Kings conquered Kings and the dispersed military power of the monsters centralized around powerful Kings that were Rank 20 and above. Those Kings didn’t ignore humans either and many human settlements surrendered to them. Night City wasn’t receiving special treatment, since they had higher Ranking members like Jake and Charlotte the Kings had to send more powerful forces against them.

Night City experience major issues when the first Rank 12 monsters arrived but at this point Jade had already told Charlotte what she lacked to improve her Bond Magic.

When the Rank 12 Shadow Hawk arrived with a horde of various monsters of lower Ranks it couldn’t find Night City; Charlotte had hidden the entire city from the senses of a higher Ranked monster. The Shadow Hawk was enraged so it rampaged on the area where Night City was supposed to be but the entire city had migrated at that point.

Where was Night City? Night City was inside the territory of a Rank 20 King in Washington. The King would increase its territory so running away would only postpone the inevitable. Jake wanted Night City to run away but one of the two Rank 7 Vampires that worked for him, Kenny, proposed that they continued toward the center of the Kings territory from a weaker point.

Since Charlotte’s Magic could now hide the city from way more powerful monsters hit and run tactics were now possible so they could grow until they were able to resist the influence of the King.

Night City wasn’t without potential, many of the Rank 6s were approaching Rank 7 and they already had two Rank 7s, Samuel was a King with Authority Level 5, he had only gotten the required amount of souls because everyone in Night City gave him the souls they got. Kenny had an upgrade of the Hunter job called Assassin. Both Kenny and Samuel were aura users. Kenny had fulfilled one of his requirements for his evolution and had gotten one evolution ticket, by slaying a Rank 7 monster he had completed the Hunter job quest:

[Vampire:

Hunter:

Kill a creature with a higher Rank than 6 – reward: instant job upgrade, one evolution ticket and all stats increase by one major Rank, pinnacle Rank is the limit. If a stat is at pinnacle Rank already it can be increased to Transcendent Rank, in exchange the other stats will remain the same – status: possible (complete).]

4 out of 7 of Kenny’s stats were now at pinnacle. The Hunter job quest was hard but its reward was worth it.

And Samuel had fulfilled the requirements for an evolution ticket too by completing the King job quest:

[Vampire:

King:

Kill 10 Kings/Conquerors – reward: one evolution ticket – status: possible (complete).]

{Author Note: You can check the details of Jade’s Quests in Chapter 34: Quests or check the details of Mira’s quests (High Human and Vampires are both High Grade races so they have the same quests) in Chapter 36: High Human}

It was the same quest for the Conqueror job and Conquerors and Kings didn’t necessarily have to be powerful or above the person doing the quest in Rank, the reward was dull. But from another perspective the Conqueror/King job made evolving easier since the quest to get the one of the evolution tickets was quite easy. It helped since Conquerors/Kings didn’t get en-code for killing monsters that were much lower in Rank than them.

So both Samuel and Kenny could evolve if they got the necessary amount of en-code which was easy for them now. They were only waiting because they wanted to get one of their Pinnacle stats to the ‘Transcendent’ rank so that they could skip the Ancient Grade races and become a Mythical Grade race.

Two evolution tickets were needed for evolution and they already had one. There were two ways to get the last evolution ticket. One was to fill all their stat en-code and unattributed en-code to the maximum and exchange the en-code for the second evolution ticket. The other was to complete an impossible quest and get an evolution ticket as a side reward.

Getting a Mythical grade race was good but the Transcendent rank was elusive. No one had gotten it before so they had no idea how to get such a stat rank, they could only keep killing and practicing until they achieved it.

So Night City decided to go behind enemy lines. Their strategy was to attack different spots in the King’s territory and disappear with Charlotte’s Magic when stronger opponents were on the way.

Night City had applied this strategy for one month before they had to bring Mira out of her training to help out. The strategy that Night City used had many problems. One of them was that there was too big of a difference between Jake and Charlotte’s power and the rest of the city so Jake and Charlotte had to fight far away from most of the people.

The other problem was that few creatures below Rank 7 had survived long enough in the event so the places that they could raid had mostly Rank 6 monsters while they had mostly Rank 4 people.

The only good thing that worked for them was the fact that Jade had given Night City a supply of small version of Portal Storages that he called Storage Rings. Bond Magic had greatly increased Jade’s Spatial spells and had increased his strength more than he had predicted so he had given Night City space rings since the research results he got from Bond Magic wasn’t worth the increase in power he got.

With the portal storage they didn’t have to stay in one fixed location anymore and could carry all the weapons and luggage stealthily and easily.

The people worked hard and improved safely under the protection of the Samuel and Kenny but they knew that they were stalling Samuel and Kenny’s growth by making them fight Rank 6s when they were Rank 7s.

Night City had to compromise but they changed strategies when all the people had become Rank 5s and 6s and no one was at Rank 4 anymore. Since many of the previous Rank 6s had been getting close to Rank 7 they had become so strong that almost no Rank 6 monster could match them; they were peak Rank 6s.

Mira was one of them and when she reported to Samuel that she could make her Novas immaterial they put her on the front lines to test if leaving the rest of the people with peak Rank 6s would be enough protection.

Mira came out of her 3 month training but she wasn’t anticipating the battles. Rank 6 monsters were nothing to her at this point so she would have preferred to train until she could take Rank 7s. But life was not a video game; things couldn’t always go as planned.