The moment I screamed [Hero Call], the world noticed.

  A circle of demons surrounded me, like an all-you-can-maul buffet. Except they forgot I was the one holding the knives. Dozens of green-glowing eyes locked onto me, rabid and ravenous, with the hunger that said level 20 Wretched Ghoul and the urgency of a tax deadline. Irwen’s golden buff had turned them from pest problem to primal nightmare.

  Claws like curved razors. Joints bending too fast. They came in fast. Faster than before. No preamble. No hesitation.

  Good.

  Neither did I.

  I didn’t draw a weapon. Didn’t shout a dramatic one-liner, yet. I just smiled. Not the cute kind. The kind that makes necromancers rethink their life choices. At least I hoped.

  I swear if there is another plushie with my name on it… No, focus, Charlie!

  I didn’t have mana anymore. I was the mana. My veins hummed like a war engine, and the magic didn’t just flow, it begged. It coiled around my spine, sizzled at my fingertips, and when I exhaled, frost whispered from my lips like a kiss of death.

  “Alright,” I murmured, too soft for the ghouls, but loud enough for the stream to hear. “Let’s play.”

  I stomped down.

  The ground didn’t shatter; it submitted. An explosion of frost erupted from my amazing heels. Not a polite spell. Not a frost bolt or a cone. This was a nova. A detonation. A wrathful scream made manifest in ice. It didn’t freeze. It unmade.

  The first wave of ghouls?

  Gone.

  No drama. No time to scream. Their bodies locked in place mid-lunge, flash-frozen into grotesque statues that cracked and collapsed into glittering shards. Bone and sinew turned to snowflakes in under a second. The circle of enemies became a snow globe from hell.

  Further out, the tougher ones were knocked off their claws. I felt their armor groan and crack under the shockwave, frost biting deep, muscles locking mid-stride, limbs shattering on impact like rotten twigs wrapped in steel.

  They didn’t die beautifully. They died fast and cold.

  But it took too long to cast. Not efficient.

  My heels hissed against the ice now coating the ground. The air sparkled with frost dust, and every breath I took painted the world in more of it. The crater around me, because yes, I made a crater, was full of ice. Even the demons outside the blast radius hesitated, watching. Processing.

  Irwen had given them five extra levels.

  I just took them away.

  The roar of combat returned in a wave behind the stillness, echoing from the wall where my people, my people, were still holding. Barely. I caught glimpses over the heads of the monsters now forming new ranks to press me again.

  The wall was cracked. Burning. Llama’s shield was a beacon in the chaos. “Order thirty three!” The moment he yelled rogues vanished. I already forgot what that meant, so I turned to see lightning arcing from Luminaria like a harp string on fire. Tramar’s explosions painting the sky orange.

  Lisa’s spell hadn’t dropped yet. Good.

  Another ghoul lunged.

  I caught it mid-air with a flick of my fingers. Ice speared upward, impaling it clean through the chest, and it froze there, dangling like a hideous party decoration. Then shattered.

  More came. Bigger ones. A [Bone Reaver] this time, all armor plates and bad breath, screaming something about axes and rage. It charged. I blinked and launched myself backward on a trail of ice, sliding like a pissed-off figure skater.

  Then I raised both hands. Ice bloomed outward in a dozen lances, each one twisting with elegance and fury, slamming into the reaver before it even finished roaring. The final one pierced through its helmet and out the back. It didn’t shatter. It just slumped.

  I took a breath.

  Yes, free-form magic casting cost a lot more mana. I learned that when I ran out in our first fight. But… still unlimited mana. Still standing. Still furious.

  I wasn’t fighting for the empire. Or the Doan. Or some political reshuffling of territory Lola never signed off on. No, not anymore. She pissed me off. I was fighting because my new mom tried to offer me mercy with a crown of ash.

  Because she said it was already over.

  “Having fun watching, Mom?” I yelled. Irwen didn’t answer. She just looked down at me, that imperious expression fixed on her face like it was carved in ice. Calm. Cold.

  Unimpressed?

  As if this was basic princess behavior. As if this frost-forged apocalypse wasn’t worth blinking at. Like wielding hero-level power was just something you did on a casual Tuesday between court meetings and soul-binding tea ceremonies.

  And damn, that pissed me off.

  Because at this moment, this exact moment, I was the strongest player. No qualifiers. No hesitation. Just raw, unfiltered truth humming in my bones.

  I was a Hero. Capital H.

  I raised my hand to strike again, but something caught in my chest. A sensation. A whisper, not in my ear, but under my skin. Pride. Not mine. Not entirely.

  Wait.

  I blinked hard. My heart wasn’t just pounding from exertion, it was exalting. The blood running through me wasn’t merely power. It was joyful. Euphoric. It wanted to be seen. Worshipped. It begged to be shown. Celebrated.

  To prove it was stronger than anything else.

  Oh.

  Oh no.

  “Rimelion, or whatever god,” I muttered under my breath. “You’re messing with my mind, aren’t you? I am a hero of ice and blood. And my blood is… boiling!”

