100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 732 - Warfront

The war spread across the preserved region.

Routes opened and disappeared.

Defensive lines shifted.

Some sectors were abandoned deliberately when holding them became too expensive.

Others became critical because evacuation corridors or supply paths passed through them.

Lootwell continued feeding information into the regional command network, but the decisions beneath that level belonged to the commanders already on the ground.

Lucien could see the difference.

During the Team Trials, many had required time to interpret changing objectives.

Now that delay had shortened.

A commander near the southern breach abandoned a ruined fortress before the Black Mass could surround it and established a second line closer to the medical district.

Another ordered a stronger faction to stop pursuing an enemy force and reinforce a group of independents holding a supply route.

There was resistance.

The order was still followed.

Elsewhere, beast clans and humanoid factions fought along the same front without attempting to copy one another’s formations.

Flying beasts handled reconnaissance.

Large-bodied races anchored the line.

Smaller forces moved through terrain inaccessible to them.

Formation specialists connected the gaps.

Nobody had become one perfect army.

They did not need to.

They were becoming a functional one.

•••

Then the first serious injuries began appearing.

A goblin spear punched through one participant’s chest.

Elsewhere, a gargoyle drove another fighter into the ground hard enough to crater the stone beneath him.

For a terrible moment, the people nearby froze.

Then both injured participants vanished.

The familiar light of emergency extraction flashed across the battlefield.

More followed.

Whenever someone crossed the competition’s fatal threshold, the safety formations intervened almost immediately and removed them from the fighting.

The realization spread quickly.

The emergency network was still active.

Nobody understood why Lootwell’s competition safeguards continued functioning during an actual invasion, but they were not about to question it while those formations were saving lives.

The effect on morale was immediate.

People still treated every attack seriously. Nobody knew whether the safety network could protect everyone, and nobody wanted to discover its limits personally.

But the fear of a single mistake becoming certain death weakened.

Commanders became bolder about holding difficult positions.

Healers began trusting the extraction network to catch the worst cases they could not reach in time.

Even some of the spectators who had hesitated at the edge of the fighting finally moved forward.

Lootwell was still functioning.

The routes remained organized.

The medical districts continued receiving the wounded.

The emergency formations kept answering.

In the middle of what looked like a world-ending invasion, that familiar efficiency became something people could hold onto.

•••

The pressure continued rising.

More breaches opened.

A third Primordial Incarnation emerged over the western sectors, followed soon after by a fourth.

Then another appeared far enough south that several factions were forced to reorganize completely.

The ancient beings finally entered the battle in earnest.

Old dragons took to the sky.

Beasts that had slept through centuries of peace moved beside descendants who knew them only from ancestral records.

Eternals from the major races abandoned observation platforms and joined collapsing fronts.

Several Celestials entered sectors where ordinary forces could no longer operate safely.

The competition classifications meant nothing now.

Nobody believed there was still a competition.

That was what made Lucien’s records valuable.

For the first time, he could see what these people did when they believed no score existed.

Some of the strongest beings immediately moved toward the Primordial Incarnations.

Others chose less glorious work.

One Eternal remained beside an evacuation corridor for nearly half an hour, destroying ordinary Black Mass monsters that would never have threatened him personally.

An ancient beast carried wounded strangers toward a medical zone instead of joining the battle in the sky.

Several powerful faction leaders accepted regional commands from Lootwell administrators considerably weaker than themselves because those administrators possessed better information.

Lucien remembered all of them.

•••

Lootwell was being tested too.

Perhaps more than anyone.

The reward halls had become supply stations.

Residential districts were converted into evacuation zones.

Teleportation personnel rerouted functioning corridors around simulated failures.

Food warehouses opened emergency reserves.

Formation crews repaired damaged barriers while attacks continued nearby.

Citizens who had never expected to fight moved equipment, directed crowds, carried messages, and filled positions wherever the network required them.

Lucien had always known Lootwell was efficient.

Watching an organization built largely through trade, exploration, accidents, strange friendships, and increasingly absurd projects function like wartime infrastructure was something else.

•••

Several hours into the battle, the situation reached its worst point.

The northern defensive line finally broke.

Not everywhere.

Only across one wide valley.

That was enough.

Black Mass creatures poured through the opening.

Gargoyles darkened the air above them while goblin formations advanced beneath enormous beasts covered in miasma armor.

