The terror attacks were only the beginning.


    After putting out all the fires that Toby could see, the screaming never stopped. The bells still rang eerily throughout the chaotic town, and smoke obscured the sky. Through the undeadwork, he could hear a lot of discussion in the distance; focusing on the chatter, Toby concluded that citizens were being ughtered near the Eshnar gate.


    Breaking out into another sprint, Toby was grateful his body never tired—only his mind felt the weight of his failure. Why hadn’t he thought of this possibility before? Why was the city a smoldering mess? His ipetence. The eldritch creature, capable of creating fractures in space and walking wherever he pleased as a mere illusion of his true self, must be shaking his head at his failure. He had been gifted this body and entrusted thisnd. He clenched his fist and ground his teeth in silent rage. The Empire would pay for making a mockery out of him in front of the supreme being.


    As Toby approached the fighting, people were fleeing between his feet. Most were middle-aged men, as merchants often were, but one particr man ran down the left side of him with a hand clenched on a sword handle.


    Toby moved to stop him, but it was toote—the sword-wielding man unsheathed the de from within his robes and, with a two-handed horizontal swing, decapitated the man running in front of him. A shower of blood coated the enraged sword wielder, and he swirled and nicked another man’s arm, causing the struck man to shriek in pain.


    Toby circted his vast amount of mana within his body and directed it to his eye. His golden pupil lit up, and a beam of concentrated energy zapped out with pinpoint uracy. The sword wielder stopped dead in his tracks as a hole went right through both his lungs—he grasped at the growing splodge of red on his robes with surprise. Toby watched as the man slowly turned to look at him. There was a silent second where the man seemed to regret his life decisions before he slumped face-first onto the gravel road, eyes wide open, looking straight at the decapitated head of the other man.


    A door to one of the shops on the right side of the gravel road was flung off its hinges as two men fell wrestling to the ground. On the bottom half of the scuffle was a terrified gentleman that owned the shop, and holding his body down with a hand sped on his neck was a second man wielding a dagger.


    Toby didn’t waste a second and sted the dagger wielder with his eye beam, causing his body to slump on top of the shop owner. He then noticed a pack of men heading to the Eshnar gate, donning the same robes the goblins under hismand used. They shoved past the people, and after reaching the gate, one of them held down the goblin that was telling the merchants to head back—while the others leaped past, shouting, “We no longer wee your kind here!” They kept their heads low so the merchants couldn’t discern their identity as they charged at them with swords drawn.


    “Oh, you bastards,” Toby snarled as he charged after them. They n to ruin our rtionship with Eshnar by posing as us while ughtering innocent merchants. The toll road only worked if both sides allowed the passage of traffic. If Eshnar deemed the toll road unsafe, merchants would have to stick to one of the other roads constructed through the cursed forest.


    Toby didn’t even bother going through the gate; instead, with a mighty leap, he soared over the ten-meter-high gate andnded on the other side in a small crater—squashing the men like bugs, much to the merchant’s horror.


    “YOU ARE ALWAYS WELCOME HERE! BUT FOR NOW, RUN!” Toby bellowed and shook the world with every word. All the merchants covered their ears and cowered behind their carts while the horses stood stunned before desperately trying to escape their reins.


    Toby knew he would cause chaos with such loud words, but this was about sending a message. People were wee, and he was strong and could protect them. He had few opportunities to show off his might, and he would much rather terrify a few hundred people and have them spread tales of his domination for the rest of their lives than them saying Necron was an unsafe ce to visit. They already had a bad reputation for being a ce run by creatures of corruption. Many merchants still chose to forcefully traverse the forest despite its rough terrain or continue the many-month journey around its border than using their toll road for this very reason.


    Having shown his face and sent the message, Toby turned around, flicked the crushed human bits from the soles of his feet, and marched back into Necron with a huff. Through thework, he learned that the goblins had finally got a hold of the situation by seizing the disguised merchants’ weapons and pinning them down. He was certain that the Empire’s nobles had snuck men inside under the pretense of merchants, had them hide among the poption to gain key intel, and then waited for a time when he was out of town to strike.


    It was all too organized and exploited their weaknesses far too much to be the work of random people. So now the question was…what’s next? The Empire had somewhat seeded in causing damage and terror in Necron but not to an unsalvageable degree. The other warehouse was still fine and now heavily guarded by ogres, and apart from a hundred or so merchants that were ughtered, everyone else was fine.


    Toby started walking toward Andrew’s pce. He knew that nothing could kill the King Ooze, which had grown to around twenty meters long and five meters tall, but he needed his help with strategies. He had been a simple bodyguard for an underperforming merchant caravan with no special skills except looking intimidating and hitting things with his fist.


