Kael’s rampage left a trail of corpses and fleeing players. Even the worker NPCs scrambling outside were hastily recalled behind the village walls.
Pushing to the West Gate, Kael found the area completely devoid of life. With no targets left, he turned his attention to the production structures dotting the western perimeter.
For a standard player, siege damage was a miserable grind. Take the "Grain Transit Hub" in front of him: it boasted two million HP and 10,000 [Fortification] armor.
[Fortification] armor inherently mitigated player damage by 50% and granted immunity to standard combat effects like critical strikes and bleed ticks. A player with a 30,000 attack rating would only scrape off 10,000 damage per hit. Even with Kael's staggering 100,000 damage output, each shot only hit for 45,000. His simulacrums hit for a mere 30,000.
It would take him and his three clones fifteen to sixteen full volleys just to level a single building. For a guy used to one-shotting players, the siege math was agonizing.
Still, with no living targets, demolition was the only option. Dozens of structures were scattered across the west side. Raze them all? It would take an hour or two, minimum.
Naturally, the enemy faction wasn't just going to sit on their hands. Just as Kael wondered what their counterplay would be, a hauntingly beautiful melody drifted through the air.
Kael's chest tightened. Crap. A Choral Naga. That's [Choral Slumber].
[Choral Slumber]: Forces all enemy units in its radius into a deep sleep, rendering them completely immune to physical and magical damage for the duration.
Nagas were a deep-sea race—the terrifying reality behind the mermaid myths. They were a rare faction with bizarre abilities, the most notorious being their vocalizations. A Naga's song could apply massive area-of-effect buffs to allies or crippling debuffs to enemies. Because the song was a channeled ability, the effects couldn't be dispelled. The only counterplay was to silence or kill the singer.
And within that already rare race was an even rarer variant: the Choral Naga.
On top of standard Naga skills, they possessed [Choral Slumber], a hard-crowd-control ability that slept every hostile in range. While sleeping targets were invulnerable, they were effectively removed from the board. In a massive 10,000 vs 10,000 multiplayer battle, instantly taking half the enemy army out of the fight shifted the odds to ten-thousand against five. It was a completely broken mechanic for large-scale warfare.
The moment the sleep status hit Kael, a name flashed in his mind: Lorelei.
In his past life, she had been Imperator’s right hand. Half of Imperator’s legendary tactical upsets—those impossible underdog victories—were built entirely around her crowd control.
He hadn't expected her to secure the Choral Naga Class Advancement this early in the timeline. Why hadn't his forward scouts picked up on this?
But there was no time to dwell on intel failures. Kael was completely paralyzed, surrounded by hundreds of players and units from the Burning Horde.
Dozens of casters were already channeling around him, pre-casting ground-targeted traps and totems. Others were chain-casting debuffs directly onto his disabled avatar—[Enfeeble], [Crippled], and worse.
Imperator stepped through the crowd, stopping right in front of Kael to examine the server's bogeyman up close.
"I've heard a lot about you, Dawnbreaker. I'm Imperator."
The long elven ears on his avatar twitched—a physical tell. Whenever Imperator was riding an adrenaline high, his ears flicked. It was a habit that bled from the real world into the VR interface.
With his avatar under the sleep status, Kael’s voice comms were disabled. But as a player, he still had text chat. A speech bubble popped over Kael's head.
Imperator? Catchy.
Imperator chuckled. "Appreciate it. Anything you want to say while you're in timeout? Any last words you want me to pass along to your faction?"
Another text bubble appeared.
Last words? You think a zerg rush is enough to kill me?
Imperator pointed at the UI cluster above Kael's head. "Have you checked your debuff bar lately?"
Kael glanced at his UI. He already had over twenty negative status effects stacked on him, some stacking linearly, others exponentially. His defense had been gutted by 20,000 points. Attack speed was down 80%. Movement speed down 60%.
Sure, most of them were dispellable. But surrounded by an army, purging them was useless; they'd be reapplied in a heartbeat. Even if each player only hit him for a measly 1,000 damage, a hundred players meant 100,000 damage. A coordinated volley from three to five hundred players would one-shot him.
An archer caught in melee range was dead meat. It didn't matter how stacked his HP or armor was. The class traded survival cooldowns for raw mobility. Sprinting away was his only real defense, but under a mountain of snare debuffs, kiting was physically impossible.
What about flight? Was there a window?
"Don't bother trying to fly," Imperator said, crushing the thought before Kael could even type it. "You showing up confirmed the rumors that you had aerial capabilities. Did you really think I wouldn't pack anti-air?"
Flight was notoriously vulnerable to [Net] and grounding skills. If the Orcs were prepped for it, the sky was a death trap.
What if he popped [Apollo's Descent]? The massive stat steroid might let him tank a single volley and break the encirclement.
"Go ahead, pop your transformation skill," Imperator goaded. "Double your stats for ten minutes. If you do that, maybe we don't one-shot you. But so what if you break out? I'll tell you exactly what happens next: that one-hour exhaustion debuff you get after the transformation? That's the exact hour we march on your main camp."
Imperator leaned in. "You either die right here, or you survive just to watch us raze your base to the ground while you're too weak to stop us."
By now, the debuff icons over Kael's head had breached thirty. His defense had plummeted by over 30,000 points.
His armor rating was literally in the negatives.
"Dawnbreaker, Dawnbreaker..." Imperator sighed mockingly. "Did you ever think you'd end up as just another stepping stone for my legacy?"
Sensing the trap was fully set, Imperator raised a hand, preparing to signal Lorelei to end her song.
But just as he did, a new chat bubble floated casually above Kael’s head.
You wish.