The plain a few hundred meters north of Windfall Town.

There was no trace of a monster out here. Ordinarily it was where players and NPCs came to idle around. Right now, two bodies of players were crashing into each other and killing each other. One side was the Red Leaf Pact. The other was Wings That Shroud the Sky.

By the time the Wings players suddenly massed into one force of better than five thousand at the southern edge of the Windfall Plains, the Red Leaf Pact players holding the ground in front of Windfall Town had noticed too late. All they could do was get word to their Pact Master asking for help.

But the Pact had scattered its players in every direction to widen its reach, and the fastest way back was to teleport to the City of Stars and ride from there to Windfall Town without stopping. Even with every one of them mounted, that was an hour.

The other side had over five thousand men, all of them well-drilled elites, and they had planned this for a while. The Pact had just come through four waves of monster assaults. It had taken losses, its supplies were close to spent, and it had not even had time to pull back into Windfall Town to restock before the Wings players came down on it… In a spot like that, what were they supposed to hold Windfall Town with until the reinforcements arrived?

What they most needed to do in a situation like this was stall for time — ramble at the enemy’s field leader about nothing, say, or trade curses and sneer at one another for a good long while. But the man leading this Wings force was nobody’s pushover either. He did not so much as show his face for a greeting; he simply charged, which left the Red Leaf Pact’s leader holding a stalling speech he had racked his brains for and nowhere at all to use it.

The man leading the Red Leaf Pact on this city defense quest was called Red Leaf Iron Wall (the one a certain Ye had made miserable twice over back in the novice village), a man with a long history with Ye Tianxie.

Attacking a city is easy. Defending one is hard. The attacker goes forward with a single mind and nothing to distract him. The defender has to watch his front, his back and both his flanks every moment against a breakthrough, and it ties his hands and feet. So from the first collision between the Red Leaf Pact and Wings That Shroud the Sky, the Pact was struck into scattered pieces and broke apart as a fighting force. The battle ran exactly the one-sided way anyone would have predicted.

Before long, the Pact’s force — under two thousand to start with — had been cleared of nearly half again, and the thousand-odd men left were barely propping the line up.

The name floating over the Wings leader’s head was “Cobra,” and in his hand was a Silver-grade dagger flickering with green light. In Wings That Shroud the Sky, a leader of any standing was fitted out with high-end gear. Piece by piece, Silver-grade weapons proved to the player world how strong these men were.

Cobra had not lifted a hand. He stood at the back of his force and watched calmly while the Red Leaf Pact was pressed back step by step. From the moment his people had slipped into the southern Windfall Plains and gathered there without being caught, this had become a siege with no suspense left in it. All that was needed of him was to organize the attack properly.

A sure win with no pressure and no suspense in it did not make Wings That Shroud the Sky careless about tactics. Every class drove in a different direction, and every class drove well drilled. Guardians broke open the jam of the enemy shield line; Archers and Mages poured out damage from behind; Assassins slipped soundlessly around to the rear and picked off the Priests one at a time.

Set against Cobra’s ease on the Wings side, Red Leaf Iron Wall was plainly nowhere near as composed. He was roaring, each roar louder than the last. “…Get over there and kill their damage classes… Plug it, plug it up for me… You good-for-nothings, protect the Priests in the back for me…”

The Pact’s losses passed a thousand. Wings That Shroud the Sky — with a flawless lineup and a flawless meshing of defense, breaking, damage and healing — had lost fewer than three hundred. Two thousand against five thousand had become something like a thousand against five thousand, a far more wretched picture.

The Pact was driven steadily backward. In a spot like this, never mind holding for an hour — holding for fifteen minutes was all but impossible. Backing up and backing up, they could already see Windfall Town behind them… And just as even they were ready to give it up, a man came walking slowly up from behind the Red Leaf Pact — one man, who the moment he was spotted pulled countless stunned stares to himself in an instant.

The pitch-black Hour of Fate in his hand was long enough to drag on the ground, and the dull cloak at his back swayed lightly in the wind. On his face, the Hero’s Headguard caught the sunlight and threw back a strange sheen that belonged to no metal. Below the Headguard was half a face, cold and severe, as if cut with a knife.

Xietian!

That one-of-a-kind outfit, known now to everyone under heaven, made every man who saw him call out the name before he could stop himself.

Why was he here? Was he just passing through, or…

A battle of several thousand men slackened strangely at Ye Tianxie’s sudden arrival, because well over half of them had begun to fix their attention on this one man. His name had once run only through Huaxia. But after he completed three System Quests one after another, each of them a world first, his legend had spread across all of it.

