Chương 174: Level 26 and the Duo Legacy Buff

The Pact's rotation board had stopped looking like a list of individual routes sometime over the last month and started looking like something closer to a real operation, names and levels climbing in a steady, coordinated line that had nothing accidental about it anymore. Finn wasn't the only one pushing hard. Half the guild was, and not just in combat levels either. Yuki's first-aid curriculum had produced a dozen members who could stabilize a serious wound in the field without panicking.

Hix's practice sessions with Higgs had spread past the original three of them into a standing rotation anyone could join. Magic that had once felt like a private, uncertain thing each person discovered alone was starting to look, from the outside, like something the Pact was cultivating on purpose.

The Ashen foothills zone alone had reshaped what a week's grinding looked like for members who'd been stuck grinding the same tired Ring 1 corridors for months, and the open ground past the tunnel system had started drawing careful, well-planned scouting trips beyond just Finn and Lira's. Solenne's moss research, still unfinished but visibly close, had already started changing how routes got planned near the Mistveil boundary.

Every piece of it fed into every other piece, infrastructure finally functioning as intended, now that enough people had committed to building it properly instead of improvising as they went. Other guilds were noticing. Zara's channel traffic had started carrying more requests for Pact-adjacent intelligence than usual, other groups quietly asking what routes were safe, what threats had shifted, whether the corridor map's open publication meant the Pact would answer direct questions too. It mostly did.

Lira had made that call weeks ago and never walked it back. None of it happened by accident, and none of it happened without cost, and on a clear morning in the second week of the month, the cost came due in the form of a creature the Pact had been putting off for months.

"Third Razorwing," Higgs said, laying the proposal card on the board where it had sat, mostly ignored, since Finn had first seen it weeks ago.

"I think we're finally ready to stop treating this as optional."

"We've got the numbers now, and the levels," Lira agreed, scanning the sign-up list that had grown considerably since the card first went up.

"Seven names. That's enough for a real coordinated operation instead of the cluster that got the first kill."

"The first kill only worked because of Finn's Aether-charged strike," Higgs said.

"Regular steel barely marks the hide. If we're doing this properly, we need more than one person capable of doing real damage, hitting the same point in sequence rather than everyone taking separate, shallow cuts that heal faster than we can land them."

"What did the first two kills teach us about weak points," Tomás asked, arriving at the board with his own notes from the earlier hunts, secondhand though they were.

"The joints," Higgs said.

"Where the wing meets the body, there's a gap in the plating narrow enough that a committed strike can get through it, but it's a small target and it only opens fully mid-wingbeat, which means timing matters more than force."

"So we need it airborne and committed to an attack pattern before we can actually hurt it," Finn said, working through the logic out loud.

"Which means baiting it into a dive instead of trying to catch it on the ground."

"That's the plan," Higgs confirmed.

"Hix draws its attention from range, keeps it circling instead of fleeing. Once it commits to a dive, Finn and I take the joint strike together, same target, same moment, doubled force instead of two separate shallow hits. Lira and Tomás cover the approach in case a second Razorwing's nesting nearby, which the last two hunts suggest is possible."

"And the rest of us," said one of the newer members, a quiet, steady woman named Aiko who'd joined months ago, around the time Finn did, "cover extraction and harvest once it's down. That hide doesn't process itself."

"Exactly that," Higgs said.

"Seven people, seven jobs. Nobody's along for decoration."

"What about the meat," Tomás asked.

"Is it worth the weight to carry back, or are we leaving it."

"We're taking everything we can carry," Higgs said.

"Razorwing's not common eating, but it's not wasted either, and after the first two left us with nothing but scraps because we weren't organized enough to harvest properly, I'd rather over-plan the extraction than under-plan it again."

"Understood." Tomás made a note of his own, already thinking through the logistics of what a full carcass extraction would actually require in terms of pack weight and pace. Lira looked over the assembled roster one more time, the same careful accounting she gave any operation before committing to it.

"Seven of us, one confirmed target, unknown whether a second Razorwing's nesting nearby. If this goes sideways, I want a clean fallback that doesn't require improvising under pressure."

"Already built it into the route," Higgs said, tapping a marked retreat path on the map.

"Same logic as everything else we run. Plan the way out before anyone commits to the way in." Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! The Razorwing's nesting cliffs sat two hours into the Ring2 border, a stretch of exposed rock face pocked with hollows and updraft channels that Tomás read with the same fluency he brought to fire terrain, calling wind shifts and thermal patterns before anyone else in the group could have noticed them.

"There," he said, pointing to a dark shape circling high above the cliff face, wings catching the light and showing, even from this distance, the razor-fine edge that gave the species its name.

"One visible. No second confirmed yet."

"Positions," Higgs said, quiet and certain. Hix moved to the exposed outcrop they'd scouted for range, bow already in hand, and the rest of the group settled into the loose formation they'd walked through twice before leaving, everyone's role clear enough that nobody needed reminding of it now that the moment had actually arrived.

