The interior of the fortress was left with only a handful of defenders, most of them stunned, wounded, or simply standing in a daze. Victor's forces would have no trouble cleaning them up. The only thing that could have posed a real threat was the Commander itself, but with enough Shield Tanks surrounding it, the thing would be reduced to little more than a practice target. Unfortunately, the presence of even a few guards meant Ethan could not simply throw the gates open from the inside.

Victor led the assault personally.

Ten thousand elite members of the Renegade Alliance surged forward at his back, accompanied by nearly thirty thousand regular players. They poured over the walls in a tidal wave, encountering almost no resistance at all. What little opposition remained consisted of scattered pockets of guards, disorganized and barely able to fight back. The fortress's entire defensive grid was dead.

A fortress stripped of its protections, facing more than forty thousand players all empowered by a full one hundred percent stat buff, never stood a chance.

When Victor finally climbed onto the wall and looked down into the courtyard below, even his battle-hardened calm wavered for a brief moment.

The scene was utter devastation.

Smoke and fire choked the air. The ground was scorched black, cracked and uneven. Buildings lay shattered, walls collapsed inward, towers broken and half-sunken into the earth. NPC corpses were strewn everywhere, limbs torn apart, armor split open, blood soaking the stone in dark, drying pools.

"Ten minutes to clear the field!" Victor's voice cut through the chaos, sharp and absolute. "All units regroup at the command post in ten!"

By all rights, a Priest should have stayed behind the front line. Victor did the opposite.

He was the first to leap down from the wall, landing directly in the ruins below. At his feet, a half-crippled guard with barely any HP remaining weakly raised a dagger, its hand trembling more from instinct than intent.

Victor did not spare it a glance.

His staff swung in a clean, efficient arc, not to cast a spell, but to strike.

Thwack.

The guard's helmet collapsed inward, and its head burst apart like an overripe melon.

"H-holy shit," a player who landed behind him blurted out, staring in disbelief. "How much Strength does Slashblade even have?!"

Several others froze, eyes wide.

Victor's class was Priest. He had no business hitting that hard. And yet, one casual swing had crushed a helmet and pulverized a skull beneath it.

What they did not know was that Victor maintained two completely different gear sets. When he needed to heal or support, he wore traditional cloth armor stacked with Intellect and Spirit. But through sheer stubbornness, he had also painstakingly assembled a second set, an entire collection of Strength-boosting cloth gear ranging from Bronze to Gold tier. This was the equipment he wore in the field.

His staff was not a casting focus at all. It was a quarterstaff, and he wielded it with the ruthless precision of someone trained for close combat, using a military-style technique that almost no one ever got to see.

Most players believed Priests were weak in PvP.

They had simply never seen Victor fight.

In a past sparring match, he had beaten Leo so badly that the man had been left completely speechless afterward.

Without slowing, Victor pressed deeper into the fortress, leading a strike team straight toward the command post while dividing the rest of the force into countless smaller squads. Their orders were simple and absolute, eliminate every wounded guard still clinging to life anywhere in the ruins.

They encountered no real resistance.

"Is this actually happening?" one player muttered as they moved through the wreckage, awe creeping into his voice. "An Advanced Fortress… going down this easily?"

"Quit staring like a tourist," another snapped back.

"He's not wrong though," someone else added as they ran. "Boss has always been insane. Now move. We've only got ten minutes."

The squads carried out their task with almost unsettling efficiency, methodical and oddly cheerful as they swept the ruins. When the ten-minute mark arrived, every single player, even those sent to the furthest corners of the fortress, had already regrouped behind Victor at the command post.

This was the Renegade Alliance.

Orders were followed without hesitation, even by casual members, and that discipline was something they took pride in.

"Pull team, draw the Commander out. Shield wall, form up. Ranged, hold your fire. Healers, stay locked on any tank the Commander turns toward," Victor said, his voice calm and unhurried as he laid out the plan. "Remember the intel. No aggro table. It attacks whoever is closest. Do not let it break containment. Understood?"

"UNDERSTOOD!"

The response thundered through the ruins, unified and sharp. Any lingering levity vanished in an instant, replaced by focused intensity.

Hearing it, Victor allowed himself a small smile.

Every soldier dreams of command, and he was no exception. He, Leo, and Williams had poured an absurd amount of time into shaping the Renegade Alliance, drilling structure and discipline into its core, pushing it toward something that resembled a real fighting force rather than a loose collection of players. This moment, this immediate and absolute response, was proof that the effort had not been wasted.

The battle began.

The fortress Commander emerged fully, revealing itself as a Dual-Blade Warrior, a berserker-type monster built for relentless close combat. A solid wall of shields closed in around it almost instantly, layers of tanks locking positions with practiced precision. Only after containment was secure did the ranged units begin firing, spells and arrows steadily chewing away at its massive health bar.

Another monster with well over a hundred million HP.

This was not going to be fast.

Fortunately, the Commander lacked any complicated mechanics. As long as the tanks held formation and the healers stayed sharp, it was effectively a training dummy, albeit one that struck hard enough to keep everyone alert and punished even momentary lapses in focus.

---

By the time Victor's last instructions were delivered, Ethan was already gone.

He flew far enough to fully disengage from combat, then descended and landed smoothly. Lyla guided Myrga down beside him, the massive beast folding its wings as it touched the ground.

"Ethan, aren't we supposed to be heading for the southern fortress?" Lyla asked, referring to the one Leo was stationed at, the same fortress currently within the WCC Radio broadcast zone.

The official WCC live stream was still running, but the footage had devolved into a static wide shot of the fortress walls. With nothing happening on screen, the two commentators had slipped deep into awkward filler, desperately stretching every scrap of speculation into something that sounded meaningful.

Even so, viewership had exploded.

The chat and comment sections were absolute chaos. Speculation ran wild. Some viewers were convinced the Renegade Alliance leadership had fractured. Others, feeding on pure schadenfreude, were declaring that the so-called Druid God was finished, only to be immediately buried under furious counterattacks from Ethan's fans. Haters and supporters tore into each other across every platform, turning the broadcasts into a full-scale flame war that Ethan himself knew nothing about.

"I want them to wait," Ethan said, a faintly amused edge creeping into his voice. "The finale should be the one everyone gets to see."

Instead of heading south, the two of them activated a free teleport stone. They returned briefly to Harmony City, using it as a launch point, then set off due east toward the Advanced Fortress on the coastal frontier.

If not for the twelve-hour lockdown placed on teleportation arrays at the start of Fortress Wars, Ethan would have simply teleported straight there. As it was, flight was the only thing making this cross-continent blitz viable. Without it, they would have spent the entire session doing nothing but running.

And Ethan had no intention of wasting this opportunity.

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