Logan turned the blade over once in his hand, testing its weight before he’d even absorbed anything.
’This alone would already be a solid upgrade. Let’s see what it actually does once it’s part of Grimlord’s Blade properly.’
He fed it straight into one of Grimlord’s Blade’s open absorb slots, and the two weapons folded into each other in a rush of dark light.
```
[ Grimlord’s Blade ]
-> Grimlord’s Blade is your class weapon. It can absorb any other weapon to permanently adopt its stats and effects, until you absorb another one. But Grimlord’s Blade has 5 slots that can permanently store one effect from any weapon fed into it, even after you devour another weapon later.
```
He could keep one effect from the previous sword’s line-up, and he chose to hold onto Gore Barrier, figuring his defensive options were already thinner than his offensive ones.
’It seems there’s no way to level up this skill. Interesting. But the freedom to have five effects from different weapons...Yeah, that’s pretty broken as long as I add effects that synergize with each other, creating a powerful build.’
In the first place, he would never have enough skill points to level up all class skills.
```
[ Grimlord’s Blade ]
Base: Tier-4 Legendary
-- Stat Bonus --
Attack: +250
Arcane: +150
[ Weapon Effects ]
> Gore Barrier
> Frostfire Edge
```
Logan swung it once through open air, and the difference was immediate: a faint trail of frost and flame both curling off the edge even without anything in front of it to actually strike.
"Much better." He grinned, testing the balance again. "Thank you, Synthia."
He could switch between the original Grimlord’s Blade form and the blade it recently absorbed, so he was trying the new sword’s form now. It was sleek and minimalist.
"Master, there’s still plenty more raw material sitting in storage. I’ll try to make some ship weaponry as the remaining materials are more suitable for offence." She smiled, already turning back toward her own workstation.
"Alright."
Logan looked back out at the remaining scattered signatures still spread across the field, then down at the frost and flame curling faintly along his own blade’s edge.
’Let’s see how this actually performs.’
He found his next target within minutes, a lone Mothership trying to slip past the edge of his patrol range rather than heading straight for the Hive.
Level 6 Grim Lock! + Reaper’s Stride!
He landed on the deck a bit over three kilometers away, and the player there barely had time to turn around before Logan’s blade caught him across the arm, a shallow cut that shouldn’t have meant much on its own.
Frostfire Edge!
"Arghhh!! Fuck, it’s painful!"
Frost spread fast from the wound, locking the man’s arm stiff in the space of a single breath, and flame followed right behind it, the two feeding into each other until the combined pain alone dropped him to one knee.
’SURRENDER!’
```
[ You have eliminated Player Bastian Ferro. +65 Tower Points. ]
```
He had put the remaining 5 skill points into Grim Lock, making it reach level 6, which increased the range to five kilometres radius, and he planned to increase it further since it allows him to hunt down targets far away. It was especially useful in directly landing on enemy players’ ships, and appearing right around the target, in whatever direction he intended to appear.
...
The coalition Veyla had warned him about turned out to be exactly as large as she’d said, and then some.
Twenty-three Motherships held formation near the Hive’s north face, each one carrying well over a hundred Spacecraft of its own. A handful of the players commanding them had Legendary-rank units mixed into their rosters, and two of the twenty-three had a pair of Mythic-rank Spacecraft as their personal centerpiece.
None of it mattered much, given what Logan had waiting behind him, and the simple but brutal plan he had.
"Billy. Take the Voidwell Reaper with you." Logan didn’t look away from the formation. "Get in close before they notice you’re coming. You know what to do."
"On it, boss."
Billy and the Voidwell Reaper peeled off from the rest of the fleet without a word, dropping into low, quiet arcs that skirted the very edge of enemy detection range. Voidveiled Frame kept Billy’s own signature scrubbed down to nearly nothing, and the Reaper carried a stealth profile of its own good enough to match.
They closed to within striking range before a single enemy sensor so much as flickered.
Gravitic Tether! Voidwell Collapse!
