[DING!]
[NEW MISSION AVAILABLE]
The system’s notification pulsed at the edge of my vision, insistent in the way it always was when it wanted my attention badly enough. I almost dismissed it.
[Save as many lives as possible within the city limits. Reward: God Rank Avatar Card.]
I didn’t have to read it twice. I’m all hype up.
"All S-Ranks, full deploynt. Protect the walls and don’t leave a single area exposed."
"Coordinate with Alexa on sector assignnts. Nobody moves alone!"
The control room erupted—chairs slid back, keyboards clattered, and everyone shouted orders at once.
My people knew the difference between a casual order and one that ant the situation had changed.
This was the latter.
I didn’t wait to watch them work. I was already moving toward the exit.
Shadow responded before I finished summoning her.
She ca from altitude, dropping fast, her silhouette cutting across the gray sky like a blade.
Thirty feet of her now—wingspan wide enough to throw a black shade over half the courtyard, scales catching what little light filtered through the cloud.
The people near the gate went quiet as she descended. A few stumbled backward. One man grabbed the arm of the person beside him without seeming to realize he’d done it.
The guards held their positions. They already got the mo.
She pulled up at the last mont and leveled beneath in a single areal maneuver .
I stepped off the ledge and landed on her back. Her wings flapped once, twice, and then settled into a steady beat.
"Sweetheart ." I leaned forward slightly. "Let’s go."
Her wings snapped back and drove down in one explosive stroke.
Zero to five hundred in under three seconds.
The mountain disappeared beneath us. The first periter wall blurred past. The open stretch of forest ca into view.
Military line was collapsing before we even reached it.
I saw it from altitude—advance cannons emptying into a horde that kept coming, bodies piling at the front doing nothing to slow what pushed from behind.
"Cast Azure Inferno." I commanded.
Her jaws opened and blue fire poured out in a torrent so wide it swallowed the entire intersection in one pass.
Continuous and absolute, sweeping left to right as she banked hard and let it drag across three blocks simultaneously. The ash hadn’t finished falling before the next rank of the horde was already gone.
Thousands dead in seconds.
I found myself feeling proud without realizing it.
She’d grown. Fast. Faster than my projections had accounted for and it showed in the temperature, the volu, the sheer reach of what ca out of her now compared back then.
"I’m not done yet, Father."
Purple light crawled up the mbrane of her wings before I could respond—branching fast, racing along every joint and ridge.
The air pressure dropped hard enough that my ears registered it. The soldiers below hit the ground on instinct, hands over their heads, no idea if what was above them was helping or killing them.
Her wings snapped wide.
Purple lightning exploded in a continuous cascading storm, chaining block to block, finding every cluster, threading through broken streets and into buildings still packed with the horde.
The sound rolled through the city like the sky splitting.
She leveled out, still humming with charge, bond telling clearly she had barely touched her reserves.
"Don’t get reckless," I said.
"I was being efficient," she replied, without a shred of guilt.
Below, a colonel standing on the roof of an armored vehicle had his radio in his hand and wasn’t using it. Soone on the other end was asking for a report. He was still looking up.
He finally rembered his radio when Shadow’s wings folded and I dropped to the roof of his vehicle.
Quickly, he took one step back before he composed himself.
To his credit, that was all he gave . Career military. The kind that had seen enough that his instincts ran faster than his fear.
"You’re—" He stopped. Started again. "Ace rcer. The guild leader of DEGEN GUILD!"
"The one and only." I laughed lightly, trying to put him at ease.
"I’m here to save the city." I nodded toward Shadow. "She’s mine. She won’t touch your people."
He looked at her. She looked back at him with one massive golden eye, a thin ribbon of blue smoke curling lazily from the corner of her jaw.
The colonel was quiet for exactly two seconds.
Then his professionalism caught up with him and he raised the radio.
"Command, hold all fire clearance on the northern and eastern sectors. Friendly asset on site. Degen Guild. Yes—" a pause, soone on the other end clearly reacting, "—I said Degen Guild. Designate priority support and clear the channel. He has a powerful flying black beast with him that can save us."
