Chapter 163
Even before the first edge of dawn crept over the ruins, Daniel was already awake. His silhouette moved quietly across the broken courtyards, cloak trailing like a shadow of its own. The others still slept, but he was not idle. With practiced calm, he plucked the faintly glowing remnants from the husks of the fallen. Dozens of undead cores clinked into the sack at his side.
The guild had sworn the castle was clear the night before—they had checked, double-checked, even torched the crypts. And yet, seeing the weight of Daniel's bag, the truth gnawed at them. The man had rooted out dozens they had missed, creatures that had hidden in cracks of stone and beneath collapsed beams. Silent, efficient, and unerring. Had he not walked the ruins before they woke, those things might have ambushed them before breakfast.
No one said it aloud. But unease flickered in their eyes as they watched him. Gratitude, too. It was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.
By the time the fire was stoked and the first pots of breakfast broth set to simmer, Daniel stepped back into camp. His expression carried none of triumph. Only urgency. He tightened the cord on his sack of cores, set it aside, and spoke with a tone that drew every ear at once.
"Inform your leaders," he said, voice measured, yet edged with steel. "I will not remain here. I march ahead toward the third city. It will be destroyed before the day is out. You may follow after, but know this…" His gaze cut across them, catching shadows beneath the firelight. "Time is at the essence now. I regret this, but certain events have forced my hand. My role in this quest is no longer what it was when we began."
A hush fell. The Lazarus sisters, Bonnie and Rainey had just risen, their hair still loose, their faces pale from restless sleep. They caught the tail of his words, and Bonnie stepped forward, steady despite the morning's chill. She inclined her head in greeting, then asked carefully, "Lord Rothchester, we are grateful beyond words for your aid. But why press so hard? We remain within the quest's schedule. There is no need to drive yourself alone into danger."
Daniel's eyes softened for a breath, but his reply was unbending. "You are mistaken. You already shortened the schedule when Grisval, the City of Echoes was purged. Days, perhaps more, were bought with your courage. But…" He paused, gaze tilting toward the horizon where the ruins of the third city lay hidden in the mist. "Sadly, there are truths I cannot share. What I can say openly is this: my presence changes the design of this quest. Threads that should never have crossed are already tangled. And if I linger… those threads may strangle more than just me. They may claim you all."
Rainey's brow furrowed. Bonnie answered before her, voice low but firm. "My lord, you forget—we are players. We knew the danger when we signed the contract. To face death is no surprise to us. So do not bear the weight alone."
For a moment, Daniel said nothing. The fire cracked. Somewhere in the ruins, a crow called. He looked at the sisters, then at the guild, and the silence drew taut like a bowstring.
Finally, he exhaled. "The third city," he said, "is nothing. A hollow husk. It holds no great power, no relic worth dying for. I will burn it from the map before nightfall. But the fourth… and the sixth…" His voice sank, dangerous, resolute. "Those cities matter. Those cities will bleed armies. And when I face them, you must be ready to decide whether you walk beside me, or turn back."
His words lingered like smoke in the air, a warning wrapped in promise. The guild shifted uneasily, torn between awe and dread. None could doubt him. None could pierce the veil of secrets he carried. And yet, in the firelight, every soul there understood one thing clearly: Daniel Rothchester was not racing the quest's clock. He was racing something greater something unseen, and closing fast.
Daniel did not linger. The moment the Lazarus cousins fell silent, he turned from the firelight, strapped the sack of undead cores to his side, and began his march into the veiled horizon. The ruins gave way to broken roads, stones split by roots that had clawed through centuries of neglect. His stride was steady, relentless, each step echoing the weight of unspoken truths. Dravensk, the Third Dead City, waited ahead, its shattered spires rising faintly in the mist like the teeth of some long-dead giant.
He did not move like a man who feared what lay before him. He moved like one who wanted to know. Every shadow that stretched across the ruined road, every trace of the Tower's corruption clinging to the land, he welcomed it. For Daniel understood—this fight would not be against the city alone. It would be against himself. In his heart, he hunted a truth darker than any lich or revenant: was he still a player chasing objectives, bound to numbers and contracts, or had the Tower already claimed him, remade him into something that belonged to its cruel, living history?
The path toward Dravensk was no straight march. The land buckled and broke as though recoiling from the city's blight. Ravines split the roads, bridges were little more than skeletal frames sagging over black water, and forests twisted into pale, husk-like trees where carrion birds wheeled in silence. Yet Daniel did not slow. He ran, his pace relentless, like a stampeding bull crashing through every obstacle that dared to rise in his way. Packs of lesser undead spilled out from cracks in the earth, but he tore through them without pause. The land itself seemed to test him, sending storms of ash-laden wind that bit at the skin and rivers clogged with bone fragments, but his steps never faltered.
