Free Web NovelChapter 147: Chapter 147: The Bounty
Dante stepped out of the swirling blue portal generated by the [Spatial Stone].
He didn’t materialize in the dusty quiet dojo where he had first received the [Blade-Master] scroll.
He didn’t appear in the grand sweeping plazas of the capital.
He had keyed the teleportation to the exact coordinates of the VIP suite inside the Astral Emporium.
The transition was flawless. His iron boots hit the plush velvet carpet without a sound.
The suite was empty.
The massive glass window overlooking the auction hall showed a completely deserted stage.
The frantic billion-credit bidding war was over.
The elite players of the server had dispersed back into the open world to lick their financial wounds or flaunt their new acquisitions.
Dante didn’t immediately contact his squad.
He walked over to the velvet sofa, unclipped the heavy starry fabric of his [Mantle of the Void-Dragon], and dropped it onto the cushions.
He needed a moment to process the absolute monumental shift in his localized power scaling.
He opened his system interface and pulled up his newly acquired Class profile.
The text was no longer the standard neutral blue of a baseline Warrior.
It was a deep aggressive crimson that pulsed slightly as if the data itself was alive and breathing.
[Participant: Dan]
[Level: 70]
[Class: Asura Vanguard (Mythic)]
The title alone felt incredibly heavy. Mythic.
It was a classification that defied the standard Zenith Protocol hierarchy.
He scrolled past his raw unmitigated core attributes.
They were currently sitting at mathematically absurd levels thanks to the massive permanent percentage boosts the class provided.
He focused entirely on the new passives and skills.
He needed to understand the exact mechanics of the tools he had just inherited from Lin.
[Class Passive 1: Aura of Despair]
[Description: Hostile entities within a 100-foot radius experience 200% simulated pain feedback. Morale and defense stats are passively reduced by 50%.]
Dante raised an eyebrow.
The defense reduction was incredible, but the pain feedback was what made the passive truly terrifying.
In the Zenith Protocol, pain was usually capped to prevent severe psychological trauma to the players connected via their VR capsules.
If an enemy player stepped within a hundred feet of Dante, that safety cap was removed and doubled.
A simple graze from a sword would feel like a limb amputation.
It was a psychological weapon designed to completely break the combat focus of an opponent. freewebnoveℓ.com
He moved to the second passive.
[Class Passive 2: Absolute Ruin]
[Description: All physical attacks permanently alter the environment. Destroyed terrain cannot be reset by standard system protocols.]
"Well, that is going to make me very unpopular with city planners," Dante muttered.
Usually, when a player dropped a massive AoE spell that shattered a cobblestone street or leveled a forest, the automated repair algorithms of the system would slowly rebuild the terrain over the next few hours to maintain the integrity of the game world.
[Absolute Ruin] meant that if Dante swung his sword and carved a trench into a mountain, that trench was permanent.
The system couldn’t fix it. He could literally reshape the continent if he wasn’t careful.
He checked the final passive.
[Class Passive 3: Predator’s Eye]
[Description: Base Critical Hit Chance is permanently locked at 100%.]
Dante just stared at the text.
He had spent a massive amount of localized effort extracting the [Celestial Strike Pearl] from the City Lord just to get a 30% critical hit boost.
Now, the class gave him absolute unquestionable certainty.
Every single time his blade touched a target, it would hit with double damage.
He dismissed the passives and opened the active skill tree.
He needed to know exactly how the power of the Asura functioned in active combat.
[Class Skill 1: Asura’s Descent (Active)]
[Description: The user voluntarily reduces their Physical and Magical Defense to 0. In exchange, Maximum HP is multiplied by 10, and Attack Power is doubled.]
[Grants 5 seconds of absolute invulnerability upon activation. Duration of invulnerability is extended by 3 seconds for every hostile entity killed while active. Cooldown: 1 Hour.]
It was a reckless and hyper-aggressive stance.
Dropping his defense to zero meant any standard attack would hit him for raw unmitigated damage.
But multiplying his 25,500 health pool by ten gave him a quarter of a million HP to soak the hits.
The rolling invulnerability frames meant he could functionally stay invincible indefinitely as long as he kept killing things.
[Class Skill 2: Asura’s Heart (Active)]
[Description: A burst of pure combat adrenaline. Boosts Attack Speed and Movement Speed by 100%.]
[Critical Hit Damage is increased to 300%. Instantly dispels all positive buffs on targeted enemies upon hit. Duration: 30 seconds. Cooldown: 5 Minutes.]
Dante nodded approvingly.
Stripping buffs was incredibly valuable against high-tier Guild Masters who relied on expensive consumables and support auras to survive.
A 300% critical damage modifier combined with his guaranteed 100% crit chance meant his burst damage would be genuinely catastrophic.
He looked at the third skill.
[Class Skill 3: Starfall (Active)]
[Description: The user commands the atmosphere to violently collapse.]
[Summons a massive indiscriminate AoE barrage of superheated cosmic meteors within a 500-foot radius. Deals catastrophic Fire and True Damage. Cooldown: 24 Hours.]
It was a siege-breaker.
It was a literal orbital bombardment that he could call down on command.
If Silas tried to trap him with an army again, he didn’t need to rely on [Cyclone of Ruin] or [Phantom Waltz]. He could just glass the entire grid square.
He skipped over the final ultimate skill, [God-Illusion].
He already knew what it did, and he had no intention of using the one-time sixty-second god mode unless the server was literally ending.
Dante closed the interface entirely.
He felt heavily and fundamentally changed.
He wasn’t just a high-stat player anymore.
