Chapter 77: Tier Five

The panel was dense with numbers, and Kael read every line of it.

He went building by building, then structure by structure, down through the long columns of data that described the bones of Ebonreach.

He studied what each hall did, what each workshop produced, and what each wall could take before it failed.

He read the stockpile figures and the population tally. He read the way a general reads a map the night before a campaign, committing every road to memory.

When he reached the bottom, he scrolled back to the top and stopped at a single line.

Level: 4.

Beneath it, the interface offered a short description of what the number meant. A level Four territory could draw on the Starstone’s power to keep an entire city aloft, and that was where the stone’s gift ended.

But if the city grew to level Five, the stone would wake further.

Higher structures would unlock, and the Starstone would spin out a shimmering dome of light over the rooftops, a veil that shielded the city from attack and hid it from sight.

The whole of Ebonreach would simply vanish.

Kael’s eyes lingered on that sentence.

That’s the one.

Nobody who knew the Ascension endgame would have called it the most glamorous feature of a level Five city.

It was not the most spectacular, and it was not the most profitable. But it was the only reason he had driven himself so hard to claim this fortress in the first place.

Everything he owned in the real world depended on it.

The gold he’d earned could be pulled out of the game and made solid, but the sum he held was nowhere near enough to withdraw a whole fortress.

A few buildings, perhaps, and a handful of garrison troops. That would be plenty to break up a raid by thirty players, or even a mob of thousands. It would not stop a state.

He had spent three nights turning the problem over, and the answer was always the same. If someone with an official budget decided to locate him and fire a long-range missile at the coordinates, nothing he had would survive it.

Ebonreach could be level Six or level Seven and it would not matter. He wouldn’t walk away from that either.

The odds were absurdly low. He knew that. One in ten thousand, maybe fewer.But Kael had died once already, and he had no intention of making the same mistake twice.

He would not gamble with a one-in-ten-thousand chance, not with his life on the other side of it.

A veil over the city would put those odds at zero. Hidden in the folds of the sky, Ebonreach would be invisible to every satellite on Earth.

The trouble was the price.

The distance between level Four and level Five was a chasm. The upgrade swallowed resources by the hundreds of thousands, and the stockpile in front of him wasn’t close.

The slow way was the usual way: seize mines and lumber camps, hold them, wait for the harvest to trickle in. A guild with patience and good logistics could manage it in ten days to two weeks.

Kael didn’t have two weeks.

He needed a faster road, and he already knew where it was.

That was the one real advantage of coming back from the dead. He remembered every high-value resource site in the whole northern realm of Northvale.

He remembered the camps where the gold-rich tribes lived and which valleys the strongest wild races called home.

He knew the unclaimed strongholds, the ones held by goblin clans and stone giants and nest-mothers, waiting for someone with an army to knock on their doors.

None of them were worth a tenth of Ebonreach. But each was a treasure chest with a lock that hadn’t been tested yet.

Crack the lock, hold the walls for a few days, and a rival guild would pay a fortune to buy the keys.

Easy money, with no one else in the game even aware it existed.

Better still, he no longer needed the Royal Guard.

He had an army of his own now, three thousand Starborn strong.

He found Gareth Thorne at the edge of the plaza, wiping a thin film of dust from his sword with a cloth.

The old knight looked up as Kael approached, his face as unreadable as ever.

Kael held out a heavy leather pouch.

"A few thousand in gold," he said. "Split it among the men. Buy them something decent to drink when you ride home. They’ve earned it."

Gareth weighed the pouch in his palm. Something almost like a smile cracked the stone of his face.

Several thousand coins sounded modest to Kael, who had just taken a fortress. But the Guard were soldiers.

Divided between a hundred men, each share would run to dozens of coins, a solid half month of an ordinary guardsman’s pay.

And a commander who paid generously after a hard day earned something money couldn’t buy.

"Captain," Gareth said, "you are too generous."

"You earned it."

"Then I’ll say it once, and plainly." The knight tucked the pouch into his belt and met Kael’s eyes. "If you ever need us, send word.

This Guard will ride through fire for you. And through worse than fire, if it comes to that."

Kael laughed, and meant it.

"That’s enough for me."

They traded a few easy words more, and then the Guard formed up, mounted, and rode out through the broken gates in tight columns.

Kael watched the last horse disappear over the ridge. Then he turned and walked back into the city.

The Starborn were waiting in the plaza. Thousands of them, silver-eyed and silent, standing in disciplined rows beneath the Starstone’s drifting light. They had not been told to wait. They had simply done it.

"Ten minutes," Kael said, and his voice carried across the square. "From your ranks, choose two thousand of your strongest. They ride with me."

A low ripple of murmured acknowledgment ran through the crowd.

"The rest stay here. Repair the walls. Clear the dead. Keep this city standing until I return."

Then he turned and walked into the great hall at the edge of the plaza, a tower of white stone that had belonged to the city’s old governor.

He climbed the stairs, sat down at the long council table, and logged out.

The world came back in layers.

First the cold, then the rough canvas against his shoulder, then the smell of damp earth and old pine.

He opened his eyes in the dark of a tent on a hillside, and for a moment he lay perfectly still, listening.

Wind in the branches. A distant owl. Nothing else.He reached for his phone, opened the withdrawal panel, and started working through the figures.

The number at the bottom made him exhale through his teeth.

To pull Ebonreach whole into the physical world, with stone, spire and walls, would cost thirty million gold. That was just the buildings.

The three thousand Starborn who lived there would cost extra, and the system did not pretend otherwise. It was designed that way.

Even deep into the endgame, only a handful of the strongest guilds ever gathered enough capital to materialize their headquarters.

Everyone else lived and died inside the game. Their coin vanished into repairs and renewals long before they could save anything worth withdrawing.

Kael had a little over six million.

Not even close.

And even if he could afford it, there was the other problem.

A floating city dropped into the real world without a veil would be the most visible object in the sky. Any satellite on the planet would spot it within the hour.

He sat on the edge of his cot and stared at the canvas wall.

There had been a warning, not long ago, from someone in a position to know. Kael hadn’t dismissed it.

In his first life, he’d never heard of any government moving against the players who crossed over, but that proved nothing

. If it had happened, the whole thing would have been buried quickly and thoroughly. Silence wasn’t the same as safety.

Take precautions.

His eyes dropped to the phone in his hand.

An idea formed, cold and quick.

He opened the withdrawal panel again and chose ten Starborn. Level forty each, summoned bodily into the real world at two hundred thousand gold apiece. It was an obscene price for a night’s work. He paid it without hesitating.

Ten figures shimmered into being in the dark of the tent, tall and silver-eyed and utterly still.

He gave his orders in a murmur. Three warriors would stay in the tent. They would lie quietly on the cot, under the blankets, and wait.

Two archers and five assassins would melt into the woods in a loose ring, and they would not make a sound.

Then Kael slipped out of the tent himself.

He crossed the slope in the dark, bent low, and climbed a second hilltop several hundred meters away.

The forest closed around him. He found a hollow beneath a fallen tree, settled in among the roots, and looked back across the valley at the tent where he had been sleeping, pale and small in the moonlight.

A trap, baited with the only thing he could not afford to lose.

Let’s see if anything bites.

He pulled a ration out of his game inventory, chewed through it without tasting it, and washed it down with a mouthful of water.

He hoped, honestly, that he was only being paranoid.

He very rarely was.

Then he closed his eyes, and the world dissolved around him.