To those who might have followed, it would have looked like madness—one man forcing himself against a hostile world designed to kill armies. But to Daniel, it was necessity. He needed to know if the Tower would yield to him or if he had already been swallowed whole by it. Each corpse crushed under his aura, each wall of stone shattered beneath his will, each cursed arrow that dissolved before it touched him—all of it whispered the same answer: he was not playing anymore. He was becoming.
And with every stride that devoured the distance to Dravensk, Daniel felt the line between man, player, and resident blur, until he no longer cared which he crossed, so long as the gods who watched from above remembered that he would not bow.
The first real abominations rose as he crossed the skeletal bridge leading into Dravensk. Their bones clattered like wind chimes, eyes burning green in hollow sockets. Daniel's blade flared once in the dawn's dim light, and in a heartbeat, three heads rolled across the stone. He did not stop to check for cores, his hand swept, his power consumed them before they fell cold. Where others would swing until their arms numbed, Daniel's every motion was efficient, merciless, precise. The Tower itself seemed to bend toward him, feeding his strikes, whispering recognition: an intruder, not a guest, one of those who wanted their land in the past,
as soon the undead enemy fell, no notification came toward his armband, even if it was a common equipment created by the guild to monitor the players entering the first floor , its function can only be use id the wearer was indeed a human player.
Inside the city, the dead gathered in waves, clawing over cracked gates and spilling from shattered houses. Daniel pressed forward, cutting through them like a storm given flesh. Undead swarmed by the dozens, but none could slow him. His aura burst outward like a second blade, tearing them down before their claws could reach him. His strikes seared through rusted armor as though it were paper, and when the mages of bone lifted their staffs to loose spells of decay, their corruption withered mid-air, dissipating before it could touch him—as if the Tower itself refused to let its own blood be wasted.
The clash was not a siege. It was not even a battle. It was a slaughter, and Daniel was the executioner.
Yet with each killing stroke, something gnawed at him. No chime. No glowing prompt. No level-up notifications blooming across his vision. He carved through lines of skeletal knights, decapitated ghosts, crushed revenants with his aura's weight, yet nothing. Not a single whisper of progress.
Daniel's eyes flicked to the curved, enchanted mirror embedded in the band at his wrist. The glass shimmered faintly, alive with the runes he had trusted for years. He tapped it once, then again. Still nothing. His stats did not rise. No messages confirmed his growing strength.
"Broken?" he muttered under his breath, but even as he asked, he knew the truth. His hunch clawed closer to certainty.
This was not malfunction. This was change.
His mind pulled back to the voice, faint, alien, unforgettable that had reached him in the hidden chambers of Grisval. The warning of a forgotten being, whispering that the gods themselves had begun to watch him. That they could not be evaded forever, unless he did the unthinkable. Unless he became not a player, but a resident of the Tower itself.
He cut down another rank of hollowed men, black ichor spraying across the broken stones, and his thoughts hardened. If his armband had failed to record his growth, it was because he had slipped beyond its reach. He was no longer rising within the system he once knew; he was diverging from it, rewriting his very place within the Tower's law.
And that law, his law, was absolute.
Long ago, when he and his team had built the foundations of Arcane Crusade, they had bound the gods themselves to its structure. The divine could meddle, they could scheme, but they could never break the laws of the Tower. That was the first and greatest safeguard. The gods could not touch the heart of its residents. They could observe, they could twist the edges, but to directly interfere with those who had been claimed by the Tower was forbidden, even to them.
Now Daniel understood why the silence of his mirror filled him not with dread but with grim certainty. He was slipping the leash. The gods of Arcane Crusade might have copied, fabricated, or even stolen the Tower into their design, but they were still shackled to its rules. If he shed the last vestiges of being a "player," if he embraced what this world demanded, then their hands would never be able to reach him again.
And that, he thought as his blade plunged into the heart of Dravensk's last lich and the city trembled in final death, was the path he was already walking.