Aiko and the fourth team member took up positions near the harvest staging point, packs already opened and ready, weapons close but not drawn, waiting on the outcome rather than anticipating a fight of their own. The first arrow went up as a deliberate provocation rather than an attack, catching the Razorwing's attention without doing meaningful damage, and the creature responded exactly as Higgs had predicted, breaking from its lazy circle into a sharper, more aggressive pattern, wings angling for a dive.

"It's coming," Hix called, already nocking a second arrow.

"Get ready!" The Razorwing dropped out of the sky in a controlled, deadly stoop, wings tucked until the last possible moment before flaring wide, the razor edges catching the light in a bright, dangerous arc as it leveled out just above the ground, claws extended toward Hix's position.

Hix rolled clear at the last possible instant, close enough that Finn heard the wind of the passing wing from thirty meters off, and put a second arrow into the creature's flank as it overshot, more provocation than damage but exactly what the plan required.

Finn and Higgs moved together, the timing they'd rehearsed translating into something close to instinct under actual pressure, both of them driving in at the exact moment the wing flared to its widest extension, the narrow gap in the plating opening just long enough for two committed strikes to land in the same instant, doubled force where a single blow would have skidded off armor too tough to yield to anything less.

The Razorwing shrieked, a sound that cracked across the cliff face and echoed back twice over, and its dive lost coherence entirely, wings beating in an uneven, wounded rhythm that carried it into an ungainly crash landing rather than the clean strike it had been aiming for.

"Again!" Higgs called, already repositioning.

"Same spot, before it recovers!" Finn crossed the distance at a dead run, and this time it was Lira who reached the joint first, Wind Step closing the gap in a fraction of the time it would have taken on foot, her blade finding the same narrow opening and driving deep, and between the two of them the creature's uneven thrashing slowed, then stopped, then went entirely still. The cliff face went quiet except for the wind.

"Clear," Higgs called, checking the surrounding rock for any sign of a second Razorwing and finding none.

"One confirmed kill. No additional contacts."

"Everyone report," Lira said, and the confirmations came back quick and steady, no injuries beyond a few scrapes from the scramble across broken ground. The harvest took longer than the fight had, and it was, by unanimous agreement afterward, considerably less glamorous.

"This hide is not cooperating," Aiko said, working a blade along the Razorwing's flank with visible effort, the tough material resisting even after the creature's death had presumably removed whatever had made it so hard to cut in the first place.

"How does the armorsmith even work with this."

"Slowly, and with better tools than field knives," Higgs said, directing the harvest with the same methodical care he brought to everything involving materials that mattered.

"We take the wings intact if we can. The hide plates along the flank come off in sections. Everything else, we assess as we go." Tomás handled the meat, efficient and unsentimental, a life that had clearly included this kind of work long before AetherForge existed. Hix and the two remaining members ran a careful perimeter, watching for any threat drawn by the smell of a fresh kill while the rest of the team worked.

Finn catalogued as he always did, notes on carcass proportions and plate thickness and the exact location of the joint weakness that had made the kill possible, data that would make the fourth hunt, whenever it came, considerably less costly than this one had been to plan. By the time they finished, the sun had shifted well past its high point, and the packs they carried back toward Haven's Reach sat considerably heavier than the ones they'd carried out.

"Three kills," Higgs said, walking beside Finn on the return trip.

"Enough material now for real gear, not just the scraps the first two hunts produced. The armorsmith's going to have a good week."

"A good month, probably, once he's actually worked through all of it."

"That's the idea." They reached Haven's Reach as evening settled over the settlement, and Finn found himself at the Pact's board an hour later, notebook open, cataloguing the day's data while the ordinary evening rhythm of the headquarters moved around him. The notification arrived quietly, settling into his awareness without fanfare. [Level 26 - Guardian Warden: 60% - Duo Legacy: Developing] Finn Ashford/Lira Thorne Duo Legacy buff +3% The system is always the last to say what the people already know.

He read it twice, the Duo Legacy line new enough to warrant the second look, Finn Ashford / Lira Thorne printed beneath it in the same flat, unremarkable font the system used for everything, as if the words themselves hadn't just confirmed something Finn had been carefully not naming for months.

"What's that," Hix said, reading over his shoulder before Finn had a chance to close the notification, which was, in retrospect, entirely Finn's own fault for not moving faster. Hix read it a second time, slower, and a grin spread across his face, the delight of a man who had just been handed ammunition he fully intended to use.

"Oh, that's fantastic," Hix said.

"That's the Nexus saying what everyone in the Pact already knows."

"Don't," Higgs said, from across the room, not even looking up from the supply ledger he was working through.

"Right," Hix said, and closed his mouth with visible effort, though the grin stayed exactly where it was. Finn closed the notification properly this time, aware of Lira somewhere nearby without needing to look up to confirm it, knowing that she probably got the same notification, the evening settling into its ordinary rhythm around a piece of information that everyone in the room had apparently already accepted as obvious long before the system had bothered to catch up.