He almost never appeared in public. Countless people were looking for him, trying by one means or another to get into his “Heaven Soul” mercenary corps, and not one had ever managed it, which only added to the mystery around him. And every time he did appear in public, he raised a storm. In the City of Stars he had beaten dozens of Battle Soul Hall men single-handed; in front of the Ten Thousand Bone Ruins, before several thousand players, he had struck down Battle Soul Hall’s First Hall Master, Thunderbolt, with one blow and not a moment’s hesitation…

At the back of the Wings force, Cobra’s brows drew together, and then he watched this figure with real interest — a man rumor had built into something out of a legend. A moment later, his face changed.

The Wings’ attack on the Red Leaf Pact had been clean and quick, a wind through dead leaves, giving them no chance to prepare and no chance to stall. Ye Tianxie’s move was more decisive still.

Under the Hero’s Headguard, the calm on his face seemed to have a deep contempt hidden in it, and something cold. His slow steps abruptly quickened. He cut through the Red Leaf Pact’s ranks and drove in a straight line into the Wings formation, and the Hour of Fate, with all its crushing weight of pressure, swung down without a shred of mercy.

Three heavy sounds. Three players were struck at once and hurled away by a shock nothing could stand against. That one blow one-shot three Wings players together, and it raised the curtain on a battle of miracles — one that would shock the world all over again and force it to take a fresh measure of how strong Xietian was.

That one move of Ye Tianxie’s set everything around him rocking.

He paid no attention to the Red Leaf Pact men behind him. He rushed forward, the Hour of Fate swinging in great open arcs, and drove straight through the middle of the chaos. Every blow that came down killed at least one Wings player. In a city defense battle, other powers and unattached players were free to join in, and no matter which side a man helped, killing players in the fighting added no Sin Value.

With Orange Fang in it, the Hour of Fate’s base attributes had nearly doubled, and with the weapon’s help Ye Tianxie’s attack power had reached a staggering 1,140, his HP 3,535. At that attack power, even his plainest swing meant that anyone who was not a Guardian could not escape being one-shot. And once his “Dragon Rend Slash” was out, barring something unexpected, there was hardly a player alive he could not one-shot.

With the Hero’s Headguard in the way, no one could make out his expression beyond a faint mocking curve at the corner of his mouth, there and then not there. Wherever Ye Tianxie went it was a tiger among sheep. As the black Hour of Fate swung where it pleased, patch after patch of empty ground opened in the crowd of Wings players, and the crimson damage numbers drifting up off them had the players around him sucking in cold breaths, too stunned to remember to attack…

“Commander… Commander, Xietian is attacking us… His attack power is just terrifying, Commander, we…” The player with the name “Lone Sword Without a Trace” over his head hurried up to Cobra, his face full of panic.

“I see him. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes.” A thin, contemptuous smile came onto Cobra’s face. “So this Xietian attacks my Wings That Shroud the Sky for no reason at all. Did the Red Leaf Pact find some way to bring him in for help? He really doesn’t know whether he’s alive or dead! Does he actually mean to turn this battle around by himself? Hahahaha… That’s too funny. Does he think he’s a god? Go! The Red Leaf Pact can wait a while — put everything we have on wiping out that Xietian for me. Let him learn that however grand he struts about out there, Wings That Shroud the Sky is not something he can afford to provoke! And don’t forget — the Son of Heaven has said Xietian is our enemy!”

“Ah… Understood.” Lone Sword Without a Trace agreed at once, wiping the cold sweat off his forehead. The instant Xietian started swinging, those spreads of four-digit damage numbers had genuinely put the fear in him — and only now did it occur to him… his own side had close to five thousand men, and Xietian was one man. One mouthful of spit each and they could drown him. What was there to be afraid of? And the Red Leaf Pact’s under-a-thousand was nothing to worry about either… Turn the battle around? This wasn’t a goddamn fairy tale.

“Go! Focus everything and take Xietian down first!” Lone Sword Without a Trace snapped out the order and ran for the front of the formation.

The shape of the battlefield changed at once, and more eyes fixed on Ye Tianxie. The first to come at him was the Wings Guardian unit driving at the very front.

-1, -1, -1, -1, -1…

Seven or eight shields boxed Ye Tianxie in the middle, sealing off his retreat and any chance of dodging, and the attacks came down on him thick and fast. But the damage numbers drifting up over Xietian’s head left every one of them staring, barely able to believe their eyes.

“Go home, sharpen your blades and come back. Your blades… are much too dull!”

One Dragon Rend Slash, and the Guardian in front of him was hammered off his feet, health emptied, his body knocking back the men surging up behind him and flattening a swath of them. Ye Tianxie was after him like a ghost, and the black Hour of Fate came down like a nightmare out of the dark, raising a spread of the white light that follows a player’s death.

He had the body of an Evil Dragon, and close to two hundred points of Constitution added on by his various gear, so his defense stood at 438. Guardians with attack power of this second-rate sort had no way at all to break it. All they could raise was a forced “-1.”

(End of Chapter 263)