AN: Chapters 76 and 77 have been updated. 76 had its list at the end changed; Adam also got OFA and Creation. In 77, he gifts OFA to Ren. Both changes are at the ends of these chapters. Enjoy!
Also, regarding all the comments to fix certain parts of the story, those will be left for the full edit. My goal is to finish the story while I still have some spare time. So after we are done, a fully edited version will be released with all your inputs taken into consideration. Ty all for the feedback.
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The guild reclassification came the next week. Adam applied for it the moment he and Ren both cleared the last of their L4 deployments and crossed into L5. Lyra Quist crossed with them, so Eclipse finally had what the paperwork it actually cared about: an official standing L5 team.
The whole guild celebrated it. Eclipse had stepped into a new stage, a new front, new possibilities. The official documentation called it Tier 2, and Tier 2 meant Eclipse could hold land on the two new fronts on the far side of the world gates. It wouldn't be easy and it wouldn't be simple, but they had been given a chance, and a chance was all they needed.
Adam framed the document and hung it in the main hall lobby for everyone to see. They updated the promos and the applications. And with the new tier came the first mission. Sadly, it wasn't the kind that put a guild on the front lines, where merits were earned and land was taken. The job was to defend Sector 5 of the Yhwcha world for thirty days, otherworld time. It started in fifteen days.
After the celebration, the guild went back to work. The members' performance had been exceptional. Not a single failed deployment or expedition yet, which, by that one statistic alone, put a guild barely two years old in the same breath as the three strongest in the world. The public started talking. How could something this small keep pace with guilds backed by explorer families and decades of history? Some called it luck. Some called it coincidence. But a few looked closer, and the few noticed a pattern.
Every Eclipse member had an unusual build. No two were the same. The guild didn't drill one approved build guide into everyone who walked through the door; it shaped each one around the person carrying it. And that pointed at something bigger. Their guild leader, Adam Varen, never stopped talking about compounding and multiplication, and the experts began to suspect he genuinely knew how to apply it across wildly different builds, tuning each one just enough to multiply its combat potential and its utility both.
A few names came up more than the rest. There were the three rookies, Maren Holst, Asha Okonkwo, and Dario Venn, who kept turning up on L3 deployments with veteran teams and kept matching them. And then there was Petar Iliescu, whose name went from nowhere to everywhere in a single week, the afternoon he walked into an L4 emergency alone, against four hostiles, and walked back out having handled all of it before another team so much as arrived. The necromancer had never wanted the spotlight. The spotlight found him anyway, and the fans decided they loved him.
You see, the week before that, Petar had a quiet meeting in Adam's office.
Adam and Sage had wanted to test a theory about how potions treated Skills. What survives the change. What carries beyond ordinary abilities and what gets burned away. And their best possible test subject was, well, Petar. He was the proud owner of one of the rarer things an explorer could come home with, a Skill called Raise Dead, picked up on a deployment years back. The Skill used magic power, but Great Sage suspected that, much like herself, it would live through the host's transition into a Beyonder and simply start running on spirituality instead. There was a second reason, too. Adam wanted Petar to become a Corpse Collector. The synergy with Raise Dead was, frankly, absurd. The Skill scaled mostly off its user, and the Corpse Collector pathway handed its walker a strong body, real direct-combat ability, and a deeper connection to death itself. If that fed back into Raise Dead and pushed it to evolve, Eclipse would be holding a powerhouse not far short of Adam himself.
So Adam called him up and made the offer.
Petar arrived in the afternoon, sat down where he was told, and waited for what he assumed was a conversation about team placement.
"Welcome, Petar. As you know, we have listings nobody else can touch, pulled straight from the Bazaar. The trouble is they don't play nicely with powers a member already owns, so I've never once recommended them to anyone L3 or above. The loss is just too steep."
Adam set his hands on the desk and laced his fingers.
"For you, it's different."
Petar looked confused.
"You're saving points for something to enhance your undead. The only large purchase you've ever made is the magic system. Correct?"
"Yes. Like I said before, I want to buff my minions and shore up my own survivability at the same time. People keep telling me to grab a few spells, or look into Haki, or save for a Devil Fruit." He shook his head. "None of it makes sense right now."
"I know. That's why I'm giving you another way." Adam leaned back. "One of the pathways we have deals with Death. It's called Corpse Collector, and the higher you climb it, the closer to Death you stand. Exceptional physical prowess, and a clean fit with that Skill of yours. Petar, when a person takes a pathway, they start walking the road to the divine. It is the surest way I know to reach a height you have never let yourself imagine."
He stood and looked out the window. Iliescu sat very still, listening.
