Luck Stat Broken: Rise of the Khan-Chapter 48 - 44: The Deep Attacks Karakorum
The iron blast doors sealed shut behind them, the echo ringing through the cavern like a gunshot.
Will didn’t turn around. His eyes stayed locked on the dark water. His Warlord Aura flared violet and gold. He could feel it. A crushing, impossible weight anchoring the pitch-black depths of the pool. The Level 92 Leviathan was down there, wide awake, and watching.
[Warning: Sovereign’s Gaze (Level 92) Detected.]
[Applying Passive Debuff: Crushing Dread...]
The sheer psychic pressure threatened to lock Will’s joints in place. He gritted his teeth and pushed back, pulsing the [Warlord’s Orchestra] through his blood. He flared the network outward, turning his ambient aura into a psychic umbrella to shield the minds of his team so they wouldn’t freeze in terror.
Beside him, Maddie tightened her grip on the standard-issue short sword. The purple plating of her Abyssal Vanguard Carapace was still cracked from the Sky-Reef, but she didn’t care about the armor. She cared about the dead weight in her hands. Without the humming, kinetic balance of her ’SANTA MON’ halberd, her Kinetic Battery trait was completely useless. She was a Vanguard without a shield, and she hated it.
Allison raised her hands, the stone beneath their boots groaning as she prepared to weaponize the floor.
They were trapped in a cage with a god.
Will lowered his bow a fraction of an inch, the skin on the back of his neck prickling. Why isn’t it surfacing?
Because a true sovereign does not hunt, boy, Khan’s voice rumbled in the back of his skull, dark and amused. Kings do not dirty their own hands when they have armies to bleed for them. It is waiting for the slaughter to come to us.
Before Will could process the conqueror’s words, the Black Pool began to boil.
A tide of multi-legged nightmares erupted from the deep. They were Goliath Void-Isopods—bottom-feeding scavengers mutated by millennia of raw mana into the size of mastiffs. They were built like segmented, heavily plated tanks, scuttling on dozens of hooked limbs and clicking jagged, bone-crushing mandibles. Hundreds of them poured out of the churning water, launching themselves toward the glowing Warlord and the roaring heat of the Abyssal Forge.
[Hostile Swarm Detected: Goliath Void-Isopods (Levels 15-25)]
[Faction Defenses Engaged.]
"Kill-box!" Will shouted.
The first wave hit the obsidian spikes. Elias’s traps triggered in a rapid-fire chain of concussive blasts.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The [Sovereign’s Snare] charges didn’t detonate with standard fire. They exploded in blinding geysers of violet-gold kinetic energy, weaponizing Will’s ambient aura. The blasts ripped the front line to shreds, sending shattered chitin and segmented limbs spinning into the dark.
A cluster of the isopods adapted instantly. They curled into tight, armored spheres, rolling straight up the cavern wall at terrifying speed to bypass the explosions. From the shadows, Elias’s P.A.C.I.F.I.C. cybernetics engaged. His arms stretched out like thick rubber cables—the [Elongation Variant]—snatching the rolling horrors mid-spin and yanking them violently backward into the blast zone.
But there were too many. The swarm scuttled over the glowing shells of their own kind, their hooked legs easily navigating the jagged wall.
Will released his bowstring. The violet-gold arrow hit the center of the pack and exploded with the force of a mortar shell, clearing a smoking crater in the swarm.
A familiar, hollow ache pulled at Will’s chest as the aura cost registered. He braced himself for the mana drain, but the ache vanished almost instantly, replaced by a cool, rushing surge of energy.
[Sovereign’s Domain Active: +25% Mana Regeneration]
Will blinked, checking his peripheral UI. The corrupted core powering the base was feeding him. His mana bar, now ten times its original size, had barely ticked down from the blast, and the base’s passive buff was already filling the gap.
He didn’t just have a limitless battery. He had an infinite one.
A feral grin split Will’s face. "Al! Shift the spikes outward! Give them a ramp!"
Allison slammed her hands into the floor, her earth-magic reshaping the obsidian barricade to funnel the swarm directly into the center of the vault.
Will raised his bow. He didn’t focus on a single devastating shot. He drew a fraction of the power, weaving the aura thin, and manifested three bodkin arrows at once.
[Skill Activated: Wind-Runner Bow-Fu]
He fired. Drew. Fired. Drew. Fired.
The [Warlord’s Orchestra] hummed in his blood. Golden artillery rained down on the kill-box in a ceaseless barrage. When a half-dozen isopods curled up and launched themselves over the blast zone, Will didn’t even notch an arrow. He snapped his free hand out, condensing an ethereal golden shield in mid-air.
