Chapter 71: The [Execution Line] of Shadow City
High above the city, the twelve neon spires slowly dimmed.
That baleful crimson bled away bit by bit until only a pale, harmless glow remained, like the final color left in a dead man's eye.
The tide was ending.
The deafening roar that had drowned out all thought gradually weakened, until only the ragged sounds of breathing remained at the bottom of the subsidence pit.
The blood lake spread across the shattered ground began to recede through the drainage grates with a wet, sucking hiss, revealing a battlefield that looked as though some enormous beast had chewed it up and spat it back out.
Broken staffs, snapped prosthetic limbs, shattered shields, charred magic constructs, torn robes, and pieces of flesh that no longer resembled anything human were strewn everywhere.
Of the tens of thousands who had entered the first phase, only four or five thousand were still standing.
Most were not standing well.
Some sat slumped against the walls, their armor cracked and smoking. Some lay sprawled in silence, too exhausted to move. Some stared blankly into the dark, their eyes emptied by pain, fear, and the simple fact that they had survived when so many had not.
Hodell stood among them, silent behind his faceplate, taking it all in.
The sight made his eyes narrow slightly.
The Ranking Festival was brutal, yes. That much had been obvious the moment it began. But was Shadow City truly worth this much?
Worth letting so many mediocrities crawl in and gamble their lives for the chance to stay?
Then again, perhaps he was the wrong person to ask.
After arriving in Shadow Valley, he had found shelter almost immediately, carved out a foothold with his own hands, killed Bagel, seized a workshop, survived the tides under controlled conditions, and entered the Inner City with resources, preparation, and a functioning brain. His path had been soaked in blood, but it had never once been passive.
For everyone else, survival alone was already a tax.
Without strength, without territory, without stable shelter, even a single magic tide could drain a person dry. Not just physically, but mentally. The pressure of waiting for the next disaster, the next ambush, the next night without rest, would crack most people long before a blade or spell ever touched them.
Hodell's thoughts drifted only for a moment.
Then he sharpened again.
His gaze pierced the lingering mist and settled on several different corners of the pit.
The later half of the first phase had not gone as smoothly as the beginning. Too many people had already started avoiding him. The moment his silver white figure appeared, they scattered like fish sensing blood in the water. His efficiency had dropped noticeably.
There were also a handful of survivors whose strength was not far below Gray's, people who had quietly probed him, then withdrawn the moment they understood enough to calculate the risk.
Hodell did not intend to waste one of his summon cards every time someone wanted to test their luck.
He lowered his head and glanced at the scratches on White Crow's arm plating.
Until the wager truly came due, all he needed was steady progress.
The experience would not run away.
Then the bell rang.
Hum.
It was not loud, yet it spread over the entire subsidence zone with a force greater than the tide itself. The sound seemed to descend from the city's bones.
[Phase One: Settlement Trial, concluded.]
The sensory shackle on his wrist vibrated once, clear and cold.
A synthetic voice spoke directly into his ear.
[Ranking Festival, Settlement Trial. Statistics complete. Base survival points: 100. Kill points: 612. Current total points: 712. Current rank: No. 7.]
[[Extreme Trial]: Current progress 996/1500]
Hodell's eyes flickered.
Seventh.
High enough to stand out. Low enough to remain interesting.
The same voice continued.
[The Depreciation List for this season has been locked. Total number: 2000.]
[Attention, listed citizens. Your civic privileges have entered frozen pending destruction status. From this moment onward, for every participant you kill, you will receive full plunder rights over their points.]
[Points may be exchanged for the following: 1. Magic crystals and liquid wealth. 2. Restoration fluid for physical functions and repair resources for prosthetic equipment. 3. Contribution points.]
[Attention, participants. Acquire a Depreciation Medal to qualify for promotion. Surplus medals may be exchanged for points.]
[Hunting field: Lower City, full district.]
[Time limit: 2 days.]
[Due to energy quota adjustment, all public lighting and security protocols in the Lower City will be shut down in five minutes.]
The pit, which had only just fallen quiet, shifted at once.
The survivors' expressions changed.
Several groups that had briefly formed defensive circles during the tide quietly loosened their formations. Eyes that had been focused outward now began to glance sideways, then linger.
One person only needed one medal.
One medal only secured one person's advancement.
The warmth that strangers borrow from each other in winter never survives the coming of spring.
Somewhere not far away, a man stared at the point exchange interface on his wristband, his expression turning feverish.
"A Depreciation Medal," he muttered. "That thing is promotion itself."
His eyes shone.
"Those bastards from the Lower City hide like rats every other day. Now they're finally being pushed out for us to butcher."
The air in the pit shifted.
Four or five thousand survivors, all bloodied, exhausted, and scarred by the first phase, abruptly turned into drawn knives.
