Chapter 78: Bound, Headquarters Secured

Boom.

A wave of condensed sword force tore down from above and split across Ebonreach’s walls, catching every Starborn warrior unlucky enough to stand in its path.

None of them survived contact.

Against warriors averaging a hair past level 40, Sir Gareth Thorne’s mere presence read as something closer to divine judgment than combat.

Even a casual, unremarkable strike from him carried enough weight to end most of them outright. To stand near his blade was to die.

To meet it directly wasn’t even a contest.

The rest of the guard matched that intensity in their own lanes.

Mages and archers poured sustained fire down from range in a steady, merciless rhythm, while the melee contingent, buoyed by wind-step and levitation enchantments laid down by their own casters, leapt the final stretch onto the walls.

They hit the battlements already moving, and they tore through the defenders at close range.

Agility and raw level advantage let them move through the chaos as though it had been built for them.

Beyond the ramparts, the arrow towers rose like a dense stone forest, white spires bristling with defensive firepower, every one of them stocked for a siege.

None of it got the chance to matter. Gareth’s blade swept through tower after tower in a continuous series of blazing arcs, each strike shredding the structures before they could fire a second volley.

Spires folded. Ballistae burst apart in their own housings. The forest came down in ruins.

Against power on this scale, resistance wasn’t even technically resistance. It was just motion that happened to end the same way every time.

A dozen minutes of sustained slaughter later, the Starborn broke. Thousands of bodies lay scattered across the battlements, and what remained of the defense fled inward, abandoning the walls entirely.

Behind them, the stairs ran dark and slick, and the gates stood open with no one left to close them.

Kael led the charge through the breach, the guard at his back, cutting a path through the city’s interior with the same brutal efficiency the walls had already demonstrated.

Hooves rang on white stone. Where the Starborn tried to hold the avenues, they were swept aside, and the streets opened before him one terrace at a time.

A few minutes later, they reached the heart of the city.It was a wide, open plaza, its stone surface etched edge to edge with intricate, glowing inscriptions and channel-work. The pattern branched and rejoined in thous

ands of spirals and arcs, too elaborate for the eye to follow, and the whole floor seemed to breathe.

At its center, hovering unsupported in open air, sat a massive gem. It was diamond-cut and several meters across, and it refracted light in every direction in a constant, shifting spectrum of color.

Violet slid into indigo, indigo into blue, and the whole range burned above the square like a cathedral window set alight.

Rivers of that same light spilled continuously from its surface and flowed outward along the carved grooves in the stone floor, feeding power through the entire city like blood through a circulatory system.

Kael recognized it on sight.

The Starstone.

Lore buried deep in Ascension’s background texts described it well enough.

It was a relic fallen from somewhere beyond the sky, its surface soaking in centuries of accumulated celestial energy until something inside it stirred awake.

The first Starborn had been born from that awakening.

Every generation since had built its cities in orbit around stones exactly like this one, the stone’s own dormant potential climbing in step with the size and strength of the population surrounding it.

For the Starborn, this wasn’t merely an artifact. It was origin, sustenance, and purpose folded into a single object, the one thing their entire existence couldn’t survive losing.

They knew it, too.

Every surviving member of the city had gathered in this exact square, standing between Kael’s column and the stone itself, faces set with grim, desperate resolve.

Spears trembled in their hands. The runes between their brows flickered, dim and uneven. They had come to stand before their god, and they understood exactly how the afternoon would end.

One word from Kael right now, and the guard at his back could finish the job completely, erasing the Starborn from Ebonreach entirely.

He had no interest in an empty city.

Everyone standing in that plaza represented real value, properly handled.

Wiping them out meant starting a garrison from scratch later, at real cost, for a result he could secure right now for free.

He pushed forward through the crowd, stopping within clear sight of the gathered population. Silver eyes tracked him as he went. He raised his voice to carry across the whole square.

"Hear me, all of you. This is the only offer you’ll get."

The crowd went still.

"Kneel. Accept me as your rightful lord, and I guarantee your safety going forward."

A breath passed, then another.

"Refuse, and my men finish what they started on the walls."

His eyes swept the crowd, cold and absolute. "This stone will simply birth a new people in your place."

"Submission, or extinction. Choose now."

The words landed like a stone through still water, panic rippling outward through the gathered crowd.

Nobody in that square doubted he meant it, or that he had the means to follow through. They had watched the wall fall.

Sir Gareth Thorne alone, at full strength, could have ended the Starborn as a people inside the hour. The threat wasn’t posturing. It was simple, uncomfortable arithmetic.

Fear spread fast, desperate murmured conversation rippling from cluster to cluster. Silver heads turned toward one another, searching for a face that would tell them it was a bluff.

None of them found one. In the end, faced with a straight choice between pride and survival, survival won out, as it almost always did once the alternative became concrete enough to actually picture.

More than three thousand Starborn, led forward by a handful of their most respected elders, laid down what weapons remained to them and knelt as one, heads bowed in surrender.

Steel rang on marble in a long, ragged clatter, and then the square fell silent.

Kael surveyed the kneeling crowd with quiet satisfaction, then pulled up the guild management interface without delay.

Binding Ebonreach to the Ascendant Concord required two conditions under Ascension’s rules.

First, every hostile force within the territory had to be eliminated or neutralized, with no standing resistance left to contest the claim.

Second, the territory’s core had to remain under uncontested control for a full hour before the system would finalize the bond.

The surrender in the square satisfied the first condition outright. Total submission counted the same as total elimination, as far as the system cared.

The second simply meant waiting.

Kael planted himself beneath the Starstone and let the clock run. Seven colors washed over his face.

A loading bar crept across the edge of his vision, empty and patient, and he stood through the full hour it took to finally close.

The guard held a silent ring around him. The Starborn did not lift their heads. Overhead, the stone hummed, and its light crawled slowly across the floor.

Then the bar filled.

Ding.

"Notification: Territory successfully claimed. Level 4 territory [Ebonreach] is now bound as the headquarters of [the Ascendant Concord]."

"Finally."

Satisfaction broke openly across Kael’s face as the notification settled in.

This had been, in a different version of his life, the single most contested piece of real estate the entire server would ever produce, the kind of stronghold whole guilds bled themselves white fighting over, month after month, for the right to call it theirs.

This time, it belonged to him outright, uncontested, days into launch.

And it was a Level 4 territory from the very first claim, with no slow construction grind required to get there. Even by his own standards, that was an absurd head start.

He opened the full management panel, eager to see exactly what he’d just inherited.

[EBONREACH]

Level: 4

Buildings: Central Plaza, City Walls, Forging Workshop, Starwell, Arrow Towers...

Resources: Timber 1,316,439 | Stone 546,413 | Steel 315,297 | Grain 264,353...

Population: 3,471