Both gravity fields bloomed at once, one from each ship, and the effect stacked hard enough to warp the entire enemy formation inward on itself. Twenty-three Motherships that had been holding careful, disciplined spacing a heartbeat earlier suddenly found themselves crushed together, hulls scraping, Spacecraft caught mid-patrol and dragged bodily into their neighbors.
"What the hell is happening to the formation?!"
"Something’s pulling us in! Break off, break off now!"
By the time anyone managed to fight clear of the gravity well, a dozen ships had already collided hard enough to cripple half their own defensive screens, and Logan’s actual fleet was already closing the rest of the distance.
"Everyone. Full offense." Logan’s grin came sharp. "The five I assigned will guard the Mothership. The rest of you come with me."
Five of his twenty Mythic-rank Spacecraft peeled back toward his own ship, taking up position around Synthia’s defense grid. The remaining fifteen tore forward alongside Solveig and Billy both, straight into the chaos the gravity opener had already carved out.
Not every enemy player panicked. A cluster of six Motherships broke formation on purpose, engines flaring hard as they aimed themselves directly at Logan’s own hull instead of trying to fight the fleet in front of them.
"Forget the small stuff! Kill the ship, kill the player, that’s the only way this actually ends!"
The defense grid answered before they closed half the distance. A barrier bloomed across the entire hull in one unbroken sheet, floating shield projectiles already peeling off to intercept the first wave of incoming fire, and the five Mythic guardians cut down two of the six charging Motherships before they got within a thousand kilometers.
The other four kept coming anyway.
"Fuck!"
"Attack! No matter what, attack!"
"How many freaking Mythics does he have? This is insane!"
Bloodfall Destruction!
Solveig’s clones caught a third one from the flank, crimson light collapsing its hull from the inside out.
Voidfall Cannon tore a fourth apart before it finished its approach. The last two broke against the barrier itself and simply stopped mattering, the same way everything else Tur’Ni Sian had thrown at that same shield had stopped mattering.
Logan didn’t wait to watch. He was already in the fray. Level 6 Grim Lock caught the nearest enemy player he could find, and Reaper’s Stride closed the distance in the same breath.
He landed on the first deck already swinging his sword.
Overgrim Slash!
The strike tore the length of the ship’s own weapon array in half before the man standing there even finished raising whatever he’d been holding. The surrender came out somewhere between a gasp and a curse.
Reaper’s Stride carried him to the second ship a blink later.
Grimlord’s Blade!
Frostfire Edge!
The cut caught a woman across the shoulder, frost locking the joint solid before flame ever got the chance to finish the job, and she went down still trying to work out which pain to react to first while her mind already screamed surrender, and she disappeared.
A third player actually managed to get a skill off before Logan closed the distance, some kind of chain lightning arcing out toward three different points on his own advancing form.
Blade Veil Counter!
The veil swallowed all three strikes at once, and the counter’s damage boost carried straight into the follow-up.
Axiom Severance!
The man’s own defenses meant nothing against a cut carrying fifty percent Omni-Penetration behind it. He surrendered before the death swallowed him.
’I’m forced to hold back quite a bit against weaklings with low-rank gears.’ Logan felt a bit annoyed, but decided to take it as a form of practice.
A pair of players tried working together on the fourth ship, one holding a barrier up while the other charged something heavy and slow behind it.
Grim Devouring Slash!
The ethereal edge passed through the barrier without slowing down at all, and whatever the two of them had been building toward shrank to half its size and half its threat in the same instant the slash finished its work. Neither of them managed to finish the combo after that.
"They are slaughtering everyone like chickens! My hundred spacecrafts were fucking deleted like he just wiped shit off his ass! Screw this!"
"Fuck me! Whose idea was it to take on this Leon Flanke?!"
Both voices disappeared shortly after cursing out loud, wasting no second in surrendering.
"Fucking losers with Rare-rank gears shouldn’t have joined this battle." Another one spoke with regret dripping from his furious voice, taking a last look at his Legendary-rank gears before surrendering. ’Fuck. I shouldn’t have joined this stupid alliance. Waste of my hard-earned 2500 Tier Points.’
