The two personal guards saw them coming and tried to fight, which was about as useful as trying to stop a landslide with outstretched hands.
The guards were dead before Jorik had taken three more steps.
Jorik stopped running.
He turned to face the Demon-Lords, and for a moment, Reidar saw the old man's expression through the eyes of his summons. He understood he was done for.
"You were never struggling," Jorik said, more to himself than to Reidar, also because the man wasn't exactly there, only his summons. "The Behemoth. The portals. You had this whole thing ready the entire time."
Reidar didn't hear him.
He was two kilometers away, riding on a condor and watching through the Overmind Consciousness what was happening inside the city. He didn't even care much about Jorik.
Sure, the fucker had to die; his stunt back then caused the death of many people and the swelling of the Church of Unbinding. Maybe the most important one, since the church was rather small at the time, with Silas having done most of the heavy lifting.
However, Jorik was not a threat to Reidar, and as such, knowing his summons would take care of him was enough.
But the monsters were still there, and they demanded Reidar's utmost focus. The good thing was that with so many summons around, it wasn't going to take a lot of time before Reidar could purge them all.
Jorik, though, raised one hand. He wasn't going to give up without at least trying to put up a fight.
Mana flickered around his fingers. It was a vain attempt to cast a last spell or use his trait. But against level 700+ Demon Lords, it was useless.
The Inferno Tyrants fired.
A dozen beams of concentrated flame converged on Jorik's position. Each beam was several meters wide, glowing white-hot at the core with edges that rippled between orange and blue. The air itself warped and glowed as the temperature spiked to thousands of degrees in an instant. The stone beneath Jorik's feet began to melt before the beams even made contact.
The attacks hit him from every direction at once. Front, back, left, right, above. There was no escape, no gap to slip through. The beams struck all at once, and the light was so bright it turned the surrounding area white for half a second.
When the light faded, Jorik was gone. There was no corpse. No remains.
Just a scorch mark on the stone, a small crater, and a cloud of ash that the wind scattered before it had finished rising.
[Jorik Malden—defeated.]
Reidar didn't feel satisfied with the death of the man. He didn't even feel relief because what Jorik did was in the past already, and there was no way to change that.
For a year, he'd fought, schemed, and clawed his way through an endless gauntlet of threats. Every day had been survival. Every victory had led to another battle. And now, with the Church of Unbinding dismantled and the world-carver behemoth finally dead, he'd expected to feel… something. Relief, maybe. Triumph.
Instead, he just felt worn out.
The monsters were still out there. The planet was still a death trap. But the two biggest existential threats—the ones that had hung over everyone like guillotines—were gone. And all he could muster was this hollow, grinding fatigue that settled into his bones like lead.
<It's over.> He was nearly shocked by his own thoughts.
"The Progenitor is dead. The Behemoth is dead. Jorik is dead. The portals are closed."
The church's network in Kingsgate was about to be destroyed, and so would the one outside the city.
A cloud of dust and smoke covered the area where the Behemoth had fallen, and it rose into the sky like a pillar.
Combined with the smoke from the fires and the residual energy from the portals, the sky above and around Kingsgate looked like the end of the world.
But it wasn't the end.
It was the beginning of the cleanup, and Reidar had thousands of Demon Lords to help with that. He turned the condor south, toward the settlement, toward his family, while his summons took care of everything.
Lyra'xis Sola stood on a building at the edge of the settlement and watched the sky to the northwest.
Something had changed. Two minutes ago, the progenitor and the world-carver behemoth were both alive.
"Legate," said the officer next to her. "The Behemoth's mana is dissipating. Confirmed across all sensor arrays."
Lyra'xis said nothing.
She watched the horizon, where a massive cloud of dust and debris climbed into the sky from the area where the Behemoth had been.
The cloud was so large it looked like an eruption, and the ground beneath her feet still trembled from whatever impact had created it.
"The Progenitor's signature ceased roughly two minutes before the Behemoth's," the officer continued. "Both events happened in the same area—the northwestern outskirts of Kingsgate, where Reidar Miller's forces were engaging the behemoth."
