Fortune, it seemed, had deigned to glance her way. A mini-boss. Even a lowly Tier 5 Swarm Leader was a prize that would set a dozen novice parties at each other's throats. In the early days of Arcane Throne, monsters were plentiful, but elites were diamonds in the rough. A 'Bunny King' could spark a server-wide brawl. For low-tier creatures, it was the elite variants that began dropping the good stuff—gems like the Eagle's Eye, which she'd used to such effect. Those were a tier above basic stat-boosting crystals, rarer, more valuable. But even a Tier 1 elite was guaranteed to drop somethingworthwhile. A foundation stone for future wealth.
Elation was a brief, bright flame, quickly banked by cold pragmatism. She assessed the terrain from her aerial perch. The maize field, half-harvested, stretched out like a ragged golden carpet. Adjacent to it, a stand of sugarcane rose in a dense, whispering wall, offering both cover and complication. A glance sufficed. She brought the skimmer down a prudent distance away—a hundred thousand copper notes of fragile machinery was not to be risked.
The dance began not with a charge, but with a taunt. She took the skimmer up again, not high, but fast, weaving just above the maize tassels. The Swarm Leader noticed immediately. A ripple of command passed through the chittering horde surrounding it. A thousand multi-faceted eyes locked onto the buzzing metal insect. The swarm condensed, a living net thrown to ensnare her. The Leader itself hung back, a jade-green dreadnought amidst its scurrying fleet.
Yao played the harried quarry, letting them chase, letting the formation tighten. As she flew, her left hand, hidden by the cockpit's rim, worked. Dozens of near-invisible Gossamer strands whispered from the Arachnid Ascension Ring, not aimed, but woven. They streamed behind and above the skimmer, tangling in the air, forming a vast, loose web suspended between the stalks below and the twilight sky above. It was a phantom snare, set in three dimensions.
With the swarm boiling at her tail, she put the skimmer into a steep dive towards a cleared patch of earth, hitting the auto-hover and landing runes. Before the craft had fully settled, she was out, hitting the ground in a rolling crouch five meters below. Dry maize leaves crunched under her boots.
Heat bloomed at her back. Instinct, honed by her ludicrous Agility, threw her sideways. A sphere of compressed flame the size of her head whooshedpast, detonating against a lone fence post and reducing it to splinters and slag. The Leader, seeing its prey vulnerable, had finally attacked. It hovered three meters up, mandibles clacking, abdomen already pulsing with the gathering energy for another fireball. The main swarm, momentarily confused by the skimmer's sudden stillness, reoriented and descended towards her like a gritty, buzzing rain.
Yao didn't fight. She ran. Thirteen meters into the standing maize, the stalks whipping against her arms. The drone of wings was a physical pressure on the back of her neck. Now.
A mental command. The vast, floating web of Gossamer, anchored to the ring on her finger, contracted. It didn't fall; it was yankeddown with tremendous force, a celestial fisherman hauling in a net. The pursuing swarm, hundreds strong, flew straight into it.
Chaos. The Gossamer strands, each stronger than steel wire, formed a grid with openings just slightly smaller than a Swarmer's body. They impacted, a horrific, fleshy smack-smack-smack, entangled instantly. Wings beat frantically against the unyielding filaments. Mandibles snipped uselessly. She'd tested it earlier; the Gossamer, a pinnacle Bronze-tier material, could withstand her own Emberburst. The feeble jaws of Tier 1 swarmlings were nothing.
The only threat was the Leader. Enraged, it belched another fireball, not at her, but at the net holding its minions. The sphere struck, and the magic-fed flames diddamage the strands. A section blackened, smoked, and several filaments snapped with pinging sounds like broken guitar strings. Its attack power was significantly higher. A Level 4 elite, at least. This complicated things.
She couldn't let it free the swarm. Her chant cut through the cacophony of insectile distress. Wind, Fire, Wood. The Triad. Arcane Missiles sheared through tangled bodies. Emberburst blossoms bloomed within the knotted mass, fed by the wind, clinging to chitin and Gossamer alike. The Forest Thorns she summoned didn't entangle—the net did that—but their wooden spikes provided more fuel, more surfaces for the fire to climb. It was a brutal, efficient slaughterhouse. The experience prompts became a constant, flickering stream at the edge of her vision.
