Gore from the fresh screams of yet another paladin perishing despite their best efforts spattered across Yuki’s face as she screamed with the glory of her very first ascension and what a breathless Richard assured her would normally be the beginning of Core Compression if she was prudent and wanted the best possible Bronze ascension… but that wasn’t the case for her. She was ALREADY filled with the highest possible grade of Qi, having been forged into pristine perfection, forged in the crucible of battle, her Middle Dantian already infused with the pristine potency of all her Bronze-Tier kills.

  Which would save her YEARS of careful cultivation, Qi Purification, and for most cultivators, Lower Dantian compression.

  Years, when they had absolutely no time at all.

  As evidenced by the screeching sound of metal shredding chalkboards and Wyrmwood’s pained cry as blood trickled from his ears even as he struggled to direct his massive floating force globe away from the monstrous swarm. Yuki shared a despairing look that took in both Richard and a catatonic Marsha and a still upright Jack, one of the very few whose wand now blazed with a superluminal intensity similar, yet so different from Richard’s own.

  “You look fucking incredible, Yuki,” Jack wheezed with an awed smile, before glaring down at the blood bubbling from his tourniqueted ankle.

  Yuki swallowed the pained lump in her throat, shivering with an odd intensity as she understood in that moment the step she’d have to take even as Richard’s eyes widened with sudden alarm, instantly understanding the message now blinking in front of her inner eye.

  As if Evelyn Death herself had taken note of the tens of thousands of monsters swarming all around them… peering through her newly-forged disciple’s eyes…

  And she had just offered Yuki the last choice she would ever have to make.

  “No, you don’t have to take that option! At your power level, it will destroy you!”

  “But I’ll live long enough to take out a fuck ton of bugs, and Wyrmwood’s about to collapse.”

  Richard paled, unable to deny it, yet he still shook his head in desperate denial. “No. Grandmother wouldn’t… there has to be another way!”

  Yuki’s eyes widened, flashing Richard a sad smile. “I… just got a message. My… patron? Has just formed a gate right outside New Arcadia City. It will port us all out of here. Us… and Elonia too.”

  She paled. “Elonia’s Doomtwister is now three Doomtwisters. All of them are sucking up the fastest flying scouts like massive hoovers and launching them back into the Black-Tier zone. She’s fucking brilliant, and it’s just a holding action and it’s all that’s keeping the bugs from swarming the entire nation. And she’s just a few minutes away from collapsing. So her Paladins… they’re heading their now.”

  Richard shivered, even as Yuki moved so fast it was a blur, thanks to 600 Quickness, decapitating one, two, three locusts before they could push through.

  “But that means we’ve lost!” Richard said with a sob. “Our world… our ascension. We’ll no longer be ascending at..”

  “One hundred times normal speed. I know. We’ll just be learning ten times as fast as anyone not born to an ascending… doomed world, the minute we leave and train anywhere else. Eric explained it to me once.”

  This earned a confused blink. “Wait, I thought you said you didn’t remember… oh.”

  Yuki nodded, still humbled by what her shockingly powerful patron had seen fit to share. “She’s opening the portal to the entire city. Hopefully, at least a few thousand, maybe a hundred thousand Elves and native-born humans will be able to flee Earth before it’s too late.” She clenched her jaw, glaring at Richard. “I’m staying behind. To hold off the swarm for as long as I can, so as many can flee as possible. You’re going through the gate the second we get there.”

  “Yuki…”

  Yuki glared in between obliterating locusts with her whirling blade of death. “Not up for fucking discussion, Rich. And you damn well know why.”

  He paled, then lowered his head. “I’d like to think that that isn’t what—”

  “Fuck you, Richard. She’s the only reason why you ascended so hard and fast...and god knows the same goes for me.” She flashed a pained smile. “I touched the peak. I now know a grace and power no mortal could have ever dreamed of. What pre-litRPG fantasy would have painted as the power of the gods. Even if you and I know it’s just the first rung, that the heights of Bronze and Silver are where its at… fuck it. I’m already as strong as what, a mid-tier standard Bronze? Maybe?”

  Rich flashed a pained smile. “Low-tier. But you’re definitely badass, and the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

  Yuki flushed, choking back a sob. “You’re timing is fucking shit.”

  “I know,” he said, whipping about his mithril polearm to bash in the head of a chittering locust about to chomp off the screaming head of a terrified Senren. The panicked blue-haired girl was a complete wreck. The farthest thing from the sleek, sophisticated girl she had seemed just an hour ago, hair covered in blood and sweat as she desperately lifted a pair of bandaged stumps to ward off awful mandibles, having somehow managed to lose both her forearms. Horrifically, she wasn’t the only one. The paladins had just enough reserves left for instant cauterizations and stabilization of chomped on students, even if they had neither the time nor reserves for any kind of healing magic equivalent to full restoration.