’Will I be able to escape? That mofo is hunting down everyone. Jumping from one ship to another in a blink...fuck.’
Meanwhile, the two players fielding Mythic-rank Spacecraft of their own put up the closest thing to a real fight all battle, coordinating their pairs into something that actually looked like tactics for the first ninety seconds or so, and managed to ward off random bombardments of Logan’s Mythic units.
Then Solveig’s remaining clones and three of Logan’s own Mythics converged on both positions at once.
Four Mythic-rank units converged on two. It wasn’t a fight. It was arithmetic.
One of Logan’s own tore through an enemy Mythic Spacecraft’s shielding in a single pass, the kind of hit that should have taken three or four strikes to land, but not if the skill had the effect to break shield. The second enemy unit lasted a few seconds longer, caught between two attackers at once and cut down before it managed a single strike of its own.
Grim Siphoning Edge pulled MP back into Logan with every cut that carried real power behind it, and by the time he reached his seventh deck of the fight, his own reserves sat fuller than when he’d started.
"He’s not slowing down!" Someone’s voice cracked across whatever remained of the shared channel. "Nothing’s touching him, nothing’s even close to touching him!"
"Fall back to the Hive, scatter, anything, just get out-"
They didn’t get the chance. Grim Lock had already caught every remaining signature the moment the fight started, and there was nowhere left in range that Reaper’s Stride couldn’t reach in under a second.
No one could escape using FTL drive as well because all of them had already used it recently to reach the Hive in the first place.
Logan worked through the rest of the fleet in a blur of frost, flame, and dark steel, one deck bleeding into the next until the number of standing Motherships dropped to nothing at all.
```
[ 23x Player eliminated. ]
[ Total Tower Points earned: 1,890 ]
```
He stood in the drifting wreckage afterward, blade still trailing a faint curl of steam where the frost hadn’t quite finished melting off it.
Billy reformed nearby, Voidwell Reaper settling in beside him. "Another one down. They really don’t learn, do they?"
Solveig’s clones folded back into him one by one. "Perhaps the next group will actually be a challenge, my lord."
Logan looked out toward the Hive itself, patient and massive on the horizon, and let the grin sit easy on his own face.
"Maybe. But I doubt it. I think we’ve wasted enough time on players. I’m betting there are at least fifty players already in the Hive, and more will enter."
Logan cracked his neck. "It’s time to enter the Hive."
Everyone turned to the Hive as the mothership drove towards it.
Up close, it stopped looking like a single structure at all. What had read as one massive shape from five hundred kilometers out resolved instead into something closer to a living continent, chitin plating the size of mountain ranges fused together in overlapping plates that pulsed faint and slow, like the whole thing was breathing on some scale too vast to notice from inside it. Veins of sickly green light ran beneath the surface in branching patterns, brightening and dimming in a rhythm that matched nothing Logan could find a reason for.
Spires jutted from its outer shell at irregular intervals, some hollow and open at the tip like throats, others sealed shut and slick with something that caught the starlight wrong. Entire sections drifted independent of the rest, massive chunks of the structure rotating slowly around a common center the way moons might orbit a planet, connected to nothing but held in place by whatever kept the whole impossible mass from tearing itself apart.
It didn’t look built. It looked grown, the way a tumor grows, patient and indifferent and enormous, filling more of the sky the closer they got until there was nothing else left to look at.
Logan felt something cold settle behind his ribs despite everything he’d already burned through to get here.
"This smells dangerous." Billy blinked.
Solveig nodded. "I’d have to agree."
"But also fun." Logan grinned. "It’s going to be an exotic ride inside this Hive. Let’s have a blast."
"And blast everything getting in our way." Billy grinned.
Solveig nodded. "Exactly. By the way, we can eat those bugs, right? I’m quite hungry after all the action so far."
"Yeah. Let’s have a feast with the first batch of bugs that comes to attack us." Logan looked at one of the Mythic spacecraft. "Make a fire pit using your Fire Manipulation talent. We’ll leave it to you to roast the bugs."
"As you wish, milord."
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