"Server Announcement: Player Unrivaled has claimed the server-first kill of the Bronze-Tier World Boss, Grimtusk. Rewards: +50 Reputation, +30 Gold, +2 Luck, Skill Unlocked [Berserker] (S-Rank)."
Four hours since launch.
The server lit up a second time, and this time the reaction wasn’t disbelief it was closer to panic.
"No. NO. He got the Bronze-tier first kill too?!"
"Same guy. Has to be. Nobody clears this fast without something broken under the hood."
"Two server-firsts, two S-rank skill drops, in one night. This isn’t a strong start, this is a different category entirely."
Kael, blissfully unaware of just how much noise he was generating, stood alone in the dark and sorted through his loot.
The skill book came first.
[BERSERKER]
Grade: S
Effect: Unleash a companion’s bloodline fury, doubling the damage of its next three attacks.
Cost: 100 mana
Cooldown: 30s
Doubled damage on its own was already worth the mana. What made it dangerous was what it could stack with.
Feast alone hit for 150% of the Husk’s attack. Layer berserker on top of that during the burst window, and the math stopped being simple multiplication Ascension’s damage formula didn’t scale flat, it compounded.
Triple, quadruple output, maybe more, depending on how the engine weighted it.
This is exactly what a tank build’s missing.
The Husk hit like a truck when it needed to defend, but its raw damage output had always lagged behind its survivability. Rampage closed that gap in one skill slot.
The only real cost was the mana bill a full hundred per cast, brutal this early in the game.
But between the two bosses, Kael had picked up enough experience to hit level 6 himself, and with it, enough mana pool to cast it several times over if he needed to.
Ascension’s stat system ran on class-specific conversion rates a Warrior turned a point of Strength into 1.5 attack, cloth classes converted less from Strength but more from Spirit, and so on down the list.
Beastlord sat in a category of its own: every stat converted at a flat 1.25x, no weak links anywhere.
Kael settled on a clean spread one point Constitution, one Strength, two Agility, one Spirit and locked it in.
He also walked away with a set of fitted leather armor, and mana sitting comfortably above four hundred. Enough Berserker casts stacked up to make the fight genuinely fun.
Under the grimtusk’s corpse, more loot waited a scatter of silver coins, three pieces of Bronze-tier gear (a bow, a helmet, a set of leathers), and a mage skill book for something called Firestorm.
All three pieces of armor sat locked behind a level 8 requirement. Storage, for now.
The kill also dropped three Evolution Points, pushing his running total to sixty-three.
He didn’t touch them.
The Husk’s current stat line already outclassed anything left roaming this starting zone no reason to burn points on incremental skill upgrades when he could bank toward something bigger.
A hundred points would unlock a full bloodline-tier evolution instead of just another number tweak, and Kael wanted to see what that actually looked like before committing anything smaller.
He looted the head last, sawing it free with the black iron longsword, and checked the count in his bag.
Three Iron-tier heads. One Bronze.Quest complete.He called the Husk and turned back toward the village.
Hours of near-nonstop grinding had done its work. The Husk had climbed all the way to level 10, its health bar sitting at a number that would’ve made a raid tank blush north of six thousand.
Its size had kept pace. What used to fit at his waist now stood over three meters tall, a hulking wall of purple muscle and bone spurs that swallowed the tree line’s shadows whenever it moved.
Kael walked alongside it, half-swallowed by its shadow, and cut through a stretch of high-level grinding territory on the way back.
Three players working a pack of monsters nearby caught sight of the Husk’s silhouette drifting between the trees and went dead still.
"...Tell me you see that too."
"That thing is massive. That’s a boss. Has to be."We are absolutely not going near it, our whole party’s struggling with the trash mobs out here.
"Someone’s already offering a bounty for boss coordinates. Just film it and cash out."
They didn’t need convincing twice.
Recording started immediately, and within minutes the clip was making its way through a private channel toward a name that meant something in this server’s opening hours.
Elsewhere, in a different clearing, a young man in gear far too polished for four hours into launch watched the footage with growing interest.
"Distance is bad, and we never got a clean name tag on it but that’s a boss. No question."
Weston Cole didn’t look up from the screen. "Could be Bronze-tier. Maybe higher."
"Get everyone moving. Now."
Within minutes, a small army was cutting through the forest toward the marked coordinates.
Kael had no idea any of this was happening.
He’d clocked the risk of standing out the moment he crossed back into lower-level territory, and dismissed the Husk before it could draw any more eyes.
Disguised as nothing more than a lone Warrior with a longsword slung over his back, he made the rest of the trip on foot, alone, unremarkable.
Ten minutes later, the village gates came into view.He wound through the narrow paths between houses until he reached a modest cottage near the edge of town, and knocked.
"Who’s there?"
The door creaked open. A woman stood in the frame older, heavyset, with the kind of weathered good looks that hadn’t entirely faded.
Above her head, a name tag hovered in soft blue text.
[ WIDOW HARGROVE]
Status: Skilled
Contract Success Rate: 1%