Behind all of them, the northern Primordial Incarnation forced Astraea and the other ancient powers farther back.

The red sector on the central map expanded.

If the breach continued, it would split two major evacuation networks and isolate several forces still fighting beyond them.

Lucien watched the reports converge.

The commanders nearest the valley were already responding.

One redirected reserves.

Another abandoned a secondary objective.

Independent coalitions moved toward the threatened evacuation routes without waiting for individual orders.

The Automatons changed formation and began reinforcing the narrowing corridor.

They were doing everything correctly.

It still might not be enough.

Lucien glanced behind Vivian, who was still directing people through the megaphone.

The sealed formations remained where they had been before the sky darkened.

The final reward was still inside.

Lucien walked toward the seals.

Vivian noticed.

So did several administrators.

Nobody stopped him.

•••

The first formation opened beneath Lucien’s hand.

Light spilled across the platform.

Even with an apparent invasion underway, nearby eyes turned toward it.

The object inside did not look large enough to matter.

It resembled a covenant disc formed from overlapping layers of translucent material, each layer carrying symbols that seemed to repeat themselves deeper than the object should physically allow.

Lucien touched it.

His system had given the item a classification the rest of the world had never seen.

Divine.

The Covenant of the Thousandfold Echo.

He had completed the final crafting before the reward ceremony.

Now he finally had a suitable demonstration.

Lucien lifted his gaze toward the northern breach.

The distance did not matter.

The merged Origin Core authority spread through the entire preserved region.

He raised one hand.

Living Creation gathered above him.

The first construct formed slowly enough for everyone watching the central projection to see it.

It took the shape of a spear, but the form itself was almost secondary.

At its core was a single Creation clause.

Sharp.

That concept ran through the construct’s very existence.

It was not merely a weapon with a sharpened edge. Every part of it had been created around the idea of sharpness itself, allowing the spear to cut through almost anything its authority could overcome.

Then Lucien fed more power into it.

The spear expanded.

Its structure became denser as Living Creation layered itself through the weapon again and again until the pressure surrounding it began distorting the air.

Lucien activated the Covenant of the Thousandfold Echo.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then another spear appeared beside the first.

A second followed.

Then a third.

The replicas continued forming.

Ten became a hundred.

A hundred became several hundred.

The number kept climbing as Lucien continued feeding energy into the Covenant.

For most people, sustaining even a fraction of that output would have been impossible.

Lucien simply gave it more.

By the time the Covenant finally stabilized, an enormous formation of spears filled the sky above the central plateau, each one carrying nearly the same structure and destructive authority as the first.

The energy consumption was tremendous.

Lucien barely cared.

Across the preserved region, countless people looked upward as the light from the spears spread across the darkened sky.

Then Lucien lowered his hand.

•••

The spears disappeared.

A heartbeat later, they arrived over the northern battlefield.

The first struck the center of the Black Mass horde.

The valley vanished beneath white light.

The second landed farther east.

Then the rest descended.

Not randomly.

Perfect Calculation spread the attacks across the advancing forces while leaving evacuation corridors and allied positions untouched.

Gargoyle formations disappeared before they could scatter.

Goblin armies vanished beneath impacts large enough to tear open the simulated terrain.

Massive Black Mass beasts were driven into the ground and erased beneath repeated strikes.

The Automatons nearest the breach stopped firing because there was suddenly nothing left within range.

For several seconds, the entire northern horizon became a continuous field of explosions.

Then the sound reached the central districts.

It rolled across the preserved region like distant thunder that refused to end.

When the light finally faded, the valley was almost empty.

Thousands upon thousands of Black Mass monsters were gone.

Only scorched terrain, drifting miasma, and scattered hostile forces remained beyond the devastated sector.

The defensive line had not merely recovered.

The entire northern front had changed.

Nobody spoke for several breaths.

The people closest to Lucien stared at the covenant disc in his hand.

Across the projection network, countless others were doing the same.

They had spent three days watching Lootwell distribute treasures powerful enough to make entire factions jealous.

None of those rewards had done this.

Lucien lowered the Covenant.

The energy it had consumed would have made ordinary use absurd.

That did not matter.

A battlefield did not care whether something was economical when it could change the battlefield itself.

Above the northern valley, the remaining Black Mass forces began moving again.

The Primordial Incarnation was still there.

The war was not over.

Lucien looked toward the darkened sky.

Then he returned the Covenant to his side.

The final reward had been revealed.