1553

"Sis ascended?"

I felt a little dumbfounded, to be honest. Who would’ve thought that a priest of all classes would ascend before the first-rate experts like He Yi, Beiming Xue, Gui Guzi, Purple Marquis and more?

Not far away from my position and sitting atop He Yi’s Snow Crystal Dragon, Murong Mingyue grinned widely as her body glowed with the transparent shield of Unusual Physique. After leaping off the mount and flying around in a circle, she declared with a proud smile on her face, "Now I can call myself a strong player!"

Beiming Xue, Lian Xin and the other girls hurriedly congratulated her, "Congratulations, Sister Mingyue!"

He Yi nodded in approval as well. "Hehe, not bad!"

……

I asked, "The important question is… how does your new skill work, sis? We all know how Unusual Physique, Flight and Mount Armor Transformation work, but what is this Kiss of the Goddess of Life?"

She looked down at the window only she could see for a second before answering, "Oh… hmm… it’s a skill that sacrifices 20% of my MP to instantly heal a target to full health. It has a cooldown of 120 seconds…"

"God damn…" Our jaws nearly hit the ground when we heard this.

All players with over ten million HP would understand exactly how powerful this Kiss of the Goddess of Life was. For example, I currently sat at 25 million HP with full buffs, so most health potions heals weren’t worth a damn. However, this Kiss of the Goddess of Life would restore 100% HP to me no matter what my max HP was. It was without a doubt the best healing spell to date!

I said happily, "Let’s grind the S7 instance when this Nation War is over, sis. I’m sure we’ll clear it easy peasy!"

Murong Mingyue agreed, "Of course!"

It was at this moment Chaos Moon looked up at us and said, "My glorious leaders, please be reminded that we are in the middle of a battle right now. Can we chat after we’ve annihilated these Chaotic 27 players?"

"Sure…"

……

Murong Mingyue’s healing abilities skyrocketed visibly after she ascended to become a god. Thanks to her casting her new Kiss of the Goddess of Life every 120 seconds, powerful fighters like me, He Yi, Li Chengfeng, Gui Guzi, High Fighting Spirits and more could almost fight on the frontline at all times. Out of all of us, the one player who benefited the most from her spell was without a doubt High Fighting Spirits. The guy possessed incredible offensive power—his Xiezhi Howl + Xing Tian’s Defiance combo was particularly devastating—but he wasn’t tanky at all. Even with his lifesteal, it usually took just a couple of skill rotations from the archers and mages and concentrated fire from a couple melee experts to drop him to low health. That was no longer the case with Murong Mingyue’s healing. Now, he almost never had to withdraw from the frontlines to allow the priests to heal him to full.

"Take out those two guild leaders over there!"

Li Chengfeng and Gui Guzi immediately carried out He Yi’s orders by catching the two guild leaders in a pincer attack. The latter turned green in the face after eating a Death Combo + Dragonbone Flurry combo and dropping to low health. "Dammit! How can this be? We may have been ambushed by the enemy, but we are also 6 million elite cavalrymen strong! It makes no sense that a single Chinese guild can beat us![1]"

Behind them, a group of cavalrymen screeched in despair, "We can’t hold them back any longer, guild leader! Our composition is completely countered, and we are unable to pierce through their shield formation at all. What do we do!?"

"What do we do?" a dark-skinned, sweat-drenched guild leader muttered to himself before shouting, "Let’s focus on the threat directly in front of us first! Someone, pin down these two fuckers with Trapping Nets! Third guild leader, dispatch a troop of Gold Cavalrymen to carve us a retreat path! I don’t know where these cunning and despicable Chinese got their mages, but our players are dropping like flies to their spells! We need to get the hell out of this trap before it’s too late!"

"Gulp…"

The third guild leader downed a health potion to heal himself, but Li Chengfeng easily deleted his recovered HP and more in two slashes. After he caught his footing, he responded anxiously, "It’s already too late! I just received word that Ancient Sword has sealed the exit with 10k Dragonlight Cavalrymen and 5k Holy Mages! So far, everyone who tried to escape through there had been gunned down like fish in a barrel! Worse, their team composition is complete, their magic knights are buffed, and they have priests to heal away all the damage! It’s a horrible mistake coming here without our full army!"

"God!"

The dark-skinned guild leader swung his axe at an enemy before roaring, "In that case, tell everyone to use their return scrolls if they can! There’s no need for all of us to die here!"