    Andrew at least had a head on his shoulders and knew Necron better than anyone. Arriving at the pce, Toby saw Andrew had left his sanctuary and was staring at the wooden door that was now a smoldering mess on the floor. The titanic gray slime that barely fit through the doorway turned to look at Toby with his cold eyes. With bells ringing out and clouds of smoke hanging eerily overhead, the two stared at each other for a moment with only the scorched garden separating them.


    “Toby.” Andrew’s voice sounded in his head like someone was shouting at the back of his skull.


    Toby carefully replied. “Andrew…what should we do?”


    “Head to the Empire’s gate. They are here,” Andrew gruffly replied as he looked eastward. “ughter them all.” A particr hatred came across with the message that Toby felt in his bones. They were bothymen who had been gifted great power and responsibility through a lucky series of events.


    Neither Toby nor Andrew had neglected their duties—they performed them to the best of their abilities—yet to have all their months of work burned to the ground in such a way was heartbreaking to see.<novelsnext></novelsnext>


    “Brother.” Toby lowered his voice to a snarl as he left for the gate and picked up his pace. “I will ughter them all.” They were not brothers bound by blood but by circumstance. “Stay strong. We will rebuild it better than ever. That I can assure you.”


    Despite Andrew’s frightening appearance, he was a sweet guy who liked his food way too much and had poor taste in luxuries…but he had worked day and night to make Necron into the town it was, and he was powerless to fix it. Only Toby could move and fight—and oh boy, did he n to fight. He balled his fists, clenched his teeth, and charged to war.


    ***


    The eastern district that handled the unloading and loading of goods from the merchants and had arge area to store horses had been transformed into an apocalyptic scene. The once-busy streets were filled with soot-covered corpses and smoldering buildings on all sides. The magical ice from the eldritch lord’s ice spell encased some still partially standing buildings in a frost tomb.


    Toby ran through the streets with a heavy heart. He passed by the post office, Bob’s inn… He wondered if that Garry fellow had made it out alive. Then, shaking his head, he focused on the task at hand. Turning a corner, he saw the eastern gate…or what was left of it.


    In its ce was a squadron of horses that were in a defensive position. They bore the Empire’s traditional full-te armor with red decorative banners bearing their coat of arms. He recognized a few noble houses andmitted them to memory forter.


    “It’s here!” a man leading the group shouted and lowered his visor with a tilt of his head.


    “The demon!” another called, and their war horses seemed to naturally back up a step without their owner’s orders.


    “Stick to the n, boys. Do not falter,” the leader snapped as he took center stage. Mana red out of his body, and his armor became wrapped in a gray hue.


    Toby ignored them and, without warning, shot out a beam of energy from his eye. Although his pupil was golden, the beam was colorless, just a collection of pure energy. He aimed straight for the leader’s head, but the leader raised an axe with the same gray energy covering his armor at thest second. The two collided, the man was propelled off his horse, and the axe melted partially, causing the leader knight to chuck it to the side before the molten metal dripped onto his hand.


    Toby continued the assault and fired another, seeing the man was now vulnerable. The man scrambled to the side, but the beam caught his ankles, separating the man’s feet from his legs. Toby ignored the leader’s wails and series of curses as he iled around and turned his eye to the group of knights still on horseback.


    He fired again—but to his surprise, he felt a burning pain in his shoulder. The main disadvantage of his eyeser…it blinded him while using it, so he failed to see the men had summoned mirrors from their spatial rings. How they knew he had an eyeser that could be reflected with enforced mirrors, he had no idea…but he relished in the knight’s faces turning from triumph to pure terror as his missing shoulder knitted itself back together in less than a second.


    Toby dropped low and charged at the group. Gravel flew behind him as he barreled toward the knights. They separated as he charged, and he saw a man right as he reached them.


    Toby had never seen the person before, but his robes were known throughout thend. He was a Hacker and not an ordinary one. He tried to change his course, but it was already toote.


    The young-looking man donning a simple white robe and holding a bamboo staff sneered. He raised his staff, and the unassuming bamboo pole shone with golden light like a beacon to the gods. “Initiate program: PURGE.” His eyes exploded with golden light as he began levitating.


    The Hacker’s mouth moved at inhuman speed as he rattled offmands that caused the surrounding air to be hazy and shimmer. Green lines of zeros and ones whizzed around the man’s body in endless streams without coherent sense.


    Toby couldn’t make sense of a single word the Hacker said, but the blood-red words hanging in his vision certainly did.


    [MANA FLOW: VALUE SET TO ZERO]