Daylight had faded into memory.
Out on the reef, he had just lured the island’s entire horde of sea monsters into a single death trap, wiping them out in one spectacular, calculated stroke.
A few stragglers might have slipped through the mesh, sure, but nothing worth sweating over.
Meanwhile, inside the Valley View Academy Observation Room.
The room had gone dead silent.
A cluster of veteran mentors stood frozen around the projection of Reed Newt’s island, the ambient blue glow casting stark shadows across their tense faces.
It was late into the sixth night, not even the dawn of the seventh day yet, and Reed’s domain was barreling headfirst into a catastrophic crisis.
Under the covert command of an elite, first-order sea monster, a ravenous vanguard of over two hundred beasts had breached the shoreline.
Silently, methodically, they were closing in.
They were barely two hundred meters from the central citadel.
If Reed hadn’t had the foresight to plant a ring of sentries along the perimeter, the assault would have taken him completely unawares.
By then, it would have been game over.
“First-order sea monsters possess high-level tactical intelligence,” Meinhard Janek murmured, his eyes narrowing as he stared into the dark, churning waters outside the city walls.
“Gathering a horde of two hundred without letting out a single sound…
using the cover of night for a surprise breach…”
He shook his head softly.
This brutal savagery was precisely why the passing rate for the Island Holder assessment was notoriously low.
The deeper an initiate went, the deadlier the threats became.
Danger didn’t wait for morning.
“I just hope the kid has enough grit to survive a night raid of this scale…” Meinhard muttered under his breath, watching the lone, static figure perched high on the watchtower.
With his stockpiled gunpowder and the sheer durability of the citadel walls, Reed theoretically had a fighting chance to hold out until sunrise.
If he could just buy time until the seventh day, the emergency extraction portal would open, allowing him to pull out safely and preserve his life.
But as a seasoned seventh-tier Island Holder himself, he knew the cold math.
Surviving an organized assault by over two hundred beasts led by a commanding alpha was nearly impossible for a greenhorn.
“Wait…
is Reed frozen?” an instructor suddenly blurted out, pointing frantically at the screen.
“Why is he just standing there like a statue?!”
Meinhard’s gaze snapped back to the projection.
Sure enough, ever since Reed had ascended the battlements, he hadn’t moved an inch.
No orders issued.
No defensive formations rallied.
He looked completely paralyzed by terror.
The observation room erupted into a frenzy of panicked chatter.
“The horde is two hundred meters out!
Tell him to move the gunpowder to the frontline and plant the traps!”
“The twin gates are his structural weak points.
“What on earth is he waiting for?!
I’m losing my mind here!”
“With those walls and the explosives, he could at least bottle them up and bleed them out!
He just needs to buy time!”
The mentors were practically tearing their hair out, wishing they could physically reach into the projection to command the defense themselves.
Reed had every environmental advantage, a fortified stronghold, and high-explosive ordnance.
If he acted now, he could turn this ambush into a meat grinder.
Standing there like a helpless deer in the headlights was suicide.
The beasts were going to crash against the base of the wall before his troops even primed the fuses.
On the Island.
“ROAAAAAR!” A bloodcurdling chorus of shrieks shattered the night air as more than two hundred monstrosities burst through the tree line, charging toward the stone fortress in a terrifying tide of claws and dripping jaws.
Two hundred meters…
One hundred and ninety meters…
One hundred and eighty meters…
The ground trembled beneath the thundering surge.
One hundred and forty meters…
One hundred and thirty meters…
One hundred meters.
And still, Reed Newt stood motionless at the edge of the parapet, his silhouette framed against the dark sky, unmoving as a mountain.
In the observation room, the mentors watched in grim silence, their faces pale with mounting disappointment.
“Look, we can’t really blame the kid,” one instructor offered with a heavy sigh, trying to soften the blow.
“He’s just a student.
He’s never faced a horde of two hundred alpha-led beasts face-to-face.
Getting terrified out of your mind is only human.”
A heavy hush fell over the room.
The instructor was right.
Even experienced field operatives would feel their heart drop faced with a wave of that magnitude, so to expect a raw recruit not to freeze up under that overwhelming aura of carnage was asking too much.
“Wait…
what is that?” Meinhard Janek’s sharp voice cut through the despair.
He leaned forward, eyes squinting at the dim light behind Reed’s position.
Dozens of sturdy simian units were hauling heavy, strange-looking iron-wheeled carts up the stone ramparts.
The tops of these mechanisms were shrouded under massive, woven palm leaves, completely concealing their contents.
Meanwhile, the monster tide roared closer.
Ninety meters…
Eighty meters…
Seventy meters…
Sixty meters…
“Fire,” Reed’s voice cut through the wind, cool, calm, and void of a single trace of fear.
Instantly, the monkeys behind the barricades whipped off the massive palm leaves, revealing terrifyingly sleek, cold metal barrels underneath.
Holding glowing torches high, they touched the flames down onto the rear touchholes.
BOOM!
BOOM!
BOOM!
The entire wall shuddered violently as blinding jets of orange fire erupted from the elevated battery.
A thunderous roar shattered the night sky, drowning out the shrieks of the incoming horde.
A split second later, the front line of sea monsters, just crossing the fifty-meter mark, hit an invisible wall of pure kinetic destruction.
Horrific shrieks tore through the air as beasts were blasted off their feet, thrown backward into the air like ragdolls.
Fire swept across the field.
Soot, shrapnel, and pulverized dirt rained down in a blinding tempest as the vanguard collapsed in mass carnage.
In the Observation Room, every single mentor leaped out of their seats.
“Holy shit!
Is that…
artillery?!”
Gasps reverberated through the room.
As the smoke cleared from the projection, the strange carts fully revealed their design: heavy, rifled cannons that looked like they belonged in a full-scale industrial war zone.
With every salvo, violent, fiery dragons spat explosive shells directly into the dense mass of the advancing horde.
Packed tightly together, the beasts had nowhere to run.
They were sitting ducks.
One head down…
Two heads crushed…
Three…
five…
ten…
In a matter of seconds, dozens of terrifying sea monsters were blown to bloody bits, their severed limbs scattering across the scorched ground.
“Insane!
This is absolutely insane!
When on earth did he manufacture weapons of this tier?!”
“No wonder he didn’t panic!
He wasn’t frozen, he was baiting them into point-blank range!”
“Right!
Look at the barrel angle, the maximum elevation limits the range; he couldn’t hit them outside fifty meters!”
“Forget the range, how the hell did a student build functional artillery from scratch?!”
The mentors stared at the screen, completely dumbfounded.
Who could have guessed that on the literal brink of what looked like total annihilation, Reed Newt hadn’t just survived; he had unleashed absolute technological warfare.