The third guild leader lamented, "It’s no use… the cunning bastards have ordered their cavalrymen to punch through our formation from every direction, and there’s practically no one who isn’t stuck in the combat state… Also, our 7 dragon knights barely got to take flight before they were killed by the enemy’s dozens of divine players…"

"What the hell are you talking about? They don’t have dozens of divine players! More importantly, what do we tell the Northern Alliance later? There’s no way Vienna will give us those cantons if they hear of our failure!"

The third guild leader steeled his resolve and said, "Shit! This is what we’re going to tell Vienna when we get back. We were ambushed by the Chinese at Falling Goose Valley with 50 million players. Not only did they bring 8 ascended players and 19 Ancient Divine Skill owners to the battlefield, they even bombarded us with 100k catapults and 7k White Marsh Catapults, AND they triggered 7 NPC main legions to attack us. Despite this, we killed over 10 million people and didn’t stop fighting until the last man. Understand?"

The dark-skinned guild leader shuddered. "Yes, I understand…"

……

A beautiful warrioress suddenly entered the scene with a mighty shout. Before they could react, she struck the third guild leader’s neck with her Ancient Divine Skill, Greedy Wolf Howl!

"Ah!!"

The third guild leader let out a bloodcurdling scream as he fell from his mount. The blow had nearly sent his head flying off his shoulder[2] and caused 3 pieces of equipment to drop from his body. Finally, Greedy Wolf Howl had stolen 10% of the gold he was currently carrying, and the amount, evident from the golden number rising from Chaos Moon’s head, was—

+119,887!

Li Chengfeng guffawed when he saw this. "Holy shit, Chaos Moon stole 120k gold from the enemy! Jackpot! Who said that the players from the barren lands were poor again? That’s clearly and evidently false! Look, this guy had over a million gold on him! They are all that rich I bet!!"

Gui Guzi let out a battle cry as he stabbed the dark-skinned guild leader in the stomach. He died and dropped a golden shield when Gui Guzi swung his halberd sideways and physically hauled him off his mount. At this point, it was clear that we were going to win this battle despite our fewer numbers. The equipment these 6 million cavalrymen dropped would be ours as well. I expected our players to improve by around 5% after they had replaced their equipment with better ones. After all, the barren lands weren’t completely devoid of experts, not to mention that some of them had received gifts from the Northern Alliance. Of course, that only made the victory sweeter!

……

I rose up to the sky until I was a couple hundred meters above ground. There, I observed the entire battlefield and helped out my troops as best I could. Every time the Chaotic 27 rallied over a thousand players and readied themselves to launch a counterattack, I would immediately treat them to a tasty Summon the Storm + Ancient Seal combo. My 6-minute-cooldown Xuanyuan Art was even deadlier as a matter of course. The battlefield was jam-packed with people, so I could affect tens of thousands of enemies with a single cast. It was practically a death sentence to these priestless cavalrymen.

Almost 5 hours of fighting later, the battle finally approached the end!

Cold wind carrying the thick stench of blood blew strongly inside the valley. The ground was positively littered with bodies, equipment, potions and other items. Near 5.5 million Chaotic 27 players had entered the valley, but less than 10%—maybe not even 5%—managed to teleport back to the city. Our 1 million elites were just that strong.

While stepping over a stack of potions, I said, "Get looting, people. Chaos Moon, give me a casualty report."

Chaos Moon nodded and typed over a hologram keyboard for a bit. Very soon, she looked up from her screen and said, "In the past 7 hours, both our main and subguilds have killed around 5.7 million enemies. We’ve lost around 300k players, but the large majority of them were mages, archers, tamers and other classes[3]. We’ve lost over 5,000 Dragonlight Cavalrymen and over 7,000 Dragonlight Archers and Holy Mages combined[4]. This absolutely counts as a great victory from a position of vast number disadvantage!"

I nodded in agreement.

He Yi said, "Although it is a great victory, we still lost about 30% of our forces…"

"Sure, but considering that we annihilated 5.7 million enemies in total, that’s a stunningly small price to pay…" Li Chengfeng chuckled.

I also chuckled. "It’s a war. Our enemies will also weaken with time. Little Gui, can you ask around and tell me how the battles at Fortress of the Iron Halberd and Swallow Ear Canton are going?"

Gui Guzi replied solemnly, "Not very well, to be honest. The Northern Alliance launched 3 assaults against Fortress of the Iron Halberd in the past 7 hours, and decreased Dominating Heaven Blade’s 5-million army to less than 2 million. The walls are fairly damaged as well. However, they should be able to hold their ground as long as the truly powerful guilds such as Hero Alliance don’t show up. The situation at Swallow Ear Canton is even more complicated. Breeze and Rain and God of War managed to reach Swallow Ear Canton and reinforce them despite a long march, and Red Maple, that ballsy bastard somehow managed to hold out for 7 hours despite all the odds that are stacked up against him. Both sides had lost a tremendous amount of forces, and it isn’t clear yet who’s going to win the battle."

