Chapter 22: It's coming

"Hey..." Rob muttered, struggling to decide whether to glance sideways at Leo or not and thus producing quite a weird expression. "Are you really sure this is a good idea?"

Leo looked over to his brother, not minding the barrel of a gun nearly scraping the back of his head the moment he turned it. Then, upon casting a quick look at Rob, he simply shook his shoulders.

"They are all going to die anyway, so what's the harm?"

The gun behind Leo's head twitched, the hand of the policeman holding it trembling.

Was it anger? Was it fear? Or was it merely the man's arm muscles getting tired from holding the gun up like that?

"I mean, they do have circuits too, don't they?" Rob mentioned, still not sure how to act when his brother had a damned gun pointed right at the back of his head. "What if they will be able to turn this situation around?"

'Oh, you sweet, summer child,' Leo nearly sighed, amazed by just how ignorant one could be about the nature of the fiends.

Sure, it wasn't Rob's fault for being ignorant. Today was the very first day that he, or anyone else in the world, encountered or at least could encounter a fiend.

Still, in the eyes of someone like Leo, it was so naive, it was almost... cute.

"Think back to the third wave," Leo muttered after a tired sigh, only to turn his head back to the front and resume his observation of the rest of the policemen slowly advancing through the plain in a loose formation. "Do you think you could hold it off with just the five of you?"

Still acting as if there was no weapon aimed at the back of his head, Leo asked.

"I..."

For a moment, Rob hesitated. Then, he turned his head down while raising his hand up to his chin, rubbing it as he recounted the recent battle.

By the time the young man raised his head back up to look back to his older brother, though, there were no further hints of hesitation in his eyes.

"I don't know. Most likely, we would all die. We would need some solid luck to survive that..." Rob bit down on his lips and looked down. "Sure, we would gain levels that would make us stronger. I still have yet to pick my class too, and I'm not the only one holding back on this either, but..."

Rob's teeth let go of his bottom lip, only for the young man to press them together into a thin line.

"But even with those, it would all come down to luck. I'm not sure if my observation is correct, but just how easy it might be for us to kill the weaker of the monsters..."

"Fiends, not monsters," Leo, busy observing the police, corrected his brother before he could even realize what he was doing.

Such was the force of a habit, something that even a veteran of several lifetimes filled with bloodshed like Leo powerless again.

Rob raised his eyes and gave Leo a short and slightly weirded-out look, only to ultimately nod his head away and keep going.

"Fine, just like we can kill the weaker of the fiends, even if the weakest of them were to land a solid hit..."

There was no need for Rob to explain any further.

Without their levels shooting through the roof, a cut of a blade was equally as dangerous when performed by an adolescent goblin as it would be when executed by a brown-cap.

'In all honesty, if not for Millie's area of effect buff and my silent support, you would all likely die to the second wave. But...' Leo sighed heavily. 'But I'm the one at fault, I guess.'

As suspicious as Leo was growing of this alien circuit... it didn't seem like mere bait aimed at killing all those who would be the first to brave into the portals.

This circuit was far too elaborate for its only goal to be the few brave ones who would be the first to challenge the portals. With civilization in an information age, it wouldn't even take a day for the news to spread if only a select few managed to survive the portal.

No.

The fact that Rob, Mark, Millie, and two of their friends needed Leo's help to survive in the portal lay solely on Leo's shoulders, for he was the one who cleared most of the fiends in the early waves, stopping his friends and family from growing stronger in a relatively safer environment.

And now that he watched the group of five policemen go deeper and deeper into the plain, blissfully unaware of how little their faith in their handguns would help them against magic-born fiends...

'I almost feel guilty just by watching...' Leo thought, only to quickly chase this self-reflecting feeling away when the mana in the air suddenly started to twist and turn.

This time, however, it wasn't the space that convulsed, preparing to spit yet another challenger into the portal. It wasn't the change caused by a swarm of monsters either.

No. This time, it was as if the very core of this place was spasming...

It was this subdimension itself that spasmed and convulsed, just like a woman in labor going through great strain for the sake of producing an heir.

To the side, all three fields of charred corpses started to melt down into the ground, their flesh dissolving into the ground before everyone's eyes.

'Huh?'

Noticing the change, Leo twitched.

'What the...'

The vanishing of the corpses happened without a single unnatural sound. There was no fizzling or sizzling that would indicate some sort of acid or great temperature at play.

It was as if the flesh of those fiends simply fell apart, deprived of what little mana kept it together now that their cores were gone.

With how silent this process was, no one in Leo's group noticed it, the policeman holding Leo at gunpoint included.

That wasn't the case for the five officers ahead, though.

Even though they walked quite a distance by now, they somehow noticed the change in the air or something, their formation coming to a sudden stop the moment their leader raised his tightened fist into the air.

"What's going... Wait, where did all the corpses go?!"

It was only when the cops ahead stopped that their companion in the back, still holding his gun to the back of Leo's head, noticed the change.

And with his words sounding out, everyone else was alerted to the silent and sudden change.

"It's about to begin," Leo announced, dropping his casual act for the second time since he entered the portal.

He did it for the very first time when he gave the cops a small hint not to fuck with him, a hint they, in their arrogance, overlooked.

Now, however, for the very first time, Leo was serious.

"What's coming?" the policeman asked, his gun-bearing hand trembling again.

Leo took a shallow breath, stalling just a few seconds.

"Your mom," he barked, squashing the gun in the cop's hand with a single whisk of his telekinesis, turning it into a dense ball of scrapped metal and gunpowder.

The ground where Leo laid the first three hordes of fiends to their eternal rest started to boil, turning from solid earth to a boiling, quicksand-like slurry.

A slurry that then gave birth to a strangely humane, yet, at the same time, grotesquely oversized hand.