Chapter 118: Mythic+ Army, Enemy Returns

Logan did not go to the wall first. He went to the plaza and sat down on the steps.

"Boss." Sonic was circling overhead and clearly did not approve. "Three ships."

"I heard you the first time." Logan pulled up the Tower Point interface. "How long until they are in turret range?"

"Long enough for you to be doing something useful instead of sitting."

"This is the useful thing."

Alice dropped onto the step beside him and looked at the panel, and then she stopped looking anywhere else.

```

[ Tower Points Ledger ]

[ Carried balance: 42,700 ]

> Aegis Isle Defense (212 hostile units, 2 player surrenders): +26,400

> Mythic Dungeon cleared (Hollowveil Crystal Sovereign’s Hollow): +15,000

> Challenge Spot cleared: +8,000

> Portal: Volcano Interior: +2,400

> Portal: Flooded Grove: +3,600

> Portal: Bone Shore: +4,800

> Challenge: Furious Dragon’s Rampage: +30,000

> Trial Vault: The Hollow Accord (first clear): +12,000

> Player Eliminations x2: +1,000

[ Current Total: 145,900 ]

```

"A hundred and forty-five thousand." Alice said the number slowly. "Logan."

"I know."

"We have been sitting on a hundred and forty-five thousand Tower Points while three ships sail at our house."

"I have been sitting on it because there was nothing worth spending it on." Logan cracked his knuckles. "There is now."

---

"Upgrade the Summoning Circle first," Alice said. "It is still Level 1. Better pull rates means better units."

"No."

"Logan, thirty-six percent of everything you summon is Normal-rank trash."

"Yes." He was already opening the summon interface. "And it does not matter even slightly."

He gestured at the plaza, at the walls, at the four spires and the fourteen Mythics that had come out of two hundred garbage pulls.

"Better rates would save me merges," he said. "It would not get me one single better unit at the end. The circle sets where I start. Boundless Genesis decides where I stop."

Alice opened her mouth, closed it, and then nodded.

"That is annoyingly correct."

"Watch this."

```

[ Summon: Combat Unit x500 ]

[ Cost: 50,000 Tower Points ]

```

The light that came off the plaza was bright enough that the turret crews on the northern wall turned around to look.

Five hundred cards spilled across the stone in a wave that reached the fountain.

Logan sorted them without hurrying, because hurrying did not change the numbers.

```

[ Pull result: 180x Normal | 170x Uncommon | 145x Rare | 5x Epic ]

```

"Thirty-six percent trash," Alice noted.

"Exactly thirty-six percent trash." Logan put both hands out. "Now watch it stop mattering."

```

[ 180x Normal merged into 90x Uncommon ]

[ 260x Uncommon merged into 130x Rare ]

[ 275x Rare merged into 137x Epic, 1x Rare remaining ]

[ 142x Epic merged into 71x Legendary ]

[ 71x Legendary merged into 35x Mythic, 1x Legendary remaining ]

```

Thirty-five Mythic-rank combat units stood up out of the light and filled half the plaza.

Alice made a sound.

Logan did not stop.

```

[ 35x Mythic merged into 17x Mythic+, 1x Mythic remaining ]

```

The second wave of light was different. It was harsher and it lasted longer, and when it cleared, the plaza held seventeen units that were noticeably larger than the thirty-five had been.

Seventeen Mythic-plus.

Billy had come down off the wall at some point and was standing at the edge of the plaza with his mouth open.

"Boss."

"Yes."

"You just made seventeen of me."

"Not of you." Logan stood and stretched. "Nobody gets to be you. But close enough that the next ship is going to have a much worse day than the last one."

---

The production batch came next.

```

[ Summon: Production Unit x400 ]

[ Cost: 40,000 Tower Points ]

```

```

[ Pull result: 144x Normal | 136x Uncommon | 116x Rare | 4x Epic ]

```

This time Logan stopped one rank early, and Alice caught it.

"You did not take them to plus."

