Insomniac Player

➤[Hollow Giant eliminated.]

➤[Personal Elimination Requirement: COMPLETE.]

Damien stared at it. Then smiled.

"My skills..." The corpse started glowing. His smile died on the spot. "...Ah."

Ten Hollow Giants lifted their heads at the exact same moment.

➤[Collective Evolution Activated.]

"Oh, come on." He almost laughed. Two skills saved and a fresh apocalypse unlocked, all in the same five seconds. Efficient, if nothing else.

Particles tore off the corpse in ten separate streams, one per surviving Giant, and the moment each thread landed, bodies started moving.

CRACK!

Broken legs snapped straight. Severed tendons knit back together. Ruined arms twitched back to life, black threads spreading fast under grey skin. Whatever had died with Noah’s Giant, that answer for raw strength, spread out across all ten at once. One Giant shoved a collapsed building off itself like it weighed nothing. Another tore straight through the chains holding it. A third pulled itself up out of tons of rubble like it was standing from a nap.

He watched hundreds of players’ worth of work undo itself in real time.

Noah stared at him. Salma stared at him.

Daria’s voice cut through the channel. "...Sleepless."

He swallowed. "Yes?"

"What did you do?"

He checked the quest window instead of answering right away, mostly to give himself a second to find words that wouldn’t get him hit.

➤[Personal Elimination Requirement: COMPLETE.]

He raised the dagger slowly as ten Hollow Giants roared across the city at once. "Well." Forced a grin. "My skills are saved, at least."

"...Whoooh." A long breath out. Small victories.

Then the sky lit up, not the gate this time, the horizon itself, dozens of shapes closing on Tycho at speeds that shouldn’t have been possible.

The real reinforcements. Finally.

They came from every direction, some flying, some riding summoned beasts that hadn’t existed a second before they were mounted, some just running across rooftops faster than his eyes could track. One man crossed the open air itself, a shockwave rippling out from each footstep like he was walking on something solid that wasn’t there. The pressure hit before any of them actually landed, the same kind he’d felt standing near something like the Knight Commander.

Except this time it was coming off humans.

A woman touched down first, boots landing clean on the roof of a half-collapsed tower.

Level 143 flashed above her.

He stared. "...One forty-three."

Another landed in the street, a sword resting across his shoulder that looked heavier than the man carrying it.

Level 167.

Then another. Level 131. Another. Level 188.

Guild crests everywhere, not the kind that recruited new players off the regional board, the kind that showed up on international news, negotiated directly with governments instead of taking orders from them. The kind ordinary players stopped calling people once the numbers got this far out of reach.

Daria let out a slow breath. "Finally."

He leaned on his dagger, half-dead on his feet. "Took their sweet time."

"They crossed hundreds of kilometers," Salma said, like that was supposed to make him feel better about it.

A Hollow Giant tore itself free from under a collapsed building, its broken leg already mostly regrown. Nine more were doing the same thing across the district. Collective Evolution hadn’t just handed out another fragment, it had cranked their recovery speed up with it. Every carefully built piece of containment was falling apart in real time.

"Positions!" Noah shouted. "Keep them contained!"

A Level 150 swordsman landed beside him, glanced at the nearest Giant, and frowned. "Contained? Why?"

Noah opened his mouth to explain. Too slow. The man had already raised his sword.

Mana detonated around the blade. It brightened until distant windows caught the reflection off it. A phantom sword the size of a building started forming overhead.

"I’ll clear the street," the swordsman said, pleasant about it, like he was offering to take out the trash.

Damien’s stomach dropped. If that thing hit more than one Giant at once—

"DON’T ATTACK!" His voice tore across the whole block.

Every head turned, the swordsman’s included, and for one genuinely ridiculous second the entire battlefield watched a Level 15 player scream orders at someone fifteen levels above him with a giant phantom blade still hanging in the air overhead. Death by embarrassment felt like a real possibility for a second.

The swordsman stared. "...Who exactly are you?"

He pointed frantically at the Giants. "Cancel it." His free hand found the edge of his mask on reflex, checking it hadn’t slipped in front of a hundred and eighty strangers who could probably read a face from across the street if they wanted to.

"You’ve got three seconds to explain why."

"Predatory Adaptation." That landed.

Noah stepped in. "He’s right."

Salma followed. "Cancel the skill."

Two respected government players backing a strange, blood-caked Level Ten in black, and that apparently carried weight. The phantom sword dissolved. "Talk."

He explained fast, and the man’s expression shifted from irritated to genuinely paying attention.

"They inherit traits from every Giant that dies."

"Exactly."

"So if we keep going one at a time, the last one alive ends up holding everything." He got there quickly enough.

The golden-armored woman nearby looked out at the ten Giants stirring back to life. "So what’s the fix?"

"Kill all ten at once."

The swordsman looked at him, then at the field, then back. "...That’s it?"

"...Yeah."

He rested the sword back on his shoulder. "Should’ve led with that."

Damien felt something behind his eye twitch. "Do you have any idea how hard it was pushing eleven of these things to death’s door without actually killing any of them?"

"No."

Noah laughed. Damien didn’t. For the players who’d been on the ground since the gate broke, doing that had taken everything they had, and cost people pieces of themselves they weren’t getting back. For this crowd, a Level 60 monster wasn’t a boss fight. It was a chore. The gap became obvious about three seconds after they landed, and it stung more than he expected.

The golden-armored woman opened the command channel. "One executioner per Giant."

A voice answered instantly. "Ten? Easy."

He genuinely felt a little insulted on behalf of everyone who’d nearly died getting them this far.

◇◇◇

The strongest players spread out, one to each Giant.

A Level 161 spearwoman landed in front of the lightning-adapted one. It roared. She rotated the spear once, unbothered. "Stay down."

It charged. She vanished.

BOOM!

Its knee blew out from under it, and it hit the pavement face-first. She rested the spear against its neck and stopped there, patient.

Another player dropped in front of the fire-adapted Giant, raised one hand, and blue chains erupted straight out of the ground, wrapping arms, legs, throat. It struggled against them and got nowhere.

He stared. "...That’s genuinely unfair."

Daria stood beside him. "You’re jealous."

"Extremely."

"You’ll get there eventually."

"You think?"

"No idea, honestly."

"...Thanks for that."

She smiled anyway.

Across the district, the impossible fight kept resolving itself into something almost tidy. One player froze a Giant’s own shadow to the ground and left it there. Another sat pinned under a stone hand summoned out of thin air. A third stood calmly on a Giant’s chest, having beaten it flat with nothing but a wooden staff, like it was a personal insult that it had tried to stand back up at all.

He’d figured out how to solve the puzzle. These people just picked the whole board up and moved it wherever they wanted.

"All targets restrained," someone announced over the channel.

Salma glanced at him. "Your plan. Finish it."

He looked out over the field. Every Giant critically wounded, every player waiting on him specifically. He opened the regional combat channel, and for once nobody interrupted, nobody questioned the level tag sitting next to his name.

Thousands of players on the line, listening. He swallowed. "Confirm targets."

Responses came back one after another.

"One ready."

"Two."

"Three ready."

"Four."

"Five."

"Six ready."

"Seven."

"Eight ready."

"Nine."

A pause, longer than the rest.

Then, "...Ten ready."