"In theory your Raise Dead stays exactly as it is, with a real chance of evolving if you take this road. But I'll warn you plainly. There is a chance it all fails and you lose everything. Trust me, that feeling is its own kind of hell. If it works, though, there is no ceiling left on you."
Petar looked absent for a long moment. Adam let the silence sit. Eventually the man let out a slow breath. "Okay. Let's do it."
[ Host. Your read on him was not wrong. ]
It wasn't. He reminds me of me. I just wish I'd been handed a opportunity this good this early.
Adam added him to the allow-list, and Petar bought the Sequence 9 Corpse Collector potion almost before the permission cleared. He sat there with the vial in his hand and looked up one last time. Adam nodded. He drank it.
Adam braced for something violent. Instead it looked like nothing happened at all.
Then Petar stood, and his eyes had changed. Colder, somehow.
"Boss. Can I bring my undead in?"
"Go ahead. I want to see this too."
He turned and let his minions file into the office, and stood there looking at them while Sage broke down the changes in the back of Adam's eyes.
[ Host, the minions carry a different aura now. The Corpse Collector pathway has reached into them as well; their strikes should land with some added effect against the living. Petar himself has taken on a physical enhancement and a large reserve of spirituality. His connection to death has deepened, so his control over the undead should be markedly better. ]
A moment later Petar confirmed every word of it.
"Boss, this is incredible. The Skill is still there. It feels stronger, if anything. I feel stronger, body and all. And there's this... sense now. I can feel my undead without reaching for them. I don't lean on the Skill the way I used to. I can hold them and move them without feeling the resistance like before, and I can hold more of them."
Adam smiled.
"Good. That's a real gift to Eclipse. Reach L5 soon, Petar. I'd like you on my team."
Petar lit up like a man handed something he'd never thought to ask for.
"I will, Boss. I won't waste your trust."
A week later he ran into that incursion, and the rest took care of itself.
It had been two weeks now since Adam got back from his last expedition.
The other members who'd chosen pathway progression had reached L2. Taking his advice, most of them picked Hunter, Sailor, Warrior, Arbiter, or Lawyer. One girl chose Assassin, and Adam, unsure whether the pathway's little habit of turning men into women would apply the same way if used in this world, had warned the rest of them about that one at length.
Sophie marched into his office that afternoon and demanded permission for the next potion. That surprised him. Seer wasn't a thing you digested in a couple of weeks. Where would she even have found the room to do it?
"Sophie, are you sure it's digested?" He looked concerned.
"A hundred percent. Felt it finish yesterday." She looked smug and proud of herself.
"All right. Then walk me through how." He looked suspicious.
"Hehe. I asked Brandt for an office and permission to divine for the members. The second they heard I could divine, every one of them wanted to know something. It was exhausting, honestly. Most of it was relationship advice. But most of the digestion came off Ren and her mother."
Adam looked at her like she'd grown horns.
"And what, exactly, did they ask about?"
Sophie put on that insufferable little smile. "Ren asked when she's having kids. Her mother asked when she can expect grandchildren."
Adam stood, then sat back down, and exhaled slowly.
"That's a lie. And now you're not getting the next potion."
Sophie's face fell. "Oh, come on, Adam. You know I can't tell you what a client actually asked. It's confidential. That was just the first thing that popped into my head."
"I don't care. You don't joke about that one. Come back in a month."
She panicked.
"Okay, okay, I'll tell you what they really wanted, just let me take the next potion, pleeease."
Adam looked furious. He was, in fact, only pretending.
"Go on."
"Ren wanted me to divine which of her planned purchases to make first. Mirelle wanted to know whether one of their cousins is a spy."
Adam turned that over. He did remember Ren mentioning that cousin once. He'd lost the name, but it didn't matter; it tracked.
[ Host. She is telling the truth this time. ]
I know, Sage. Don't spoil it for me.
"Fine. All right. Everyone else has to take a month after digestion, but I suppose you can have yours now. I'm staying to watch the process."
Sophie bought the next potion and downed it on the spot. The integration went about as smoothly as these things go. It took a little longer than usual, but she pushed through it, and came out the other side an official Sequence 8 Clown. One more L2 expedition and she'd be able to unlock the Sequence 7 Magician.
After another week of guild work, Adam, Ren, and Lyra joined the next rotation to the Yhwcha front.
They stood with the other teams in front of the gate, that huge imposing thing of bone. The L7 went through first; everyone else followed. Walking through felt like Bazaar teleportation, near enough instant, one step and the world simply changed. The air on the far side hit heavy and thick and full of dust. The whole place looked gloomy and dark, no vegetation anywhere, just long stretches of desert and bare rock under a low, bruised sky.
