Chapter 122: Warlord

Logan restocked his seed pods before they left the dock.

Wanderroot Seed Courier grew four of them while he waited, keyed each one to the courtyard, and handed them over with the solemn air of something that had rehearsed the gesture.

"Two for me, two for you." He passed half to Alice. "I burned both of mine coming home from the vault and the dragon."

"I still have my originals," Alice added the new ones anyway. "Four each, then. Try not to spend them all in one place."

Sixty kilometers of open water later, they saw what they had come for.

---

The island was not an island so much as a mountain with a coastline.

It rose grey and sheer out of the sea, and somebody had spent a very long time carving it. Terraced walls ran around it in nine concentric rings, each one higher than the last, all of them worked stone and all of them occupied.

There were campfires on every ring. Thousands of them.

"Nyriel," Logan said. "Count."

The constellation spread wide across the approach and came back fast.

```

[ Faction strength: approximately 2,100 units. ]

[ Rank range: Rare to Legendary. ]

[ Mythic-rank signatures: 6 ]

[ Primary signature: 1 ]

```

"Two thousand one hundred," Alice said. "Six Mythic lieutenants. And whatever is sitting at the top."

"That is why it was the biggest reading on the map." Logan watched the rings for a moment. "Everybody else looked at that number and picked a smaller one."

"Which is why it is still standing at twenty-five Warlords dead."

"Yes."

’Twenty-five percent stronger than it started, and untouched.’ He ran it through. ’And the badge is worth fifty percent more than it was when the match opened.’

Billy drifted up beside him and looked at the nine rings with obvious enthusiasm.

"Boss. Are we doing the thing?"

"We are doing the thing."

---

The thing worked like this.

Sonic went first and went high, because Skyrend Current meant the longer he stayed airborne the faster he got, and nothing on those rings could track him after the first ten seconds.

He did not attack. He drew fire, and every gun and caster on the lower four rings turned to follow him.

That was when Billy hit the second ring from behind in Duskfall Leviathan form and took out a hundred and fifty meters of wall.

Solveig went through the hole with six of the nine Mythic-plus units and started walking up.

The other three went around the far side with Xairon, who had spent the crossing building something out of dragon bone and Emberglass that nobody had asked about and everybody was now glad existed.

Vulkarn stayed at the waterline and put Ore Grubs into the rock. By the time the assault reached the fourth ring, the fifth had started sinking into itself.

Logan and Alice went straight up the middle.

’Two thousand units,’ Logan thought, cutting through the second rank without slowing. ’And eleven of ours, and it is not close.’

It was not close. That was the whole point of the last thirty Chapters of building.

The six Mythic lieutenants were the only real resistance, and they came at Solveig one at a time because the rings were too narrow to come at him together.

He was wearing the Dawnfire Sovereign Gauntlets and every wound he took made the next swing worse for whoever gave it to him.

Four of them died on the sixth ring. The other two saw what happened to the first four and ran upward, which only meant they died on the eighth.

---

The ninth ring was empty except for the thing in the middle of it.

```

[ Warlord: Ossvane Ironmarch ]

Mythic | Level 40

HP: 6,200,000 / 6,200,000

Attack: 4,100

Speed: 3,300

Constitution: 3,900

Arcane: 3,600

```

Alice read the stat block and let out a slow breath.

"That is not the dragon," she said.

"No."

"That is nearly twice the dragon."

"The dragon was worth four and a half thousand points." Logan set his feet. "This is worth a badge."

Ossvane Ironmarch did not have a body anybody could see.

What sat at the center of the ninth ring was a sphere of stone plates about twenty meters across, each plate the size of a door, all of them rotating slowly around whatever was inside.

Logan opened Sword Intent and found that the plates were not armor. They were the Warlord. There was something at the center of it feeding them and nothing else.

He hit it anyway, because information was worth a swing.

```

[ Grimspire Lance ]

```

Eleven feet of condensed death energy punched a hole clean through two plates.

The plates rotated. The hole went around the back. Two fresh plates slid into the gap and it was sealed before the lance finished withdrawing.

"It is rebuilding faster than we can open it," Alice said.

"It is rebuilding faster than I can open it." Logan blinked clear as the shell fired at him. "You may have better luck."

---

Because the shell had to open to fire.

It fired a compressed stone lance that took a chunk out of the eighth ring, and the port it fired through was open for less than half a second before the rotation closed it.

Worse, the port did not appear in the same place twice. Logan watched four shots and got four different positions, high and low and on opposite faces.

"Alice, did you see it?"

"I saw all four." She was already moving to a better angle. "There is no pattern. It opens wherever it wants."