I clenched my fists and gritted my teeth. "I see. This means that the war now hinges almost entirely on the action of Northern Alliance’s top guilds. Chengfeng, Chaos Moon, do everything you can to find out where Vienna’s Sorrow is and what he is plotting. We cannot allow him to disrupt the flow of the war!"

Chaos Moon nodded. "I’ll do my best!"

Li Chengfeng asked with a frown, "What do you think the Northern Alliance will do in this situation, Lu Chen?"

I thought for a moment before answering, "If I were them, I wouldn’t try to end the war as soon as possible. That will be disadvantageous for them. I would continuously chip away at the top guilds’ strength until they are too weak to do anything. In fact, that is exactly what Vienna has been doing up until this point. He has sacrificed powerful guilds like Olympus and Blood Soul and tempted the Chaotic 27 to attack all to achieve this point. What I’m most worried about is the killer move that is supposed to end it all after we’ve been completely worn out. In my opinion, they’re going to one of our three main cities and hit it with everything they have next. That will be absolutely terrifying."

"What should we do then?"

"Keep a close eye on everything close to the main cities."

"Mn!"

……

It was at this moment Xu Yang’s voice came from the guild channel. "Lu Chen! Are you guys finished? If you are, then come back to the Fortress of the Iron Halberd as soon as possible!"

"What’s wrong?"

"Ghost ships… huge ghost ships have just appeared in the sky!"

"What the fuck?"

1. T/N: someone never played tower defense I see ☜

2. T/N: how did it NOT send the head flying? It’s an ADS! ☜

3. T/N: I don’t understand how they manage to lose any mage or archer at all. Tamers I can understand since they control multiple units at a time and can probably lose track of themselves, but archers and mages can attack from pretty far away. This isn’t like a real MMO where there is tons of space for you to slip through either. The dragon knights went down within like 1 minute as well, so where did this 300k come from? ☜

4. T/N: HOWWWWWW??? ☜

"Sis ascended?"

I felt a little dumbfounded, to be honest. Who would’ve thought that a priest of all classes would ascend before the first-rate experts like He Yi, Beiming Xue, Gui Guzi, Purple Marquis and more?

Not far away from my position and sitting atop He Yi’s Snow Crystal Dragon, Murong Mingyue grinned widely as her body glowed with the transparent shield of Unusual Physique. After leaping off the mount and flying around in a circle, she declared with a proud smile on her face, "Now I can call myself a strong player!"

Beiming Xue, Lian Xin and the other girls hurriedly congratulated her, "Congratulations, Sister Mingyue!"

He Yi nodded in approval as well. "Hehe, not bad!"

……

I asked, "The important question is… how does your new skill work, sis? We all know how Unusual Physique, Flight and Mount Armor Transformation work, but what is this Kiss of the Goddess of Life?"

She looked down at the window only she could see for a second before answering, "Oh… hmm… it’s a skill that sacrifices 20% of my MP to instantly heal a target to full health. It has a cooldown of 120 seconds…"

"God damn…" Our jaws nearly hit the ground when we heard this.

All players with over ten million HP would understand exactly how powerful this Kiss of the Goddess of Life was. For example, I currently sat at 25 million HP with full buffs, so most health potions heals weren’t worth a damn. However, this Kiss of the Goddess of Life would restore 100% HP to me no matter what my max HP was. It was without a doubt the best healing spell to date!

I said happily, "Let’s grind the S7 instance when this Nation War is over, sis. I’m sure we’ll clear it easy peasy!"

Murong Mingyue agreed, "Of course!"

It was at this moment Chaos Moon looked up at us and said, "My glorious leaders, please be reminded that we are in the middle of a battle right now. Can we chat after we’ve annihilated these Chaotic 27 players?"

"Sure…"

……

Murong Mingyue’s healing abilities skyrocketed visibly after she ascended to become a god. Thanks to her casting her new Kiss of the Goddess of Life every 120 seconds, powerful fighters like me, He Yi, Li Chengfeng, Gui Guzi, High Fighting Spirits and more could almost fight on the frontline at all times. Out of all of us, the one player who benefited the most from her spell was without a doubt High Fighting Spirits. The guy possessed incredible offensive power—his Xiezhi Howl + Xing Tian’s Defiance combo was particularly devastating—but he wasn’t tanky at all. Even with his lifesteal, it usually took just a couple of skill rotations from the archers and mages and concentrated fire from a couple melee experts to drop him to low health. That was no longer the case with Murong Mingyue’s healing. Now, he almost never had to withdraw from the frontlines to allow the priests to heal him to full.

