After A Billion-Year Torture, I Returned As A Transcendent Player

Chapter 77: Saved The Day

Ordun Kessa was the one who broke the silence.

"Well." The old Hunter lifted his spear again, and something had changed in the set of his shoulders, exhaustion burning off him like fog under sudden sun. "I don’t know what you are, small one. But I like this development considerably more than the last one."

"Name’s Garen." He rolled his neck, crimson-gold light still curling lazy off his skin, tracing slow arcs against the torn clouds behind him. "And I agree. Let’s ruin their day."

A ragged shout of agreement went up across the battered defenders, and it sounded different this time. Not the thin, exhausted cheer from before. Something with teeth in it, voices that had spent the last twenty hours convinced they were fighting a losing war and had just been handed a reason to believe otherwise.

Somewhere below, a healer’s voice crackled faintly across the comm net, relaying word that the broken-armored Hunter had a pulse, weak but steady, and stretcher teams were already moving him toward the shelter.

Aidan heard it.

’Not dead yet.’ He flexed his fingers, watching lightning gather eager between them. ’Then let’s make sure the ones who did that to him don’t get to feel proud of it.’

"Formation on the crimson one!" Kyrsa Wren’s voice cut clean across the storm-torn sky, her silver rings flaring brighter than they had in hours. "He opens them, we finish them! Move!"

The six remaining Terrors had scattered wide across the upper battlefield, wary now, circling instead of pressing forward, wings beating in slow, uncertain arcs against a sky that no longer felt like theirs to own. Aidan didn’t give them time to decide on a new strategy.

He picked the nearest one and simply arrived.

Wind carried him across two hundred meters in a blink, close enough that the beast’s own storm-dark shadow hadn’t finished falling across the clouds before he was already inside its guard, and he hit its chest with a palm wrapped in translated fury. Not enough to kill it outright, but enough to stagger something that hadn’t been staggered by anything smaller than a Divine-rank peer in years, and the impact rolled out across the sky like a second, closer thunderclap.

"NOW!" he shouted.

Veshan was already there, both massive hands buried wrist-deep in the Terror’s exposed flank, physical strength alone tearing a wound wide enough for Ordun’s starlight spear to drive through a heartbeat later.

The beast convulsed, wings thrashing wide enough to scatter the surrounding clouds into ribbons, and shrieked one long, dying note before it came apart in a spray of white light.

[Divine-rank Terror eliminated.]

Three down, five remaining, and the battlefield’s whole rhythm had flipped over.

Aidan didn’t slow down to admire it. He was already moving toward the second target, a hulking Terror wreathed in storm-dark scales, and this time two other Hunters fell in beside him without being asked, reading the new pattern before he’d even finished explaining it.

"Left flank’s open if you push it," one of them called, a woman with twin blades and a voice gone rough from hours of screaming orders.

"Copy."

Aidan drove in low, drew the storm-scaled Terror’s guard down and left exactly as promised, and the twin-blade Hunter came in over the top in a single, perfectly timed arc that opened a gash from shoulder to hip.

Aidan finished it with a compressed drill of lightning and metal punched straight into the wound, and the beast’s death scream rattled the clouds apart for a full kilometer.

[Divine-rank Terror eliminated.]

Four down.

Kyrsa fell into step beside him after that one, chains humming bright and steady again, energy restored by something Aidan suspected had a great deal to do with hope replacing exhaustion in her chest.

"You draw two of them off," she said, already scanning the remaining beasts. "I’ll wrap them together. You finish what I can’t cut through."

"Efficient. I like it."

He peeled two Terrors away from the shrinking group with nothing more than a taunting burst of lightning to the face, and Kyrsa’s rings unspooled into that same spinning lattice that had once saved his life, binding both beasts wing to wing in a tightening cage of silver chain.

They thrashed, furious and trapped, and Aidan walked into the gap between them without hurrying.

He gathered the anger down through both fists this time, not a beam, something closer to what he’d built on Vorkapar’s frozen tomb, and struck one skull with each hand at the exact same instant. The twin impacts rang out as a single sound, deep and final, and both Terrors folded at once, chains going slack around empty ash.

[Divine-rank Terror eliminated.]

[Divine-rank Terror eliminated.]

Six down. Two left.

The last two Terrors broke formation entirely, wheeling back toward the Tear itself, some animal instinct finally recognizing that this fight had turned unwinnable.

"They’re running for the gate!" someone shouted. "If they get back through..."

"They don’t." Aidan was already moving, faster than he had all day, the crimson-gold whips of his aura trailing behind him like a comet’s tail. "Not on my watch."

