Free Web NovelChapter 126: [126] : Sovereign Logic Set, Loot Distribution
The massive cavern of the 9th floor was completely quiet now.
The heavy, oppressive humming of the Level 80 Abyssal Boss was entirely gone. It was replaced only by the soft, rhythmic pulsing of the red organic walls and the faint dripping of corrupted fluid from the ceiling.
Sloane, Morgan, and Nova slowly walked out from the safety of the dark elevator shaft. They stepped carefully over the thick, fleshy cables covering the floor. They stopped a few yards away and just stared at the empty space in the center of the room.
They had just watched a man turn into a literal black hole and completely erase a boss that possessed nearly a million health points!
They didn’t cheer. They didn’t clap or celebrate the victory. They were way too busy trying to process the absolute mathematical absurdity of what they had just witnessed. It was like watching someone delete a hurricane by snapping their fingers.
Declan ignored their shocked faces. He didn’t care if they thought he was a monster. He was a Warlord, and Warlords only cared about one thing after a major fight.
The loot.
He casually rested the massive dark matter shaft of his +40 Eclipse Severance halberd on his shoulder. He walked over to the spot where the Corrupted Core Guardian had been standing just a minute ago.
He crouched down next to a glowing pile of dropped items sitting on the meaty floor.
He didn’t even look at the massive chunk of raw experience points that had just hit his account. The system chimes had faded out almost instantly. At Level 70, a cool million EXP barely moved his progression bar. He needed tens of millions just to level up once now.
He reached out with his free hand and tapped the first item sitting in the digital dust.
It was a pair of heavy, bulky gauntlets. They were massive. They were made of a dull, dark gray titanium and covered in jagged, brutal-looking spikes along the knuckles and forearms. Just looking at them made your jaw hurt.
A bright golden system prompt immediately popped up in his vision.
[Item Recognized: Titanium Rage Gauntlets]
↳ Tier: Sovereign (Melee Weapon)
↳ Base Stats: +800 Strength, +400 Defense
↳ Trait: Kinetic Overload. Every consecutive punch landed on a target increases the user’s base physical damage by 10 percent, stacking indefinitely until combat ends.
Declan read the text twice. He let out a low, impressed whistle that echoed in the quiet server room.
"Stacking infinite damage on punches," Declan muttered to himself. "That is a completely broken tank weapon."
It was a brawler’s dream. You just stand in front of a boss, soak up the damage with that massive +400 Defense boost, and keep punching. The first hit does normal damage. The tenth hit does double damage. By the fiftieth hit, you are basically punching with the force of a speeding freight train. freewēbnoveℓ.com
But he didn’t need it.
His own combat style relied on raw, heavy cleaves and physics-breaking halberd swings that deleted coordinate planes. He liked taking out entire armies in one wide swing. Punching things one by one was way too slow for his taste.
But he knew exactly who could use a pair of Sovereign-tier brass knuckles.
Declan opened his system interface with a quick mental command. He pulled up the Iron Bastion guild roster. The holographic screen floated in the air right next to the glowing loot.
He scrolled down the long list of names until he found his top scavenger captain. Jax.
Jax was the tall, heavily scarred guy who ran the mining teams. He was the guy currently risking his neck every single day, dragging heavy wooden carts full of highly volatile Void-Ore back to the city so Bram could build the automated turrets.
Jax was currently Level 22. He was holding the frontline back at the safe zone, organizing the new refugee hunting parties. He was a dedicated close-quarters brawler who used a rusty battleaxe because he didn’t have anything better.
Well, he was about to get a massive promotion.
Declan tapped the remote delivery function on his administrative interface. Normally, players had to physically trade items face-to-face. But as the absolute owner of the Iron Bastion, Declan had root access to the city’s internal mailing system.
He dragged the Sovereign-tier gauntlets into the digital transfer slot, typed in Jax’s name, and hit send.
The heavy titanium gauntlets vanished from the floor in a flash of blue pixels.
"These are for Jax," Declan muttered to himself with a satisfied nod.
A second later, his private chat icon started pinging wildly. It flashed bright red in the corner of his eye.
[Jax: BOSS?! WHAT IS THIS?! I WAS JUST EATING A BOWL OF RAT NOODLES AND THESE ROCKET LAUNCHER GLOVES POPPED INTO MY LAP!]
[Jax: THIS IS SOVEREIGN TIER! I CAN PUNCH A COMMERCIAL BUILDING DOWN WITH THIS! THANK YOU BOSS!]
Declan smiled. He pulled up the keyboard and quickly typed a reply.