"Then we do not predict it." Logan started running. "We just make it fire a lot."

He gave it every reason to. Reaper’s Stride carried him around the ninth ring in a widening circuit, and every pass he made forced another shot, and every shot opened another port somewhere on that sphere for four tenths of a second.

Alice stopped trying to watch the shell at all.

’I cannot predict it. I do not have to.’ She drew, and Arrow Intent came up silver around the shaft.

’A thousand identical plates in a hall, and one of them was where an arrow wanted to go. This is the same problem wearing different stone.’

```

[ Starfall Cadence: 120 stacks. ]

```

She started shooting before she had a target.

That was the part that mattered. Homing corrected an arrow in flight, which meant the arrow did not need to be aimed at the port when it left the string. It needed to be in the air when the port opened.

So she filled the air.

```

[ Starfall Cadence: 340 stacks. ]

```

Forty arrows. Sixty. Every one of them bouncing off stone, every one of them landing a hit and stacking Cadence anyway, every one of them making the next one come faster.

By the time she passed four hundred stacks she had six arrows in flight at any given moment.

The shell fired at Logan again. A port opened low on the eastern face.

Three of Alice’s six arrows corrected mid-flight and went into it.

```

[ Ossvane Ironmarch: 94% HP ]

```

"THERE," she said.

"Keep him firing!" Logan was already swinging wider. "I can do this all day!"

---

He could not quite do it all day, but he did it long enough.

Every circuit forced a shot. Every shot opened a port. Every port ate three or four arrows out of a sky that Alice kept permanently full.

```

[ Starfall Cadence: 610 stacks. ]

```

```

[ Tempest Cadence: +610 Attack ]

```

The numbers climbed on both sides of the exchange and only one of them was climbing in a useful direction.

At forty percent, Ossvane Ironmarch stopped firing.

That was smart. It should have done it forty percent ago.

The sphere sealed completely and stopped rotating and simply sat there. No amount of Logan hammering on it produced a single opening.

"It worked out that shooting was killing it," Alice said.

"Then it is going to sit there until it starves or until somebody opens it." Logan looked at the sealed shell for a moment. "Xairon."

The Creation Sage came up the ninth ring at speed, trailing the thing it had built during the crossing.

It was a drill. It was a very large drill made of dragon bone and Emberglass, and it had clearly been built for exactly one kind of problem.

"I told you that you would want me here," Xairon said.

"You did. I am formally admitting it."

"I would like that recorded."

"It is recorded. Drill the rock."

---

Xairon did not drill the shell.

It drilled the ninth ring underneath it, and then it kept going, and the Ore Grubs Vulkarn had put into the island came up through the tunnel to meet it.

The floor under Ossvane Ironmarch gave out.

Twenty meters of rotating stone sphere dropped four meters into a hole it had not agreed to, hit the bottom at an angle, and had to rotate to right itself.

Rotating meant moving. Moving meant the plates shifted.

For about one and a half seconds, there were gaps all over it.

```

[ Starfall Cadence: 680 stacks. ]

[ Arrow Intent: Homing ]

[ Starflow Arts: Death Star ]

```

Alice put eleven arrows into eleven different gaps, and Homing carried every one of them around the plates and into the thing at the center that Logan had seen and never been able to reach.

The eleventh was the fatal point.

```

[ Critical strike. Fatal point struck. ]

[ Damage dealt: 402,900. ]

```

The shell came apart from the inside.

```

[ Warlord Ossvane Ironmarch has been slain. ]

[ Killing blow: Ruby Starviel. ]

```

---

The rewards came up over the wreckage.

```

[ Warlord Badge (Ossvane Ironmarch) ]

> Convertible to Tier Points at match end. Current value: +50%.

[ Tower Points: +18,000 ]

[ Blueprint: Ninefold Bastion Ring ]

[ Mythic-grade materials recovered from faction armory. ]

```

```

[ Twenty-six Warlords eliminated. ]

```

Logan looked at the badge sitting in his inventory next to the four he had taken off a dead Oniniad.

Four stolen. One earned.

’Five,’ he thought. ’And Vaerith Solmane has more than anybody alive by a distance Sikra Thall would not put a number on.’

"Alice."

"Mm." She was still staring at the crater, breathing hard, bow hanging loose in one hand.

"That was yours. Start to finish."

"It was ours." She finally looked over, and the grin came slow and enormous. "You made it fire six hundred times. I just had arrows in the sky when it did."

```

[ Tower Points: 43,900 ]

```

Logan closed the panel and looked north, to where Nyriel’s map still had two signatures burning.

"Seventy-four left," he said. "Next one."