Hodell remained motionless, but the logic behind the system unfolded clearly in his mind.
The [Depreciation List] was not some gimmick added for entertainment. It was the true execution line of Shadow City.
Any resident whose contribution had stayed below the city's maintenance threshold long enough would be downgraded until they reached this step.
There was only one way to avoid it.
Leave the city.
Give up residency.
Give up access.
Give up the right to stand beneath these walls.
Shadow City's light had never been free. It was merely rented.
And now, with the lights about to go out in the Lower City, order was withdrawing its final lie.
What remained would be hunger.
Primitive, direct, and perfectly honest.
Hodell understood at once that the two thousand [Depreciation Personnel] would not be lambs.
Those who had truly lost all courage would never have stayed to this point. The ones still here were the ones who had chosen the blade over escape.
Men and women with rotten lives, yes.
But also people who had already been pushed to the edge and learned how to grow fangs there.
The platform beneath the survivors began to rise.
Heavy chains dragged, clanked, and groaned as the mechanism pulled them upward from the giant pit. Neon lights stretched into long blood red streaks across Hodell's vision.
The timer on his wristband began ticking down.
04:58.
A final chime rang out.
Then he stepped off the platform and into the Lower City.
The soles of his boots landed on damp blue stone.
At once, the atmosphere changed.
The Lower City was the gut of Shadow City, the place where the city's heat, waste, and desperation were all pushed downward and forced to keep functioning anyway.
Magic conduits ran through the district like tangled roots. Steam hissed from ancient valves overhead. Buildings had no clean lines. Most had been bolted, welded, or grown onto load bearing pillars like steel fungus, overlapping layer upon layer into narrow, twisted vertical slums.
This was where people lived when the city no longer considered them worth its polished surfaces.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
The last strips of public light overhead began to flicker.
Thin violet tubes struggled, flashed, dimmed, then flashed again.
And then, right on schedule, everything went black.
Not dim.
Not shadowed.
Black.
The darkness in the Lower City had weight. It flooded the streets like deep water, swallowing alleys, corners, rooftops, and faces all at once.
Hodell moved the instant it fell.
Before the final light completely vanished, he tapped lightly with his foot and rose onto a high pressure pipe arching over the street. White Crow's silhouette blurred once in the dark, then disappeared.
No hesitation.
No wasted motion.
In the silence above the street, he opened a loot panel.
[You have obtained [character summon card: Bone Engraving]]
[[character summon card: Bone Engraving]: [Necrotic Chains], condense necrotic energy to bind a target. Deals 303 to 331 (+Mystery x 0.7) corrosion damage and applies a binding effect.]
[Uses: 0/1]
Hodell looked at it and gave a small nod.
"Not bad. A control skill."
Then, with faint amusement, he added in his heart, As expected of me. A true archmage.
The darkness did not hinder him.
As long as no one stood close enough to be seen, he could hide his shape well enough. He activated [Bat Habit], and his outline dissolved even further into the night.
In the distance, Red Light Alley was already turning violent.
That district had once been a place for the poor, the addicted, and the desperate to waste their coin beneath neon filth. Now every window was shut. The only light came from dying instruments and broken panels flickering weakly on street corners.
From an awning above a narrow passage, Hodell watched the first hunt begin.
Three gaunt shadows burst out from behind a discarded power pod.
"Surround him!"
"He has Merchant Guild gear on him!"
Their voices were low, urgent, and vicious.
The target was a participant from the first phase, a mage by the look of him. He had likely burned through much of his energy reserve during the tide. His hands shook as he raised his staff, trying to force out a spell.
The moment magic gathered at the tip, he made himself the brightest thing in the street.
In absolute darkness, a light source was nothing but a confession.
Pfft. Pfft.
Two weighted steel nails punched straight through his kneecap and shoulder blade.
The spell collapsed.
The glow vanished.
His scream echoed.
The next instant the three shadows were on him.
Hodell watched without expression.
He did not intervene. He did not even move.
He simply lifted his wrist and looked more carefully at the shackle ring.
The inscriptions embedded in the metal were changing.
With a small adjustment of his focus, the district map unfolded in his perception. It was much richer than before. Within a radius of five hundred meters, he could now see twenty three dark red dots representing [Depreciation Personnel], and only six bright dots representing [Participants].
He let out a quiet breath.
So that was how it worked.
This system was not protecting participants.
It was feeding them.
And if every participant thought the same way, then the Lower City was about to become a butcher's yard.
Hodell had no interest in joining the stampede.
He was ranked seventh already. He did not need to slaughter indiscriminately to hold position. What he needed were medals.
Not quantity.
Precision.
His gaze settled on one red dot to the northwest.
It moved slowly.
No white dots nearby.
No direct competition.
He made his choice at once.
His body flowed over the city like liquid silver, leaping from pipe to pipe until he reached an abandoned gear processing factory.
