MMORPG: Birth of the World's Luckiest Player-Chapter 162: Unleashing the Storm

The Highland Jackals were terrifyingly fast. They moved with a lean, predatory grace that matched even the Flame Chargers ridden by SoulfireBlade and his team, which was exactly why Soulfire had been trapped in the first place. They could not outrun the pack, and they could not break it. Every attempt to push forward was answered with snapping jaws and flanking claws. It had become a grinding stalemate, the kind that slowly bled a team dry.

Marcus, however, was not trying to win that stalemate.

He leaned forward in the saddle, syncing his breathing with the rhythm of his mount. His high Agility and Speed stats surged into motion as if a switch had been thrown. He cut a wide arc across the barren field, deliberate and controlled, pulling aggro with surgical precision. One by one, over fifty Highland Jackals turned and locked onto him.

Only about twenty were fast enough to snap at his heels. The rest followed in a dense, snarling mass behind him, a dark tide rolling across the cracked earth. Thanks to his evasion rate, nearly half the attacks aimed his way sliced through empty air. The few that landed scraped against layered defenses and auxiliary buffs. He was tanking a small army, and he made it look effortless.

Ahead, the Inferno line tightened. Marcus saw the shift in their posture, the subtle lift of bows and the glow of spells gathering at the edges of their formation. They were preparing their opening volley.

He did not slow.

"Wraith."

The word left his lips softly, almost casually, but the effect was explosive.

His speed spiked in an instant. The world blurred. He became a streak cutting through the battlefield, forcing the jackals behind him to stretch themselves to the limit just to keep pace. Dust and snarls churned together into a rolling storm.

From Inferno’s perspective, it did not look like a single player charging.

It looked like a disaster bearing down on them.

"Target the Knight! Drop him now!" Ash001 shouted, his voice cracking as the danger finally registered.

Spells and arrows tore through the air.

Miss.

-60.

Miss.

-75.

-70.

Miss.

Most of Inferno’s ranged dealers had already committed their aim to the main Soulfire force. Adjusting mid-cast was not instant, and in the chaos only about twenty players managed to redirect their fire in time. The volley hit Marcus in scattered bursts instead of a unified execution.

Between his natural defenses, stacked buffs, and the protective wards the Soulfire Clerics had layered over him, the damage barely registered. His health dipped by roughly a thousand points, no more than half his total.

He weaved through the barrage, cloak snapping behind him.

’I’m still standing.’

Adrenaline flooded his veins, sharp and electric. His timing had been exact. By forcing Inferno to split their focus at the worst possible moment, he had bought himself the few seconds that mattered most.

He had charged fully prepared to die.

He knew Inferno had around forty ranged dealers capable of erasing him in a synchronized volley. His contingency had been simple: trigger the Ring of Resurrection, use the three seconds of invulnerability to finish the delivery, and let the jackals do the rest.

But It seemed he would not need to. Not yet. He remained strong, fast and untouchable.

The thought flickered through him, not as arrogance but as recognition. This was not only about raw stats. It was positioning, observation, exploiting hesitation. Seventy players were trying to stop him, and they could not even pin him down.

"Ash! It’s him!" Rock001’s voice cut through the chaos, high and sharp with disbelief. He pointed straight at Marcus. "It’s that brat from the Newbie Village. The one with the rabbit mask!"

The recognition spread like a spark through dry grass.

The Inferno brothers had been hunting Marcus for weeks, furious over their public humiliation. None of them had expected to find him here, much less leading a stampede of monsters straight at their formation.

"Knights! Surround him!" Rock001 shouted, rage and excitement twisting together in his voice. "I want him carved up piece by piece!"

His fixation did exactly what Marcus hoped it would. Instead of focusing cleanly on the jackals, parts of Inferno’s formation shifted toward revenge. Orders overlapped. Movement lost its cohesion.

Back in Soulfire’s ranks, silence fell for half a heartbeat.

SoulfireBlade stared, stunned. They had all expected Marcus to be vaporized the moment Inferno’s volley hit. Instead, he was still charging, still upright, still dragging a wall of teeth and claws behind him like some deranged conductor guiding an orchestra of death. SoulfireBlade’s jaw dropped so far he could have swallowed an ostrich egg.

The Clerics recovered first. Two Restoration spells flared in quick succession, white light washing over Marcus and snapping his health bar back to full.

How can two Knights feel this different? SoulfireBlade wondered.

He was ranked among the top ten Knights in all of Dominion. On paper, his stats were elite. Yet he knew, with uncomfortable clarity, that he could not have done this. Not like that. It was not just numbers. It was nerve. Marcus stepped into chaos as if it were familiar ground.

He remembered how much SoulSync trusted the man. Until now, he had quietly questioned that judgment.

Now he understood.

At Rock001’s command, Inferno’s ranged dealers began redirecting their fire toward the incoming jackals instead of Marcus, while eight Inferno Knights kicked their mounts forward to intercept him.

The Furious Three were not panicking yet. They had twenty Knights in total. If they locked shields and formed a proper wall, their forty ranged dealers could dismantle the jackals from behind cover. No kiting Knight, no matter how bold, should be able to break a disciplined line.

But they were calculating against a standard opponent. Marcus saw the eight riders closing in and smiled.

’Perfect.’

"Since you’re all so eager," he muttered under his breath, tightening his grip on the Skeleton Blade, "let’s see how you handle a Temple Knight."

He quickly judged the distance and angle. ’Please don’t crit,’ he thought. He needed them alive, barely, wounded enough to panic but not enough to drop. Maximum chaos required survivors.

"Hundred Phantom Strike!"

The Skeleton Blade dissolved into a storm of shimmering afterimages that flooded a three meter radius ahead of him.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

The impacts landed almost simultaneously across all eight Knights.

He had moderated his strength just enough. No critical hits triggered. Each Knight lost roughly seven hundred health, about half their total.

"What the hell—" "Gah!"

Shock ripped through their voices. They each carried around one thousand to twelve hundred HP, and a single area skill had nearly gutted them all.

Marcus did not give them time to recover.

Using the superior acceleration of his mount, he angled sharply through the smallest gap in their formation, slipping past shields before they could fully close. His eyes locked onto a Knight on the outer wing.

"Triple Surge!"

-800.

-700.

-1,250.

The three strikes landed in a heartbeat. The final blow detonated in a massive critical hit. The targeted Knight vanished before he could even cry out, his body dissolving into pixels and leaving a jagged hole in Inferno’s line.

Marcus drove his Flame Charger straight through the opening.

By the time the remaining seven Knights turned their mounts, he was already past them, plunging deep into the heart of Inferno’s formation with fifty enraged Highland Jackals thundering behind him.

He was too fast. Too precise.

To those watching, he no longer looked like a player, he looked like the eye of the storm.