"Colonel Jung." He extended a hand and I took it. Firm grip. No theatrics. "I won’t pretend I understand what I just watched, Mr. rcer. But I’m not in a position to complain about it."
"Good. What’s your worst sector?"
He pointed west without hesitation. "We received reports that multiple monster was there."
"West, huh?"
That ant the tower we cleared never released any bosses.
Good thing my team took down several other tower floors over the past months.
That choice paid off. Fewer bosses broke free because of it.
Shadow lowered her head beside , her eye level with the rooftop, pupils narrowing as she read the skyline.
She already knew the location.
"We’ll take the west," I told Jung. "Don’t send anyone else. We’re more than enough."
I stepped off the vehicle and caught Shadow’s neck, pulling myself up as her wings spread and threw a shade across the entire block below.
Her wings drove down hard and we punched into the sky, banking west into the thickest smoke.
We slled the west sector before we saw it.
Burning concrete. Scorched tal. Sothing organic underneath that I didn’t want to think too hard about.
Shadow broke through the smoke wall and the street opened up beneath us.
Two of them were imdiately visible, and size was the first thing that registered.
The first stood easily two stories—a grey orc built like a siege engine, iron mace dragging a furrow through the asphalt with every step, the head of it the size of a compact car.
Each footfall cracked the road beneath it.
The second moved faster despite matching the first in height, green-skinned, wide shoulders rolling as it swung two axes in looping arcs that kept everything within twenty feet permanently airborne or retreating.
Then I saw the third.
Three stories. Black-skinned, the color of sothing that had never seen light.
The axe it carried wasn’t a weapon so much as it was a statent—a single blade wide enough to split a building lengthwise. It moved slower than the other two but with the kind of unhurried certainty that ca from knowing nothing in the imdiate area could actually hurt it.
I looked at them for a mont.
Honestly? I’d seen worse.
"Father." Shadow’s tone carried a question she wasn’t quite asking.
"Hold."
Sothing moving at street level had caught my eye.
A single figure, weaving between the grey orc’s mace strikes with footwork that shouldn’t have been possible given the speed and weight behind each swing.
Dodging the green one’s axe on the back half of the sa movent, using the montum of her own teleportation to reposition instead of wasting it.
Then adjusting again for the third, always keeping tabs on her side, always making sure no two of them had a clean angle on her simultaneously.
I knew that fighting style all too well.
"Hai-Yen."
Shadow descended without being asked, dropping low enough that the wind off her wings scattered debris across the street below.
Hai-Yen’s head snapped up mid-dodge, eyes finding the dragon first—a flicker of raw shock crossing her face before her focus snapped back to the grey orc’s backswing.
She ducked it by four inches. Didn’t flinch.
I leaned over Shadow’s neck.
"Do you need help?"
She threw a glance up at .
"I have it under control," she said, and then imdiately had to teleport as the black orc’s axe ca down and turned six feet of asphalt into a crater.
She ca out a few ters away. Already repositioning.
I watched her for another minute.
She genuinely did have it under control. Not comfortably—she was working hard, reading all three simultaneously, spending every ounce of her instincts just to stay ahead . But she was staying ahead of it.
That was the thing about Hai-Yen. Raw talent so deep it looked like cheating when you watched it up close.
Alexa had gotten where she was through my help—cultivation, magic , and so on.
Hai-Yen didn’t have that advantaged yet.
However, she was actually far stronger now than when we fought before.
No wonder the system insisted that I make her fall for .
If she trained alongside Alexa, she would rank third. Only Shadow and I would stand above her. The gap between her and fourth place would also be huge.
"Are you really just going to watch?" she shouted, breathing hard.
"But you said you could handle it," I shrugged.
"I didn’t an that!" she shot back.
Won—always expecting n to read their minds.
"Let handle this, sweetheart ," I said, leaping off Shadow.
Hai-Yen panicked instantly. "What are you doing? Let your beast fight!"
I kept walking, ignoring her warning, my eyes locked on the black orc.
It raised its massive broad axe, and swung it down.
BOOOOOM!
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