The building was almost completely dark. Rust ate through the support beams. Broken windows let in wind that smelled of acid rain and old machine oil.
Below, an elderly mercenary limped through the ground floor with a rusted magic rapier clutched in one hand.
The man's breathing was too loud.
His prosthetic leg dragged with every step, metal scraping over concrete in a harsh, ugly rhythm.
He had not come unprepared. Hodell saw that immediately.
Magic conducting threads had been laid around the machine tools in delicate lines. Several sensor mines waited at key approach points. They were old devices, crude by Inner City standards, but in darkness, even crude tools were lethal if placed by a careful hand.
Unfortunately for him, [Energy Vision] made them about as subtle as bonfires.
Hodell stayed on the rafters for three breaths, letting the man's pattern settle in his mind.
Then he moved.
He did not rush down like a beast.
He adjusted his source energy until it matched the low hum of the factory's dead generator, blending his own presence into the building's old mechanical residue.
To the mercenary's senses, it was nothing more than a cold breeze drifting through the room.
Click.
The old man spun violently and thrust backward with the rapier.
He struck nothing.
His pulse leaped. Fear broke across his face.
At that exact moment, the shriek came.
[Painful Shriek]
The old mercenary's body locked up. His eyes rolled white.
Before he could drop, Hodell's palm was already on the back of his skull.
A current surged.
The old man's brain stopped being a coherent thing.
[Kill confirmed. Points: 15. Current rank: No. 7]
Hodell crouched beside the corpse, expression unchanged, and took the medal from inside the man's clothing.
One.
The objective for this phase was already technically met.
He could have left.
Instead, he frowned.
Something felt wrong.
As the energy surrounding the medallion settled, he sensed an additional fluctuation. Subtle. Hidden. The moment he touched it, a faint spectral residue spread across White Crow's surface like invisible dust. It was not visible under normal sight, but under a specific spectrum it would blaze like a signal flare.
Hodell's eyes cooled.
"I've been marked."
He did not try to remove it.
Breaking the mark on the spot would trigger a collapse pulse and expose his location more clearly than leaving it in place.
He searched the factory in silence, checked every angle, confirmed nothing had shifted, then withdrew immediately.
He moved through the pipes again, swift and silent, wiping away every trace he reasonably could.
And still he found no one.
Not in his detection net.
Which meant the watcher was not part of the Ranking Festival.
In a shadow across from the factory, someone in a robe lowered a handheld detector.
The man's concealment had been careful and indirect. He had avoided direct lines of perception and used only the medallion marker to track.
On his device, a pale circle expanded slowly across the screen.
"Lord Morin was right," he whispered into the communicator. "During the tide, Pale's combat pattern was abnormal. I did not detect ordinary casting fluctuations."
He watched the cooling tower district ahead.
"Target confirmed. Gear Processing Factory. His abilities are strange. Proceed with caution."
Orders moved quickly through the dark.
The net began to close.
Hodell, unaware of the precise watcher but already aware of pursuit, did not return to any predictable route. He shifted districts, taking elevated paths through the water pump station quarter.
The moment he landed on a suspended maintenance beam there, cold danger exploded up his spine.
His danger sense was screaming.
I've been found.
His body moved before the thought finished.
He attempted to phase.
But the air around him suddenly became impossibly heavy.
A massive gravitational field slammed down.
The transition failed halfway, and his body was forced back into solidity.
At the same time, eight [Blood Red Positioning Stakes] burst up from the ground around the street. Scarlet light flared between them, weaving into a rigid cage of force.
[C rank mission triggered: [Encirclement and Killing]]
[Mission reward: 200,000 experience]
[Bonus reward: extract two enemy skills or perks]
Hodell's eyes narrowed.
Four figures in black robes and silver gray heavy armor stepped out of the surrounding buildings with drilled precision.
No wasted words. No dramatic entrance.
This was a kill team.
"Mr. Pale," the lead man said coldly. "Your way of killing is elegant, but the ripples you leave in darkness are too obvious."
Before the last word had fully left his mouth, all four raised compact heavy crossbows. Their bolts were coated in a foul mucus that immediately made Hodell think of energy interruption compounds.
So that was the plan.
Suppress White Crow.
Restrict movement.
Take him alive if possible.
Kill him if necessary.
Hodell drew one slow breath.
He thrust source energy outward, shaping several layers of scale thin air shields directly in front of himself.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The crossbow barrage hammered into the shields hard enough to shake his bones. White Crow's surface runes flared. The impacts rippled down the street like small detonations.
Still, Hodell stepped forward.
He activated [Overload] without hesitation.
Then, with the casual extravagance of a man spending coin he knew would come back, he dumped 1.3 million experience into [Intermediate Ability Affinity], forcing it straight to the limit.