Skreee-ee-ee!The Leader shrieked, a sound of pure fury. It stopped trying to burn the net and instead charged it, its heavier body and hardened carapace bursting through the weakened section. A few dozen surviving swarmlings escaped with it. The rest were charred husks.
It emerged smoking, its jade carapace darkened to a sooty emerald, but intact. It fixed its compound eyes on Yao and spat fire. She was already moving, a blur in the fading light, the fireball obliterating the space she'd occupied a heartbeat before. The maize stalks here were dry, and fire began to spread, adding a wall of heat and smoke to the battlefield.
The calculus was simple and grim. She was on foot. It could fly. She could dodge its attacks, barely, and return fire with Missiles, but it was a war of attrition she would lose. A monster's mana pool and regeneration, at equivalent level, always outstripped a human's. She drank a Lesser Spirit Tonic, the cool liquid a fleeting balm. The Missiles came slower, less frequent. She let her movements grow slightly more labored, let a fireball come closer than it should have, scorching the hem of her tunic.
She turned and fled, a genuine sprint deeper into the field. The Leader saw weakness, the chance to finish the exhausting, irritating pest. With a powerful beat of its wings, it accelerated, closing the gap with terrifying speed. Two-fold. Three-fold. It was upon her, looming from behind, the air growing hot and thick with the promise of a point-blank fireball.
Yao hit the dirt in a controlled roll, coming up on one knee. As she rolled, her hand shot out. A Gossamer strand, not part of the net, lanced from her ring and wrapped around the creature's bulbous, segmented abdomen. Now.Every ounce of her 311 points of Strength, the product of two awakened Gene-Sequence branches, went into a single, vicious yank.
The Leader, committed to its attack dive, was utterly unprepared. It was wrenched from the air with a sound of tearing atmosphere. Yao was already moving with it, a predator matched to her prey's fall. She landed astride its heaving back, the dagger from the small of her back flashing in the firelight. She drove it down, aiming for the vulnerable joint between the thick head carapace and the body—the neck.
Steel met chitin with a screech, bit in, drew forth a spurt of acrid, green hemolymph. Victory was a millimeter away.
A pulse of sickly light erupted from the creature's body, a desperate survival skill. The dagger's progress halted as if hitting stone. The Leader thrashed wildly, its shrieks reaching a deafening pitch. It beat its wings, not to fly, but to dislodge her, lifting both of them a few meters into the air in a chaotic spiral. Yao held on with one hand, the other still tangled in the Gossamer, a rancher on a berserk bull. She tried to pull the dagger free for another strike.
Four meters up, the world tilted. Her eyes, scanning instinctively, caught the patterns in the maize below. The stalks they'd crushed in their struggle lay in a haphazard circle. But other stalks were flattened too, in neat, deliberate lines leading from two directions: the treeline of the woods, and the wall of sugarcane. Paths. Recent paths.
Her blood went cold.
The thrumwas almost silent, swallowed by the insect's screams and the crackle of fire. The arrow that followed was not. It was a line of darkness against the darker sky, moving faster than the Leader's frenzied charge, faster than thought.
Yao threw herself sideways, a contortion that abused her spine. The arrow tore through the air where her heart had been, the fletching grazing her arm with enough force to rip fabric and scrape skin raw.
Ambush.
The realization was ice, then fire. The hunter had been waiting, patient as a stone. Her mask hid her snarl. Using the momentum of her dodge, she yanked herself forward along the Gossamer, back onto the Leader's neck. Her dagger found the same wet puncture, now slick with green blood, and she drove it home with all her weight and wrath.
Below, the hunter, a lean silhouette now visible at the edge of the cane field, nocked a second arrow. The air around it shimmered with a faint aura—a Wind-boosting cantrip. The string sang again.
Yao's dagger pierced the neural ganglion. The hunter's arrow, aimed with murderous precision, buried itself in the creature's soft underbelly an eyeblink later.
[Tier 5 Verdant-Brown Swarm Leader eliminated. Experience +3800.]
The creature gave a final, shuddering gurgle and died instantly, its magic snuffing out. Its body went limp, and gravity reclaimed it. Yao fell with it, a puppet with cut strings.
The hunter's face, sharp and grim in the twilight, showed no triumph, only cold focus. He hadn't received the kill notification. The prize was hers. His bow came up again, the third arrow already drawn. This one had no elemental augmentation; it was pure, refined killing intent, aimed for the center of her falling mass. The bowstring's release was the snap of a trap closing.
