Chapter 99: Legendary Boss: The Bloodscale Reaver

The announcement rolled across the server three times before it finally faded, and in its wake the whole community erupted at once.

“Wait, am I reading that right? First Legendary kill, and it’s him again?”

“Isn’t there supposed to be a real gap between Gold-tier and Legendary bosses? Fifty’s the floor for Legendary, isn’t it?”

“He’s only level 40. How does a ten-level suppression not end that fight before it even starts?”

“People keep forgetting he’s a Beastlord. His own level isn’t the number that matters here.”

“Right, his companions could easily be sitting well above him by now.”

“And they’re not ordinary companions, either. Every single one of them reads like a boss in its own right.”

“Stack enough of those against one Legendary target, and the math stops looking so lopsided.”

“Is this just what being the server’s best actually looks like?”

“Honestly? I don’t think anyone alive right now is in the same conversation as him.”

The shock rippled outward fast, and it knocked a theory loose that plenty of players had been quietly nursing for days.

Most had assumed Kael’s hidden class had a strong opening and a soft middle. Dominant early, the thinking went, and doomed to flatten out as the rest of the field caught up.

Reality had other plans. Nothing about his class showed the slightest sign of slowing. If anything, the gap kept widening the deeper the game went.

While everyone else was still fighting to clear Level 40 content cleanly, he had already put a Legendary-tier boss in the ground.

A gap like that didn’t close. It only stretched, and every new milestone made the distance a little easier to see for anyone willing to look.

On the hundred-and-first floor of the Astral Spire, the echoes of the fight were still dying in the stone.

Kael knelt beside the fallen boss, the vast corpse cooling under the pale starlight that bled through the tower’s high windows. He laid a hand on the Beastsoul Relic at his throat and triggered Soul Binding.

A faint wisp of essence rose from the body, silver and thin as breath on a winter morning. It drifted upward, curled once in the air, and sank into the jade. The relic pulsed.

A permanent twenty percent bonus folded itself into its stats as the soul of a level-50 Legendary sealed inside.

Good.

Satisfied, he pulled up the skill book the system had dropped, eager to see what he’d been given.

[THRESHOLD SEAL]

Skill Grade: SS

Effect: Binds a seal of life and death within a companion. On death, the companion revives on the spot at 50% health after a two-second delay.

Mana Cost: 1,000 | Cooldown: 1 hour

Note: The seal takes 72 hours to re-form after each use.

Kael’s eyes lit up as he read it through.

Ascension’s balance rules normally made a companion’s death an expensive mistake.

A fallen companion recovered in the Rest Sanctum, certainly, but it came back carrying a thirty-minute weakness and couldn’t rejoin a fight until the timer ran out.

It was a deliberate limiter, built to stop Beastlords from treating their companions like disposable ammunition.

The Threshold Seal didn’t merely soften that limiter. It tore it out by the roots. Instant revival, full combat readiness, no downtime, no penalty.

An SS-grade skill, and for once, it lived up to every letter of the label.He learned it on the spot. The book dissolved in his hands and left a fresh icon glowing on his bar.

Light flared around him and his companions as the system carried them upward to the hundred-and-second floor.

The chamber was vast and cold, and something was waiting in the center of it.

It stood nearly ten feet tall, a wall of hard, blood-red scale with a massive greatsword slung across its back.

It didn’t move. It didn’t have to. The pressure rolling off it pressed down on the whole room like a hand, and the torches along the walls guttered and leaned away from it.

[BLOODSCALE REAVER] (Legendary) Level 51

A boss this far above an ordinary level-40 player lived in a different conversation entirely. In a life he’d already lived once.

He remembered clearing the hundred-and-first floor and still feeling real resistance from the encounter. Whichever way he looked at it, the stretch ahead wasn’t going to come easy.

Then his gaze landed on the greatsword across the Reaver’s back, and something sharper than caution lit behind his eyes.

He had an open slot waiting. Freeing Sterling from the bond earlier had cleared exactly the space he needed.

A blade-focused Legendary boss, fused through Warden’s Mandate, would give him a second sword option alongside Lyra’s fused form. It was the kind of flexibility he’d been quietly wanting since the day that fusion skill first unlocked.

This one’s perfect.

He raised his hand without hesitation and triggered the bond.The level gap worked hard against him.

Even with the Ring of Infinite Fortune tilting every roll in his favor, the first attempt failed outright. The Reaver took the provocation as the insult it was, and it ripped the greatsword from its back and charged, the floor cracking under its tread.

Kael sent his full roster in to meet it and held back himself, cycling the bond attempt again and again between the exchanges.

Steel rang on scale. The chamber shook. A second attempt failed, then a third, then a fourth, each one costing him a breath he could barely spare.

The fifth finally landed.

[Notification: Warden’s Mandate successfully activated on Legendary-tier boss Bloodscale Reaver. Companion acquired.]

The instant the bond settled, Kael selected the Reaver and triggered the Mandate’s fusion a second time, without so much as a pause.

Crimson light swallowed the whole of the Reaver’s frame. Its body twisted and compressed, folding in on itself again and again until nothing remained but a single imposing longsword, wreathed in bloodred fire.

It hung there, drifting faintly in the air, a slow crimson vortex curling around the blade as though it hadn’t quite decided to stay solid.

Kael reached out and closed his hand around the hilt.

Power surged through him the moment his fingers closed. His stats climbed hard across the board, and the Reaver’s entire skill kit folded into his own in the same breath.

Something fierce and satisfied settled behind his eyes, the particular confidence of a man who had just made himself considerably harder to kill.

With the Reaver bonded and fused, the hundred-and-second floor’s challenge closed out clean. Light swept over him, and the hundred-and-third floor resolved around him a heartbeat later.

He didn’t even have time to find his footing.

Three blood-red claw marks tore through the air without warning, already closing the distance before he’d finished registering the threat.