Chapter 133: Snowballing

They stayed on the rock until Logan could stand without help.

It took a while. Alice sat beside him with the bow across her knees and did not say anything, and the Mythic-plus units spread out along the shoreline and kept watch over two bodies that nobody had moved yet.

Logan’s MP climbed back slowly. The Attrition reduction did not move at all at first. Then, very gradually, it started to.

```

[ Attack: -36% ]

[ Speed: -36% ]

```

"Two percent," Alice said.

"It will come off."

"Slowly. By itself." She looked at the rise. "He told us it decays. He just never told us it would outlive him."

Logan got one foot under himself and then the other.

"Eighty-four players," he said. "And fifty Warlords."

"You can barely walk."

"I can barely walk at sixty-four percent." He tested his grip on the hilt and it closed this time. "Which is still more than anybody else left on this board."

---

He laid it out on the ship, because saying it out loud was how he made sure it held.

"None of the eighty-four is carrying a badge," he said. "The ledger is clear on that. Every surrender from here costs us nothing."

"So we let them surrender."

"We give them the chance to." Logan pulled up Nyriel’s map. "But we do not wait for them to come to us."

"Every one of them out there is clearing a challenge or stripping a resource node, or sitting on something we might need for the Warlords."

Alice studied the scattered signatures.

"You want to hunt them."

"I want to find them fast and tell them we are coming." He closed the map. "Kaevan came to our island without a word. So did the brothers. I am not doing that to anybody."

"Even though it would be faster."

"Even though." Logan looked at her. "Anybody who sees thirty-seven Mythic-plus units on their horizon and still wants to fight has earned the fight. Anybody who does not should get to leave."

Alice was quiet for a moment.

"Good," she said. "I was hoping you would say that."

---

Finding them turned out to be the easy part, because the army had been built for exactly this without anybody meaning it to.

Nyriel spread its constellation across ten kilometers of sea and logged every energy signature it touched. Sonic took the readings and went.

With Skyrend Current building the whole way, he could cross ten kilometers and confirm a signature. He was back before the ships finished turning.

"Two players on the atoll to the south," he called in, somewhere in the first stretch. "Clearing a treasure vault. They have not looked up once."

"Units?"

"About forty. Legendary and below."

Billy carried half the army in Leviathan form and the ships carried the rest.

They came over the southern atoll in full formation, thirty-seven Mythic-plus units in a line across the water, and they stopped four hundred meters out.

Logan stepped to the front of the lead ship.

"You are being eliminated," he called across the water. "You can say the word and leave with whatever you are carrying. Or you can fight, and we will finish it."

There was a long pause on the atoll.

Then one of the signatures vanished. A moment later, the other one did too.

```

[ Player surrendered. Player removed from the match. ]

[ Player surrendered. Player removed from the match. ]

[ Leon Flanke: +1 Elimination ]

[ Ruby Starviel: +1 Elimination ]

```

"That was easy," Alice said.

"That was two." Logan was already turning back to the map. "There are eighty-two more."

---

Most of them went exactly like that.

Nyriel found them. Sonic confirmed them. The army arrived and stopped at a respectful distance, and Logan told them what was happening, and they did the arithmetic every player in this match had eventually learned to do.

```

[ Players remaining: 67 / 500 ]

```

A pair on a volcanic island had built walls and wanted to see whether the walls would hold. Billy took one pass at them in Leviathan form and the answer was no.

The first player said the word with the dust still falling. The second one tried to hold the breach alone.

He did not get far. Solveig reached him, and the Vorpal Lord’s blade came down.

Somewhere in the half second before it landed, the man simply was not there anymore.

’He thought it.’ Logan watched the sword pass through empty air and bury itself in stone. ’He did not have time to say anything. He just thought it, right at the end.’

```

[ Player surrendered. Player removed from the match. ]

```

That became familiar fast. Players who wanted to fight would fight, right up until the exact moment the fight became real.

Then a strike would land on nothing and the panel would come up. The person who had been standing there a heartbeat ago was already out of the match.

"It bothers you," Alice said, watching him watch it.

"It is not bothering me." Logan thought about it. "It is surprising me. They all wait until the last possible second."

"Because they want to have tried." She shrugged. "Nobody wants to leave having surrendered to a line of units on a horizon. They want to leave having fought something."

---

```

[ Players remaining: 48 / 500 ]

```

The ones that fought properly were the ones Logan remembered afterward.

A trio of solo players who had banded together held a canyon against the whole army for almost a full minute. They knew they could not win. They picked the narrowest point on the island and made the Mythic-plus units come through it single file.

It did not change the outcome. But when the last of the three finally thought the word with Mythic-plus units closing on him from both sides, Logan felt something close to respect for all three.

"They were good," he said.

"They were very good," Alice agreed. "They just ran into us."

A pair on a floating reef tried to run instead. Running was a mistake. Nyriel saw ten kilometers in every direction and Sonic crossed that distance faster than any ship could turn.

He caught them over open water, did not touch either of them, and simply hovered in front of their bow until Logan’s fleet arrived behind him.

They surrendered without anybody raising a weapon.

"You could have just hit them," Logan told him afterward.

"You said announce," Sonic said. "So I announced by being there."

---

```

[ Players remaining: 31 / 500 ]

```

The last stretch was harder, and it was harder for a reason Logan had not expected.

The remaining players had stopped doing anything that produced a signature.

’They worked it out,’ he thought, watching Nyriel’s map go quiet across whole regions at a time. ’Anybody who clears a challenge or fights a monster lights up. So they have stopped doing both.’

They were hiding. Not the way Ilyra had hidden, sitting under a detection floor through sheer discipline. They were simply staying still in caves and coves, doing nothing at all, waiting for the match to forget them.

"They cannot stay like that forever," Alice said.

"They do not have to stay forever." Logan closed the map. "They just have to outlast us, if we get impatient and go after the Warlords instead."

"Will we?"

He looked at the fifty signatures still burning on the far side of the map.

Every Warlord that stayed alive was one more thing somebody else might reach first. Every player who stayed hidden was one more person who might try.

’Two lists,’ he thought. ’Neither one can wait for the other.’

"No," he said. "We do both."

---

```

[ Players remaining: 31 / 500 ]

[ Leon Flanke: 97 Eliminations ]

[ Ruby Starviel: 98 Eliminations ]

[ Warlord Badges held: 41 ]

[ Warlords remaining: 50 ]

```

Logan split the army on the ship before they moved on.

Nineteen Mythic-plus units under Billy would keep hunting players, working the quiet coves and caves with Nyriel sweeping ahead of them. The other eighteen, with Solveig, would come with him and Alice toward the Warlords.

"You trust Billy with the announcing?" Alice asked.

"Billy announces louder than I do."

"That is not the same as trusting him."

"It is close enough." Logan looked at the map one more time, at fifty Warlords burning in the dark, stronger than they had ever been and worth more than they had ever been.

"Twenty-nine players hiding," he said. "Fifty Warlords waiting."

Alice slung the bow across her back.

"Then let us see which list runs out first."