  The power surged, like a puppy wagging its tail after knocking over a bookshelf. No remorse. Just anticipation. Just more.

  “So be it,” I said aloud, already surrendering to the wild pull. My smile was cold, not from temperature, but from intention. “Watch me undo your army, Mother.”

  And then I moved.

  It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t poetic. It was efficient.

  The ice beneath my heels obeyed before I even thought. I launched forward, leaving behind a trail of cracked frost that licked outward like the scars of Gatei’s tantrum. Ghouls surged toward me, buffed, faster, dumber. Their claws swiped for my throat like they had opinions about me being alive.

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  Bad news for them.

  I swept my arm low, and a blade of ice unfurled like a rising wave, wide and angry. It carved through the first five with minimal fuss. Their torsos parted from legs like they’d never been attached in the first place.

  Less than one second per body. That was the rhythm.

  The tougher ones, the plated [Bone Reavers], they took longer. I had to aim. To focus. A pillar of ice rose from beneath one, impaling it through the gut, but it didn’t fall. It screamed. It swung.

  I ducked, slid beneath its arc, and slammed both hands into the earth. Frost erupted around me in a spiral, thin, cutting, beautiful. It sliced through the back of the Reaver’s knees. It dropped. I beheaded it with a flick of frost from my palm.

  Two seconds, tops.

  Another [Blight Mage] tried to hex me from behind a crumbling siege tower. Their mistake. I sent a long-range shard of ice, a spiral like a frozen javelin, and caught him mid-incantation. The sickly green light of his spell fizzled as he toppled like a ruined candle.

  I kept moving.

  Every step forward was a fight. A rhythm. One-two-cut. Dodge-freeze-impale. Mana wasn’t a resource now, it was an extension of my fury. I didn’t burn it; I breathed it. Let it scream through me like an unlimited happy hour at Patrick’s.

  A [Doom Rider] rode straight at me from the flank. Bony horse. Spiked armor. Lance raised.

  Cute.

  I raised my hand and the path in front of it became a spike trap of towering frozen stakes. Horse and rider exploded into a mess of armor and jagged whinnies before the sound even reached me. The parts kept sliding for a few meters.

  “Stay dead this time,” I muttered. “Demon.”

  A few commanders, mini-boss types, tried to slow me. One was a Ghoul Matron, bloated and covered in bone jewelry, shrieking commands. I didn’t engage her squad. I just lobbed an ice lance through her throat and watched the others fall into disarray.

  The power let me snipe. Target intent. Dissect command from chaos.

  And that was my strategy now, surgical obliteration. I wasn’t here to wade through the tide. I was here to part it. To cut the nerve and let the limbs twitch in confusion.

  I spotted Llama’s shield glinting in the distance. Still holding. Good. But barely. He had a cluster of demons swarming his position. I didn’t need to hear his order numbers to know what was happening. He was bleeding fighters to hold the wall.

  I needed to reach them.

  I surged again, carving through a cluster of [Foot Soldiers] with a sweeping arc of frost that left only snowdrift and twitching stumps in its wake. Above us, the golden light from Irwen’s spell still shimmered. Mocking us. And she was already casting another spell.

  Maybe she wasn’t as calm as she appeared?

  A [Sky Reaver] dove overhead. I reached up without looking and grabbed it by the ankle, icy tendrils shooting from my palm. It screamed, twisted, and I slammed it into the ground hard enough to leave a crater. It burst like a demonic pi?ata.

  “Get in line,” I growled.

  Then I ran.

  No more tricks. No more pausing.

  I conjured a curved path of ice underfoot and surf-charged across the last stretch. Around me, ghouls rose and fell like waves. But the tide didn’t matter.

  I vaulted over the last ridge of viscera, skidding across a sloped patch of my own ice like a bat out of frozen hell. The wall loomed just ahead, battered, scorched, still standing. Barely.

  TechiLlama let out a laugh, one of those rare, pure battlefield laughs, as he bashed a [Bone Reaver] in the teeth and pivoted to drive a short sword into a [Wretched Ghoul] trying to leap over the formation. His voice carried over the chaos, wild and proud.

  “I gained four levels!” he bellowed, sounding more amused than exhausted. “FOUR!”

  All around him, players roared back. Cheers. Cackles. Manic joy. Because we weren’t just surviving, we were leveling.

  Luminaria, perched behind him like a lightning goddess cosplaying a librarian, sent a bolt so precise it sliced through the wings of a [Sky Reaver], impaling it in midair. She glanced at me, nodded once, and then kept casting. Her robe was pristine, but she had blood on her cheek. It almost looked as if she painted it herself.

  “Charlie!” Tramar shouted from his tower, fire wreathing his hands, eyes wide with glee. “This would’ve taken two weeks to grind through!”

  “Same here!” came another voice, Fty, I think, buried behind a wall of half-conscious healers glowing like overworked lightbulbs. “Thank you, Princess! My team leveled thrice from just the support XP!”

  They didn’t see the demon army anymore.