[Skill Activated: Warlord’s Arsenal (Solid Aura Manifestation)]
The aura shield swatted the armored spheres out of the air like baseballs, knocking them back into the meat grinder.
"Is that all you got?!" Tyson roared over the explosions.
Three of the scavengers slipped past Will’s barrage, uncurling mid-air as their mandibles snapped for the MMA fighter. Tyson didn’t step back. He stepped into the swing.
He threw a brutal right hook with his new Goliath-Plate gauntlets. The dark metal connected with the first isopod’s segmented skull. The carapace shattered like cheap glass. The kinetic force blew the creature backward into the other two, dropping all three in a twitching, tangled heap. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚
[Faction Kill: Goliath Void-Isopod (Lv. 22). Warlord +400 XP]
[Faction Kill: Goliath Void-Isopod (Lv. 24). Warlord +450 XP]
Tyson laughed, smashing his gauntlets together. "Zero recoil! Boss, I can do this all day!"
They weren’t just surviving; they were farming. Deep below the surface, a low, tectonic rumble vibrated through the water. The ancient god was enjoying the show.
Then, Elias’s neon-blue [Oversight Eye] whirred, spinning frantically in its socket.
"Boss," Elias yelled over the explosions. "Blinding energy spike from the bottom. It just painted the Forge!"
A command, Khan murmured, his tone sharpening into pure steel. The king grows bored of pawns.
The water on the far left side of the pool—thirty feet away from Allison’s kill-box—erupted.
A shadow launched out of the deep, bypassing the trapped shoreline entirely. The water fell away, revealing a mutated Alpha Void-Isopod. Its shell was black, thick, and brutally scarred, its front section evolved with four scythe-like mantis claws.
[Warning: Abyssal Alpha (Level 45) entering combat zone.]
The beast hit the stone floor with a cratering thud, shaking the vault. Driven by the sovereign below, its multi-faceted eyes locked instantly onto the pulsing corrupted core burning inside the Abyssal Forge. It didn’t care about the players; it wanted the mana.
"I got it!" Tyson yelled.
The Vanguard pivoted away from the swarm, planting his boots and raising both gauntlets to form a physical wall between the Alpha and the Forge.
The Alpha didn’t slow down. It curled its armored front section inward, and its carapace flared with a necrotic green light.
[Enemy Skill Activated: Abyssal Siege-Charge (Armor Piercing)]
Tyson braced, his muscles locking to absorb the blunt force.
The Alpha hit him.
Thick iron buckled. Bone fractured. The sound echoed over the roar of the Forge like a car crash. Tyson’s eighty-five percent kinetic mitigation meant absolutely nothing against an armor-piercing skill. The Vanguard’s guard shattered instantly.
Tyson was launched backward like a broken doll, flying through the air and crashing into a stone pillar in a crumpled heap.
[Vanguard Tyson: HP Critical (12%)]
"Tyson!" Maddie screamed.
She sprinted, her boots slipping on the slick stone, but the brutal math was already done. She couldn’t cross the gap. She gripped the useless standard-issue sword, the ghost of her halberd’s balance mocking her empty hands. In the one moment her team needed a shield, the Vanguard was completely helpless.
The Alpha didn’t even look at her. It charged straight past, stampeding toward the brightest source of heat and magic in the room.
And Bram was standing right in front of it.
The Forgemaster was exposed, his back turned to the fight, his forging hammer raised mid-swing over the roaring Abyssal Forge. Inside the Tier-3 flames, the fractured steel of Maddie’s ’SANTA MON’ halberd was glowing white-hot, halfway fused with the acid-resistant Goliath Mana-Tick carapace they had dragged out of the Sky-Reef.
He turned, his eyes widening as the shadow of the Alpha eclipsed the light of the fire.
The Level 45 beast coiled its thick legs and launched itself across the final gap.
Bram saw the monster coming. He felt the crushing weight of the systemic choice settling over his shoulders. He knew the strict rules of the Abyssal Forge: if he dropped his hammer now, if he broke the rhythm of the flames for even a fraction of a second to defend himself, the Goliath Tick plating would flash-freeze. The ’SANTA MON’ mythic upgrade would be shattered and ruined forever.
The P.A.C.I.F.I.C. breach was exactly twenty-seven days away. If Maddie lost her weapon here, she would go into the corporate war completely stripped of her power. It wasn’t just a broken polearm; it was a death sentence for next month.
Bram had to make a choice.
Step aside and abandon the strike, saving his own life while dooming the Faction’s Vanguard, or finish the hammer blow and take a Level 45 armor-piercing hit directly to his unprotected spine.
The beast flew through the air, its scythe-like claws extending, its mandibles snapping open, a millisecond away from impact.