  “So get the fuck ready, and keep these fuckers off our headmaster until we get there!” Yuki roared, bluster to replace her fluster, channeling her bitter dismay as she glared hot and fierce at the death that would eventually claim her, CLEAVING and CRUSHING and EVISCERATING one bug after another as she felt herself break through to Bronze. Unable to choke back the scream as she visibly started to glow, ascending at what she already knew had to be a shockingly fast rate as she slammed 25 points into each of her key stats save for 50 in Quickness. The only stats populating on her Character sheet right now… the only ones that mattered. And it was exactly how she’d set it up for every Bronze-Tier level she actually ascended in what could well be the last night of her life. Absolutely absurd progression even for a System assisted Legendary-Tier hybrid class on an ascending world that was about to erupt.

  Her golden ticket to keep a golden boy in one piece, even if she would be going out in a blaze of glory… she sure as fuck was going to go out in a blaze of glory!

  “Hurry the fuck up, Wyrmwood! You got the coordinates! Go! Go! Go!”

  Jack cursed in dismay as the headmaster glared with bloody orbs Yuki’s way, flashing a Silver tier killing aura, even if exhausted… before revealing a bloody smile. “Well done, child. Your choice of allies and destinies is unparalleled.”

  Yuki snorted. “Sure, old man. You can raise a flagon in my honor when I fall, and I damn will be drinking it up in Sovereign-guard. But for now, we FIGHT!”

  Richard’s eyes twinkled with mirth, his pearlescent smile achingly beautiful even with his face spattered with gore. “I fucking loved that game! Ruling that hall as a divine Titan Born—”

  Yuki snorted. “Hold that thought, Richard. I just ascended to Rank 3 Bronze. Which means that I now have a Pristine fucking Mid Dantian core to ignite and a final battle to prepare for.”

  “No, Yuki. You can’t!”

  Her exhausted smile turned hard and cold. Surprisingly, the boy before her flinched. “Yuki…”

  “There is no time! The mantises are swarming! We’ll be lucky if we make it back in time to save anyone! But damn if I’ll let my world fall without giving every dreamer who actually made it to New Arcadia a chance at life! In a world your grandmother somehow got us all golden ticket to. And don’t blanch, Richard. It doesn’t matter that I know. I’m a dead girl walking by your side, which is the only reason why she’s even interested in me! So let me do my fucking job! Because I won’t stand helplessly by while my world falls. I’ll bring down every last one of those fucking abominations before I explode and take out their fucking queen!”

  Her blazing eyes met the solemn regard of the boy before her. And why the fuck had she never ran into him before? He looked so familiar… somehow.

  Richard opened his mouth to speak, before his eye widened in sudden alarm matching what Yuki felt, the very air vibrating with a monstrous killing aura rapidly approaching.

  She lurched back, eyes wide with dismay.

  “Dragon!” A wild-eyed Senren screamed, looking so horrified in a trembling pool of sweat, puke, dismembered limbs and terror that Yuki sensed her desperate desire to jump right off the disk and end it all. Instead, she barked helpless laughter. “A dragon’s aimed right for us because our foes won’t stop at anything to see us…”

  Yuki held up a clenched fist, silencing the terrified girl as the air vibrated with an odd hum, feeling so sharply a sudden change in arcane density? Mana pressure?

  Heart pounding with what was either terror or hope, she gazed upward through the translucent dome, gazing up at blazing white comet rapidly approaching right for them.

  Her eyes widened, ears ringing with the inevitability of her own death as she prepared herself for what must be done when a powerful hand grabbed her wrist.

  “Wait.”

  “Richard! Fresh bugs are about to pierce Wyrmwood’s—”

  “Wait! Can’t you feel it?”

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  She blinked, caught off guard by Richard’s strange expression.

  “Rich?”

  “The story. The twisted fate were trapped in.” His eyes widened with awe. “Some dares to contend with the author of our doom.”

  “Who?”

  “His son.”

  “Richard, what the fuck are you—”

  Yuki lurched back with a cry as the entire sky seemed to explode with a supernova of brilliant blue light.

  The air screamed with high pitched silence, long seconds before a shockwave of sound battered Headmaster Wyrmwood’s globe and send it lurching back as a gigantic fiery phoenix seemed to light up the sky.

  Blazing through the massive swarm of vile locusts like the fiery rays of the morning sun burning away a chilly morning fog.

  Then she rubbed her watering eyes, getting a closer look at the titanic battle now playing up in the skies.

