Dungeon King: The Hidden Ruler-Chapter 56: [Thrones in Ruin 5] - Burn the Gate, Break the Will

It wasn’t a clean death.

Not some cinematic end, no noble last stand. Just a blur of noise, fire, and pain.

He remembered the flash—flames swallowing the alley. The taste of ash when he tried to shout a warning. The way the ground shifted under his boots as the Fold units swarmed through the breach.

He remembered the spear.

A blur of silver and raw muscle driving it forward. No flourish. No mercy. Just the efficient violence of war.

The impact hit like a hammer to the chest. His HUD screamed a fatal error even before he hit the ground.

His body dropped backward in a haze of red. Shouts. Metal. The collapse of walls.

Then darkness, folding around him like wet concrete.

And now,

Light.

Runes.

A scream tearing itself from his lungs as he was yanked back into existence.

The Inner Sanctum was quiet.

Not peaceful—just waiting.

The tremors had stopped, but the air was thick, heavier than stone. Faint plumes of smoke curled from shattered braziers. Somewhere beyond the walls, siege engines pounded relentlessly, their shockwaves rumbling through the marble floor like distant heartbeats.

Tattered banners hung limply from broken poles, their colors dulled by ash. Cracks veined across the stone tiles, and shattered weapons littered the shrine’s edge—a broken axe, a splintered shield, a staff snapped cleanly in two.

The players who remained near the shrine wore the exhaustion openly—shoulders slumped, faces pale under magical glow. Someone had overturned a supply crate in the corner, scattering rations and empty potion bottles like battlefield debris.

No one spoke.

No one needed to.

The silence pressed harder than any enemy formation.

It was the quiet before something worse. A final breath before the wave.

The tremors had stopped. The last of the defenders had either run to the breach or died trying. A few players milled near the shrine, checking cooldowns or hovering near siege vendors. Someone arranged their skill setting in the main altar. Another yawned.

Then—

"...aaAA—"

A sound. Far away. Like a scream dragged uphill.

"—AAARGH!"

The sanctum lit up in a flash of runes. Raven reformed mid-scream, his body arching from the jolt. One knee hit stone. His hand slapped over his chest where the spear had pierced him just moments before.

It wasn’t real.

Not technically.

But if you didn’t mute the haptics, it still felt like dying.

A couple players nearby turned. One flinched. A priestess stepped back instinctively.

Raven gasped, then rolled to a crouch. His HUD was still syncing. He didn’t wait.

He was already moving.

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"Yo, where’s that guy in the black robe?"

"Wasn’t he leading the breach line?"

"Pretty sure he died. I saw the animation."

"Do we go back?"

"What the hell do we do now?"

"Man, I hope he didn’t log off..."

The streets were chaos—archers repositioning, siege crews dragging ballista kits, support players screaming over cooldowns.

The summoner classes—normally one of the event’s backbone in quantity—were frozen.

Tamers waved hands in empty air. No beast answered.

Necromancers spammed commands. Their corpses wouldn’t rise.

One conjurer near the bakery corner just dropped to her knees.

"They’re not coming. None of them are coming."

Raven pushed through the wreckage.

Raven moved through the fractured streets like a ghost—silent, furious, barely holding his body together.

The Fold soldiers were already spilling into the Middle Area, their formations sloppy but overwhelming by sheer numbers. Shieldbreakers led the charge—hulking figures in iron carapaces, hammers cracking the cobblestones as they advanced. Behind them, rows of storm archers rained down shock-tipped bolts, setting the rooftops ablaze.

He didn’t waste time.

Raven cut into a squad of shocktroopers mid-sprint, his daggers flashing under their guard. One fell instantly, throat blooming red. Another staggered backward—only for a ballista bolt, meant for the walls, to punch through his chest.

[System Message: Fold Shocktrooper defeated.]

Raven pivoted, lunging toward a formation breaking around a collapsed fountain. He ducked under a halberd swing, plunged his knife into the attacker’s ribs, and used the dying body as cover against a volley of arrows.

Even as he fought, the battle swirled around him.

Players screamed. Summoners without beasts tried desperately to channel siege magic. A storm beast tore through a barricade, its iron horns flinging a defender into a second-story window with a sickening crash.

Raven spotted a small cluster of defenders pinned near an overturned wagon. Without thinking, he dashed forward, activating Phantom Bind to teleport behind a Fold captain leading the assault.

His chain coiled around the captain’s throat, dragging him backward as Raven’s dagger opened an artery cleanly. The defenders barely hesitated before counterattacking, rallying around the sudden opening.

Small victories.

Tiny, brutal inches of survival.

It wasn’t enough to win.

But it was enough to keep breathing.

