Read Novel Full Chapter 796: Last Tower
Chapter 796: Last Tower
The waves came harder after the Devourer, and they came without pause.
By the eighteenth hour, the monsters stopped arriving in waves at all and simply kept arriving, a steady grinding pressure that never fully broke and never fully let up. Ananta Regalon’s tower answered it the same way it had answered everything else, in shifts, in rotations, with Kayla moving constantly between positions and nobody standing the same watch twice in a row.
"Fourteen towers," Marcus reported at the twentieth hour, reading the board with red-rimmed eyes. "Down from twenty-two. Whatever’s hunting the others is working fast."
"Not whatever," Maya said quietly. Farsight Loom had been stretched wide across the battlefield for hours, and she’d been watching something take shape out there that nobody else could see yet. "Whoever. Three kingdoms are moving together. They’ve stopped defending their own towers entirely and started splitting the work."
Rudra’s head came up sharply at that. "Explain."
"One kingdom holds all three towers with a skeleton crew," Maya said. "The other two send everything they have to knock down anyone still standing. They’ve taken four towers in the last two hours alone."
"That’s not a strategy," Almond said slowly. "That’s an alliance."
"It’s a good one," Rudra admitted. "It’s what I’d do, if I trusted anyone here enough to try it."
They came for Ananta Regalon at the twenty-second hour, and they came in numbers.
Fifteen fighters crossed the open ground together, three kingdom banners flying above them, and every one of them carried the same confirmed X-rank Potential every person on the tower carried. This was not a raid. This was a coordinated assault built specifically to end the strongest remaining tower on the board before it could become anyone’s problem later.
Natalia watched them come and felt something cold settle in her stomach that had nothing to do with fear. Fifteen against thirteen was bad math on its own. Fifteen rested against thirteen who had been fighting for a full day was worse.
"They waited," she said. "They watched us kill an Epic-Tier and then waited until we were tired."
"That’s what I’d have done," Rudra said, and there was no bitterness in it. "Positions."
Thirteen people moved without needing a second word.
The first wave hit the wall directly. A fighter whose whole body had gone crystalline slammed into the tower’s cracked face and simply kept going, refracting light in a hundred directions as she moved, each reflection carrying a fraction of her weight, so that striking any single one of her accomplished almost nothing at all.
Kira met her with Eternal Frost, and the two of them fought a fight made entirely of angles and reflected light, ice against crystal, neither one able to fully catch the other. Every time Kira’s frost found a reflection, the woman’s real body was already somewhere else, and every time the crystal fighter struck, Kira’s ice had already shifted to meet the wrong angle.
Then Kira stopped chasing reflections entirely and locked the ground beneath the woman’s feet instead, frost spreading across stone in a wide, patient sheet.
"Reflections don’t need footing," Kira said. "You do."
The crystal fighter’s next step found ice instead of stone, and the reflection trick failed the instant her real body lost its balance.
A second fighter came over the wall entirely, wreathed in a swarm of small metallic constructs that reassembled themselves into new shapes every time Noah cut one apart. Endless Blade found five of them in as many seconds, and five more replaced them before he’d finished the follow-through.
"They’re not individually strong," Noah called, breathing hard. "They’re just endless."
"Then stop cutting them," Marcus called back, markers already flaring toward the swarm’s center. "Find the one that’s actually holding the pattern together. Third from the left, low."
Noah found it exactly where Marcus said it would be, buried in the swarm’s heart, and Anchorpoint drove down through it hard enough that the entire swarm dropped out of the air at once, a hundred small constructs falling dead to the platform in the same instant.
Julian and Emma took the western wall together, where three enemy fighters had already breached the outer defenses and were working inward fast.
The first threw acid that ate through stone as easily as flesh, and Julian’s Wildfire Eternal met it head-on, flame and acid canceling each other in a hissing cloud that stripped the air of anything worth breathing.
"Emma, up!" he shouted, and she was already climbing.
Eclipse Veil folded shadow around her as she moved, breaking the line of sight of a second fighter whose whole ability seemed built around never letting a target out of view, and by the time he found her again, Nova’s Crown was already falling.
The third enemy fighter did something none of them had seen before, splitting cleanly into three separate bodies, each one carrying a third of her original strength but moving at three times the speed.
"Oh, I hate that," Emma said.