Another officer turned from the communications equipment.
"Reports from our scouts say the sky to the northwest is full of flying humanoid creatures. Thousands of them."
"Describe them," Lyra'xis said.
"They are…" He paused. "They are Reidar's summons, legate… It's just that they are in a different form before, as if they were made of pure elements."
The officer paused, rechecked the display, and then looked at Lyra'xis with an expression that she read as disbelief.
"Legate, many of these creatures are at levels above 700."
The Legate's eyes widened, but whatever she had in mind, she kept it to herself.
Reidar Miller's strongest summons had been at level 582.
That was what the intelligence reports showed, what she had personally seen, what the sensor data confirmed, and what Reidar himself had shown when he arrived at the settlement with his army.
Level 582 Demon Lords, level 577 Specter Kings, and level 567 Chimera Colossi.
Now there were creatures above level 700 in the sky.
Thousands of them.
And both the Progenitor and the Behemoth were dead. But she understood what had happened. It was clear. The demon lords were stronger than Reidar, so he must have used his trait. However, this also suggested that Reidar had not activated his trait up to that moment, likely to convince everyone that 50,000 summons was his maximum.
And it worked. Even she didn't realize he wasn't using his trait once, but that was expected, given how weird the skills were about what they could do.
However, that he was able to summon 50,000 creatures without using it was scary enough, but with it, the numbers were many times higher.
"Are any of these creatures hostile?" Lyra'xis asked.
"Negative, Legate. They appear to be taking part in cleanup operations—eliminating the remaining portal monsters and forest creatures. Several groups are patrolling the settlement perimeter, but they haven't approached the barriers."
Lyra'xis looked at the sky.
The monsters' mana inside Kingsgate was disappearing as the new Demon Lords swept through the city.
In real time, the map was being changed, with the creatures that had threatened the Aegis Phalanx's positions minutes earlier getting erased one by one.
The entire monster siege of Kingsgate—the threat that had plagued this region for months, that had kept hundreds of thousands of survivors trapped behind barriers, and that the Aegis Phalanx had struggled to contain with their full regional contingent—was being taken apart in minutes.
By one man's summons.
"Legate," the communications officer said. "A Terror Condor is approaching from the northwest. Single rider. It must be Reidar Miller."
Lyra'xis watched the white bird approach.
It glided toward the settlement, trailing shadow and ash, and the rider on its back was visible now—a human man sitting.
She checked the level reading.
—[Reidar Miller—Level 645]—
<What the hell?>
But of course, part of the blame was hers. She gave Reidar the quest to defeat or repel the Behemoth. She gave high rewards because she thought it would be impossible for Reidar to kill it. It just had to act as an incentive. At the same time, the rewards for having pushed it away were moderate.
The secondary goal was to motivate Reidar to do his best. Despite being nearly 200 levels weaker than it, he managed to defeat it.
<This guy…>
The condor landed in the clearing, and Reidar dismounted without looking at the Aegis soldiers who had gathered to watch.
He walked toward the building where his family was, the same building he had visited before the battle, and the crowd parted around him without being asked.
Lyra'xis watched him go. She said nothing because there was nothing to say, and even if there was, she could do nothing about it. Reidar could have already decimated the Aegis, but Lyraxis still stood a chance of fighting if she used her summons. But now, even that possibility had been destroyed.
The officer beside her spoke in Kytinn.
"What just happened?"
Lyra'xis turned from the clearing and looked at the pillar of dust still rising from where the Behemoth had fallen.
The ground still shook. The sky was full of demons that answered to a single human.
"I don't know," she said. "But I need to report to the others, and I have no idea how to explain this to them."
She turned back to the command building. She took in the aftermath of what Reidar Miller had done to the most dangerous battlefield the Aegis Phalanx had encountered on this planet.
The junior officer followed her inside without another word.
Reidar entered his company's building, went to his old office, and opened the door. There he found his son and wife waiting. A smile bloomed across their face, and it appeared all the same on the man's visage.
Reidar looked at his wife in the eyes.
"Let's go home," he said.
There is a message for you, loyal readers: go to the author's notes!