Chapter 124: Arrival

The biggest reading on the board turned out to be a hole.

There was no island. There was a ring of black rock about two kilometers across, open to the sea on every side, and in the middle of it the water simply stopped and went down.

Nyriel spread out over the rim and came back with a number that made Logan read it twice.

```

[ Primary signature detected. ]

[ Faction strength: 0 ]

```

"Zero," Alice said. "Every other Warlord had two thousand units around it."

"This one does not need them."

’Nobody has touched this reading all match.’ Logan looked down into the dark. ’Thirty Warlords have died and this one has not lost a single unit, because it never had any to lose.’

Billy drifted out over the gap and looked down and came back noticeably less enthusiastic than usual.

"Boss," he said. "I do not like the shape of the quiet down there."

---

It came up before they went down, which was polite of it.

```

[ Warlord: Ashkaran Vothul ]

Mythic | Level 40

HP: 14,800,000 / 14,800,000

Attack: 6,400

Speed: 5,100

Constitution: 5,800

Arcane: 6,900

```

Alice read the numbers and then read them again, and her voice came out very flat.

"Fourteen point eight million."

"Yes."

"Ossvane was six point two and Ossvane nearly beat us."

"Yes."

Ashkaran Vothul had a body, which after Ossvane was almost a relief, and then it moved and the relief stopped.

It was tall and thin and made of something like polished bone, and it came out of the hole standing upright with no wings and nothing holding it up.

’Five thousand one hundred Speed.’ Logan felt his mouth go dry. ’The dragon was two thousand one hundred. This thing is two and a half times the dragon.’

He ran the other number beside it and did not like where it landed.

At two thousand stacks of Reaper’s Stride he was fast. He was faster than anything he had fought in this match.

He was not sure he was faster than five thousand one hundred.

---

He found out in about four seconds.

Ashkaran Vothul crossed eight hundred meters of open rock and took Solveig off his feet before Logan finished turning his head.

Solveig was Mythic-plus, wearing Dawnfire gauntlets, and he went thirty meters and did not get straight back up.

Billy hit it from above in Leviathan form and it moved out of the way. Not blocked. Moved.

Nine Mythic-plus units closed from four directions at once and it went through the gap between two of them without touching either.

```

[ Reaper’s Stride: 900 stacks. Speed +6,300%. ]

```

Logan got in front of it and got a blade up and Ashkaran Vothul simply was not there anymore.

The strike caught him across the back. The Skyrend Emberglass Coat ate most of it and the rest put him face down in the rock.

```

[ HP: 71% ]

```

"Logan!" Alice’s arrow went through the space it had occupied and hit nothing at all.

’It is reading us.’ He got an elbow under himself. ’Not dodging. Reading. It knows where the swing is going before the swing does.’

That was familiar. That was exactly what Arrow Intent did with a target’s future position, and Sword Intent with a thread.

’It has something.’ Logan spat rock dust. ’Whatever it is, it works on movement, and everything I have is movement.’

---

He pushed the stacks.

```

[ Reaper’s Stride: 1,400 stacks. Speed +9,800%. ]

```

It helped. He landed two cuts he would not have landed before, and Sword Intent showed him the threads under the bone plating for the first time.

There were not many. Ashkaran Vothul was not held together by much, which was why it did not need an army.

```

[ Reaper’s Stride: 2,000 stacks. Speed +14,000%. ]

```

He stopped there, because he always stopped there.

And Ashkaran Vothul was still faster.

Not by much. Not the way it had been at nine hundred stacks. But Logan swung at full extension with fourteen thousand percent behind it, and the thing slid out of the arc with room to spare, and then it hit him again.

```

[ HP: 44% ]

```

Alice put four arrows into its shoulder while it was committed and it did not even look at her.

"Logan." Her voice came through the sigil, tight and level. "You are losing."

"I know."

"You have a skill you have never used."

He knew that too.

---

’Two thousand has been my number since the mountain.’

Logan rolled clear, came up, and felt his shoulder grind where it had been grinding since the siege.

’Rishin put me in a pond over it. The Hive cracked me over it. I held it through fifty waves of Dark Fall Conquest because I decided two thousand was the line.’

He looked at Ashkaran Vothul crossing the rock toward him at five thousand one hundred Speed.

’And the line was never the skill. It was always my body. And I bought something for that.’

```

[ Grimbound Threshold ]

> For twenty seconds, physical strain caused by your own Speed is redirected into MP consumption instead of your body.

```

He let go of the number.

```

[ Reaper’s Stride: 2,400 stacks. Speed +16,800%. ]

[ MP: 91% ]

```

The world slowed down.