"Pick one and commit," Julian said. "They’re weaker apart. That’s the trade."
They picked one, and Cinderstorm and Starfall landed together, and the woman’s three bodies snapped back into one badly wounded whole a moment later.
Almond, Lily, Rudra, and Ainen held the tower’s heart, and they held it against the assault’s real strength.
The enemy commander arrived last, the way commanders always did, and Almond understood the shape of the man’s power before he’d taken three steps onto the platform.
Every fighter behind him moved a fraction faster. Every strike landed a fraction harder. Every wound they took closed a little quicker than it should have. He wasn’t fighting at all. He was making everyone around him better simply by standing there, and he’d clearly been doing it across four separate tower assaults tonight without ever once needing to draw his own weapon.
"Force multiplier," Almond said. "He’s the reason three kingdoms have been taking towers this fast."
"Then he’s the one that has to fall," Rudra said.
It was easier said than done. The commander’s own guard fought with the coordination of people who had been drilled for exactly this scenario, two fighters who moved like they shared a single mind, one always covering the exact angle the other left open. Ainen tested them twice and came away from both attempts with nothing to show but a shallow cut across his forearm.
"They’re not reading each other," Lily said, watching carefully. "They’re linked. Whatever one sees, the other knows."
"Can you cut it?"
"I can cut anything that thinks it knows who it is."
Oathbreak Wraith reached into the pair’s shared coordination and severed it clean, and for one crucial second neither of them could tell where the other actually was. Their perfect guard collapsed into two people swinging at empty air.
Ainen took the opening with Flashforged Cleaver, faster than either could recover, and the guard broke apart in a single crossing exchange.
The commander finally moved himself, and his own strength turned out to be considerable once he stopped spending it on everyone else. His first strike drove Rudra back three full steps, stone cracking beneath his heels. His second cracked the platform where Almond had been standing a half second earlier.
"He’s holding a lot in reserve," Lily said, circling wide.
"Then let’s spend it for him," Rudra said.
Tollbound Reckoning marked every strike the commander threw, quietly, patiently, and the man never once noticed the debt building behind his own aggression. He pressed harder, growing confident as Rudra gave ground, spending more with every exchange, certain he was winning a fight of attrition against someone visibly retreating.
Rudra let him spend it. That was the entire point.
"Now," Almond said.
Rudra called the debt in all at once, and the commander staggered under the weight of every strike he’d ever thrown in this fight arriving back in a single moment, the accumulated cost of his own confidence landing on him like a collapsing wall.
Grimreaver Sovereign finished it a heartbeat later, Almond’s blade finding the one true center underneath a man who had spent this entire battle making other people stronger and had never once considered what happened when someone made him weaker.
The three-kingdom alliance broke within minutes of their commander falling. Not from cowardice, but from simple arithmetic, the same arithmetic that had held this whole event together from the start.
The board updated as the last of the enemy retreated.
[Towers remaining: 6 of 100.]
"Six," Marcus breathed. "And three of those just lost their commander."
The last six hours ran differently after that. The three-kingdom alliance, broken and leaderless, lost all three of its towers to monster waves within the hour, unable to defend positions they’d stripped bare to fuel their own offense.
Two more towers fell to the event’s final waves, worn down past the point where survival was still possible.
And when the final horn sounded across a battlefield gone quiet and smoking under a rising sun, exactly one tower still stood.
[The Hundred Towers is complete.]
[1st Place: Ananta Regalon.]
[Champion-position victories: 5 of 5.]
[New deck-modification attempt unlocked for all qualifying members.]
Nobody cheered. Thirteen exhausted people simply sat down where they stood, on a cracked platform they’d defended for a full day and night without ever once losing a single person off it.
"Five of five," Natalia said finally, disbelieving. "We actually did it."
"We did," Almond said.
Ainen laughed once, tired and genuine. "I’m going to sleep for a week. Then I’m going to go rebuild a deck. Then I’m going to sleep for another week."
"Monthly event’s in four days," Rudra reminded him.
"Then I’ll sleep for four days," Ainen said. "I’m flexible."
Almond looked out at the empty battlefield, at ninety-nine fallen towers and one still standing, and let himself feel it properly for a moment before the next thing arrived to demand his attention.
They’d earned it. All of it. And there was still so much further left to climb.