Read Novel Full Chapter 793: Gathering
Chapter 793: Gathering
Six months passed the way real growth always did, in a rhythm too steady to notice day by day and too obvious to miss looking back on it.
The bottom layer had become something none of them had planned for so directly, but all of them had built toward without quite naming it. Every soul freed through the Geneline’s climbing paths, every Asura who survived the long road up from slavery, found Ananta Regalon waiting at the top of it with an open door instead of another cage. Word spread the way word always spread among people who had nothing left to lose and everything left to hope for.
The army grew. Not in careful, measured increments, but in waves, month over month, until the kingdom that had once crawled up out of the bottom plane with a double handful of names now counted its numbers in ways that would have seemed impossible a year earlier.
Four events won. Four championship-position victories, one shy of the five they needed, each one harder than the last and each one worth exactly what it cost.
[Kingdom Leaderboard Update: Ananta Regalon now ranks 78th.]
The top of the family had climbed with it. Almond, Lily, Rudra, and Ainen now stood at Tier-56, a height that would have seemed absurd back when a Tier-30 reward had felt like the ceiling of the world. The Six Empires and the layer’s other true powers had climbed faster still, sitting now at Tier-65, a gap that reminded everyone exactly how much further this whole climb still had to go.
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The gathering ground had never held this many people comfortably before, and it still didn’t, exactly, but nobody minded standing shoulder to shoulder for something this important.
Almond, Lily, and Admiral Rudra stood at the center of it, Big D beside them the way he always was, and the reports came in from every direction the kingdom now had a hand in.
Silvester and Hiroshi gave the training numbers first, blunt and proud in equal measure. The vanguard’s readiness had never been higher, and neither had it needed to be, given how many new arrivals still required proper drilling every single week.
Arjun handled recruitment intake, dry as ever about the sheer volume of it. "We’re running out of places to put people who want to fight for us," he said. "Good problem. Still a problem."
Julian and Kexell split the report on active kingdom defense, the standing watch that never fully stood down anymore given how large the territory had grown. Viktor and Bianca covered the middle-plane holdings, the ten worlds the Asura Executives still ran with the same quiet competence they’d shown since the day they’d first been trusted with them. Liang reported on supply lines that stretched further now than anyone would have guessed possible six months earlier.
Theo and Paloma covered diplomacy, the careful work of keeping Ananta Regalon’s rapid rise from looking like a threat to kingdoms who might otherwise have felt cornered by it. Zauna and Christina handled the layer’s shifting alliances, Solmire chief among them, still standing, still grateful, still useful in ways neither side had expected at the start.
James and Aarav gave the numbers on new construct sentience, the quiet, ongoing miracle of summoned soldiers waking up into real people, still happening, still treated with the same seriousness it had been treated with from the very first case. Liam and Ruyi covered the training pipeline for those newly awakened souls, making sure nobody who woke up into personhood was left to figure out what that meant alone.
And then the family everyone already knew stood up in turn. Natalia, Emma, Marcus, Maya, Kira, Noah, Tejas, and Valentina, each with their own piece of the growing whole, X-rank Potential humming quietly under every one of them now, a full second generation of the kind of power that had once belonged only to four people standing at the very top.
"That’s everything," Marcus said finally, closing the last report. "Empire’s healthy. Growing faster than we can properly track some weeks. Good problems, mostly."
Almond let the gathering settle into quiet before he spoke again.
"Good problems," he agreed. "But the layer doesn’t slow down to let us enjoy them. The monthly event is five days out."
The gathering ground went still and focused all at once, the particular quiet of a family that had learned, a long time ago, exactly what those five words meant.
"Everyone prepares," Almond said. "Same as always. We’ll talk assignments tomorrow."
---
The rest of that same evening, a smaller group broke off from the gathering entirely, headed for one more thing before the monthly event’s preparations swallowed everyone’s attention whole.
Almond, Lily, Rudra, and Ainen walked together toward the registration ring, Natalia and the rest of the Grim Breakers close behind them, thirteen X-rank Potential Regalons answering a notice that had gone out to every kingdom on the layer capable of fielding one.
[New Event Detected: The Hundred Towers]
[Format: Tower Defense Battle Royale]
[Participants: 100 Kingdoms]
Marcus read the full posting aloud once they reached the ring, and the shape of it made even Rudra’s steady expression sharpen with real interest.
"Each kingdom gets a tower," Marcus said. "Your own base, built and defended however you choose. Waves of monsters hit every tower on the field at the same time, and they get worse the longer the event runs. But it’s not just survival. Any kingdom can send a strike force out to hit another kingdom’s tower directly, and if your tower falls, whether to monsters or to another kingdom’s assault, you’re out."
"Last tower standing wins outright," Lily said, reading over his shoulder. "Everyone else banks points based on how long they lasted and how many other towers they took down along the way."
"So it’s defense, and it’s a hunt, at the same time," Ainen said. "I like it already. Feels like the kind of thing that punishes anyone who only prepared for one or the other."
"A hundred kingdoms," Rudra said, already turning the shape of a whole battlefield over in his mind the way he turned over any war worth winning properly. "That’s a great deal of towers to watch fall before ours does."
"Then we build something worth watching fail to fall," Almond said.
Natalia rolled her shoulders, grinning despite the size of what they were about to walk into. "Five of five," she said. "This could be the one that gets us there."
"Or it could be the one that teaches us exactly how far we still have to climb," Rudra said. "Either way, we go in ready."
The registration ring lit gold beneath all thirteen of them, and the notice above it began its countdown.
[The Hundred Towers will begin in one hour.]
Thirteen people who had already rebuilt themselves once, and were more than willing to do it again if this was the event that demanded it, settled in to plan exactly what kind of tower a family like theirs was capable of building in the time they had left.