  It wasn’t a fiery phoenix, spreading its wings, no. It was… thousands of ancient bronze-covered spearmen, their armor flashing in the light of the setting sun, running through the air like men charging down a steep steep hill in a shallow V formation that blasted right through the swarm of buzzing bugs at such shocking speeds that Yuki was pretty sure the fuckers had actually managed to break the sound barrier as the air rang with hundreds upon thousands of obliterated locusts falling to the ground like a rain of shrapnel and gore.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  Yuki had no answer as the shimmering bronze formation that DID look like what she imagined a giant phoenix spreading its wings as it soared through a cloud of locusts might look like. Then the formation tore right past their bobbing force globe as it streaked through the air, beginning a much slower ascent as it gained altitude once more as the entire mile-long cloud of furious locusts was stunned by the explosive force of the blazing sentinel that had just torn through them all.

  And that was when she heard it, the words that echoed endlessly across the locust-infested plains.

  “Surge Centuria! Imperator Imperat Tibi!”

  She shivered, feeling unwelcome tendrils of… something, skitter across her skin, though utterly unable to penetrate her Qi saturated body.

  For most of the purple eyed foreign exchange students, it was worse. Several once perfectly coiffed youths now covered in gore and missing limbs, trembled and shook, blinking away crimson tears from purple and violet hued eyes.

  “Forbidden arts are being channeled!” Senren sobbed. “This awful night won’t end!”

  “Wait, it’s not so simple! Look!” whispered an awed Jack of all people. Even his near human perception, though Yuki sensed that he too had undergone a most unexpected and miraculous transformation… even he could see the hundreds of fresh Bronze spearmen bursting from the desiccated carnage of shattered carapaces below, furiously thrusting at any locust that approached as they sprinted forward in phalanx formation… running through the air at an incline, chasing after the already vanished winged formation that had brought them all at least a few second’s time.

  Yuki clenched her fist in sudden desperate hope.

  The locusts were distracted. Pressure was suddenly off Wyrmwood.

  Now was the time to retreat to New Arcadia city.

  She turned to look the headmaster’s way, stunned by the fiery look in the man’s eyes.

  Fierce. Resolved.

  Filled with sudden hope as his voice roared, Yuki’s ears now ringing as the man’s words echoed across the battlefied.

  “Hold the spell formations, My Queen! Retreat no further! Let no foe past your perimeter!”

  Yuki blinked, confused. “Headmaster…”

  Her words were cut off by that awful sense of pressure again. A dizzying feeling as she looked up, seeing that massive glittering armada of ancient spearmen once more. Once again racing down through the clouds at an incline and pace that Yuki thought absolute glorious madness, now recognizing that awful pressure as a scream through the spiritual ether itself.

  Supersonic words washing over them all. Words she could now make out.

  “Charge of the Light Brigade! You’re going DOWN, MOTHERFUCKERS!”

  Yuki opened her mouth, though she had no idea what to think or say as the air flashed and exploded with a shockwave of light and sound as the entire formation tore through the air. Followed by a thunderous roar of a thousand carapaces pierced, crushed, and shattered in a glorious explosion of gore as the air rained with death and destruction once more.

  Jack swallowed in disbelief. “Yuki. People are out there! They’re charging into the swarm directly! Outside any silvery ward!”

  “I know.”

  “How? My ears are popping, even with Wyrmwood’s barrier protecting us from the shock waves. Those fuckers are slamming into the bugs like supersonic jets! Supersonic fucking bullets! Living artillery! How?”

  “No fucking idea.”

  She turned to Rich, blinking before the fiery hope she saw in his gaze. A hope she refused to let into her furious resolve, even now.

  “There’s no way any idiot, even a fucking hero and his chosen champions, is going to make a dent in a hundred thousand bugs when the swarm keeps growing!”

  Yet still, Rich dared to smile. “Just hold off on igniting your beautiful, perfect core. Okay, Yuki? Just help me fend off whatever bugs are still focused on our globe… and we’ll see what happens.”

  Yuki’s eyes flashed with what was either wonder or disbelief, her naginata lashing out to decapitate a fresh mantis trying to slip through the barrier behind her. “It’s thick locusts so fucking fierce I could only sense those wild fuckers with my Qi Sight! And since when did I have Qi Sight?”

  “Since your class evolved, of course.”

  “How the fuck are they even alive, Richard?”

  “I don’t know, Yuki. How are we alive?”

  “We’re insane classers… Contenders, now! Who got gifts so sweet that we better be honoring your ancestors all our days.”

  Richard actually laughed at that. “So that answers your question, doesn’t it?”

  “A thousand Contenders managed to get here in time?”

  Richard smirked and shook his head.