"Production wants numbers and variety, not peaks." He ran the chain anyway, fast and practiced. "One Mythic+ builder is worse than two Mythic builders working on different problems. Xairon taught me that."

```

[ 144x Normal merged into 72x Uncommon ]

[ 208x Uncommon merged into 104x Rare ]

[ 220x Rare merged into 110x Epic ]

[ 114x Epic merged into 57x Legendary ]

[ 57x Legendary merged into 28x Mythic, 1x Legendary remaining ]

```

Twenty-eight Mythic-rank production units.

Xairon arrived at a speed Logan had never seen it move at, chaotic energy sliding between six shapes in as many steps.

"Twenty-eight," it said.

"Twenty-eight."

"Lord." Xairon’s voice came from several places at once and all of them were delighted. "Give me the wall for ten minutes and I will give you a different island."

```

[ Remaining Tower Points: 55,900 ]

```

"Take the wall," Logan said. "Take whatever you want. Just do it while they are still sailing."

---

Xairon took the wall.

What the production line did to Aegis Isle in the time the three ships needed to close was not construction. It was closer to weather.

Twenty-eight new Mythics plus everything already on the island went at the defenses at once. Kroth poured new bastions out of dragon bone and Emberglass. Draventh ran the length of every wall laying sigils faster than Logan could follow.

Vulkarn’s Ore Grubs came up through the terraces and thickened the ground underneath them.

Maren filled every magazine on the island twice over.

Logan stood in the middle of it and watched his home get harder in real time, and felt something settle in his chest that was not quite calm.

’They came last time and took Terry off me.’ He put a hand on the wall and felt it humming. ’This time they are arriving at a different island.’

Alice climbed up beside him and looked out at the water.

The three ships had resolved out of the haze. They were smaller than the Ironmaw Battleship had been, leaner and faster, built for speed rather than for shrugging off artillery.

On the lead deck, two figures stood at the rail. One of them had a lance.

"Oh," Alice said. "Of course it is them."

---

```

[ Hostile Force Detected ]

[ Vessels: 3 ]

[ Hostile units: 340 ]

[ Rank range: Rare to Mythic ]

```

"Mythic," Sonic said from overhead. "They have Mythics this time."

"They have been busy." Logan’s grip settled on Grimlord’s Blade. "Nyriel, how many players?"

The constellation above the spires shifted.

```

[ Player signatures detected: 2 ]

```

"Just the two of them," Alice said. "Three ships, three hundred and forty units, and only two players."

"Because they did not recruit anybody." Logan watched the lead ship come. "They have been hunting players since the shelf. That is where the Mythics came from."

Rakhan Vurel’s voice came across the water, amplified by something.

"LEON FLANKE."

Logan did not answer. He let him keep going.

"You told me you would already know what to cut." Rakhan sounded almost cheerful about it. "So I brought you nothing to cut."

Then he stepped off the deck and dropped onto the Skyhoof Tempest Courser, and the ships opened fire.

---

The first exchange told Logan everything.

Rakhan did not charge. That was the whole adaptation, and it was smarter than Logan had expected from him.

Instead of running one long approach and stacking a single enormous line of momentum, he flew short. He made dozens of tiny passes, each one only forty or fifty meters, turning constantly.

Every pass built a small stack and spent it immediately.

Logan opened Sword Intent and found exactly what Rakhan had promised him. There was no bright line running back through the man. There was nothing gathered, nothing stored, nothing hanging off him.

There were just dozens of tiny threads, each one blinking into existence and dying within a second.

’He is not wrong.’ Logan blocked a lance thrust and gave three meters of ground. ’I cannot cut a leash that does not exist long enough to be cut.’

The lance came in again from a different angle. Then again. Then again.

None of them were the huge hit from the shelf. All of them were bad.

Alice covered him from the southern spire, and she ran into a different problem.

She had Homing now, and Homing should have made this trivial. She fixed on Rakhan and released, and the arrow corrected beautifully toward him.

Then Idresh Kaan raised a hand from the deck of the lead ship, and the arrow simply stopped caring.

```

[ Weight of Ages ]

```

It did not get blocked. It did not get deflected. It went heavy in mid-flight and dropped out of the sky twenty meters short of the target.

