Chapter 44: First Blood of the Strange Tide

The whisper chime pulled Kael’s attention to the corner of his screen before he’d even finished reading the sender’s name.

TidalBlade: Still not interested in a proper team? Kael’s mouth twitched. So she hadn’t given up.

It tracked. In his old life, Alexis Kane had been the same the kind of person who treated "no" as a suggestion rather than an answer, right up until the day she’d carved her way to second-best blade on the entire server through sheer, stubborn repetition.

Nobody climbed that high on talent alone. You needed the refusal to quit built into your bones.

Which made what she was about to walk into somewhat unfortunate for her.

Melee classes, as a rule, had almost nothing to offer in a siege event like this one.

The terrain did all the talking walls to stand on, distance to burn through, arrows and spells raining down on anything dumb enough to charge in a straight line.

Archers and mages turned siege days into their own private highlight reel. Warriors mostly stood around holding aggro nobody asked them to hold.

Alexis knew Kael’s two heavy hitters were both melee. No matter how monstrous their stats, a wall of stone and forty feet of open ground erased most of that advantage.

So she’d built around it assembled a four-mage strike team, geared for nothing but raw magical output, and thrown in an invitation dressed up as a favor.

Let my mages carry your points for you. That was the pitch, more or less. Generous-sounding.

Except Kael had run this math before, in a different life, and he already knew how it ended.

he’d hand over control of his event standing to four strangers who’d quietly bleed his contribution dry the second nobody was watching the scoreboard too closely.

He wasn’t in the business of donating his own effort to somebody else’s leaderboard.

Kael: Appreciate the offer. I work alone.

TidalBlade Shame. A pause, then Guess we’ll just have to settle it the old-fashioned way see who ends this event with more points.

Kael read that twice, and something in his expression went strange enough that he was glad nobody could see his face through the headset.

You’re a swordswoman. I’m asking a legendary tank and a Beastlord kit built for exactly this kind of event to race you for points. The confidence was almost admirable. Almost.

Kael: A race needs stakes. Winner takes the loser’s event rewards. Deal?

TidalBlade: Deal. Don’t cry when you lose them.

The window closed. Alexis leaned back from her rig with the satisfied look of someone who’d just closed a negotiation instead of walked into a landmine, and called across the room without bothering to raise her voice much. "Elle. Get over here."

Frostbloom Elle, when she wasn’t logged in and playing top healer for half the server’s raiding scene wandered over already smirking, like she’d caught the tail end of the conversation through the wall. "Well? He take the bait?"

"No." Alexis shook her head, entirely too pleased with herself for someone reporting a failure. "But I bet him. Whoever scores less this event hands over every reward they earned."

"Rongrong." Elle only used the old nickname when she thought Alexis was about to do something spectacularly stupid.

"Please tell me you thought that through."

"I thought it through plenty. Buff me the second the horn sounds we’re taking this from the opening whistle."

Alexis rolled her shoulders, already loosening her wrists like the fight had started. "Let’s remind him exactly what this studio can do."

"Don’t get cocky just because you’ve got a hidden class backing you up," Elle said, dry as sand. "You’re betting against Unrivaled.

That’s not a rival guild leader you’re needling that’s the guy the entire server still hasn’t figured out how to counter."

"You’re supposed to be hyping me up, not talking me out of it." Elle didn’t dignify that with an answer beyond a look.

"Relax." Alexis waved a hand like she was swatting the doubt out of the air. "His two mains are melee.

Melee gets nothing out of a siege event you know that as well as I do.

Even with a fresh second advancement and whatever third pet he’s dragging around now, there’s no way he’s leveled anything fast enough to matter.

Four mages on burst rotation, plus you keeping every buff stacked and green this should be embarrassingly easy."

"I hope you’re right," Elle said, in the exact tone of someone who suspected she wasn’t.

Neither of them had long to find out.

Noon hit the server clock, and the plain beyond Highwatch Bastion answered it with a sound like the sky tearing.

The ground didn’t so much shake as convulse, one long shudder rolling out from some point past the horizon, and a curtain of red light came boiling up out of the earth to answer it not fire, not blood exactly, but something that pulled from both, rising in a sheet that unrolled itself skyward until it hung there, vast and silent, blotting out the horizon behind a wall of dull crimson.

Then the wall began to ripple.

It moved the way a pond’s surface moves under heavy rain, ring after ring spreading outward from a hundred different points at once.

And from each of those ripples something clawed its way through into the world hunched, reeking things wrapped in torn hide and exposed bone, eye sockets crowded with rot-slicked eyes that never quite sat still.

They came pouring out by the hundred, then the thousand, coalescing into a black-red tide that broke and surged toward the fortress walls with a sound like the world itself snarling.

Above the battlements, a translucent panel bloomed into view visible only to players, hanging in the sky like a second, colder sun.

[Strange Tide Event Current Wave: 1 / 10]

Point Rankings Unavailable (Tide has not yet breached the wall)

The things pouring across the plain didn’t wait for the ranking system to catch up.

Rotted hounds, bone showing white through torn muscle, fangs bared in permanent snarls Hollowfang Hounds, the floating tag read, level sixteen and unremarkable in isolation, terrifying in the sheer, suffocating numbers now grinding forward across the grass.

The archers on the wall opened up first, the ones stationed at maximum range loosing arrow after skill-wreathed arrow into the oncoming mass.

The volume alone was staggering a sound like hail hitting a tin roof, dense enough to blur into a single continuous roar, damage numbers blooming and vanishing across the horde faster than the eye could track them. It thinned the front ranks. It didn’t come close to stopping them.

Mages picked up where the arrows left off the moment the hounds crossed into range fireballs, ice lances, cracking stone, whipping blades of raw wind, an entire skyline of overlapping spellfire dropping onto the horde in overlapping waves.

Bodies collapsed by the dozen, mid-stride, health bars flatlining before their claws ever touched stone.

But for every ten that dropped, twenty more climbed over the corpses without slowing, driven by something that looked less like instinct and more like hunger. Claws found purchase in the fortress stone. They began to climb.

Melee players lined the walls with nothing to do but watch, weapons useless at this range, itching for a fight they weren’t built to reach.

A few edged toward the parapet like they were considering the jump anyway one look at the sheer, roiling mass below was usually enough to talk them back out of it.

Get caught in that tide without the stats to survive the landing, and there wouldn’t be enough left of you to loot.

Kael had no such hesitation.

Beside him, Void Behemoth threw its head back and let out a roar that cracked across the battlefield like a second thunderclap, shaking dust loose from the stone under their feet.

Then Kael put one hand on the parapet, and jumped.