Not the way it slowed at two thousand, where everything got manageable. This was different. Ashkaran Vothul stopped being a blur and started being a thing walking toward him, and Logan could see every joint in it moving.

```

[ Reaper’s Stride: 2,900 stacks. Speed +20,300%. ]

[ MP: 74% ]

```

He hit it four times before it finished the step it was taking.

Nothing in his body objected. He felt the strain arrive and felt it go somewhere else entirely, straight out of his MP bar, and his spine stayed where it belonged.

’Nineteen seconds.’

```

[ Reaper’s Stride: 3,600 stacks. Speed +25,200%. ]

[ MP: 51% ]

```

Ashkaran Vothul read his movement, and being able to read it stopped mattering, because knowing where a strike is going is worthless if you cannot get out of the way in time.

Logan cut the threads. All of them. Sword Intent showed him four and he took four in under a second.

Grim Siphoning Edge fed off every one of them, and the MP bar stopped falling as fast as it had been.

```

[ Ashkaran Vothul: 31% HP ]

```

"ALICE."

"CADENCE IS UP."

---

She had been building the whole time she could not hit it.

```

[ Starfall Cadence: 720 stacks. ]

```

Every arrow that had bounced off that bone plating had still counted, and Tempest Cadence had turned all seven hundred and twenty of them into Attack.

The problem had never been her damage. It had been that the thing moved out of the way of anything she aimed at.

So she stopped aiming at it.

```

[ Astral Displacement ]

```

Alice fired six arrows wide, exchanged places with the third one mid-flight, and came out of nowhere eleven meters off its flank at a range no archer should ever want.

Ashkaran Vothul read the arrows. It did not read the archer arriving inside them.

```

[ Arrow Intent: Homing ]

[ Starflow Arts: Death Star ]

```

At eleven meters, Homing did not have far to correct.

```

[ Critical strike. Fatal point struck. ]

[ Damage dealt: 511,400. ]

```

It staggered. It was the first time in the entire fight it had done anything but move perfectly.

Logan was already there.

```

[ Reaper’s Stride: 4,100 stacks. Speed +28,700%. ]

[ MP: 22% ]

[ Grimbound Threshold: 3 seconds remaining. ]

```

Grimspire Lance went in at the base of the skull and came out somewhere near the hip.

```

[ Warlord Ashkaran Vothul has been slain. ]

```

---

The duration ended two seconds later and the bill came due all at once.

Logan hit his knees. Not from damage. His MP bar was at nine percent and his hands were shaking so hard he could not close them on the hilt.

```

[ Grimbound Threshold: expired. ]

[ Reaper’s Stride: stacks decaying. ]

```

’Four thousand one hundred.’ He watched the number fall and could not quite believe it. ’Twice what I have ever held. And nothing broke.’

Alice reached him and got a shoulder under his arm.

"Four thousand," she said.

"Four thousand one hundred."

"Do not ever do that again."

"I am absolutely going to do that again."

```

[ Warlord Badge (Ashkaran Vothul) ]

> Convertible to Tier Points at match end. Current value: +60%.

[ Tower Points: +42,000 ]

```

Fifteen badges. The biggest reading on the board, untouched by anyone for the entire match, and it was theirs.

Logan got about four seconds to enjoy it.

---

"That was extremely good."

The voice came from the rim of the crater, and it was not one of theirs.

Two people stood on the black rock about sixty meters up, and neither of them had been there when the fight started, and Nyriel had not called them.

Logan knew both faces before he saw them properly, because there were only two names left on that board that mattered.

```

[ Vaerith Solmane ]

[ Class: Sundered Crown Herald (Mythic) ]

[ Talent: Attrition Sovereign (Mythic) ]

```

```

[ Ilyra Tanthess ]

[ Class: Veilthread Oracle Sovereign (Mythic) ]

[ Talent: Quiet Arithmetic (Mythic) ]

```

Logan’s MP was at nine percent. His stacks were gone. Solveig was still down. Three of the nine Mythic-plus units were not moving.

’They watched.’ The understanding arrived cold and complete and entirely deserved. ’They stood up there and watched the whole thing and waited for us to spend everything on it.’

It was exactly what he had done to Orlen Skarr.

Tension sprang up.

Logan reached for the hilt with a hand that would not close.

"Do not bother," Ilyra Tanthess said. She had not moved at all. "We are not going to fight you today."

"Then what are you doing here?"

Vaerith stopped about thirty meters out and smiled, and it was not unkind, which somehow made it worse.

"Counting," he said.