"Shield the southern residential area! Buff squads to alley cover. Stand up! Don’t clump! Your summons didn’t answer, use sieges!"

"You don’t understand... you’re not a summoner or a tamer!" one of the summoners barked at him.

Raven snarled and summoned his Bone Wolf, harmless mob from Bone Tyrant dungeon, which he was captured when he starting out. The beast glitched mid-materialization—legs stuttering, fur phasing.

"I AM a summoner, goddammit! You want to break down and cry? Log off from the war!"

He unsummoned Bone Wolf with a flick of his wrist and stormed off toward the central residential district—the Middle Area.

For a heartbeat, no one moved.

The southern residential lanes were a graveyard of spells—half-finished incantations, smoking summoning circles, siege kits discarded in panic.

Then, a rogue with a cracked bowstring grabbed a ballista bolt and rammed it into a handheld launcher.

A shieldbearer—armor scorched black—hauled himself upright and started barking orders to nearby healers.

A conjurer tore off her summoning runes and pulled a fire trap from her inventory instead, hands shaking but determined.

They moved not because they trusted Raven.

But because there was no one else.

"Cover the east alley!" Raven shouted, slashing his hand through the air. "Drop traps there! Pull back heavy hitters to the shrine steps!"

"We can’t hold them forever!" someone cried.

"We don’t need forever," Raven snapped back. "We just need longer than them."

Bit by bit, the line reformed.

Traps were laid. Siege crews hastily reassembled broken engines. Archers set kill zones down the alleys.

A necromancer—bloodied, eyes wild—slammed down a resurrection scroll, dragging a fallen defender back into the fight.

A heavy armor tank player, a tank stood his ground.

His armor was battered, scorched black from spellfire, but his stance never wavered. A tower shield braced against his shoulder, he roared a taunt that echoed through the alleys, drawing the Meridian Fold soldiers toward him like moths to a bonfire.

They came in waves—swords flashing, axes biting—and he met them all head-on.

He laughed.

His swings were heavy but slow, more to knock enemies back than to kill. His damage was negligible. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t his job to finish them.

It was to hold.

To endure.

Behind him, a squad of archers and healers worked in perfect tandem—arrows raining down with lethal precision, healing magic patching every crack in his armor.

Every second he bought, every blow he absorbed, allowed the line behind him to survive.

He was a PvP veteran, born for this role—taunt, absorb, outlast.

It wasn’t about glory.

It was about trust.

Standing when others would fall.

Cindraleth defender wasn’t organized.

Wasn’t clean.

But it was enough to buy time.

And for now, time was survival.

The defense line cracked not all at once, but piece by piece. The Fold army had reached the middle layer—rows of storm units, shieldbreakers, and siege beasts that shouldn’t have made it this far.

Without summoned monsters soaking damage or blocking paths, the Cindraleth forces were spread too thin. Even the players who held the line were too scattered—out of sync, out of options.

Raven dropped two elite storm warriors with dagger flurries, then vaulted over a broken wagon to intercept a third.

He plunged a blade into its shoulder—only to be struck in the back by a blast of chain lightning.

HP: 14%.

He staggered. Another spear caught him from the flank.

[You have died.]

The world reset again.

Death the second time was worse.

Not because of the pain—it was the numbness that followed.

The world came back slower this time.

When the Inner Sanctum’s runes flared, Raven barely gasped. His body reformed sluggishly, pixels stitching his limbs together like a broken puppet. For a moment, he stayed kneeling, hands braced on cold stone, head bowed.

Around him, the other respawned players moved like ghosts. No one cheered. No one even spoke.

In the distance, the drums of siege engines still thundered, marking each breath they failed to hold the line.

His HUD pulsed dimly, warnings flashing about armor durability, potion exhaustion, mental strain.

Raven closed the system alerts with a flick of his wrist. He didn’t need the game to tell him what he already knew.

This wasn’t a defense anymore.

It was survival on borrowed time.

He rose stiffly, rolling his shoulders once to force life back into them, and moved—silent, determined, and already preparing for the next inevitable death.

And the circus of chaos continued.

...

The capsule hissed open. He’d been logged in for six hours.

Adrian stepped out, jaw tight.

He didn’t speak. Not until he saw his reflection in the capsule glass—eyes burning, jaw locked.

He exhaled through his nose. A sharp, focused breath.

"They’ll see it," he muttered. "Every glitch. Every death. Every wipe."

The streamers had been there. Their cameras had caught the fold. The screams. The collapse.

He turned, wiped his face with a towel, and straightened his jacket.

The anger faded. Not gone. Just buried.

He close his eyes and took a breath of the fresh air as he stepped out from CloudSpire Lounge.

Then opened his eyes. Cold again. Composed. Calculating, as always.

The seed was planted.

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