Chapter 659: Change of Plans

<Ashbound found the ravine empty.> Alice sounded delighted. <The cuck is yelling at the tallest bitch with big tits.>

<Which one is that again...?> Kaiden asked dryly. To him, Ash’s women looked pretty much identical. Though, to be fair, he did not get a good look at them.

<I don’t know!>

Alice was the same.

Like brother, like sister.

The third engagement put them against a creature none of them had seen before. A Mirecrawler. It looked like someone had crossed a centipede with a komodo dragon and then scaled the result up to the size of a school bus, its segmented body dragging through the loose shale as it emerged from a crack in the mountainside. Two more followed it.

The Mirecrawlers moved with a low, grinding urgency, their many legs finding purchase on the steep terrain with disturbing ease. Acidic mucus dripped from their mandibles and sizzled where it hit stone.

Calypso’s grin widened. "Ooh, ugly ones."

They engaged.

This time, despite their best efforts, the fight took longer than expected. The Mirecrawlers were tough, their segmented carapaces deflecting glancing blows and their acid spit forcing constant repositioning. The creatures were worth more than the Boulderjaws; that much was obvious from their durability alone.

Then a blade of energy tore through the flank of the largest Mirecrawler, stealing the kill mid-collapse.

Ash landed at the edge of the engagement with his weapon still glowing. Brittany, Stacy, and Trisha fanned out behind him, already moving on the two remaining creatures that Kaiden’s group had softened.

"Thanks for finding these!" Ash called out, waving. His grin was back in full, camera-ready and wide. "We were looking everywhere for new species!"

Both streams caught it.

Kaiden watched him for a moment, then turned and walked.

The girls followed without a word.

They left two Mirecrawlers behind. Two kills they’d softened, set up, and earned through coordination and blood. Ash’s team would finish them off in seconds and collect the points for a fraction of the effort.

The obvious question was: why?

Why not stay and fight for the kills? Why not ignore Ashbound and finish what they started?

The answer was simple, and it had nothing to do with weakness.

In the mountain range, fights between awakened were forbidden.

But accidents happened.

S-tier combatants swung weapons that could cleave giant rocks. Their attacks carried area-of-effect damage that didn’t discriminate between monster flesh and human flesh. If two groups were fighting the same cluster in close proximity, and an S-tier’s strike happened to catch a nearby combatant from another guild...

Kaiden didn’t know if Ash was a man who’d go this far, but...

If he injured one of the Sinners on stream, the drama would be nuclear. Viewership would explode. The manufactured rivalry would become the only story anyone talked about for weeks.

And if someone died...

Kaiden’s jaw tightened.

There was also the inverse. If Kaiden or his girls accidentally hurt one of Ash’s people while fighting in close quarters, the narrative flipped. Suddenly, Valhalla’s Sinners were the aggressors, and potentially their image in the public eye would suffer.

Ash wanted chaos. Kaiden wanted progress.

The math was clear.

Ash was a loser in his eyes. A nobody. Risking the safety of his girls, risking jail time, risking everything they’d built over a handful of stolen points?

That wasn’t a trade Kaiden would ever make.

So he walked.

"We’re pushing harder," he decreed.

The girls fell into step beside him. No one looked back.

Crevice Borers, burrowing predators that erupted from the ground in ambush patterns. Nasty, disorienting, good points.

Ashbound arrived before the last one was dead.

They rushed again. A mixed pack of Glasswing Darters and Venomfang Stalkers, two species that had no business coexisting. The Darters’ crystalline wings refracted light into blinding patterns while the Stalkers used the visual chaos as cover for their paralytic strikes.

Ashbound arrived before the last one was dead.

Again. A lone Pyrawalker, massive and wreathed in volcanic heat. A spectacular kill. Great content.

Ash showed up forty seconds after the Pyrawalker fell, too late for the points but early enough to pose near the dissolving remains for his stream.

The pattern was relentless.

The stalker was too good. Wherever Kaiden moved, however fast they cleared, the intel reached Ashbound in real time, and Ash had nothing slowing him down. He wasn’t fighting his own monsters.

He wasn’t farming his own zones. He was sprinting from location to location with his team in tow, arriving at each new engagement with fresh legs and full resources while Kaiden’s group burned through mana and stamina clearing the actual threats.

The parasitic math was brutal in its simplicity. Kaiden’s team did the work. Ash took a cut. And because Ash wasn’t wasting energy on his own fights, he had more than enough to keep pace with a group that was grinding at full intensity.

"This isn’t working," Luna said between engagements, breathing hard. Her Storm reserves were running low from the constant output with no recovery time between fights.

She was right. The speed rotation only worked if Ashbound had their own fights to slow them down. Without that, they were free to chase. And they’d chase all day, because chasing cost them nothing.

Kaiden looked north.

The same direction the monsters had been migrating. Deeper into the range where the species got stranger, the terrain got worse, and the point values climbed toward numbers that would close the gap to third place in days instead of weeks.

Where the difficulty would force even Ashbound to fight for their lives just to keep up.

’If I go deeper, the monsters get harder. If the monsters get harder, Ash can’t just sprint past them to follow us. He’ll have to fight through them or turn back.’

The idea was simple.

The risk was not.

Because anything strong enough to slow down an S-tier would be strong enough to seriously threaten his own team.

He looked at the girls. Sweating, bruised, running low on mana but still ready. Still sharp. Still trusting him to make the right call.

’If we want a chance at winning, we’d have to move deeper anyhow.’

’Tomorrow,’ he decided. ’We go deeper tomorrow.’

"Let’s retire for today," Kaiden said. "Tomorrow will be a hard day."

...

Back in their private wing, located inside the Runewoven guild hall, Kaiden checked the standings.

The day hadn’t been a waste. Even with Ashbound stealing kills, the sheer volume of clusters they’d pushed through meant the numbers moved. The gap to fourth had shrunk. The gap to third remained stubborn because every point Kaiden earned, Ash was skimming a percentage off the top.

But Kaiden wasn’t looking at third place anymore.

He was looking at the map. At the deep northern zones where no rookie-track team had ventured. At the density markers that the association had flagged as "extreme caution" and most guilds had interpreted as "do not enter."

’If the parasite wants to follow the host...’

He looked at his girls, already settling in for the night, finding their comfortable places. Aria leaned against his shoulder. Luna was busy cursing very colorfully. Nyx was egging the stormy girl on. Bastet sat near the fire with her eyes closed. Calypso was trying to convince Alice that her horn had grown another millimeter since that morning.

"It hasn’t."

"Measure it."

"I’m a Conduit, not a ruler. Dumb demon! Stop using your tits to think!"

"What? But I’m really smart."

"Hah? Said who?"

"Ask literally anyone besides the Choco Kitty. She’s jealous of my strength, smarts, and beauty."

"Am I?" Bastet purred.

The demoness ignored the tanned feline and observed Alice. "By the way, have you considered growing bigger ones?"

"???"

The little sister looked ready to throw hands with the demoness.

The demoness looked ready to throw hands with the little sister.

"Try to get along..." Kaiden sighed.

The bickering was endless in this group, he noted with a tired mind.

Then he sighed again, watching Ash’s stream and how he was far too smug about his team’s performance today.

’... I’m curious to see how deep he’s willing to go.’