By the time the sun crowned the horizon, Dravensk was burning. Its towers wept smoke, its streets were charred trenches, and not a single corpse twitched among the ashes. Alone,
Daniel had reduced a city of the dead to silence. Streets that once howled with the gnashing of corpses now lay littered with black husks and smoldering bone. His blade still dripped with ichor so foul that each droplet hissed and chewed into the stone like acid. The stench of ruin clung to the air, thick enough to choke, but Daniel stood in the city's hollow heart unmoved. His chest rose and fell with calm, deliberate rhythm. The city had fallen, yes but not all of it. He could still feel the enemy's presence, hiding like vermin in cracks of shadow, waiting for the courage to crawl back into the light.
So he waited too.
His gaze lowered to the armband on his wrist, the faint curve of the enchanted mirror catching the flicker of firelight from a burning corpse-pile nearby. His thumb brushed against the glass, expecting the familiar cascade of prompts , notifications of cleared objectives, achievement tallies, the reward tables of experience and loot. But the mirror gave him nothing. Its silence was louder than any scream.
"Uh?" His voice cut through the dead air. "Still nothing. No confirmation. No objectives cleared. Nothing related to a player's achievements."
His frown deepened. With a thought, he summoned Assessment, the oldest of his tools. The arcane lattice unfolded across his vision, strings of text outlining his body, his essence, his power. There—something had changed.
Mana: 52,000.
Only hours ago, it had been 50,000. No fanfare. No rising chime. No system notification. The increase was there, but not in the way it should be. It hadn't been awarded to him, it had grown, like muscle torn and reformed in battle.
Daniel's grip tightened around his blade. A suspicion that had stalked him since Grisval stirred again, sharper now, undeniable. The Tower no longer treated him as a player. It was reshaping him, feeding his victories back into his essence without the trappings of the game. No numbers rolling, no arbitrary ceilings. His strength rose as though he were part of the Tower's body itself, a resident, not a visitor.
And if that was true, then the rules he once relied upon, the safety nets, the contracts, the divine restrictions, were dissolving beneath his feet. The gods who designed Arcane Crusade could watch, but they could no longer measure him.
Daniel let the mirror fall slack against his wrist. Around him, the Dead City of Dravensk groaned faintly, as if resenting its own silence. The last enemies still lingered, clinging to the dark corners like stubborn mold, but he no longer cared about cleaning every crack. The proof he sought had already revealed itself.
this was no longer a quest bound by player contracts. He was not merely walking the Tower's paths. He was being written into its script, woven into its lore with every cut, every strike.
Yet still, no announcement. No reward. No system message to confirm his triumph.
Daniel narrowed his eyes, whispering to himself, "Not a single announcement… but I still need to test this idea further."
With a thought, he cast open a transfer gate. Shadow split the air like black glass, and through it, the shapes of his familiars stirred. He called them, not as a player summoning units, but as a master commanding old allies.
"Vaelith," he said first, and the gate rippled as the great serpent-man stepped through, scales black as onyx and eyes gleaming with a predator's calm. Vaelith bowed low, the leader of the Black Legion.
"Nyxiel," Daniel intoned, and a rush of cold air answered. The horned owl-woman emerged, feathers silver-edged, eyes sharp with otherworldly light. Her wings flared wide before folding into the shape of a cloaked commander as she kneel with absolute loyalty .
"Kitsune," Daniel finished, and the gate shimmered with foxfire. A woman stepped forth, nine tails of flame and shadow curling behind her, each movement wrapped in allure and menace. She bowed with theatrical grace, a smile that could disarm kings playing on her lips. Behind her name lingered whispers of the Sapphire Lotus,
Daniel let his gaze settle on the three. Not their armies, just them. Just the leaders, the embodiments of his will.
"You are now in karion " he ordered, voice low but ironclad. " Merge into one, that i shall now call Vaenyx (blended from Vaelith + Nykiel + Kitsune), the Roaming Eternal Veil of the chaos Flame, release your power and decimate this city to ash as a await the outcome, If the Tower rejects your presence, if it dares to announce your entrance into a sanctioned quest, withdraw immediately. No armies. No battles. Just the three of you. Nothing more."
Vaenyx was not born, it was forged. Where once three beings had stood apart, now a singular abomination remained, bound together by obedience and fire. Its vulpine head carried the sleek cunning of a Kitsune, yet every blink betrayed the golden, unyielding predation of Nyxiel's owl-gaze, as though wisdom itself had been sharpened into a weapon.
Its body was a paradox in motion: fur and scale entwined, silver feathers drowned beneath patches of serpentine armor as if the creature's flesh could not decide which truth to wear. From its shoulders unfurled colossal wings, each beat of them stirring the air into storms of ash, talons glistening with an unnatural sheen. Behind it, nine serpent-tails writhed in perfect unison, each tipped with a venomous fang that dripped poison like molten jewels.
