Chapter 80: Exclusive Reveal Unrivaled’s True Face

The new S-rank description alone was enough to put a grin on Kael’s face.

The summon count had doubled outright. Whatever line separated A-rank from S-rank, it clearly wasn’t a gentle one the gap played out less like an upgrade and more like stepping into an entirely different category of power.

Ten thousand points, well spent.

The cooldown had refreshed along with the rank, and Kael wasted no time ordering both Wraithlords to cast it again.

Light flared. The sixteen Bonecaster Mages trailing behind him doubled on the spot, thirty-two robed casters now funneling spellfire into the dwarven ranks at once.

Output doubled with them, the pace of the slaughter climbing into something close to overkill.

The Starborn column caught up moments later two thousand strong, finally arriving at Cinderhold’s gates.

With that weight added to an already lopsided fight, what remained of the dwarves’ organized resistance collapsed within minutes.

The survivors several thousand strong were driven back into one of the fortress’s largest underground halls and trapped there, surrounded on every side.

Kael didn’t order a massacre.

A territory’s real value rarely lived in the stone.

It lived in whatever people called that stone home and binding a territory to a guild carried the native population along with it, trainable into specialized garrison troops no ordinary recruit could match.

The dwarves’ combat stats ran well below the Starborn’s. What they offered instead was craft.

Master smiths, every one of them, the kind of specialized labor that turned raw ore into real equipment a genuinely rare commodity among the tameable races scattered across the map.

Kael already had a plan for them: hold Cinderhold a while, let word spread, then sell the whole package fortress, dwarves, and all to whichever guild bid highest once the market caught up to what he’d just claimed.

Outright slaughter would’ve torched that plan for nothing. Instead, a show of overwhelming force did the job just as well intimidation enough to force a clean, bloodless surrender.

He left four hundred Starborn behind to hold the fortress, a hundred more assigned specifically to oversee a thousand conscripted dwarf laborers, and set every accumulated resource in Cinderhold’s vaults moving toward Ebonreach.

With fifteen hundred Starborn still at his back, Kael pressed on toward the next target.

The two days that followed blurred into a single continuous campaign.

Kael covered nearly every corner of the map within a thousand miles of Frostwatch territory after territory falling the same way Cinderhold had, resources flowing steadily back toward Ebonreach with each conquest.

Seven or eight claims later, the stockpile finally cleared the threshold for a level 5 upgrade. Kael gave the order immediately, setting every available Starborn artisan to work.

Upgrades didn’t finish on command, though, however much he wanted them to. There was nothing left to do but wait out the build timer and keep himself occupied in the meantime.

Keeping occupied turned out to be the easy part. Grinding alongside three companions this strong meant his own level climbed in step with theirs all four of them crossing level 38 within days, the 40 mark now firmly in sight.

Two days of near-continuous farming had netted him well over a hundred thousand fresh Evolution Points.

With that kind of surplus sitting unused, Kael picked out the highest-potential skills on both Void Colossus and Thunder Roc and pushed them straight to S-rank.

Void Colossus’s upgrades hit hardest.

Dread Wail, already evolved once into the roaring A-rank Voidscream, climbed a full tier further into Hollowscream the raw damage climbing further still, now paired with a genuine silence effect, locking anything caught in the wave out of its own skills for a full two seconds. A control tool layered on top of an already brutal area attack.

Abyssal Hunger underwent something even stranger.

The damage formula itself changed shape entirely no longer a flat percentage of attack power, but a fresh two percent of Void Colossus’s own maximum health, dealt as true damage with every bite.

Endless Hunger, the new name read.

Two percent didn’t sound dramatic on its own. Then Kael checked the number it was actually scaling off of.

Void Colossus’s maximum health, stacked relentlessly through months of devoured prey, now sat north of 360,000.

Two percent of that translated to over seven thousand true damage, guaranteed, every single bite and that number would only keep climbing as the health pool underneath it kept growing.

No soft cap in sight, no diminishing returns written anywhere in the formula.

Functionally limitless, Kael thought, turning the number over with real satisfaction. The bigger it gets, the harder it hits. There’s no ceiling on this one at all.

Thunder Roc’s evolution told its own story. Its innate passive, originally a flat twenty percent boost to lightning-based skill damage, carried an active half as well a bloodline surge granting a full thirty percent to every attribute for two minutes once triggered.

Evolved, the whole package climbed into Stormcrown. Passive lightning amplification jumped to thirty percent.

The active surge climbed to fifty percent across every stat, extended out to a full three minutes of uptime.

The transformation reached further than the numbers, too.

The familiar blue crackling along Thunder Roc’s wings deepened into something richer a dense, molten gold current replacing the old current entirely, the whole silhouette somehow heavier and more regal for the change.

It circled overhead now looking less like a predator and more like something closer to a small, airborne storm front, raw output climbing with every pass it made over the battlefield below.

Deep in the grind, none of it registered to Kael as anything unusual.

He had no idea that, barely ten meters off his flank, something had gone invisible and was closing the distance with absolute precision.

The player’s gamertag read IntelDrop a professional streamer, currently live to an audience well past a hundred thousand concurrent viewers.

Close enough now that even breathing wrong risked blowing the approach, IntelDrop kept every word confined to stream overlay text instead.

"You all seeing this? That’s Unrivaled. Number one on the Ascendant Rankings."

"Been wearing that mask since day one of launch. Nobody and I mean nobody has ever confirmed what’s underneath it."

"Today, that changes. Scout’s about to show you exactly who’s been hiding under there."

"Gifts keep this stream running, people. Let’s get that reveal moving."

The chat exploded instantly, a flood of gifts and donations cascading across the screen, viewers practically begging for the payoff.

IntelDrop’s grin stretched wide behind the camera, pulse hammering with the kind of excitement only a genuine career-defining clip could generate.

He flipped the stream’s active view over to his own in-game perspective, locked his gaze on Kael’s back, and triggered the detection skill.

A faint crimson shimmer rippled across his vision.

The bronze mask dissolved from view entirely.

And in that exact instant, the face underneath it streamed live, unfiltered, to every single one of those hundred thousand watching viewers.