The air was tense. The ground trembled with a funeral rhythm.
From the high walls of the city, the warriors of Iris watched with their hearts in their throats as the monstrous tide emerged from the forest, advancing like a nightmare avalanche. There were more than six hundred enemies: giant ogres dragging massive clubs, beastmen with shaggy fur, grotesquely shaped demons, goblins with rusted spears, and human mercenaries with madness etched into their faces.
In the center of that horde stood Vault, mounted on his black stallion, smiling with boundless arrogance as he savored the fall of the fortress. Beside him, the mage Kin narrowed his eyes, sweeping the battlements with his gaze.
"Is that man here?" Vault asked, a vein bulging on his forehead from irritation.
Kin nodded slowly, tense.
"Yes... I can feel that strange energy again."
At the top of the wall, Alicia kept her hand steady on the hilt of her sword. Her knuckles were white. Beside her, Primm swallowed hard, pale.
"This is madness... There are too many of them," Primm whispered.
Even Luu Luu, usually brash and mocking, had lost her smile. The scale of the army was overwhelming.
Only Reik remained in an unshakeable calm. The wind of the battle lightly stirred his clothes as he stepped firmly toward the edge of the wall. He flexed his shoulders, cracking his joints one by one.
"Alright," he muttered to himself, his eyes fixed on the horde. "This time I'm actually going serious."
Olga watched him from the corner of her eye, maintaining a deathly silence. Chloe, on the other hand, frowned in disbelief.
"Are you planning to face them all by yourself?"
Reik flashed a sly smile and tilted his head. He didn't answer right away; he just made a nonchalant gesture and said, "You guys stay up there. Enjoy the show."
"What?!" Primm exclaimed, dumbfounded.
Alicia only narrowed her eyes but said nothing. She felt that, even though it sounded crazy, something inside her told her he was capable of pulling it off, as strange as it seemed. Olga stayed out of it; although it had been brief, she had already witnessed Reik's true strength, so she trusted him. Besides, she was already secretly preparing to help and, while she was at it, claim her own revenge.
Luu Luu's expression changed upon hearing Reik's wild idea, but before anyone could stretch out a small hand to stop him, the exorcist propelled himself forward and leapt into the void.
BOOM!
The impact of his landing cracked the stone ground, kicking up a dense cloud of dust. A sudden, dangerous impulse flashed from his body, causing the tide of monsters to stop dead in their tracks for an instant. Bewildered to see a single man blocking the path, some of the weaker enemies even began to tremble unconsciously from the sheer danger emanating from him.
At the rear, Vault's eyes widened in recognition of the figure. A cluster of veins popped on his forehead before he shouted in a rage, "...It's that bastard!"
Reik raised his head slowly. A savage smile formed on his face.
"Welcome," he whispered before lunging forward.
As if his words had broken a dam, the monsters roared in unison and charged. The earth groaned. A gigantic minotaur, eager to shed blood, led the onslaught, raising a battle axe the size of a tree. But before the steel could descend...
BOOM!
Reik vanished from its field of vision. The minotaur blinked, completely disoriented by the human's disappearance, until it heard a voice right behind its back: "Too slow."
Reik's fist, imbued with a dense layer of concentrated Reiki, was already crashing fully into the beast's spine.
CRACK!
The shockwave tore through the minotaur's torso, pulverizing its internal organs and splintering its ribs outward before exiting clean through its chest. The colossus went flying through the air, sweeping away a dozen goblins in its trajectory.
The battlefield fell silent for a microsecond. Then, it exploded into a frenzy.
"KILL HIM! CRUSH HIS HEAD!"
Dozens of enemies pounced on him en masse. But this time, Reik wasn't going to stand still and take hits to test his endurance. He moved like an elusive shadow, a ghost amidst the steel. He dodged greatswords, claws, and projectiles with minimal, fluid shifts and surgical precision.
A massive ogre tried to crush him with a stone club from above. Reik simply raised his left hand, and a translucent, geometric barrier materialized in the air.
BOOM!
The impact of the club against the shield generated a counter-blow so violent that it fractured the ogre's wrists, sending it staggering back while howling in pain. In the enemy rear, the mages were shocked.
"Defensive magic without an incantation?!" one speculated, but Kin quickly dismissed it, his face pale.
"No..." Kin murmured. "That wasn't mana, nor was it aura. It seems like another kind of energy I've never seen before. How interesting..."
Quickly, another group of demons tried to surround him from the flanks. Reik could have finished them off with a single blow, but he was feeling playful and wanted to test spells he rarely used in combat. He extended his right palm toward the ground.
"Containment Barrier."
Suddenly, an invisible and relentless force restricted the movements of several monsters at once.
"What the hell is happening, I can't move?!" the creatures bellowed, struggling uselessly against the air.