  Yuki gasped, eyes widening as she sensed the threat behind him, only for Rich to whip around, tearing through the locust with an effortless twist and flash of his mithril poleaxe in the middle of the gore-slicked battleground that the disk had become. Head and thorax both cartwheeled out the far side of the force dome that happily ejected the corpse, even if spattering a fair amount of viscera upon the captive audience of twenty exhausted students and one grimly smiling headmaster, all of whom were gazing upon the pair of heroes with either dismay or awe.

  “No, Yuki. Not a thousand. Just one.”

  “How the fuck do you figure…”

  “Surge Centuria! Rise, Motherfuckers!”

  Yuki paled. “Fuck. That’s necromancy! And look below at all those soldiers rising from the ground, spear-point first like in those Greek tales…”

  “Yup. Whoever’s out there is raising the dead.”

  “Blasphemy!” Hissed Senren reflexively, before her cheeks flushed at the odd looks the others gave her.

  “Chill, girl,” Jack snapped. “Who the fuck cares? Those locusts are able to feed off our own world and multiply. So who better to counter than a Necromancer who can raise our own enemies to kill more of our enemies?”

  “But even the most powerful Necromancers have limits,” said a tired-looking youth with ancient purple eyes in a young man’s face, his wand also glittering with a blue fire making it clear that he too had savored perilous revelations, much like Jack had.

  Rich actually winked. “That limitation doesn’t apply to the strongest Necromancers on a newly forged world.”

  The youth blanched, then laughed, bitter and long. “And that’s why the Counsel wants his head. For there’s only one person that could possibly be.”

  Rich nodded, in clear agreement as they were all jolted in their globe once more as the air shrieked and exploded with a massive pressure wave yet again, and now they were all privvy to the odd sound of a rain of shattered bugs washing over their own globe before bouncing off and tumbling to the ground below.

  Senren’s eyes widened with amazement. “The cloud of swarming death is thinning… a little… I can actually feel the light of the sun!” She sobbed, tortured face easing with a relieved smile. “I can die with the light of the heavens upon my brow, as should be all our fates, in the end.”

  “Let’s not count ourselves out just yet, beautiful!” Jack quipped.

  The girl’s eyes widened, as if caught between outrage at Jack’s daring… and grateful that he would care enough to bother with a mangled girl enduring their final shared hour, but all she said was… “There are countless devouring locusts. There’s no way anyone can hold off—”

  “Surge Centuria! Imperator Imperat Tibi!”

  The words echoed endlessly through their floating force bubble, and Yuki couldn’t help noting that every last purple-eyed member of their party, offworlders with powerful heritages, looked sickened by the words. More than a few were actually shuddering in groaning heaps, leaking blood from both eyes and ears, until the surviving Paladin’s gentle hymn eased their discomfort away.

  Yet the dispassionate-eyed youth with the countenance of a lord dipped his head in odd approval. “He strengthens. Even in the midst of ultimate chaos… the strength of his dark magics grows.”

  Yuki frowned before blinking in wonder, realizing the alien classer was absolutely right as a hoard of bronze spearmen considerably more massive than the former clusters seemed to burst from the thick sea of locusts that were now absolutely covering the ground, rolling over everything like a wave. Even as a handful of spearmen were buried and consumed… thousands successfully tore free and took to the air once more.

  Yet that instant, wonder turned to dismay.

  Because even if their unexpected savior had managed to blaze through the swarm thrice without perishing himself… the temporarily broken cloud of locusts did naught but give all of the survivors lacking anything like Qi Perception a clear view of the absolute flood of locusts washing over the ground like a flooding sea.

  “The cloud of bugs was just the tip of the iceberg!” Jack screamed, eyes wild with furious dismay. “There’s no way we could win. We were screwed from the very start. Earth is fucked, no matter how hard we fight! The bugs are going to devour all of New Arcadia and fucking grow like mad! Everything we did to better our world, our enemies are using to destroy it!”

  This earned a bitter snort from the noble youth who had spoken before. “Welcome to galactic politics, boy. We’ve got dooming newly ascending worlds down to an art.” He flashed a bleak smile. “No matter how much a growing number of us .wish things could be different, stupid enough to chase dreams of reawakened legends… we were fools to come here. Fools not to realize that a world this filled with fortuitous encounters and prizes would be one that the greater houses would stop at nothing to destroy!”

  “Well whichever house dared fuck with Earth, they’re going to pay!” Yuki snapped, fists trembling as she gripped the hilt of her naginata. “Whoever they are, I’ll see them dead, if it’s the last thing I do!”

  Strangely, the noble-born youth didn’t look offended. He actually cracked an approving smile, dipping his head. “And my House shall join your own… all our Houses will join your own, and together we will show the perpetrators the price to be paid for daring to taint the paradise that our clans were promised!”

  Yuki nodded. It might not be perfect, but she would take whatever help she could get. Assuming they survived long enough to hunt down the perpetrators at all.