[Player V: Stop yelling in my chat. You work for me. You get the best gear. Now finish your noodles and get back to the mines. I expect double the ore quota by tomorrow morning.]
[Jax: YOU GOT IT BOSS! I AM GOING TO PUNCH THE ROCKS INTO DUST!]
Declan closed the chat window with a dry smirk. Keeping your employees heavily armed, highly motivated, and aggressively loyal was just good business management. You take care of the workers, and the workers take care of the city.
He turned his attention back to the fleshy floor.
The second item was sitting right where the gauntlets used to be. It was much smaller. In fact, it didn’t look like a weapon or a piece of armor at all.
It was a tiny, sleek piece of polished black metal. It was curved gracefully and covered in microscopic, glowing blue runes that pulsed with an intense, humming digital energy.
It looked exactly like a high-tech ear-cuff. The kind of expensive cybernetic accessory the corporate elites wore in the upper districts of Sector 1.
Declan reached down and picked it up. It weighed absolutely nothing in his palm.
A new golden prompt flooded his vision.
[Item Recognized: Sovereign Neural Interface]
↳ Tier: Sovereign (Set Piece: Logic Set 1/3)
↳ Base Stats: +1,500 Intelligence, +800 Agility
↳ Passive Trait: Quantum Processing. The user’s neural link is completely detached from the standard server rendering engine. Skill cast times are reduced to zero.
Declan stared at the prompt. His dark, purple-swirling eyes went wide.
"Zero cast time," Declan breathed out.
He actually had to stop and process that. Most high-tier magic spells required a massive casting sequence. A player had to stand completely still, wave a staff around, and chant for several seconds while the game engine calculated the mana cost and the elemental physics.
During that casting time, a mage was a sitting duck. If a fast rogue or a heavy warrior hit them, the spell was canceled.
The Sovereign Neural Interface just deleted that rule entirely!
It meant he could drop a massive, sun-sized Starfall spell instantly. He didn’t need to stop walking. He didn’t need to chant. He could just think about the spell, and the system would instantly render a miniature star directly over his target’s head.
With his Boundless Enhancement talent pushing his skills to completely absurd levels, giving him zero cast time was basically handing him a fully loaded nuclear machine gun.
But as amazing as that was, the real prize was the text sitting right there in the parentheses at the top.
"Logic Set," Declan whispered, running his thumb over the glowing blue runes.
He knew all about Set pieces. He had read enough gaming forums and web novels to know they were the absolute holy grail of MMO gear.
Normally, an item just gave you the stats written on the tin. But Set items were different. Equipping multiple pieces of the same specific set granted exponential, hidden stat multipliers. They stacked on top of each other, creating bonuses that broke the game’s balance entirely.
If this tiny, weightless ear-cuff gave him +1,500 Intelligence and +800 Agility on its own, finding the other two pieces of the Logic Set would turn his physical brain into a literal supercomputer!
He didn’t hesitate for a single second. He raised his right hand and clipped the dark metal cuff onto the upper cartilage of his right ear.
The world around him instantly slowed down to a complete crawl.
It was like someone had hit a slow-motion button on the universe. Declan blinked, and he could actually see the individual microscopic pixels of digital dust floating lazily in the freezing air.
He didn’t just see the room; he felt it. He could hear the exact, rhythmic thumping of the fleshy walls expanding and contracting. He could hear the nervous, rapid heartbeat of Nova standing twenty feet away. He could map the exact trajectory of a drop of corrupted fluid falling from the ceiling before it even hit the floor.
His new +800 Agility stat meant his body could physically move fast enough to match his new processing speed. He was reading the data of the physical world faster than the Primordial Grid could comfortably render it.
"Declan?" Sloane called out from the elevator shaft.
Her voice sounded strange to him. It sounded incredibly slow, drawn out, and heavy. He watched her mouth form the words at a snail’s pace.
"Did you get the drop?" she asked nervously, her eyes darting around the dark, fleshy room as if she expected another boss to pop out of the walls.
Declan stood up. He turned around smoothly to face his party. His movements were so fluid and perfectly optimized that he didn’t even displace the dust in the air. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com
The glowing blue runes on his new ear-cuff pulsed brightly in the dim light of the cavern. The dark purple voids of his eyes locked onto the three girls. He felt entirely untouchable. He felt like he could dodge a sniper bullet just by tilting his head.
"I got exactly what I wanted." Declan smiled. It was a dark, completely ruthless smile that made the hairs on the back of Morgan’s neck stand up.
