Free Web NovelChapter 120: Storm Sovereign
The shadow moved, and Kai moved with it.
The island cracked under his launch, the stone giving way from the force of the air-step carrying him forward, and Sera accelerated beside him, golden light gathering along her armor. She had already made her decision.
The shadow disappeared back into the clouds.
"You’re seriously chasing it," Sera said. It was not quite a question.
"Do you have a better idea?"
A pause. "No."
The dungeon answered before either of them could say anything else. A windstorm erupted across the islands, the currents that had been threading between structures all throughout the run reversing and multiplying, and the sky darkened as if something had chosen it.
Ancient stone ripped free from the nearest ruins.
It moved through the air as projectiles, not falling, moving, directed, a chunk the size of a vehicle spinning directly toward them.
Sera’s spear was already up. Golden light exploded outward, and the barrier formed between them and the debris, the stone slamming into it hard enough that the impact echoed back from the distant islands. Cracks spread through the barrier immediately. Then it shattered. But the debris had been redirected around them, and neither of them had slowed.
The shadow appeared again. Closer, larger, lightning played across its silhouette before the clouds reclaimed it.
It wasn’t retreating.
It was going somewhere.
"Still northeast," Sera said.
"I know," Kai said, and they kept running.
The next island gave way without warning, the ground fracturing beneath them and the whole section dropping into the cloud cover below, ancient stone coming apart mid-fall. Kai went off the edge before the fracture finished, and the air-steps carried him across the gap, one foot then the next, each one finding purchase in empty air while the island disappeared below. Sera came across behind him on a burst of light, her class output compensating for the footing the dungeon had removed.
More islands shattered behind them as they ran. The shadow moved above the clouds again, and the thunder that accompanied it this time was close enough to feel, rolling through the air and through the stone underfoot simultaneously.
Then three tornadoes appeared ahead.
They were tall enough to connect the floating islands to the clouds above, rotating fast enough that the debris caught inside them was moving at velocities that would have made direct contact with any of it dangerous.
Ancient stone, metal from the fortress structures, and accumulated material from across the dungeon interior. The path between the three tornadoes shifted every second as the rotations interacted with each other.
Kai looked at the tornadoes.
Distortion ran the calculations.
A route appeared.
He moved before it finished and Air-step through the first gap.
A direction change at the moment the second tornado’s rotation opened a route that closed in two seconds. A jump to the top of a fragment of floating stone that was itself moving through the space between the second and third tornadoes. Air-step from the fragment to the far side.
Behind him, Sera’s spear flashed repeatedly, golden lances destroying incoming debris before it reached either of them, the light of the impacts illuminating the storm corridor in pulses.
Then the wind stopped.
Both of them stopped with it.
The silence was absolute.
The dungeon had gone completely still.
It felt intentional.
Ahead of them, a massive island floated in the cleared air, unlike everything else they had passed through. Smooth stone, no ruins, no broken bridges. Just an expanse of flat surface under a sky where the clouds circled rather than crossed.
The shadow descended.
It came down through the cloud ring slowly enough that they could see it fully for the first time.
Silver-blue feathers covered a massive body. Lightning crawled across its wings. Every movement bent the air around it. Its shadow covered most of the arena. fгeewebnovёl.com
[Storm Sovereign Roc] freewebnσvel.cøm
[Level 48.]
The notification appeared at the edge of Kai’s vision as the creature touched the arena surface and looked at them.
Sera was looking up at it. "That is definitely not a normal C-rank boss."
Kai smiled. "No."
The Roc screamed, and the sky shook with it.
Lightning came first. Hundreds of bolts fell at once.
There was no single trajectory to track.
Kai disappeared into the air-step sequence before the first bolt landed, moving faster than the tracking on the strike pattern, and the lightning hit stone that was already empty.
The Roc descended in a blur of silver and compressed force. Wind exploded from its wings in the shape of a dragon, compressed air and thunder given a form, the construct roaring as it covered the distance toward Sera.
She met it head-on.
Her spear erupted, and the golden light hit the wind dragon at its center, and the construct shattered outward in a detonation that lit the entire arena. Sera came through the dispersal without breaking stride and landed twenty meters from where she had started, spear already repositioned.
The Roc came back faster, the second pass a blur that Kai barely cleared with an air-step that took him ten meters horizontally in a fraction of a second. The creature’s wing hit the island surface where he had been, and the stone cracked deep, chunks launching into the sky.
The fight ran for several minutes at that intensity.
Wind and lightning filled the arena continuously.
