Novel Full Chapter 673: New Target
Chapter 673: New Target
The afternoon was colder than the morning.
Kaiden pulled up the Association’s tactical overlay on his wrist artifact. The holographic map flickered to life above his forearm, a topographical spread of the northern range dotted with colored markers. Red for confirmed hostile. Yellow for unconfirmed. Grey for stale data, positions logged more than an hour ago that may have shifted since.
The map wasn’t perfect. The Association’s monitoring teams updated positions based on drone sweeps and veteran reports, but the deep northern zones had gaps.
Monsters migrated. Territories shifted. A marker that showed a lone creature resting in a basin could be a pack of six by the time you arrived.
Better than nothing.
Kaiden studied the spread while his girls walked beside him. Luna kept pace on his left, eyes darting between the terrain ahead and the hologram.
What he was looking for was obvious enough that no one asked.
Killable was the operative word. Level seventy-five and above didn’t mean every monster in that bracket was a viable target. Some were flatly impossible for a team of their level regardless of coordination.
A creature significantly faster than Luna meant they couldn’t control engagement distance. If it wanted to run, they couldn’t catch it. If it wanted to close on the backline, nobody could intercept. Speed nullified their entire tactical framework.
A creature too durable for sustained damage meant they’d burn through mana reserves before the thing went down. The Borer Queen had nearly hit that threshold, and she’d had exploitable joints. A pure tank with no structural weak points would outlast them every time.
What they needed was something strong enough to grant meaningful experience, slow enough to be kited, and possessing a weakness their team composition could exploit.
"There." After fifteen minutes of searching for the right target, Kaiden tapped a red marker on the map. Level seventy-six. A Gorecliff Trampler, positioned in a narrow ravine about two kilometers northeast. The Association notes flagged it as a territorial grazer with heavy armor plating and slow rotational speed. Powerful charges in straight lines, but poor lateral mobility.
Aria could stay airborne outside its charge lanes. Luna could hit the flanks between wind-ups. Nyx could use the ravine walls to toss boulders at it. Bastet could cook it from afar. Calypso could tank the charges if she positioned herself at an angle instead of head-on.
It was the right target.
"We move quiet. There are three other markers between us and the target, all level seventy-plus. We go around, not through."
...
After another ten minutes spent carefully navigating the terrain, they reached the ridge .
Kaiden looked down.
His expression darkened.
The Trampler was there. So were about twenty-five other people.
The ravine was a warzone. Ashbound was in the thick of it, Ash’s weapon carving into the creature’s plated flank while Brittany and Stacy worked the opposite side. Trisha provided ranged support from a ledge, energy bolts hammering the Trampler’s skull in a rhythm that suggested she’d been at it for a while. Ash’s camera drones orbited the fight in their usual tight formation.
The moment Ash spotted Kaiden on the ridge above, he stopped mid-swing. The Trampler’s tail nearly caught him across the chest, but Brittany shoved him clear just in time.
Ash didn’t care.
He raised both hands toward Kaiden, middle fingers extended, and sneered. The grin was back, the camera-ready one, full of petty revenge.
But the S-tier clown wasn’t what made Kaiden’s jaw tighten.
Beyond Ashbound, spread across the ravine’s southern entrance in a disciplined formation, a full competition squad of twenty fighters held position. They weren’t all engaging the Trampler. Some observed. Some maintained a perimeter. Their gear was uniform, well-maintained, and carried the kind of enchantment density that came from a guild with deep pockets.
New Dawn.
Kaiden’s eyes found two figures standing apart from the squad, elevated on a rock formation that gave them a clear view of the entire ravine. They were watching.
A woman with a dark braid and a thin cigarillo trailing smoke from her fingers. A man in combat armor that somehow looked casual on him, arms folded, posture relaxed.
Mariana and Chinedu.
New Dawn’s S-tier celebrities. Mariana, the Colombian strategist whose kill compilations had more views than most entertainment streams. Chinedu, the Nigerian spearman whose laid-back interviews and rotating roster of girlfriends made him tabloid gold.
They were both looking at Kaiden.
Mariana’s cigarillo paused halfway to her lips. Her eyes narrowed, assessing, the way a predator measured something it hadn’t decided to hunt yet.
Chinedu smiled. "Hey there!" he greeted, accompanied by rapid, friendly waving.
Kaiden didn’t return the gesture.
He turned around and walked away. His girls followed without a word, because the set of his shoulders said everything his mouth didn’t.
He was furious, because he knew.
His father had sent them.
The realization arrived with the certainty of a man who had grown up studying Magnus Ashborn’s playbook. New Dawn sat at the top of the rookie standings. Their optimal strategy was to keep doing exactly what they’d been doing for eighteen days: farming efficiently, maintain the gap, coast to victory. There was no competitive reason for their S-tiers to suddenly appear in Kaiden’s hunting grounds, at the exact target he’d spent fifteen minutes filtering for, unless someone had redirected them.
And Ash. The man who’d spent the last two days getting in his way, was suddenly fighting alongside his direct competition like they were old friends.
Ashbound was third on the standings. New Dawn was first. They had no business cooperating. Unless someone had offered Ash something he wanted more than points.
Kaiden said nothing. He pulled up the tactical overlay again and started searching.
<Big brother!! I’m->
<I know, Alice.>
She went quiet.
The second search took longer. The first viable target had been obvious, a lone marker in an accessible ravine with a favorable profile. The next one required sifting through clusters and migration routes.
Twenty minutes of walking, scanning, rerouting, and filtering.
Finally, they found it. A Ridgeback Scorcher, level seventy-seven. Solitary. Territorial. Perched on a plateau about three kilometers northwest, far enough from other markers that engagement wouldn’t draw company. Fire-based attacks, thick carapace, but their notes mentioned vulnerable underbelly tissue exposed during its flame-breath wind-up.
They could work with that.
Three kilometers of careful navigation. Avoiding sight lines. Circling wide around two packs of migrating creatures. Another twenty minutes of investment, zero points earned, all of it building toward a single fight that would push them closer to the level threshold they needed.
They crested the plateau’s edge.
Mariana was already there.
Twelve New Dawn fighters in tight formation, engaging the Ridgeback Scorcher with the coordinated precision of a squad that had drilled together for months.
They had arrived only minutes before Kaiden’s group. Perhaps only seconds.
The timing was surgical.
Kaiden’s hand closed into a fist at his side. He pulled up Ash’s stream.
The feed showed Ash pumping his fist in the air, camera drone zoomed in on his grinning face. Brittany and Stacy were cheering behind him, the Gorecliff Trampler’s corpse visible in the background. "Let’s gooo! Chat, did you see that?! Ashbound is FEASTING today!"
Chinedu was in the frame, leaning on his spear with that easy smile, watching Ash celebrate with the amused detachment of a man observing a particularly entertaining pet. His spear tip was dark with ichor. He’d joined the kill.
Kaiden closed the stream.
Two targets. Two interceptions. Different locations, different timelines, different squads. Ash and Chinedu on the first. Mariana on the second. Both arriving just before Kaiden’s group, at targets matching the exact criteria he’d been filtering for.
Once was bad luck. Twice was a pattern.