When Imperator realized the battlefield wasn't reflecting his projections, he quickly identified his miscalculations. But with the two armies already clashing, changing orders on the fly was impossible. On paper, his forces still held the numerical advantage; it just wasn't as overwhelming as he had anticipated.
He adjusted his strategy into a three-pronged countermeasure:
1. Pin down the five enemy boss pets with a small contingent of high-HP bosses.
2. Bog down the enemy's Level 35 elite squads with the rest of his high-HP bosses.
3. Exterminate the Starlight Town cannon fodder.
Now, all he could do was wait for the frontline to deliver results. Even the most brilliant strategy was useless without capable soldiers to execute it. Even history's greatest tacticians, from Alexander the Great to Napoleon, still needed boots on the ground to actually win the wars.
At the vanguard.
The players micromanaging the five boss pets were Orion, Glytter, and three elites appointed by Starlight Village's other major guilds. All five shared one distinct trait: god-tier APM (Actions Per Minute) and multitasking capabilities.
[Strengthened Norlun]
[Level: 45]
[HP: 500,000,000]
[Enslaved Leafcutter Ant Chieftain]
[Level: 45]
[HP: 280,000,000]
[Enslaved Rock Ant Chieftain]
[Level: 45]
[HP: 300,000,000]
[Enslaved Fire Ant Chieftain]
[Level: 45]
[HP: 280,000,000]
[Enslaved Carrion Ant Chieftain]
[Level: 45]
[HP: 300,000,000]
The Carrion Ant Chieftain had been assigned to Orion specifically for its summoning skill: [Summon Undead Elite Carrion Ant].
[Undead Elite Carrion Ant]
[Level: 45]
[HP: 80,000,000]
[Passive Skill: Carrion Strike – Attacks reduce the target's armor by 8,000.]
[Passive Skill: Corpse Explosion – Upon death (or self-detonation), deals 50,000 damage to all enemies within a 30-yard radius.]
The chieftain didn't summon just one Undead Carrion Ant—it spawned ten!
Orion's position was the fulcrum on which the entire battle tipped. Imperator's battle plan hadn't accounted for bursting down the five boss pets; doing so would burn too many resources and stall his momentum. Instead, he had deployed WarChief bosses to bog them down in a five-on-one attrition war. He explicitly chose high-armor, high-HP meat shields that wouldn't fall easily. Even if one or two died, it would take at least an hour. An hour was more than enough time to wipe out the main Starlight Town army.
But Imperator couldn't have predicted Orion dropping ten 80-million-HP Undead Elite Carrion Ants onto the field. The minus-8,000 armor debuff from their strikes was devastating. Orion also assigned a specialized 100-player strike team to focus-fire whichever enemy boss the Carrion Ants swarmed.
The result? The first WarChief boss collapsed in under five minutes. Orion's squad snowballed their momentum. In less than twenty minutes, they wiped out all five of the enemy bosses assigned to pin them!
Freed from their meat shields, the Carrion Ant Chieftain and its undead swarm turned their mandibles toward the defending players. The frontline crumpled instantly. Players were slaughtered or routed, leaving a bloody trail of corpses in their wake. Seeing his flank secure, Orion didn't get greedy for kill points. He immediately marched his strike team to reinforce the adjacent Leafcutter Ant Chieftain.
The Leafcutter Ant, being a support-oriented boss, was struggling against the five WarChief bosses pinning it. But the moment Orion's legion arrived, he executed an absolutely filthy play.
Confirming the Carrion Ant Chieftain's summon cooldown was refreshed, Orion commanded all ten Undead Elite Carrion Ants to charge into the densest cluster of enemy players and self-detonate.
Boom! Boom!
Massive explosions rocked the battlefield, wiping out swathes of enemy players.
The Carrion Ant Chieftain immediately cast its spell, spawning ten fresh Undead Elite Carrion Ants. Then, the Leafcutter Ant Chieftain followed up with a disgusting play of its own: it cast a mass resurrection on the ten shattered corpses of the previous ants.
Instantly, the field swarmed with twenty Undead Elite Carrion Ants!
The enemy players stared in utter disbelief. As the elite ants scuttled toward them, the attackers scattered, terrified of another chain detonation. Orion didn't waste the explosions on them; instead, he sicced all twenty undead ants onto the five WarChief bosses. This time, it only took ten minutes to melt the bosses into paste. What followed was another one-sided massacre.
Soon, all five of Starlight Village's boss pets were liberated. Imperator's containment strategy had utterly collapsed. The five bosses, backed by a horde of undead elite ants, steamrolled across the vanguard to reinforce the remaining pockets of resistance.
On the opposite side of the battlefield, a chaotic melee raged between tens of thousands of regular players and the Burning Horde. Everyone was roughly Level 30 to 35, but Village 9139 held a two-to-one numerical advantage. Logically, it should have been a stomp. However, heavily bolstered by their socketed gems, the Starlight Village players held the line. For the first ten minutes, they traded blows evenly.
But as the fight dragged on, the sheer numbers began to tell. The Starlight Town lines buckled, and casualties mounted. Forty minutes into the slaughter, over 4,000 of the 10,000 Starlight Town players were dead. If this attrition continued, the entire army would be wiped.
Desperate squad captains flooded Lila's comms:
"Commander, pull the reserves! We're breaking!"
"Guildmaster Liu, the main force is bleeding out!"
The faction chat exploded with pleas from the reserve defenders:
"Guildmaster Liu, send us in!"
"We can't just sit here and watch!"
But Lila rejected them all.
"The Burning Horde still has half its forces hidden. The barracks must be held!"
"Do not abandon the mining sector! Their Rogues are moving again."
"To the brothers on the frontline: grit your teeth and hold! We are pushing out soon!"
On the main battlefield, the original 10,000 Starlight Town players had been whittled down to a meager 1,000 survivors. Surrounded by over 10,000 WarChief troops, they were like candles in a hurricane—one gust away from extinguishing. They knew the grim reality: the moment they were wiped, the enemy Priests would mass-resurrect their fallen, restoring the Burning Horde to near-full fighting capacity.
Just as total despair settled over the Starlight Town survivors, a sudden commotion rippled through the WarChief lines.
That chaos was a ray of dawn cutting through the dark. On the outer perimeter, two new forces had appeared.
One was a pristine, 1,000-man Level 35 elite legion.
The other was just one person.
Him.