From the top of the wall, Olga, without taking her eyes off the carnage, narrowed her beautiful eyes and murmured, "That must be the energy they use in his world."
In the center of the chaos, Reik frowned slightly as he noticed that the stronger demons were beginning to show signs of breaking free from the grip.
"Too weak against enemies with physical bodies," he muttered with annoyance. However, he didn't give it much thought, since his only real objective was to test the technique's effectiveness in a real environment.
Reik released the spell completely and widened his smile, baring his teeth.
"Well... I guess we'll have to do it the old-fashioned way."
BOOOOM!
The ground exploded beneath his boots as he released Reiki directly to propel himself forward. Reik transformed into a veritable human bullet. A beastman barely blinked before Reik's forearm cleanly severed his head with pure brute force. A demon tried to stab him in the back, but Reik pivoted on his own axis, unleashing a spinning back kick of devastating power.
CRACK!
The demon's torso bent at an impossible angle before it was sent flying at breakneck speeds, tearing through and ripping apart three other monsters coming up behind it. A rain of black blood and viscrea covered the mud. Reik's speed kept increasing; he moved with a ferocity that made hair stand on end. He was a true monster in human skin.
On the wall, Alicia contemplated the scene completely dumbfounded. Primm had her hands pressed against her cheeks, unable to process the spectacle, as she murmured in disbelief, "He's exterminating an entire army all by himself...!"
Luu Luu, far from being frightened, felt her panther blood boil with pure excitement.
"Hahaha! He's strong! He's ridiculously strong! I love it!"
Even Chloe swallowed hard, astonished. With this, she finally understood that during their previous skirmish at the castle, Reik had held back in a flagrant manner. What she was seeing now was, perhaps, a real display of his true strength.
Olga didn't comment. Her eyes were closed, as if she were concentrating intensely on something, but if you paid close attention to her figure, you could notice small specks of pure mana gathering at great speed around her.
A cyclops roared, making the air of the plain vibrate, and hurled a solid iron war hammer at him. Reik simply extended his arm and caught it in midair with a single hand, stopping the projectile's colossal inertia dead in its tracks. The cyclops froze, petrified by absolute shock.
"Giving it back to you," Reik said with a playful smile.
BOOM!
Reik planted himself in front of the giant and drove his fist into its abdomen. The expansion wave of the impact was so brutal that the upper half of the cyclops's body exploded into a thousand pieces, scattering a red mist over the enemy ranks.
The horde, which had previously advanced confident of its victory, began to falter. Panic spread in seconds.
"A monster!"
"That guy isn't human! Retreat!"
Vault gnashed his teeth until they bled, drawing his sword with blind fury.
"BASTARD!!!"
Beside him, Kin was breaking out in a cold sweat, his hands trembling over his magic staff. Now he understood the terrible truth. The previous time, in the ruins of the Discordia Kingdom... Reik had only used the battle to experiment and train. He hadn't even exerted himself. And that absolute indifference toward death was the most terrifying thing of all.
Meanwhile, Reik advanced at a slow and steady pace among mountains of mutilated corpses. His face was splattered with enemy blood, but his eyes shone with a golden light and a wild excitement he couldn't hide.
"Now this feels good," he thought, clenching and opening his fists, feeling how the Reiki flowed with more strength after breaking his own physical limits.
But Reik didn't keep advancing. Instead, he stopped abruptly, snapped his head around in the direction of the girls on the wall, and roared with all his might, "What are you waiting for! Now!"
Olga snapped her eyes open and raised her staff into the air. A spear of pure, concentrated darkness formed at the tip, tearing through the battlefield at sonic speed and aiming directly at the enemy commander's chest.
For an instant, time seemed to freeze. However, just before impact, an emergency magic circle activated with a flash beneath the feet of the horde's leaders.
"My lord!" Kin shouted in desperation. "Let's go!"
Olga's spear of darkness violently pierced the exact spot where the commander had been a millisecond before... only to dissipate into nothingness. When the light of the escape spell vanished, Vault was no longer there. Only the floating remnants of a complex spatial distortion magic remained.
Reik was the first to notice that the enemy had managed to slip away. Angered and exasperated for not being able to finish him off right then and there, he stomped hard on the ground, opening deep cracks in the earth as he muttered between his teeth, "That bastard runs too fast."
Vault's army, which just minutes ago had been marching convinced they would burn Iris to ashes, upon finding themselves completely abandoned by their own leader, broke ranks and began to flee desperately in all directions.
Alicia, noticing the disorganization of the monster tide, reacted with quick tactical awareness, drew her weapon, and gave the general order from atop the battlements: "Attack! Leave none standing!"
Reik, seeing the squads of knights finally exit the fortress, rolled his eyes with annoyance and muttered to himself, "Now that they're running away is when they attack."
Even so, he didn't add anything else out loud, remembering with a grimace that he himself had been the one who ordered them to stay back and enjoy the show.