He was walking around with the localized equivalent of administrative developer tools wrapped in the lore of a tragic ancient massacre.
He pulled the heavy dark [Primal Chaos Token] out of his inventory and rolled the jagged metal over his knuckles.
"One favor from an unlisted faction regardless of the consequences," Dante murmured. He remembered the instructions of Lin.
He didn’t know who the Primal Chaos Divine Realm was. But if a Mythic-tier ghost thought they were dangerous, Dante believed him.
He slipped the token back into his void ring and kept it securely hidden next to his [Bloom of Decay].
His private party interface suddenly pinged, and the notification flashed aggressively in the corner of his vision.
[Lila: Dante! Where are you?! Are you still in the forbidden zone?]
Dante tapped the reply button.
[Dan: I am in the VIP suite at the Emporium. I just used the fast-travel stone.]
[Lila: Get down here right now! Sera is having a meltdown in the main office, and Nyx is literally threatening to throw her datapad out the window.]
Dante frowned.
[Dan: What happened? Did Silas try to breach the building?]
[Lila: No. It is the forums. You need to see this.]
Dante didn’t wait for further explanation.
He grabbed his cloak from the sofa, clipped it over his shoulders, and walked out of the suite to take the grand marble staircase down to the first-floor administrative offices.
He pushed the heavy mahogany doors open.
The office was a localized hub of panicked activity.
Sera was pacing furiously behind her massive desk, and her usually flawless merchant robes were slightly rumpled.
Nyx was sitting on a sofa and aggressively typing on three different floating holographic projections simultaneously.
Mei was leaning against the wall and polishing her massive frying pan, while Pip hovered nervously near the ceiling.
Garrick was standing by the door. He held his rusty shield and looked entirely confused but highly supportive.
"What is the emergency?" Dante asked and stepped into the room.
Sera spun around, and her eyes were wide. "Dante. Have you checked the global leaderboards in the last ten minutes?"
"No," Dante said. "I was busy inheriting the cosmic trauma of a dead man."
Nyx didn’t look away from her screens.
She just swiped her hand sideways to forcefully throw one of the holographic projections across the room so it hovered directly in front of the face of Dante.
It was the Global Hidden Class Rankings.
Dante had checked this board once before back in Outpost 404 when he realized the innocent-looking girl who handed him the [Bloom of Decay] was actually the number-one ranked ’Soul Weaver’.
The board had updated.
[Global Hidden Class Rankings]
[Rank 1: Asura Vanguard (Mythic) - Owner: Dan]
[Rank 2: Soul Weaver (Legendary) - Owner: Aria]
[Rank 3: Astral Arcanist (Epic) - Owner: Lila]
Dante stared at the top slot.
"The system auto-published the class acquisition," Dante realized flatly.
"It did not just publish it, Dante!" Sera yelled and threw her hands up.
"It blasted a localized ping to every single major guild on the server! Everyone knows you are sitting on a Mythic-tier Hidden Class! The forums are literally catching fire!"
"Aria was sitting at Rank 1 for two days," Nyx added rapidly. Her fingers blurred across her keyboard.
"Nobody bothered her because ’Soul Weaver’ sounds like a passive support class, and she kept a low profile."
"’Asura Vanguard’ does not sound like a support class. It sounds like a localized extinction event."
"Silas is going to lose his mind," Dante noted. He was completely unbothered by the exposure.
"He already did," Sera sighed heavily and dropped into her desk chair.
"Ten minutes after the leaderboard updated, Vanguard’s Legacy issued a localized kill order. He is actively mobilizing the five million fresh recruits he acquired this morning."
"Five million Level 10 players are not a threat to me," Dante said and crossed his arms.
"They are not hunting you, Dante," Nyx corrected him sharply and finally looked up from her screens.
Her dark glasses reflected the glowing red text of a public bounty board.
"Silas knows he cannot kill you. He knows you have zero cooldowns and reality-bending stats."
Nyx spun the projection around so Dante could read the bounty.
[Global Bounty - Issued by Vanguard’s Legacy]
[Target: Any active member of the guild ’Aegis Vanguard’.]
[Reward: 50,000 Veridian Credits per confirmed kill.]
"He is not hunting you," Nyx repeated quietly.
"He is hunting us. He wants to force you into a localized trap by constantly and aggressively harassing your supply lines and your party members in the open world."
Dante read the bounty.
The cold absolute fury he had felt in the mindscape with Lin returned instantly.
Silas wasn’t trying to fight him like a man.
The Guild Master was using his massive newly acquired zerg-rush army to bully and execute the people Dante had decided to protect.
Silas was deliberately targeting Sera, Lila, Mei, and the others to try to bleed the localized support structure of Dante dry.
"He wants to play dirty," Dante whispered and his red eyes narrowed.
"Dante," Sera said. Her voice was tight with genuine fear.
"We cannot leave the safe zones. If we step outside the city walls, we will be swarmed by thousands of players instantly."
"They will camp our resource nodes. We are completely trapped in the Capital."
"You are not trapped," Dante stated.
He didn’t turn to the door. He didn’t rush out to fight an army.
He looked at his system interface.
He had twenty unallocated attribute points from the guild milestone, and he had a brand new class that needed testing.
"I told you I was going to systematically dismantle his empire," Dante said smoothly.
The influence of the Asura bled a dangerous and terrifying confidence into his tone.
"If he wants to send his people into the open world to hunt Aegis Vanguard, that just means I do not have to go looking for them."
He turned toward the door.
"Where are you going?" Lila asked nervously.
"I have a new buff I need to evolve," Dante said.
"And then I am going to take a walk. Let him send his five million men. I will make sure none of them ever want to log back in."
