Chapter 685: End of the Star Mayhem Mountain Defense

It killed two of the Suryax generals who pushed in too close, its blade taking them before anyone could react. It killed a Spirit Lord, cutting clean through the domain to do it. It killed three of the 100,000 troops in a single sweep.

And Almond brought every one of them back.

Golden threads spread from him even as he fought, finding the fallen, reassembling them. The generals gasped back into existence. The Spirit Lord reformed and rejoined its domain. The soldiers stood back up. The Executioner killed, and the killing did not stick, and slowly the math of the fight turned against it.

Lily stacked her debuffs across its slowed frame. Maya widened the wounds. Silvester and Hiroshi held its guard open. And Almond’s convergence came down through the gap they made and split the first Executioner from crown to core.

It did not reassemble. Almond made sure of that. Grim Severam denied it everything, and the first Executioner came apart and did not come back.

One.

But the second Executioner had reached Rudra’s team while the first was still dying.

---

Rudra met the second Executioner with his bare hands, and the second Executioner was just as fast as the first.

It cut him before he landed his first strike. The blade opened his side, and he ignored it, driving his fist into its chest. Absolute Breaker spread from the impact, and the Executioner’s armor failed at that point, but the Executioner did not. It twisted away, faster than anything its size should move, and came back with a strike that would have taken Rudra’s head if Marcus had not gotten his shield between them.

The shield held. Barely. The impact drove Marcus to his knees and cracked the barrier across its whole face.

Then Ainen’s flame world closed around the Executioner.

The cold flame caught it and slowed it. The corrosion flame ate at the armor Rudra had cracked. But the Executioner moved through the flames in a way the Titans had not, cutting through the cold flame’s hold, burning a path with its own dark power, refusing to be locked down.

It killed Marcus.

Its blade found the gap above the shield and ran him through, and Marcus fell.

The Suryax King roared.

His Geneline ignited fully, the awakened lineage of his people pouring out of him in a column of solar light, and he struck the Executioner with everything his bloodline had been hiding for a thousand years. His strongest generals struck with him, their own Genelines flaring, and for a moment the Executioner was driven back under the weight of an entire awakened kingdom.

Almond’s golden threads found Marcus.

Marcus stood back up, his shield reforming, and the look on his face was not fear. It was anger.

The ten Asura Executives hit the Executioner together. Vael’s constructs, Tharion’s weapons, Vokren’s reversed shockwaves, Nyrelis’s echoing strikes, all ten of them committing everything at once, the training of the past two months turned loose. The Executioner killed three of them in as many seconds. Almond brought all three back before they hit the ground.

That was the thing the Executioner could not solve.

It was faster than them. It was stronger than almost all of them. It could kill any of them it reached. But it could not make the killing stay, and every second it spent killing the same people twice was a second it gave the alliance to hurt it.

Rudra hit it again. Absolute Breaker tunneled through the wound Ainen’s corrosion had opened. The Suryax King’s solar column drove it backward. Saffa turned the defensive grid into a lance of focused energy and ran it through the Executioner’s flank. Clovelle brought the Skydread fleet screaming down out of the sky, every craft firing at once into the pinned hunter. Fraisea triggered the rebuilt enemy weapons the alliance had hoarded, and storm-matrix and precision-array fire poured into the Executioner from a dozen captured systems at once.

The second Executioner staggered.

Lily, finished with the first, turned the Wheel of Achromatic Shade on the second and stole its speed too.

The hunter slowed.

And the whole Suryax-Regalon force, leadership and army and king and X-rank holders alike, fell on it together.

Rudra broke its guard. Ainen’s origin flame went into the break. The Suryax King’s solar light poured into the same wound. Almond’s Grimblades converged one final time and came down through all of it.

The second Executioner came apart.

Two.

---

The Mountain shook with the aftermath, and then it went still.

Across the field, the other three alliances had each managed their single Executioner, barely. Thalmyr-Ronethis had brought theirs down with the cold, total commitment of their entire fleet. Virexion-Kezryx had killed theirs with Jaskrit leading the assault personally, the storm sovereign trading blows with the hunter until it fell. Celestara-Dravokh had survived theirs and killed it at terrible cost, half their remaining fleet gone.

Each of them had killed one.

Suryax-Regalon had killed two.

The Doom tide that had followed the Executioners broke against the four alliance lines without its leaders to drive it, and the army cleared it the way it had cleared every wave before. By the time the last of it withdrew over the ridge, the final wave was over.

The leaderboard updated for the last time.

[Star Mayhem Mountain Defense]

[Rank 1: Suryax Kingdom | Ananta Regalon: 3,912,600]

[Rank 2: Thalmyr Ascendancy | Ronethis Apex Sovereignty: 2,884,310]

[Rank 3: Virexion Dominion | Kezryx Void Imperium: 2,701,950]

[Rank 4: Celestara Sanctum | Dravokh Tyrant Conclave: 2,313,470]

The dual kill had done it. Two Executioners at one and a half billion each had put Suryax-Regalon more than a million points clear of second place. Nothing the other alliances could do in the time remaining would close that gap.

The event was effectively decided.

[Ananta Regalon Kingdom will acquire theVirion Iridant Tree Embryo— aTier-70 resourcethat grows into a full Virion Iridant Tree.]

’Got it.’ Almond stood at the center of the southeastern arc, his Grimblades settling, his Spirit Lords contracting their domains, the bodies of two Executioners steaming on the cracked plateau.

Around him, the alliance stood whole. Every general who had fallen was back on their feet. Every Asura Executive who had died was alive. Marcus stood with his shield on his arm and a scowl on his face, entirely uninterested in discussing the fact that he had been run through twenty minutes earlier.

The Suryax King walked to Almond through the settling dust, his solar light fading back into him, his awakened generals behind him.

"We could not have done that alone," the King said. "Any of it. Without your resurrection, we would have lost half this army holding those two."

"You awakened your Geneline for this," Almond said. "You used it. That is all I asked."

The King looked at the leaderboard, at the first-place ranking that was now beyond anyone’s reach.

"We are going to win this event," he said quietly. "Truly win it."

"Yes," Almond said.

Lily came to stand beside him, Dreadlings settling across the field, the Wheel of Achromatic Shade fading from the air behind her.

"First place," she said, the same way she had after the Titans.

"First place," Almond smiled.

Across the Mountain, on the eastern arc, Jaskrit Kezinos looked at the final leaderboard for a long time. He had killed his Executioner. He had fought it himself, the strongest powerhouse on his force, exactly as the wave had intended. He had won his fight.

And he had still lost the event, to an alliance that had killed two of the same monster while bringing back everyone who fell.

"They have a resurrector," he said quietly. "A real one. Not a network like the Oblivion priestess. Something that does not run out."

The Kezryx commander beside him said nothing.

Jaskrit kept looking at the leaderboard, at the gap that could not be closed, and he understood that the question that had been bothering him for weeks finally had its answer. Whatever Suryax-Regalon had been building in the dark, whatever the three missing powerhouses had been doing while he searched the mainland and the ocean for them, it did not matter anymore for this event.

The event was lost.

But the event was not the war.

"When this ends," Jaskrit said, "and we all leave this world, that Ananta Regalon Kingdom walks out stronger than any of us. Remember that."

He turned away from the leaderboard.

On the southeastern arc, the Suryax-Regalon line stood over two dead Executioners, in first place, whole and unbroken, and the Star Mayhem Mountain pulsed quietly above them, secured at last.