"Take out those two guild leaders over there!"

Li Chengfeng and Gui Guzi immediately carried out He Yi’s orders by catching the two guild leaders in a pincer attack. The latter turned green in the face after eating a Death Combo + Dragonbone Flurry combo and dropping to low health. "Dammit! How can this be? We may have been ambushed by the enemy, but we are also 6 million elite cavalrymen strong! It makes no sense that a single Chinese guild can beat us![1]"

Behind them, a group of cavalrymen screeched in despair, "We can’t hold them back any longer, guild leader! Our composition is completely countered, and we are unable to pierce through their shield formation at all. What do we do!?"

"What do we do?" a dark-skinned, sweat-drenched guild leader muttered to himself before shouting, "Let’s focus on the threat directly in front of us first! Someone, pin down these two fuckers with Trapping Nets! Third guild leader, dispatch a troop of Gold Cavalrymen to carve us a retreat path! I don’t know where these cunning and despicable Chinese got their mages, but our players are dropping like flies to their spells! We need to get the hell out of this trap before it’s too late!"

"Gulp…"

The third guild leader downed a health potion to heal himself, but Li Chengfeng easily deleted his recovered HP and more in two slashes. After he caught his footing, he responded anxiously, "It’s already too late! I just received word that Ancient Sword has sealed the exit with 10k Dragonlight Cavalrymen and 5k Holy Mages! So far, everyone who tried to escape through there had been gunned down like fish in a barrel! Worse, their team composition is complete, their magic knights are buffed, and they have priests to heal away all the damage! It’s a horrible mistake coming here without our full army!"

"God!"

The dark-skinned guild leader swung his axe at an enemy before roaring, "In that case, tell everyone to use their return scrolls if they can! There’s no need for all of us to die here!"

The third guild leader lamented, "It’s no use… the cunning bastards have ordered their cavalrymen to punch through our formation from every direction, and there’s practically no one who isn’t stuck in the combat state… Also, our 7 dragon knights barely got to take flight before they were killed by the enemy’s dozens of divine players…"

"What the hell are you talking about? They don’t have dozens of divine players! More importantly, what do we tell the Northern Alliance later? There’s no way Vienna will give us those cantons if they hear of our failure!"

The third guild leader steeled his resolve and said, "Shit! This is what we’re going to tell Vienna when we get back. We were ambushed by the Chinese at Falling Goose Valley with 50 million players. Not only did they bring 8 ascended players and 19 Ancient Divine Skill owners to the battlefield, they even bombarded us with 100k catapults and 7k White Marsh Catapults, AND they triggered 7 NPC main legions to attack us. Despite this, we killed over 10 million people and didn’t stop fighting until the last man. Understand?"

The dark-skinned guild leader shuddered. "Yes, I understand…"

……

A beautiful warrioress suddenly entered the scene with a mighty shout. Before they could react, she struck the third guild leader’s neck with her Ancient Divine Skill, Greedy Wolf Howl!

"Ah!!"

The third guild leader let out a bloodcurdling scream as he fell from his mount. The blow had nearly sent his head flying off his shoulder[2] and caused 3 pieces of equipment to drop from his body. Finally, Greedy Wolf Howl had stolen 10% of the gold he was currently carrying, and the amount, evident from the golden number rising from Chaos Moon’s head, was—

+119,887!

Li Chengfeng guffawed when he saw this. "Holy shit, Chaos Moon stole 120k gold from the enemy! Jackpot! Who said that the players from the barren lands were poor again? That’s clearly and evidently false! Look, this guy had over a million gold on him! They are all that rich I bet!!"

Gui Guzi let out a battle cry as he stabbed the dark-skinned guild leader in the stomach. He died and dropped a golden shield when Gui Guzi swung his halberd sideways and physically hauled him off his mount. At this point, it was clear that we were going to win this battle despite our fewer numbers. The equipment these 6 million cavalrymen dropped would be ours as well. I expected our players to improve by around 5% after they had replaced their equipment with better ones. After all, the barren lands weren’t completely devoid of experts, not to mention that some of them had received gifts from the Northern Alliance. Of course, that only made the victory sweeter!