Sera created barriers and destroyed incoming constructs while Kai worked through the Roc’s attack patterns from range and from close. The Fractured Blade finds gaps in the lightning coating between strikes.
The creature was fast, and it adapted, each pass incorporating the positions of both fighters, never committing to a trajectory that left it exposed for more than a moment.
Then it gathered power.
The clouds above the arena split apart, and the wind and lightning that had been producing the attack patterns stopped and redirected upward, converging at a single point above the battlefield.
The pressure alone produced visible distortion in the air and cracked the stone across the arena surface. A spear of compressed storm energy formed, wide enough that its shadow covered half the island.
Sera looked up at the attack. Then tightened her grip on the spear. "That looks unpleasant."
The spear came down.
She thrust her spear upward, and the shield of light that formed was the largest Kai had seen from her, pulling from everything she had available, and the storm spear hit it and the barrier shattered immediately, but it had slowed the impact and redirected enough of the force that the remainder spread across the arena surface rather than through them.
Kai was already moving.
Air-step, the first one, and then the second, and then the third, his foot finding the empty air the way it always found it, the sequence running at the pace the situation required.
Then he stopped.
Not landing. Not catching himself. Simply stopped, suspended in open sky at the peak of the third air-step with nothing beneath his feet and no surface within reach, and for one clear moment, he was standing in the air itself.
Not on a cushion of diverted force. Not at the apex of a jump. Standing, with the same quality of contact that his feet had with solid ground, the air held him.
The Roc noticed.
Something had changed.
Kai moved, and the Fractured Blade came through the arc he had been positioning for across the entire final sequence, the line running from the suspension point through the Roc’s central mass, where the storm energy had been concentrated and where the barrier Sera had broken had forced the creature to draw everything inward for the generation.
The blade went through.
The storm energy dissipated from the outside in, the lightning going quiet first, and then the wind, the silver-blue feathers losing their current as the creature’s systems stopped running. The Roc was still for one held moment.
Then it fell.
The impact with the arena surface sent a final shockwave across the stone, and the cloud ring above dispersed, and the sky above the Sky Fortress opened into clear blue for the first time since they had entered.
The silence was different from the dungeon’s earlier silence. That had been a held breath. This was after.
[Dungeon Cleared: Duo.]
[Recalculation Initiated.]
[Distortion Applied.]
[Drop Quality: Optimized.]
[Amplification Complete.]
Kai landed.
The air around the fallen Roc distorted.
The cloak and armor became clearer.
Sharper.
As though reality itself had upgraded them.
Among the scattered silver feathers where the Roc had fallen, two items were visible. A cloak, dark silver, with feather patterns woven through the material that shifted slightly when the wind touched them, small arcs of lightning running along the edges intermittently. Beside it, a set of silver armor lined with faint golden runes, the surface of it still carrying traces of the storm current.
He picked up the cloak. Information populated at the edge of his vision.
[Storm Sovereign Cloak: Grade S.]
[Plus fifty agility. The wearer could channel stored wind through the cloak for short bursts of dramatically increased movement speed or release it as a compressed shockwave. The cloak grew stronger as wind energy accumulated within it.]
Kai looked at plus fifty agility for a moment.
He put the cloak on.
Beside him, Sera had picked up the armor and was reading her own notification. She looked at it for long enough that he knew the number was significant.
[Stormlight Aegis: Grade S]
[Plus forty vitality, plus twenty light affinity. Incoming ranged attacks lost momentum before impact. The armor reinforced itself continuously using condensed wind currents.]
"This is ridiculous," Sera said.
"Yeah," Kai said.
She looked at him. "You’re not going to say anything else?"
"What else is there to say?"
She looked at the armor in her hands. Then back at him. "Fair."
Both of them stood in the cleared arena and held the evidence of it.
Then the island cracked.
The dungeon was collapsing.
They stepped through.
The gate shattered behind them, and the crowd outside had been watching the point where the gate stood for the entire duration, and the sound that came from several thousand people simultaneously was significant.
Kai stood in the ordinary city air with the Storm Sovereign Cloak on his back and looked at the sky above the northwestern district where the gate had been.
The B-rank gates were coming. Two weeks, according to the projections circulating through the hunter networks. Whatever the system produced at B-rank was going to be designed for hunters who had cleared the C-rank phase and had developed accordingly.
He was looking forward to it.
The B-Rank Gates were coming.
For everyone else, that was a warning.
Kai smiled.
To him, it sounded like an invitation.
