Kael’s eyes narrowed as he ran the numbers.
Triple digits on attack. Ten thousand health.
That put the Skeleton General’s stat line above his own companion’s and the Husk was carrying hours of stacked Feast kills plus a full class passive on top of its base numbers. Four skills, all of them nasty.
A level 10 boss with numbers like that had no business existing in a starting zone.
Exactly what I was hoping for.
Instead of caution, something closer to hunger settled behind his eyes. The scarier the stat sheet, the higher the ceiling once it belonged to him. All that raw, overtuned potential just needed the right hands on the leash.
Only problem: a 3% bond rate wasn’t going to cooperate on the first try. He’d need to grind the odds down the hard way beat the thing half to death first, then try again.
Ascension’s taming math was simple enough: the lower a target’s health, the more damaged its condition, the better the odds a contract actually landed. Bosses were no exception.
Kael’s hand shot up, chaining Rampage straight into Wild Awakening. Crimson light rolled across the Husk’s frame, its stats spiking hard under the double buff.
"Go."
The Husk didn’t need telling twice. It thundered forward, closing the distance in three strides, jaws snapping open the instant it reached striking range.
Feast.
-279
Even fully buffed, stacking two S-grade skills on top of each other, the bite barely cracked three hundred. On a normal target, that kind of number would’ve been a one-shot.
Against ninety-five points of raw defense, it barely registered as a scratch.
The General answered in kind, spear flashing through three strikes almost too fast to track.
Combo Strike.
-107
-104
-102
Over three hundred health gone in under two seconds. A single skill cast had done more damage to the Husk than the Husk’s strongest combo had managed on the General.
Two tiers apart. Even with the passive bump, that gap doesn’t close on its own.
Kael had known going in that a straight one-on-one wasn’t winnable. Didn’t matter. The Husk wasn’t fighting alone.
While the two titans traded blows in the center of the valley, Kael hung back at range and flicked out a Bond attempt.
Golden light flared over the General’s skull, threading itself into the shape of a rune intricate, half-formed, climbing toward completion.
It collapsed a heartbeat before finishing.
Kael exhaled, unbothered. "Figured. Three percent doesn’t hand out freebies."
He nocked another arrow instead, more to keep the pressure on than out of any real hope of meaningful damage against that kind of defense rating, his shots barely qualified as an inconvenience. Still, every point counted toward wearing the fight down faster.
The moment Bond’s cooldown cleared, he fired it again.
Failed again.
No panic. He cracked open a mana potion, funneled the refill straight into Healing Light, and watched the Husk’s bar tick back up before diving into another exchange of blows.
Bow. Bond. Heal. Repeat. A loop with no wasted motion in it anywhere.
Minutes crawled by.
The General’s health bar finally slipped under the halfway mark, and the success rate ticking along the edge of Kael’s panel climbed with it three percent, then six, then nine.
He fired again.
This time, the rune didn’t collapse.
Gold light spread across the General’s skull and locked into place, complete and blazing.
The threatening blood-red glow above its head shifted, cooling into a calm, safe green.
"Bond established. Silver-Tier companion acquired: Skeleton General."
"There it is."
Kael tore open the panel before the notification had even finished fading.
[SKELETON GENERAL]
Bloodline Tier: Silver
Constitution ★★★★★★
Strength ★★★★★★★★
Agility ★★★★★★★
Spirit ★★★★★★
Skill I Combo Strike: Three consecutive hits, 80% attack each, single target. 50 mana, 20s cooldown.
Skill II Gale Thrust: A wind-charged lance strike hitting everything in a 10m line for 120% attack. 70 mana, 30s cooldown.
Skill III Undying Fury: All stats +20% for 10 minutes. No cost, 1hr cooldown.
Skill IV Raise the Fallen: Summon four ordinary undead, level-capped to the user, to fight alongside you. 200 mana, 30min cooldown.
Kael did the math twice, just to be sure.
Twenty-seven stars.
The accepted ceiling for a Silver-tier companion sat at twenty-five a number he’d heard repeated so many times in his last life it had practically become gospel. This thing had blown straight past it.
Two points didn’t sound like much on paper. In practice, it meant the General’s growth curve had no honest cap left to hit. Every other Silver-tier pet in the game was chasing a wall that this one had already walked through.
The skill kit sealed it. Combo Strike and Gale Thrust sat comfortably at D-grade solid, unremarkable.
Undying Fury and Raise the Fallen, though, both graded out at C a spread that belonged on a Gold-tier boss, not something he’d contracted out of a starting-zone side quest.
Called it. This thing was never a normal boss.
The only Silver-tier hidden boss on the entire server, and it had turned out to be exactly as broken as the rumors promised.
With the General settled quietly at his side, Kael turned to the bronze coffin and found what he’d actually come for tucked beneath the wreckage of the lid a strongbox, dark iron worked over with patterns too fine to have been cut by any ordinary hand.
He picked it up carefully, weighing it once in his palm.
The prize that got a hundred people killed fighting over it, last time around.
This time, it was walking out of the valley with him, and nobody else even knew it existed yet.