NOVEL NEXT Chapter 125: The First Rift
Just as Ryan was searching for any sign of change, a line of brilliant text flashed across his vision, freezing him in place.
"The elements of the world have begun to stir, as if drawn to something here!"
He immediately understood what it meant.
The Elemental Invasion. The first true world event in Kingdom Forge. This was the prelude to an all-out assault.
The game's surface world was vast enough, but hidden beneath it were countless pocket dimensions. The first to bleed through were the Elemental Planes. From the Scorched Lands came fire elementals. From the Abyssal Sea, water. From the Deep Places, earth. And from the Howling Cliffs, the restless winds. Their invasion into the mortal realm would unlock the game's first raid-level dungeon: the Elemental Citadel.
At the heart of it all was Cinder, the exiled elemental god. He ruled from within the Citadel, intent on remaking the mortal plane into a sanctuary for his kin.
But Cinder's ambition had angered his own kind. The other elemental gods severed his tie to his eternal font, leaving him stranded in the mortal realm as something far less than divine. Only in that weakened state could players even hope to bring him down.
According to the lore, every elemental that spilled into the world carried a fragment of Cinder's essence—shards of his own being scattered across the land.
Ryan recalled all this without the faintest sense of alarm. The quest rewards for starting the invasion were tempting, yes, but they meant little to him. What interested him were the preparation quests that followed, which promised far greater opportunities.
With the picture in mind, he continued forward at his usual pace, methodically cutting down the venomous slimes that trailed after him.
Ten minutes later, he found the body of a man sprawled lifeless on the ground. The quest marker that should have hovered above his head was gone. Someone else had beaten him to it.
Ryan rubbed his nose and shrugged. The quest itself offered nothing more than a sliver of reputation with the future neutral town of Elementium and a few pieces of gold.
Even so, he knew exactly who the man was.
Instead of moving on, Ryan stopped and waited.
The Elemental Invasion always began with this same NPC: a human named Andy, whose corpse now lay at Ryan's feet. Andy spawned at random in the Arid Plains, the Dreadful Mire, or the Land of Four Elements. He never stayed in one place for longer than an hour. If no player took his quest during that time, a squad of elemental monsters would teleport in and cut him down.
Once slain, Andy would reappear in a different zone every six hours, wandering until another player stumbled across him. The outcome was always the same. Accept his quest, and he would collapse beneath the elemental god's curse. Refuse it, and he would be slaughtered anyway.
Either way, once Andy was dead and the quest turned in, the portals would open. Across every map he could have appeared in, rifts would tear the sky, spewing elementals into the world. The invasion would truly begin.
That was why Ryan lingered there, patient and unhurried, waiting for the first portals to rip open.
Once the portals opened, elemental monsters would spill into the world. Their strength always matched the surrounding zone, which meant here they would be no higher than level thirty.
Ryan waited. The air grew heavier, the silence stretching longer than he expected. No rift. No sign of the invasion.
He frowned. Did that Undead rogue not turn in the quest yet?
After a moment's thought, he sent out a call to a few guild members who had already reached level twenty-six, marking his coordinates.
Moonlight Beauty, Smoking Gun, and several others arrived not long after. All of them had just hit level twenty-seven in the anomaly zone Ryan had directed them to earlier. They were chasing hard after the top spot on the leaderboards.
Ryan didn't mind. Once the Forest of Decay unlocked at level thirty, they would see just how wide the gap really was.
"Guild leader," Moonlight Beauty said, glaring at the corpse on the ground, "you dragged us all the way out here just to stare at a dead NPC?"
She was still bristling with irritation. Moments ago she had been cutting down a pack of Undead rogues, killing two before the rest fled. She had been ready to chase them down when Ryan's summons had pulled her away.
"The anomaly zone's been exposed, hasn't it?" Ryan asked with an amused smile.
The others groaned and nodded.
It wasn't surprising. That anomaly had been the first of its kind discovered in the game, and it had already become infamous. Too many players were grinding there, too many eyes watching. A group of people constantly pulling and killing mobs was bound to draw suspicion. Sooner or later, someone was going to figure it out.
Ryan had sent his top guildmates there after he'd reaped his share, hoping they could get a few levels in before the spot went public. But the window had closed.
"It's chaos now," Smoking Gun muttered. "We can barely hold a single spawn point, and the Dark Horde keeps harassing us." He let out a sigh, his frustration written across his face.
He had leveled the slowest among them. Early on, he hadn't managed his stamina well. By the time he needed it most, he was exhausted, forced to rest at an inn while others surged ahead. He had only just returned to grinding that morning when the anomaly became overrun. By the time he left, the entire place had been swarmed with players.
His mood showed it.
"That's exactly why I called you here," Ryan said with a grin. "There was a quest here, but someone else got to it first. Which means a portal is going to open any moment. When it does, we kill everything that comes out."
"A portal?" Mia spoke up for the first time, her eyes bright with curiosity. "What's going to come out of it?"
Ryan's heart lifted. She had been cold to him earlier, still upset about the morning's incident, but now it seemed she had let it go. He was about to answer when a thunderous roar shattered the silence.
The ground trembled. Roars echoed from every direction, layered one after another until the air seemed to vibrate.
"I think," Ryan said with a shrug and a soft laugh, "you're about to see for yourselves."
Black lightning forked across the sky in the distance, tearing at the seams of reality itself. The void split, raw and jagged, and from it a gate began to take shape. Its surface shimmered with unearthly light as it widened, looming above them like a storm about to break. Slowly, inexorably, the rift descended toward the earth.