  They saw numbers.

  XP bars.

  Loot.

  “You’re welcome,” I yelled, breathless and pissed and proud all at once. “Now shut up and focus!”

  I could feel the pride twisting in my ribs like a sweet poison, an echo of the power still coiled in my bones. I wanted to unleash it again. I could. With the unlimited mana pool, I could freeze a canyon shut. I could sculpt a cathedral of death and trap her entire army inside.

  But it wasn’t fast enough.

  I wiped sweat from my forehead, freezing the droplet on my glove for no real reason except pettiness. The truth hit me like one of Llama’s shield slams.

  I could kill anything. But not everything. Not fast enough. Not in the numbers we were up against. A single cast took seconds. Seconds where someone else died. Even with all the power I had, no, especially with it, I couldn’t make up the difference in time.

  “A third of my power is up!” I screamed over the din, summoning another ring of spiked ice that skewered a group of foot soldiers trying to climb a siege ladder.

  It was the only warning I could give them. Ten minutes left of me being a frost-powered goddess. Then I’d go back to cooldown hell. For months.

  That stung.

  Llama caught my eye through the whirlwind of motion. His battered shield cracked, his armor dented. Still, he grinned widely, his teeth blood-streaked, wild-eyed and radiant with defiance. “This is it,” he shouted over the clash of steel and the hissing of spells. “I gave them enough time. After order thirty-three comes… Order sixty-six!”

  I didn’t know what the hell that was, but the battlefield did.

  Like smoke igniting, the rogues rose. Not from cover, not from shadows, but from inside the enemy ranks.

  NightSwallow and her ghosts-in-leather appeared mid-charge, slipping through the chaos with impossible grace. Some emerged from nothing, blades already sinking into exposed demon necks. Others dropped poison bombs that hissed and churned, coating the air with a green mist sharp enough to sting the nose even through my icy haze.

  I saw one rogue laughing as he somersaulted through a cluster of [Blight Mages], twin daggers flashing faster than my eyes could follow, the ground behind him a blooming garden of collapsed corpses.

  At the same time, the illusions kicked in.

  One second, a hulking [Bone Reaver] was roaring at our front line, the next, it turned and slaughtered its own allies. Because the rogue beneath its mask had mimicked the armor, the gait, even the voice. And no one, not even the demons, had noticed.

  Until it was far, far too late.

  NightSwallow herself darted, whispered something I couldn’t hear, then launched herself into a fight with two towering [Reaver Champions]. She didn’t wait for backup. Of course not.

  Because apparently this was a meme. It was order Sixty-Six.

  Tramar was enjoying it too much, the entire time he was throwing spells and whistling a song that usually went along the order sixty-six. I just hoped Riker bought rights… Who was I kidding? He was probably blasting it in orchestral now.

  Even Lunaris had somehow slipped behind the enemy, her jacket’s embroidered sock flapping defiantly as she twirled between demons like a dancer in a bladed masquerade. She ducked, rolled, stabbed up through a ghoul’s chin, kicked a mage off a ledge, then flipped backward and saluted mid-air.

  I would’ve cheered if I weren’t so busy trying to keep them alive.

  I flung sheet after sheet of defensive ice into place, raising walls, freezing pathways, turning the ground into slippery death traps. But it wasn’t enough. Not fast enough. My mana was infinite, yes, but the seconds it took to shape something effective were still seconds.

  And the rogues didn’t have seconds.

  “LUNARIS!” I screamed. I’d seen the second wave hit her. Three casters, a ghoul pack, a flying Reaver swooping down from above. She was barely standing, one blade lost, her jacket burned at the edges…

  And then a glow erupted around her.

  Fty.

  He moved to the frontline, and I didn’t even see him cast. Just a golden light that enveloped Lunaris like a divine slap, throwing back her enemies and knitting bone and sinew with brutal efficiency.

  Lunaris coughed, spat blood, then stood tall again, barely, but still upright.

  I took one breath.

  Just one.

  And summoned another wall of ice between her and the next charge. “I can’t keep this up,” I muttered to no one. “But I will. Because screw you, Irwen. Good job Fty.”

  He saluted, which was very sweet and idiotic because the next second he had to duck as a [Blight Mage] hurled a sickly green bolt toward his head. Luminaria zapped the mage mid-spell with a crackling whip of lightning that arced between three enemies before fizzling out in the mud.

  We were winning. Somehow, against odds, logic, and everything my mother thought she knew—we were actually winning.

  The rogues had cut deep. Llama’s line had held. Luminaria’s lightning flayed the sky like judgment itself, and Lunaris… bless her flashy, sock-wearing heart. She hadn’t just survived, she’d bled for us.

  The players roared like a choir of the unhinged. Tramar laughed every time a fireball went off near a siege tower. Fty was running on fumes, but no one had died in the last ten minutes. Even the wall, cracked, cursed, and burning, was still standing.

  So, of course… it didn’t last. Irwen, as if to confirm, she was playing with us, cast a mythic-level spell… Before Lisa finished.