Alice stared at the place where it fell.

"Logan." Her voice came through the comm sigil, tight. "He is making my arrows heavy."

"He is what?"

"Weight of Ages. It is not just a stacking hammer." She was already nocking another. "He puts weight into things. Any things. My arrows are things."

’Of course he worked that out.’ Logan took another lance strike on the blade and slid back another meter. ’He had one look at her two hundred thousand damage shot and went home and built a counter.’

The Accord Sigil at his collar told him she was upright and steady and about two hundred meters behind him, which was the only good news available.

---

The ships hit the rocks and the units came off them.

Three hundred and forty, Rare to Mythic, into a wall that had been rebuilt by twenty-eight Mythic production units in the time it took them to sail in.

Draventh’s second enchantment finally revealed what it had been hiding.

Every Aegis Bastion Turret fired at once, and the shells did not travel in straight lines. They curved.

They went around cover and around shields and around the hulls of the ships themselves. Each one arrived at a target that had thought it was safe.

```

[ Turret Enchantment: Dragonblood Trajectory. ]

```

The first volley alone killed sixty units.

Billy hit the beach with seventeen Mythic-plus combat units behind him and stopped being visible after that. Terry planted himself at the gate and the gate stopped being a problem anybody needed to think about.

Solveig went up the causeway with gold burning at the edges of his crimson armor and did not come back down.

’The island is holding.’ Logan registered it in the back of his mind while he gave ground to Rakhan. ’The island is holding easily.’

Which meant, as it always did with these two, that the island was not the point.

---

He worked it out about four seconds too late.

Rakhan’s passes had not been random. Every short flight had pushed Logan a little further from the wall, a little further down the terrace, a little further from anybody who could help him.

And Idresh had not thrown anything at Logan all fight. Not one hammer swing.

He had been standing on the lead deck putting weight into the air.

’He is not defending his brother.’ Logan’s stomach dropped. ’He is loading.’

Logan looked up.

Directly above him, the air had gone strange. It shimmered and sagged the way a canvas sags under water, and it covered a circle of terrace maybe forty meters across.

All of it was weight. Every stack Idresh had absorbed across the whole first phase of the battle was up there, held in the sky and waiting.

Rakhan pulled up and out, fast, and for the first time all fight he stopped attacking.

"NOW," he called.

Idresh closed his hand.

Forty meters of stored weight came down at once.

Logan had a quarter of a second and no way out of the circle.

He did not try to leave it.

```

[ Blade Veil Counter ]

```

He swung, and the veil opened above him, and the sky landed on it.

The stone under his boots cracked in a ring. His knees went. The veil held for exactly one second, which was all it was ever built to do, and then it broke.

Most of the weight was already spent by then.

Most of it.

The rest put Logan through the terrace floor and into the level below.

---

He came up in a cloud of dust with blood in his mouth and one arm that was not answering properly.

```

[ HP: 41% ]

```

’Cinderveil Aegis.’ The thought came through the ringing in his ears. ’That would have been a lot worse without the new set.’

Above him, through the hole he had made, he could hear Rakhan coming back around.

Then he heard something else, and it was much closer.

The Accord Sigil at his collar had gone warm.

Not a location. A condition.

Alice was moving, and she was moving fast, and she was not moving away.

"Logan." Her voice came through the comm, and it was completely level. "Do not get up yet."

"Why."

"Because I have been shooting at Idresh for six minutes and he has stopped nine hundred arrows."

Logan spat blood and started grinning despite everything.

’Six minutes of arrows.’ He knew exactly what that number meant.

"Cadence," he said.

"Nine hundred and forty stacks," Alice said. "He made every single one of them heavy. He did not make one single one of them miss."

Every arrow that connects grants a stack. The skill had never once specified that the arrow had to kill anything.

"Tempest Cadence gives me a hundred Attack per hundred stacks," she said. "That is nine hundred and forty extra Attack sitting on top of everything else, and he has been feeding it to me personally."

Logan got his good arm under himself and pushed up onto one knee.

"Alice."

"Mm."

"Make it count."