Chapter 98: On Time

Nick tore through the forest with his eyes fixed on the map, following the last position he had for Jaxir until the marker stopped moving beneath his feet. He slowed when he reached the small patch of forest where Jaxir had apparently been standing less than an hour ago, then looked around at the trees, roots and disturbed dirt with one eye beginning to twitch.

There was no cliff nearby, no teleportation formation hidden between the trees, and no obvious transportation method waiting for him to discover. Nick stood there for several seconds searching for something he must have missed before finally letting out a long breath and opening the forums.

"You’ve got to be kidding me..."

**

Night had already swallowed Sparkle Village by the time Marti reached it, but the flames consuming several buildings made the darkness around the walls glow orange. Smoke rolled above the rooftops and blurred the moon overhead, while dozens of players crowded the roads outside the village discussing what had happened, but Marti barely heard any of them as the color slowly drained from his face.

He had made it to Sparkle Village, just nowhere near soon enough.

Marti’s knees struck the ground before he realized he had stopped standing, and he stared through the gates at the burning village with his hands hanging uselessly at his sides. Sinha had given him a single job after everything that had already happened: get to the final village before Jaxir, prepare for his arrival, and don’t fail again.

He had failed again.

"It’s over..."

He had no idea how Jaxir had crossed the distance this quickly, but the answer didn’t matter enough for Marti to care anymore. The forums had already exploded, and unlike the rumors surrounding the first 2 Village Heads, nobody could question what had happened this time because someone had recorded almost the entire fight.

Marti opened the forums with numb fingers and found the same image waiting for him in nearly every section. Jaxir hung above Sparkle Village with enormous sapphire and emerald wings spread behind him, his staff angled toward the ground while a beam of silvery-blue mana burned through everything beneath it.

6:22.

The number appeared on preview after preview until Marti started seeing it before he even focused on the screen. Someone had uploaded the original recording, then other players clipped it, slowed it down, added commentary or simply reposted the same footage while hoping their version would be the one that spread the farthest, and every copy already had thousands of views.

The timer always ended in the same place as though they were playing a joke on him.

6 minutes and 22 seconds.

The Sparkle Village Head had spent most of the battle trapped on the ground roaring up at Jaxir, unable to close the roughly 20-meter gap between them. Every time he tried to gather enough mana to do anything more than rely on his raw physical strength, another silver-blue attack came down, and he would do devastating damage to himself.

Then came the beam.

Marti watched it tear across the battlefield once more before finally closing the video, his stomach twisting enough that another replay sounded unbearable. Jaxir was long gone, whatever rewards the Village Head had dropped were gone with him, and Marti had somehow managed to arrive late to the exact place he’d been ordered to reach first.

There was no explanation he could give his father that would fix this, and there was definitely nothing he could tell Sinha that would make another failure acceptable. For most of Marti’s life, money had kept real consequences far enough away that he had never seriously considered what would happen if that protection disappeared, but now he could almost feel everything his father had built beginning to crack around him.

He hadn’t only ruined his own position. He had dragged his father’s company into something neither of them had understood, failed the people who had given him a chance to correct it, and somehow managed to make the situation worse for everyone involved. Marti lowered his head while the fires continued burning beyond the walls, unable to think of anything left for him to do.

**

The recording reached its final second, froze on Jaxir hanging above a ruined section of Sparkle Village, then immediately looped back to the beginning. Rin watched the first few seconds again without blinking, Kaina sat across the table with both arms folded, and Lieutenant Doren stood beside the projection with enough heat rolling from his body to make the air around him shimmer.

The silver-blue beam appeared again.

Rin’s eyes narrowed. "That staff has to be an Ultra item."

Nobody answered her because nobody needed to.

The difference between equipment Grades became heavier the farther someone climbed, and Epic treasures were already rare enough to completely change what a player could accomplish. There were Epic items that entire groups built strategies around, protected for years or killed to possess, while Ultra sat another level beyond even that.

Kaina’s attention shifted from the staff to the sapphire and emerald wings behind Jaxir. "Are those the reason he got there so fast?"

It sounded like a question, but she’d already found the answer in the database before this meeting even started. The Sapphire-Emerald Glider Wings were a Level-10 Epic item considered useful but not extraordinary enough for major guilds or factions to organize around, mostly because their best performance depended on reaching heights that most Level-10 players had no reliable way to reach.

"The minimum activation isn’t anything special," Kaina continued, still watching Jaxir hang in the air. "The problem is what happens once you reach the upper scaling, and most people at this level can’t launch themselves 160 meters into the sky over and over again."

Rin’s mouth tightened. "He apparently can."

They had the timestamps now, which made arguing against that conclusion pointless. They knew when Auren died, when the first reports spread out of Twinkle Village and when the Sparkle Village Head fell, so they also knew Jaxir had crossed a distance that should’ve taken hours in less than 1.

Kaina leaned forward as the wings opened again on the looping projection. "There’s no way we can catch him if he has a method like this. Based on the time it took him to get from Twinkle to Sparkle, he has a reliable way of reaching 160 meters whenever he wants, and there’s no way to corner someone who can travel like that."

Lieutenant Doren’s fist slammed into the table hard enough to crack the wood beneath it, while flames sputtered across the surface before shrinking away. He stared at the image of Jaxir floating above the Village Head with his staff raised, and the fire around his mouth brightened as his expression twisted.

"He’s fucking taunting us."

Neither woman bothered correcting him, and a second later the video reached its end and started all over again.

**

Moonlight slipped between a pair of curtains and stretched across a quiet bedroom floor, while the faint sound of light snoring filled the room beneath the slow rise and fall of a blanket. Nothing else moved, and the person responsible for one of the most talked-about events in Divinity that night had apparently decided none of it was important enough to interfere with his sleep schedule.

Outside that room, phones buzzed, forums refreshed and players argued over Jaxir Chance faster than new posts could be written. His name sat beside videos, theories and increasingly ridiculous explanations for how 1 Level-7 player had killed another Level-20 Named Boss in 6 minutes and 22 seconds.

Well, they were wrong, because after another tidy +20,000 Experience, he was now a Level 8.

Jaxir didn’t see any of it, though. While the world of Divinity was losing its mind over Jaxir Chance, he had gotten to bed on time.