The Orc survivors were a broken mob. Roughly a thousand players remained—three hundred Rogues hiding in the shadows, five hundred stragglers from the rout, and another three hundred hunkered down in the city. Organized, they could have still bled Starlight Town, but without a leader to rally them, they were little more than headless chickens.
With no players to harass them, Starlight Town’s expansion exploded. Research wings and barracks surged upward as new combat NPCs were summoned to replace the fallen. They hit the 30,000 Garrison Point (DP) cap within hours, though the limit remained stubbornly fixed.
At 3:00 PM, a crimson system alert flashed across every player’s vision:
[SYSTEM: Warchief reinforcements have been deployed. Estimated Time of Arrival: 120 minutes.]
Two hours. No one knew the strength of a Warchief’s personal guard, but they didn't want to find out.
Lila gathered the raid leaders. The consensus was immediate: a total blitz. They had to sack Outpost 9139 within two hours. Kael, finally recovered from his Exhaustion debuff, slipped away to harass the western walls alone.
The main force—15,000 players and another 15,000 DP worth of elite NPCs—marched toward the Point C pass. They brought a hundred upgraded catapults, shielded by a dense wall of players. These weren't the rickety engines from the first siege; a tech upgrade had boosted their damage and extended their range to 150 yards.
The Orc towers at the pass had been upgraded too, but their tech lagged behind. Their range topped out at 130 yards.
It was a range-mop. A hundred catapults focused a single target, and the tower’s health bar vanished. Two volleys, and the structure collapsed into splinters. Within minutes, the C-point fortifications were nothing but smoking craters.
Norlun and the swarm of Ant Bosses spearheaded the charge, soaking up the initial aggro. High-armor NPC guards followed, smashing through the Orc lines, while players flooded the gaps to harvest points.
The Orc defenders were a level higher than before and boasted better stats, but Imperator had taken the bulk of the elite garrison with him earlier. The pass was undermanned. With only a few hundred NPC casualties, the Starlight Town army punched through into the forest.
They swept the woods of stragglers and emerged before the towering outer walls of Outpost 9139. Ninety minutes remained on the clock.
Draevan looked at the massive stone walls and grinned. "Ninety minutes? We’ve got time to spare."
SkyVault nodded. "Our catapults outrange them. We’ll have a breach in ten minutes, then it’s just a cleanup job."
Apocalypse_Dreadclaw looked less convinced. "The Burning Horde NPCs at the pass were significantly tougher. Who knows what’s changed behind these walls in the last half hour?"
"Don't sweat it, Apocalypse," MirthBringer chimed in. "They're just mobs now. Without players to micromanage them, they’re sitting ducks."
Lila stayed silent. The die was cast. Regardless of the Orcs' strength, they had to go in. "Engage," she ordered.
A hundred catapults rolled forward.
Then the trap sprung.
Whistling streaks of iron-tipped bolts rained down from the walls. The enemy towers had been upgraded again—to 160 yards. They outranged the catapults.
Twenty Orc towers opened fire simultaneously. A single coordinated volley disintegrated four catapults instantly.
Panic rippled through the siege crews. "What’s the play, Lila?" someone shouted over the faction channel. "Should we pull back and research a range upgrade?"
"That’ll take twenty minutes we don't have," another argued. "And what if they just upgrade again?"
Lila didn't hesitate. "Push. Keep firing."
It became a war of attrition. The catapults crawled forward, trading wood and iron for stone.
CRUNCH.
Another batch of catapults was reduced to toothpicks.
BOOM.
An Orc tower finally toppled.
The Orc towers had the fire rate, but Starlight Town had the numbers. If Imperator were still in command, he would have sent a suicide squad out to disrupt the engines. But without a player’s tactical intuition, the NPCs simply stood their ground in a rigid tower-defense trade.
By the time the last tower was silenced, eighty of Starlight Town’s catapults were junk.
The remaining twenty began hammering the main gate, but time was slipping away. With only an hour left before the Warchief’s arrival, anxiety began to set in. The walls were thick, and the damage was slow.
"This is taking too long," Lotusbond muttered, joining the other guild leaders near Lila.
"The wall’s health pool is insane," SkyVault added.
"Should we just order a general infantry assault?" Draevan suggested. "We can climb or hack at the base."
"The casualty rate would be a bloodbath," Silverwind countered. "We’d have nothing left for the urban combat inside."
Lila squinted at the wall’s health bar. "Wait... look. Is the wall regenerating?"
The leaders looked up. Usually, NPC engineers would be visible on the ramparts, hammering away at the masonry to restore health.
"That’s weird," SkyVault said. "The pass had repair crews. Why not here?"
"Maybe they ran out of materials?"
Lila checked her private messages and a small smile touched her lips. "The repair crews didn't run out of materials. They’re all dead. Kael got them."
The leaders stared at her. "Dawnbreaker? How the hell did he pick off the engineers inside the city?"
Before she could answer, a massive server-wide notification cut through the air:
[SYSTEM: The Western Gate of Grom'kar Outpost has been breached! Victory is within reach!]
The army went silent for a heartbeat before erupting into a deafening roar.
"What the fuck?! He soloed a gate?!"
"Did he just shoot the wall until it fell over?"
"Doesn't matter. If Sir Dawnbreaker says the gate is open, it’s open!"
At the Western Gate, Kael wiped a layer of grime from his face and spat on the ground, looking at the heap of masonry and the dozens of dead NPC engineers scattered around the breach.
"Goddamn," he muttered, his shoulders aching. "That was a lot of repairmen."