……

I rose up to the sky until I was a couple hundred meters above ground. There, I observed the entire battlefield and helped out my troops as best I could. Every time the Chaotic 27 rallied over a thousand players and readied themselves to launch a counterattack, I would immediately treat them to a tasty Summon the Storm + Ancient Seal combo. My 6-minute-cooldown Xuanyuan Art was even deadlier as a matter of course. The battlefield was jam-packed with people, so I could affect tens of thousands of enemies with a single cast. It was practically a death sentence to these priestless cavalrymen.

Almost 5 hours of fighting later, the battle finally approached the end!

Cold wind carrying the thick stench of blood blew strongly inside the valley. The ground was positively littered with bodies, equipment, potions and other items. Near 5.5 million Chaotic 27 players had entered the valley, but less than 10%—maybe not even 5%—managed to teleport back to the city. Our 1 million elites were just that strong.

While stepping over a stack of potions, I said, "Get looting, people. Chaos Moon, give me a casualty report."

Chaos Moon nodded and typed over a hologram keyboard for a bit. Very soon, she looked up from her screen and said, "In the past 7 hours, both our main and subguilds have killed around 5.7 million enemies. We’ve lost around 300k players, but the large majority of them were mages, archers, tamers and other classes[3]. We’ve lost over 5,000 Dragonlight Cavalrymen and over 7,000 Dragonlight Archers and Holy Mages combined[4]. This absolutely counts as a great victory from a position of vast number disadvantage!"

I nodded in agreement.

He Yi said, "Although it is a great victory, we still lost about 30% of our forces…"

"Sure, but considering that we annihilated 5.7 million enemies in total, that’s a stunningly small price to pay…" Li Chengfeng chuckled.

I also chuckled. "It’s a war. Our enemies will also weaken with time. Little Gui, can you ask around and tell me how the battles at Fortress of the Iron Halberd and Swallow Ear Canton are going?"

Gui Guzi replied solemnly, "Not very well, to be honest. The Northern Alliance launched 3 assaults against Fortress of the Iron Halberd in the past 7 hours, and decreased Dominating Heaven Blade’s 5-million army to less than 2 million. The walls are fairly damaged as well. However, they should be able to hold their ground as long as the truly powerful guilds such as Hero Alliance don’t show up. The situation at Swallow Ear Canton is even more complicated. Breeze and Rain and God of War managed to reach Swallow Ear Canton and reinforce them despite a long march, and Red Maple, that ballsy bastard somehow managed to hold out for 7 hours despite all the odds that are stacked up against him. Both sides had lost a tremendous amount of forces, and it isn’t clear yet who’s going to win the battle."

I clenched my fists and gritted my teeth. "I see. This means that the war now hinges almost entirely on the action of Northern Alliance’s top guilds. Chengfeng, Chaos Moon, do everything you can to find out where Vienna’s Sorrow is and what he is plotting. We cannot allow him to disrupt the flow of the war!"

Chaos Moon nodded. "I’ll do my best!"

Li Chengfeng asked with a frown, "What do you think the Northern Alliance will do in this situation, Lu Chen?"

I thought for a moment before answering, "If I were them, I wouldn’t try to end the war as soon as possible. That will be disadvantageous for them. I would continuously chip away at the top guilds’ strength until they are too weak to do anything. In fact, that is exactly what Vienna has been doing up until this point. He has sacrificed powerful guilds like Olympus and Blood Soul and tempted the Chaotic 27 to attack all to achieve this point. What I’m most worried about is the killer move that is supposed to end it all after we’ve been completely worn out. In my opinion, they’re going to one of our three main cities and hit it with everything they have next. That will be absolutely terrifying."

"What should we do then?"

"Keep a close eye on everything close to the main cities."

"Mn!"

……

It was at this moment Xu Yang’s voice came from the guild channel. "Lu Chen! Are you guys finished? If you are, then come back to the Fortress of the Iron Halberd as soon as possible!"

"What’s wrong?"

"Ghost ships… huge ghost ships have just appeared in the sky!"

"What the fuck?"

1. T/N: someone never played tower defense I see ☜

2. T/N: how did it NOT send the head flying? It’s an ADS! ☜

3. T/N: I don’t understand how they manage to lose any mage or archer at all. Tamers I can understand since they control multiple units at a time and can probably lose track of themselves, but archers and mages can attack from pretty far away. This isn’t like a real MMO where there is tons of space for you to slip through either. The dragon knights went down within like 1 minute as well, so where did this 300k come from? ☜

4. T/N: HOWWWWWW??? ☜