Once everyone was through, the teams that had been holding the line started filing home to Earth Prime, and Adam's team took up Sector 5. There was a camp in the middle of it, and Sector 5 itself was long since cleared, a fully functioning facility built into the rock. High concrete walls with mounts for artillery and missiles and a dozen other defenses. Observation towers. Cloaking and radar gear bristling off the top of the main spire.
Four teams held this place, Eclipse among them, all of them freshly promoted Tier 2 Guilds. The area was marked relatively safe, which, this far through a war gate, was a sentence that carried its own quiet warning.
Once they'd settled, Adam went looking for information about the place. He talked to the other teams and to the base commander, and circled back, again and again, to the one question nobody seemed to enjoy: why this world?
There was nothing here. Nothing the humans who'd combed it had ever found worth the dying for. No life at all, except the hostiles, and the hostiles didn't live here so much as arrive. They came off-world in ships, in waves, and threw themselves at the human outposts. So far the humans had found twelve enemy stations scattered across the planet, and L7 teams had taken every one of them fairly quickly. Right now humanity held exactly half of the world.
The reason they hadn't simply taken the rest was that the Yhwcha had answers of their own: androids and biological weapons that had the power of L7. A few of those clashes had gone so far past cataclysmic that they were felt on the other side of the planet.
By now the world's sharpest people had pieced the larger thing together. Every world humanity fought across ran on something equivalent to the Bazaar, just wearing a different face. On the Yhwcha world that something was a vast archive of knowledge, and the IEC had filed it under a name borrowed from older books: the Akashic Records. From the information pulled out of the dead, the IEC had learned that the Records handed their side missions too, demanded ceaseless research, and paid out in what the analysts had taken to calling black technologies, advances that pushed the whole civilization further up the same ladder Earth was climbing. The difference was that it didn't reward an individual. It rewarded the species. Yhwcha, Xenomorphs, humans, the others nobody had names for yet, all of them on it.
The biological weapons tended to be Xenomorphs and the androids human made weapons. The Yhwcha themselves were something in between, a little of both.
Adam took it all in and kept the obvious conclusion to himself, because the commander plainly didn't have an answer for it and plainly didn't enjoy being asked. If every one of these worlds ran on a system, and every system handed out power for the exact reasons the Bazaar did, then somewhere past the dust and the dropships there was a version of him on the other side. Somebody the Records had looked at and chosen to invest in. He wondered, idly, whether that somebody slept any better than he did.
He didn't share the thought. There was no profit in handing a tired man a new thing to be afraid of.
The first night settled over Sector 5 like a lid. There was no moon that Adam could find, only that low ceiling of dust that turned the dark a dull rust color and never quite let it go black. The floodlights along the wall carved out their hard little island of white, and past the last of it the desert simply stopped existing.
He took the high watch on the main spire, more to feel the place than because the radar needed a second pair of eyes. Ren came up after a while and leaned on the rail beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched, and for a long time neither of them said anything. She'd been observing the dark with her Observation Haki since they arrived; he could tell by the small, even way she breathed when she was holding her senses open.
"Anything?" he asked, eventually.
"Empty," she said. "All the way out. It's the cleanest nothing I've ever felt." She frowned, which on Ren was a whole paragraph. "I don't like it. Empty like that usually means somebody emptied it."
"Lyra says the same thing in fewer words."
"Lyra's smart." Ren bumped his shoulder. "First gate run, and they hand us a wall and a month of staring at sand. You realize this is the most boring posting on the entire front, and they gave it to a team that, between the three of us, could probably take one of those twelve stations."
"They don't know that," Adam said. "That's rather the point."
"Mm." She didn't look at him. "Plenty of people are starting to guess it, though."
He let that sit, because she wasn't wrong. Down on the wall a sentry changed shift. Somewhere far out in the rust-dark, too far to be anything yet, the air did something to the dust, a faint disturbance with no sound attached to it, the kind of thing you'd never notice if you hadn't spent your whole life learning to.
[ Three faint heat traces, high atmosphere, Host. Edge of range. Descending. Slow. ]
Dropships?
[ Unconfirmed. Could be weather. Its still far out. ]
Adam watched the place where the dark had moved and said nothing. Beside him Ren had gone still, which meant she'd caught it too.
"Well, it seems the action came to us this time."
Ren smiled. While smashing her fists together.
"I don't mind."
Noo my dear Ren, starting to behave like her mother now.
[ Host. Calm down, its still too early to say. ]
No, I am sure Sage, its over. She became a battle maniac.
AN: If we get to 500 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 700, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123