He caught the slower of the two twenty meters short of the Tear’s shimmering edge, grabbed it by the trailing edge of one wing, and hauled it bodily back out of its own escape with a wrench of pure electromagnetism.

It rounded on him, cornered and desperate, and threw everything it had left in one final, screaming barrage.

Aidan didn’t dodge this time.

He let the crimson-gold border eat every strike whole, consuming spectral claws and death-toll shrieks alike without so much as a flicker, and answered with a Wrathspiral Lance fired point-blank into its open jaw. The beam didn’t need to travel far to finish the job.

[Divine-rank Terror eliminated.]

One left, and it had stopped running.

The last Terror turned in the mouth of the Tear itself, and something in its void-white eyes shifted from predator to something closer to fear, watching its seven kin scattered to ash across a sky it no longer recognized as safe.

Every Hunter still standing converged on it at once, Kyrsa’s chains, Veshan’s fists, Ordun’s spear, the twin-blade woman’s arcing strikes, a full circle of exhausted, furious defenders closing in from every angle.

Aidan hung above the center of that circle, gathering the last of his anger into both palms, and looked down at the beast that had helped kill a man he didn’t even know the name of yet.

"This one’s for the guy on the ground," he said quietly. "Everybody, together, on my mark."

The Hunters struck as one.

Chains bound its wings, silver light biting deep into scale. Fists caved its ribs with a sound like a hull collapsing underwater. A starlight spear opened its throat in a long, clean line, and blood the color of dying stars poured out across the black mouth of the Tear.

Into the wound all of that violence carved open, Aidan drove both palms full of translated fury, discharging everything he had left in a single, absolute detonation of crimson-gold light.

The Terror didn’t come apart slowly. It simply stopped being there, ash scattering out from the blast in a perfect, silent sphere that rippled through the clouds like a stone dropped into still water, and the last of the Tear’s monstrous output finally ran dry.

[All Divine-rank Terrors eliminated.]

Above them, the ragged black wound in the sky shuddered, its violet edges dimming from angry purple to a soft, fading grey, and began, at last, to close, the wound in the world stitching itself shut one slow inch at a time.

The exhausted defenders hung there in the sudden quiet, staring at each other, at the shrinking Tear, at the crimson-gold figure floating in the center of what used to be a losing battle. For a long moment nobody moved at all, the whole sky holding its breath.

Then somebody started laughing, wild and disbelieving, and then somebody else joined in, and within a few seconds half the sky was full of people crying and cheering and hugging each other in mid-air, armor scraping armor, exhaustion finally allowed to turn into something gentler.

Ordun Kessa drifted over and clasped a hand to Aidan’s shoulder, firm and grateful, spear finally lowered for good.

"Garen,"he said, voice thick. "You have no idea what you just gave us back."

Kyrsa Wren arrived a moment later, silver rings settling into slow, quiet orbits instead of frantic ones, and studied Aidan’s face like she was trying to memorize it before he could disappear on her.

"Whoever taught you," she said, "I’d like to shake their hand someday. Assuming they exist and aren’t just a very convincing story you tell yourself."

"They exist." Aidan let the crimson-gold light finally begin to fade, exhaustion he’d been ignoring for hours crashing in behind it. "Divine-rank, actually. Grumpy about laundry."

Kyrsa blinked, then laughed despite herself, the sound raw with relief.

Aidan looked around at all of them, at the hope written plain across every exhausted face, at the sky slowly closing over their heads like a wound finally allowed to heal, and let himself feel, just for a moment, exactly as tired as he actually was.

’So how much suppressed anger I have left now? And I need food, some good real food before I lose my mind.’

The battle had drained him almost entirely. Although these Terrors were weaker than Vorkapar, he still had to give his all to deal with them.

[Still 93.7%. You are doing good. It’s one billion years of cumulation, player Aidan. Takes time.]

’Rad.’

"So, hey. If you don’t have anything else to do, come with us to the shelter. Food and drinks on us."

"That’s right. Let us thank you for your divine intervention, haha. I almost thought it’s my last day."

"And if you don’t mind telling, what kind of power you used that boosted your parameters so much?"

The high and mighty Divine-rank Hunters gathered around Aidan with curiosity and jubilation.

None of them were Final-stage Divine-rank Hunters, and this Divine-rank Tear was quite dangerous. But just when they thought they would fight until death, Aidan changed the game, and now every one of them was alive!

Aidan grinned. "Sure, I’m hungry as hell. As for how I saved the day?-"

Everyone’s ears perked up, wanting to know just how a Legendary-rank hunter possessed such power.

"That’s thanks to my master." Aidan answered after a pause with a smile. "He gave me his personally crafted artifact that can temporary allow me to use his powers, which boosted my parameters that high."