sound dramatic in isolation. What made it genuinely valuable was the delivery.

Fully passive, triggering off every single hit landed, turning raw output into a steady, self-sustaining stream of recovery rather than something that had to be activated and managed.

Wraithlord’s whole design leaned hard into glass-cannon territory brutal offense paired with a health pool and defense that lagged noticeably behind.

Up to now, keeping him alive through a serious fight had meant constant intervention, shields and heals cycled in almost continuously just to keep pace with incoming damage.

Grim Harvest changed that math permanently. The harder Wraithlord hit, the more he healed, converting his single greatest strength into coverage for his one real weakness.

Calling it an upgrade undersold it. This single passive did more for Wraithlord’s overall survivability than a straight offensive S-rank skill ever could have no longer a glass cannon that needed babysitting through every extended fight, but something that could stand and trade blows on its own merits.

Kael was still turning the thought over when a second notification caught up with him a trickle of leftover Evolution Points from the Hollowgale Tyrant kill, more than enough to finally push his running total past the hundred-thousand mark.

The threshold Void Leviathan had been sitting on for days.

He’d been eyeing that threshold for longer than he cared to admit, watching the counter creep up one monster at a time, patient in a way most players would never have managed with a resource this valuable sitting unspent.

The wait was over.

He opened the panel without hesitation and confirmed the upgrade.

A full hundred thousand points vanished from his total in an instant, and a wave of raw, transformative energy rolled through Void Leviathan’s frame.

Its deep purple hide hardened into something closer to armor plating, twisted bone spurs breaking through the new carapace in jagged, asymmetrical rows.

Its jaw stretched wider still, rows of teeth crowding an already monstrous bite, the whole silhouette settling into something that radiated raw, oppressive menace even at rest.

"Notification: 100,000 Evolution Points consumed. Gold-tier companion [Void Leviathan] has evolved into Legendary-tier [Void Colossus], awakening A-rank skill [Titanshift]."

[VOID COLOSSUS]

Bloodline Tier: Legendary

Constitution ★★★★★★★★★★★

Strength ★★★★★★★★★★

Agility ★★★★★★★

Spirit ★★★★★★★

Skills: Voidforged Aegis (A), Abyssal Hunger (A), Skyrend Barrage (A), Voidscream (A), Voidrupture (A), Titanshift (A)

Titanshift: Alter your own body size within a defined range. Shrinking grants bonus defense and agility; growing grants bonus strength and extends skill range.

Void Colossus had been Kael’s very first companion a creature he’d personally raised from an unremarkable Iron-tier nobody into the towering, Legendary-grade force standing in front of him now.

Its core identity had always run through the Devour chain, every kill permanently stacking its maximum health, the whole build leaning hard into size and raw endurance.

That same strength carried a built-in cost, though.

More health meant more mass, and more mass meant a frame that kept climbing past anything reasonable past ten meters tall by now, a purple mountain of muscle and bone that moved with all the grace its size implied.

Caves, corridors, anywhere built for something human-sized simply stopped being usable terrain the moment Void Colossus tried to follow him through it.

Titanshift solved that outright. Scale down for agility and survivability in tight quarters, scale up for raw offensive reach when the terrain allowed it a problem that had quietly nagged at Kael for weeks, resolved in a single awakened skill.

No more leaving his best companion stranded outside a dungeon entrance it simply couldn’t fit through.

Alexis had watched the entire evolution unfold in silence, and the finished result hit her harder than she expected jagged armor plating, a silhouette built for pure menace, power radiating off it even standing still.

"You" Her voice came out thin, disbelief bleeding through every word. "You can actually raise a companion’s bloodline rank?"

"Is that your own talent, or something built into the hidden class?"

Something in Kael’s expression cooled instantly. He turned a flat, level look on her. "That’s a question you don’t get to ask."

Her stomach dropped. Warden’s Mandate’s grip on her ran deep enough that even a look like that one landed with physical weight, a cold shiver running straight through her before she’d consciously registered why.

"I’m sorry I won’t repeat it, I swear, not to anyone." The apology came fast, genuine fear threading through it.

"Mm." Kael let it go without further comment.

Privately, he didn’t consider it much of a crisis either way. Class specifics, hidden talents, his real identity none of it would stay buried forever.

Sooner or later, enough scattered clues would add up for someone determined enough to piece it together. Alexis knowing a little early changed nothing, as long as it went no further for the next several days.

The instance chimed closed around them a moment later the Hollowgale Tyrant’s death having completed the map in full, the whole realm beginning its countdown to collapse.

A clean wash of blue light swept over both of them, and the canyon dissolved, depositing them back outside the instance entrance.

The rest of the party had been waiting, and the moment Kael and Alexis reappeared, all three closed in at once.

Both names had ticked up a level on the public rankings a few minutes earlier more than enough for Frostbloom, SilentDrifter, and Farshot to piece together exactly what that meant.

Frostbloom reached them first, eyes bright with open admiration. "You actually took down a berserk Legendary boss! That’s insane!"

Something about the warmth in that look, aimed squarely at Kael, needled at Alexis more than she expected it to.

She stepped in between them without quite deciding to, chin lifting. "Don’t go putting him on a pedestal. I was in that fight too, you know."

"Sure you were." Frostbloom’s eyes flicked between the two of them, something sharp and knowing flickering behind the teasing.

"You just seem a little extra invested in defending his honor all of a sudden. Anything you two want to share?"

Alexis’s face went instantly, furiously red. "Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Drop it."

SilentDrifter and Farshot exchanged a glance behind her back, wisely choosing to say nothing at all.

Kael, for his part, said even less content to let the moment pass without weighing in, already running the Void Colossus’s new stat sheet through his head and filing away every way the fresh evolution would change how he planned the next fight.

And the one after that, and however many more it took to find out exactly what this second life was actually going to become, one evolved bloodline at a time.