Chapter 144: Raid Wipe

As soon as they landed, PD, located at the core node, saw the desperate scene before him.

This was the location of the throne, and the entire map presented an open, circular altar structure.

In the deepest part of the altar, a giant Demon God Pillar was coldly looking down at them, its body surrounded by a layer of translucent, pale golden shield with flowing runes.

Unlike any previous single-player main story, at the bottom of the screen, PD could not only see his own Servant bar, but also clearly see the Servant icons of the other three teammates, as well as the independent, non-interfering Cost bars for each person!

And on the map, the four blue-gate defensive lines guarded by the four players were mutually supportive, allowing players to conveniently and quickly conduct tactical coordination and cross-cover.

This sounded like it greatly enhanced the players' defensive capabilities, but given Oriole's malicious numerical balancing, he would never let this "1+1+1+1" team-up become a simple, effortless mowing down of enemies.

Since the system granted the four players the authority to fight on the same field and use crossfire, the cost—the number of monsters spawning, their attributes, and the length of their HP bars—was naturally scaled up to an astronomical figure that would drive people crazy!

Almost at the same instant they landed, a dozen abyssal rifts churning with chaotic black mud tore open in the void from all directions of the altar.

Accompanied by nauseating roars, dozens of demonic hounds burning with black flames and deformed cursed arms covered in sharp teeth, carrying terrifying HP bars so thick they looked black, rushed crazily towards the core position that PD and the other three were defending, like a black tidal wave that had broken a dam!

"Damn! Why is the pressure in this core area so high right from the start?! A monster wave with four times the HP?! Hurry, hurry, hurry, everyone watch your own intersections, put the Vanguard and Defender up to block the gates first! Clear the mobs!"

PD broke out in a cold sweat, hurriedly dragging the Servant icons to deploy them on the defensive line he was responsible for.

He and his three other "whale" teammates had originally been thinking only about how to deal nuclear explosion damage to the Boss, but now they were forced into a frantic state by this sudden multi-line monster wave, and could only barely plug the gaps where monsters were leaking by relying on each other's high-star Defenders for mutual support.

"Brothers, hold steady! These monsters are too tanky, clear this wave of mobs first, don't let them break our formation!"

"Once Team Four pulls down the Demon God Pillar's shield, and Team Three and Team Two get the buff skills out, we'll activate all our support skills and burst this damn pillar down together!" PD gripped the controller tightly, frantically issuing defensive orders while standing ready.

However, no sooner had he said "hold steady" than the team's built-in voice channel instantly turned into a horror movie set.

"Damn! Calling for backup! The monsters at this [Spirit Vein Tower] just can't be cleared! Why is that big shield guy so tanky?!"

"Damn! My Arash's self-destruction didn't kill the monsters! Leaked, leaked! A dog leaked through!"

Accompanied by the out-of-tune screams of the Team Five members.

PD discovered in horror that the Cost indicator at the bottom of his screen, which had originally been slowly ticking up, "snapped" and, along with the other three teammates' Cost bars, became stuck in a solid red locked state.

[Warning: Pseudo-Spirit Vein damaged, total team magic supply interrupted!]

"Don't panic! Deploy low-star Vanguards to recover cost!" PD roared anxiously.

"It's useless, Boss P! The poison HP drain is too fast!" The player from Team Four responsible for breaking the shield was almost crying over the voice chat.

"[Supply Pipe] is full of poison fog! My Luxas just deployed and was poisoned to death in less than ten seconds! Can't heal, just can't heal!"

"Team Two is the same! The [Foundation Anchor] has four times the HP, it's too thick, our damage is just tickling it, the time limit is almost up, not only can we not interrupt the ultimate move, we can't even apply that 20% vulnerability debuff!"

"Ah—! Flying insects came over and stunned my main DPS!"

The headset was filled with the mixed screams and breakdowns of his followers.

In less than a minute of combat, the perfect tactical layout that PD thought he had thoroughly studied was completely torn to shreds by the uneven operations of his followers under this extreme high-pressure mechanism of mutual constraint and zero tolerance for error.

One move affects the whole situation.

Without Team Four's shield breaking, without Team Three's board clearing and debuff removal, and without Team Two's 20% vulnerability.

The Demon God Pillar in front of PD still had that hateful invincibility shield hanging on it. Desperately, he unleashed the Noble Phantasm of his maxed-out Jeanne dArc Alter, only to have a long string of blinding [0]s float up on the screen.

And because Team Two failed to dismantle the anchor point within the allotted time to interrupt the casting.

The thousands of scarlet eyeballs on the central Demon God Pillar suddenly constricted.

The ultimate kill move's cast bar instantly filled up!

"Boom—!!!"

A dark red, full-screen destructive beam that incinerated everything swept across PD's position like a world-ending flood.

PD, along with his teammates and the maxed-out Servants on the field, were instantly reduced to ashes under this beam, like paper toys.

Following the annihilation of the central main team, the nodes where other players were located on the outer defensive lines also suffered consecutive destructive chain punishments, falling one after another like dominoes.

The screen suddenly went dark.

Blinding red text popped up:

[Mission Failed]

[Raid team annihilated.]

From entering the instance to the entire team of twenty dying completely, the whole process did not even take three minutes.

PD sat blankly in the VR gaming pod, motionless.

There was a deathly silence in the voice channel.

Those followers who had originally been clamoring to get the first kill were now completely silenced and depressed.

However, in sharp contrast to the deathly silent voice channel, the chat in PD's live stream exploded instantly:

"??? What happened? I just went to pour a glass of water, how did everyone get wiped?"

"First kill? I think it was being killed first! Three-minute light-speed feeding, Demon God Pillar is awesome!"

"Hahahaha! 'Money power' is a joke in front of Old Thief Kirito's chain-punishment mechanics!"

"Too real, brothers! Twenty people doing their own thing, Team Five leaks monsters and the whole team loses cost, Team Four dies and the Boss is invincible, one noob and the whole team ascends to heaven!"

"Despair! I just went to browse the forums, out of hundreds of thousands of raid teams across the server, not a single one has scratched off a single drop of HP, everyone just shatters upon contact!"

PD looked at the screen full of schadenfreude-filled but also despair-tinged chat, then glanced at the terrifying HP bar on the main map that was still at [30000000], and a deep sense of powerlessness welled up in his heart.

Until this moment, the tens of millions of players across the server, whether they were casuals or high-skill veterans, finally woke up in endless despair.

This was not a mowing-down event that could be soloed by one or two maxed-out veterans, nor was it an ordinary instance where you could just read a text guide and achieve perfect coordination.

Oriole used a brutal, chain-punishment mechanism where one move affects the whole situation to declare a bloody fact to all players:

This is, in the true sense, a nightmare-level epic raid that requires twenty people to work together, with no room for even a single mistake!

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