Ascension Online: My Beasts Evolve infinitely

The headline alone was enough to sour his mood.

”MERCER EXPOSED: The Real Reason Ironclad Cut Their ’Captain’”

Kael clicked it more out of morbid curiosity than anything else, and by the third paragraph he was laughing the kind of laugh that had nothing funny behind it.

Someone had built an entire narrative out of thin air. Chronic no-shows to practice. Bullying teammates out of their own drops to pad his stats.

A pattern of harassment toward female staff. And the kicker that he’d demanded an obscene raise the night before launch and gotten cut for his greed.

Every word of it was garbage. And the comments underneath were already a pile-on, hundreds deep, strangers calling for his head over a story that had never happened.

He didn’t need three guesses to know who’d paid for it.

Cynthia.

Something cold settled behind his eyes. He didn’t say anything out loud. He just added a name to a very short, very permanent list.

Once extraction unlocks, you’re the first thing I’m hunting.

He closed the tab and went back to work.

The Husk kept feeding hare after hare disappearing down its throat, its frame swelling a little more with every kill, health climbing in slow, steady increments.

Half an hour in, the evolution counter finally ticked over to 5.

Kael dumped it straight into Feast.

”5 Evolution Points spent. [Feast] upgraded: E-rank → D-rank.”

Feast: Bite for 120% → 130% attack, converting 30% → 40% of damage dealt to HP. On kill: permanent +5 → +10 max HP, and grows in size. No mana cost. 40s → 36s cooldown.

Next Upgrade Cost: 25 Evolution Points

He whistled low. Five points had bought this upgrade. The next one would cost five times that.

So that’s the curve. Rough.

Didn’t matter. Double the HP per kill made the grind worth every second.

”Keep going,” he told it. ”Eat until you can’t move.” Another hour disappeared into the routine bite, swallow, repeat and somewhere in there the Husk hit level 5.

Its health had climbed past two thousand.

And it didn’t look like a starter pet anymore.

What had fit at Kael’s knee now stood shoulder height, its frame thick with muscle under skin gone rough and cracked like dried stone.

Bone spurs jutted from its shoulders and spine, longer now, sharper, and its jaw had widened into something built to swallow things whole.

It didn’t look cute anymore. It looked like something you’d cross the street to avoid.

The brush ahead of them exploded.

Something huge burst out of the tree line a hare the size of a small horse, fur matted with old bloodstains, ears scarred from what looked like a hundred fights.

[THORNBACK ALPHA] (Iron-Tier Boss)

Level 5

Kael’s mouth curled into something close to a grin.

”There you are.”

He’d been circling this stretch of forest for the last twenty minutes waiting for exactly this. He snatched up the rusty longsword he’d looted off an earlier kill a common white-grade drop, two extra points of attack, nothing special and fell in step beside the Husk as it charged.

Ascension didn’t gate gear by class, not really. A Warrior could throw on a mage’s robe if they wanted. A caster could strap on plate.

The stats just wouldn’t sync right, and the payoff would be garbage but nothing stopped you from trying. So Kael swung his stolen sword like it mattered, chipping away from the flank while the Husk did the real work.

Two hours into launch, and most players were still fighting over level 2. Level 3 practically made you a legend in the newbie zone.

A level 5 boss, this early, should have wiped an entire party.

The Husk didn’t even slow down.

It slammed into the Alpha at full speed, jaw locking around its throat, claws raking deep furrows through matted fur. The two of them went down in a tangle, and Kael circled behind, driving the longsword in wherever he found an opening.

Five minutes. That was all it took to empty a health bar that should have taken a raid group.

The Husk’s jaw unhinged, and the Alpha vanished down its throat in a single convulsive swallow.

”Ravenous Husk used [Feast] and killed Thornback Alpha (Lv. 5, Iron-Tier Boss). +500 EXP, +10 Max HP, +2 Evolution Points.”

A second prompt followed immediately, the text flaring gold.

”You have achieved the server-first kill of an Iron-Tier Boss. A server-wide announcement will follow. Display gamertag?”

Kael’s eyebrows lifted slightly.

Server-first. Already.

He hadn’t planned on drawing this much attention this fast but the mask covered his face, and a gamertag was just letters on a leaderboard. Whatever people did with ”Unrivaled,” they’d have to work a lot harder than this to trace it back to him.

He tapped confirm.

A heartbeat later, a single line of text lit up in every player’s HUD across the entire server, chased by the deep chime of a system-wide announcement.

”Server Announcement: Player Unrivaled has claimed the server-first kill of the Iron-Tier World Boss, Thornback Alpha. Rewards: +10 Reputation, +10 Gold, +1 Luck, Skill Unlocked [Lifechain] (S-Rank).”