Yao had already moved. As the corpse fell, she'd sent a Gossamer strand whipping out, anchoring to a thick maize stalk. It pulled her sideways in a sickening arc, the hunter's arrow passing through empty space where her torso should have been. She hit the ground in a tangle of dry leaves, rolled, and vanished into the high stalks, dragging the heavy corpse of the Leader with her via the Gossamer tether.
Her fingers found the still-warm carapace. Loot.
A prompt flashed. [Tier 5 Verdant-Brown Swarm Leader Loot: Skill Tome – 'Verdant Locust Wing', Gem – Tier 1 Cloaking Stone.]
No green equipment. Disappointing, but the alternatives… Her heart skipped a beat. The Cloaking Stone was slapped against the Arachnid Ascension Ring almost before the thought finished. The gem melted into the metallic spider-form, and a wave of cool distortion washed over her. To the world, she winked out of sight. Simultaneously, she focused on the skill tome—Verdant Locust Wing. It was a wind-element single-target skill, infamous in the early game for its brutal speed and armor-piercing potential. A small treasure. Knowledge flooded her mind, complex formulae for compressing air into a scything, crescent projectile.
The invisibility would last a minute. She was a ghost now. A ghost with a new sting.
The hunter was coming. He knew her tricks, knew she was low on Spirit, knew she had the loot. He couldn't let her digest it. She heard him before she saw him, a swift rustle through the maize, far faster than any normal man. A soft chant—"Pacing Art: Gale-Step!"—and his form blurred, closing the distance with terrifying speed.
He'd pinpointed her last position. Through the stalks, he saw a shape, a darker patch against the shadows. He didn't hesitate. Draw, aim, loose. The arrow flew true, striking the shape with a soft thump.
It was her discarded outer tunic, draped over a stalk and weighted with a clod of earth.
His eyes widened. Decoy!
The attack came from behind and above. Not an arrow. A sliver of shimmering, compressed air, curved like a raptor's primary feather, humming with a sound that split the night. Verdant Locust Wing.
It struck him between the shoulder blades. His leather armor—not just leather, but enchanted, a true low-tier Green equipment)—flared with a defiant jade light. The spell's devastating cutting power met the gear's defensive wards in a shower of green sparks. The armor held, but the concussive force was like a mule's kick. It blasted the air from his lungs and sent him stumbling forward.
He was skilled. Instead of falling, he used the momentum, starting a tactical roll to regain his footing and distance. His hand went to his quiver for a close-range, broadhead arrow.
His boot caught on something. Not a root. Something thin, strong, and everywhere. Gossamer. Dozens of strands, laid at ankle-height during her flight, now formed a tripwire lattice across the ground. He'd been so focused on the aerial threat, he'd forgotten the spider's love for webs.
He went down hard, tangled. In that moment of vulnerable imbalance, she appeared. Not from where the Locust Wing had come, but from the shadows three meters to his left, her invisibility dissolving. Her chant, begun while he was still in the air, ended. Her hand swept out, a dismissing gesture.
A second Verdant Locust Wing, this one launched from point-blank range with the full, terrifying whip-crack acceleration her monstrous Agility provided. It wasn't a spell; it was a guillotine blade made of wind.
The hunter's head turned, his eyes meeting hers for a fraction of a second. He saw no triumph, only focused finality. There was no time for his Green armor to react, to protect a region it wasn't covering.
The shimmering crescent passed through his temple with a wet, crisp sound. The world, for Chen Lixing, ceased.
Silence, sudden and profound, fell over the maize field, broken only by the crackle of distant fires.
[Level 7 Arcanist Hunter – Chen Lixing eliminated. Experience +6000.]
[Experience threshold reached. Level 5 -> Level 6. All attributes +30.]
Yao stood over the cooling body, her breath coming in steady, controlled draws. The brutal economy of this world: a moment's lapse, a split-second advantage, and the hunter became the harvested. Her heart was a steady drum against her ribs, not with panic, but with the intense, clean focus of survival.
She did not bend to loot the corpse. Instead, her enhanced senses, the world in hyper-clarity, scanned the whispering stalks, the dark wall of sugarcane, the treeline. The fight had been loud, bright. It was a beacon.
She tilted her head, voice cutting through the stillness, calm and clear. "You've been watching long enough. Doesn't your neck ache? Or are you waiting for me to look down?"