And yet, despite the horror stitched into its frame, Vaenyx was not grotesque. It was, impossibly beautiful. A creature unclaimed by any world, yet carrying in its form the essence of three, fused into something higher, stranger, and undeniable.
The six gods stood in silence, their immortal hearts rattled by what they had witnessed. Vaenyx should not have existed, not within the weave of creation they themselves had helped uphold, and yet it was, a thing of flame, obedience, and fused essence that defied every law of their dominion. Confusion curdled swiftly into anger. Light, who prided himself on illuminating all truths, found only shadows in this revelation, and the brightness within him flickered with doubt.
War clenched his gauntleted fists, furious that he faced an enemy he could not yet name, a battle whose beginning he had missed. Death felt unease gnawing through his perfect stillness, for he sensed no tether of mortality binding this creature, as if it had slipped his reach entirely. Knowledge rifled through the endless archives of memory and truth within his mind, but for the first time, no answer surfaced, only silence, raw and mocking.
Dreams trembled, his visions clouded, every future he cast dissolving into mist before he could touch it. And Time, oldest and most patient of them, felt the clockwork of eternity falter, a single missing beat that threatened to unravel all sequence.
Together, they turned their collective will toward the throne where the ancient primordial, Aether, slumbered. If anyone could unravel this riddle, it was the one who had set the first breath into the void. Yet the throne remained unmoving, its master bound in sleep older than suns. No whisper stirred, no gaze opened. And in that silence, the gods' fury deepened into something far more dangerous, fear. For if even Aether would not answer, then perhaps this abomination was not born of error, but of intent.
Daniel did not smile. The lack of a declaration from the Tower system was not triumph, it was revelation. The silence confirmed what he feared most: he was no longer a player outside its story. He was becoming one of its authors.
For a breath, silence pressed heavy, the flames of burning city of Dravensk crackling around them. Daniel's jaw tightened. This was more than a command, it was a test of the Tower itself. Would it recognize his familiars as intruders, as unauthorized pieces in a game bound by rules? Or would it remain silent, as it had with him, acknowledging in its silence that he was no longer bound to the same laws as the others?
The ruins of Dravensk crackled in the silence left behind. He stood still, waiting for the Tower's judgment. An announcement, a warning, some divine decree to mark his disobedience.
But the Tower said nothing.
"Vaenyx… you may proceed!"
At the command, the colossal hybrid took to the sky, its wings carving through the air with the power of storms. From above, it unleashed its combined magic in a single, devastating assault on the city of Dravensk. The blast was not as refined or concentrated as Daniel's plasma vortex, yet its force was unimaginable, fire and arcane energy roaring together, tearing through streets, smashing buildings into dust, and sending shards of charred stone hurtling like meteors. The shockwave rippled across the valleys and mountains for miles, a spectacle of destruction that lit the horizon in hellish red and gold.
Far below, the unified guild of 288 stirred within their camp. The night's lessons clung to them like chains, Mary Kaye's words sharper than any blade: unity was not optional; without it, they would die long before Dravensk's gates even challenged them. Now, as distant flames and ash spiraled into the sky, the gravity of their situation pressed down. Their march toward the Third City began in silence, every step heavy not from fatigue, but from reflection.
The twelve deaths at Grisval haunted them still. Shame and self-recrimination coiled in their chests like serpents. They realized, perhaps too late, that they had still been thinking as players: tallying loot, comparing stats, seeking shortcuts or safe zones that existed only in their memories of Earth, in the illusions of old patterns. The Tower punished all such illusions with merciless clarity. Here, weakness was devoured, greed punished, and certainty was a fool's death sentence.
As the road twisted upward and the mountains opened into distant ridges, the truth became undeniable: Daniel was no longer simply ahead in power. He was ahead in vision. Where they hesitated, calculating odds or dreaming of convenient outcomes, he had already chosen. His steps, his strikes, his very essence were aligned with the reality of this world, not its borrowed rules. He moved as a force of nature, a man whose understanding of life and death.
When the guild crested the final ridge, the sight of Dravensk stole their breath. Smoke and fire spiraled high into the clouds, the city's bones shattered, streets empty of life, yet still thrumming with menace. The Third City had already fallen, not by siege or attrition, but by the singular will of the one who led them. For a moment, awe tangled with silence reigned. The path to the city lay open, but the distance to the man who had conquered it seemed immeasurable. Daniel was no longer among them; he was something other, something that the guild could follow, but could never fully reach, not yet, and perhaps not ever.