[[Intermediate Ability Affinity Lv10 (MAX)]: ability control +20%]
[Your [Intermediate Ability Affinity] has reached the level cap. You gain 1 Potential Point.]
The change was immediate.
Control sharpened.
Every fluctuation felt clearer.
Every boundary became easier to grasp.
He stamped down.
The metal plate beneath his foot shattered.
Then he launched himself.
He did not retreat from the suppression zone. He crashed straight through it like a silver cannon round and drove himself into the chest of the lead squad leader.
At the same instant, he ran a high frequency oscillation through White Crow's striking arm.
Clang!
Concentric black spirals spread over the enemy's chest plate. The impact was partially diverted by the squad leader's armor array, shredding the pavement beneath him instead of fully caving in his ribcage. Even so, the man staggered back three full steps.
Hodell saw it and understood immediately.
Their armor had been custom tuned to disperse precisely the kind of blunt force White Crow excelled at delivering.
So they had studied him.
Interesting.
The lead squad leader steadied himself.
"I knew you still had another card to play."
The remaining three moved at once. They dropped their crossbows, drove long spears attached to magic conducting cables into surrounding walls, and locked the formation down tighter.
Hum.
The eight scarlet stakes synchronized with the cables.
The gravitational suppression doubled.
White Crow's output spiked in response, and Hodell felt resistance spread through the armor like wet concrete trying to hold him in place.
Even so, his thoughts remained perfectly calm.
He activated [Simple Energy Perception] and [Energy Replication] simultaneously.
Risky.
If he failed, he would burn energy for nothing and lose his rhythm.
But the moment the two skills engaged, the suppression field changed in his mind. It was no longer a prison. It was data.
He saw it.
The cage wasn't static.
It pulsed.
Twenty four shifts per second, alternating in a pattern designed to prevent resonance based disruption.
Whoever built it knew what they were doing.
Hodell almost smiled.
If you insist on treating me like Ryan, then at least enjoy the privilege properly.
He deliberately let White Crow's posture shift half a degree out of balance.
Not much.
Just enough.
The bait worked instantly.
One black robed executor lunged from the flank, spear point shrieking toward White Crow's ribs.
The spear touched the armor.
At that exact instant, Hodell matched its energy frequency.
Perfectly.
For one brief moment, both systems entered the same resonant state.
Instead of piercing in, the spear slid away.
Like two magnets of the same polarity rejecting each other.
The executor's eyes widened.
Hodell caught the shaft with his left hand, twisted, and poured a hard, condensed burst of energy back through the conducting wire.
The suppression formation relied on linked nodes.
That meant the shock traveled everywhere.
Two of the blood red stakes on the left side exploded immediately.
The cage tore open in a fan shaped gap.
Hodell did not hesitate.
He entered phase at the exact instant the gap widened and folded his body through the crossed lines of two heavy crossbows in a motion too strange to be called natural.
"He's left! Bone Cage, now!"
The squad leader's reaction was excellent.
A rune shattered in his hand.
Bone spikes erupted from the ground, trying to seal off Hodell's landing path.
But Hodell had already adjusted.
He blasted a stream of compressed flame downward from White Crow's heel vents, using the recoil to force a second change of direction in midair.
Then he hit the weakest target first.
Two alloy spikes launched from White Crow's shoulder module at near point blank range.
Pfft.
Both drove clean through the opening in one executor's visor.
[You killed a Hunting Squad member (Lv38), gaining 21,000 experience.]
[Killed a target 8 levels higher. 190% bonus experience. Total experience: 39,900. Personal output: 100%.]
[You gain an additional 39,900 experience.]
[You gain 9 Trial Points.]
The lattice formation collapsed at once.
The three survivors did not panic.
That alone told Hodell how troublesome they were.
"He's definitely Ryan!"
The squad leader barked it out as if the words themselves could stabilize their resolve.
Then he drew a small bronze box from his chest harness and snapped it open.
Gray white mist flooded outward.
The moment it touched White Crow, it clung to the armor like wet lead. The suit's mobility algorithms were forced into compensation mode. Several negative states flashed across his panel.
Agility down.
Energy conduction slowed.
Breathing resistance increased.
Hodell's movement stalled by a fraction.
That fraction was all the remaining executors needed.
They drove in together.
Spears hooked his arms.
The leader raised a broad executioner's blade inscribed with anti magic runes and brought it slamming down toward White Crow's arm joint.
From afar, inside his hidden observation room, Morin watched the smothered battlefield through indirect arrays.
At the moment the suppression formation had first broken, his expression had darkened.
Now it eased again.
The gray mist had spread. The target's motion had slowed. The finish was close.
Morin leaned back slightly and let out a quiet breath.
"A trapped beast's last struggle."
He was smiling when he said it.
.....
[If you don't want to wait for the next update, read 50 chapters ahead on P@treon.]
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