Rades Spirito, the architect of the now-destroyed undead army, was currently sprawled in the mud. He had barely managed to throw himself backward to avoid the devastating, superheated explosion of Fire and Ash magic that had completely vaporized his remaining creations.
He lay there for a long, agonizing moment, his chest heaving as he gasped for breath. His wide, unhinged eyes stared at the smoldering pile of rusted iron and burnt flesh that had once been Jimmy, his most prized, heavily modified soul corpse.
Slowly, the shock of his sudden, overwhelming defeat began to curdle into something far more volatile. His hands dug into the wet, cold mud. The stitches that marred his pale face stretched taut as his lips pulled back into a snarl of absolute, unadulterated fury.
He was Rades Spirito. He possessed a magical attribute so rare, so incredibly powerful, that the entire Clover Kingdom had feared him. He had been banished because his potential eclipsed the arrogant, pampered nobles of the Royal Capital. He was a chosen member of the vanguard, tasked with bringing the entire kingdom to its knees.
And yet, here he was, sitting in the mud of a worthless border village, his entire army dismantled in less than a minute by twelve nobodies in red cloaks.
"You..." Rades hissed, pushing himself up onto his knees. His grimoire, floating beside him, began to violently flip its pages, radiating a sickly, pulsing aura of dark purple mana. "You... how dare you?"
The Red Hood leader, standing at the apex of the wedge formation, did not move. He simply watched the necromancer with cold, mechanical detachment.
Rades stumbled to his feet, his dark, messy hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and grime. He threw his arms out wide, his voice cracking as he descended into a hysterical, high-pitched rant. The humiliation he felt was unbearable, and his fragile, twisted ego desperately needed to tear down the people who had just humiliated him.
"I know exactly who you are!" Rades screamed, his voice echoing off the burning thatched roofs of the village. He pointed a trembling, mud-caked finger directly at the Red Hood leader. "You think you can hide behind those ridiculous red cloaks? You think you can mask your identities from me? I can smell the stench of the Royal Capital on you! I can smell the arrogant, self-righteous stink of the noble realm!"
The twelve Red Hoods remained perfectly still, though the ambient temperature around them seemed to suddenly, inexplicably rise.
Rades paced back and forth, his purple mana flaring erratically around him, kicking up clumps of mud. He was projecting all of his deep-seated hatred for the kingdom onto the disciplined unit standing before him. To Rades, anyone who fought with such synchronized perfection, anyone who possessed that level of elite tactical training, could only belong to one group.
"You are Magic Knights!" Rades accused, spitting the words out as if they were a deadly poison. "You're just another squad of pampered, arrogant lapdogs sent by the Wizard King to police the borders! You come out here, flaunting your flashy spells and your perfect teamwork, looking down your noses at the rest of us! You think you are the heroes of this story, don't you?!"
Rades paused, clutching his chest, his unhinged eyes wide with a maniacal, fiery zeal. He was speaking not just to the Red Hoods, but to the entire Clover Kingdom that had rejected him.
"But you Magic Knights will never understand our thoughts!" Rades roared, his voice filled with a genuine, twisted agony. "You will never understand the pain of being discarded! You sit in your high towers, gorging yourselves on the wealth of the kingdom, protecting a system that crushes anyone who doesn't fit into your perfect, shiny little boxes! We have suffered in the dark while you bathed in the light! You will never understand the hatred that fuels us, and you will never, ever understand the glorious despair we are going to bring down upon your precious kingdom!"
He threw his head back, laughing a harsh, jagged sound that contained absolutely no joy. "You think you won here today because you burned a few corpses?! We are a tide that cannot be stopped! You Magic Knights are nothing but obsolete relics defending a rotting corpse of a nation!"
As Rades finished his grand, high-sounding monologue, expecting the cloaked figures to recoil, or to spout some self-righteous drivel about protecting the peace of the Clover Kingdom... something entirely unexpected happened.
The silence that followed his rant wasn't the silence of awe, nor was it the silence of fear.
It was the heavy, suffocating silence of an incredibly violent, profoundly offended reaction.
The disciplined, cold, mechanical aura of the Red Hoods abruptly shattered.
All twelve figures tensed simultaneously. The ambient mana in the village square didn't just spike; it exploded. The ground beneath their boots instantly scorched black. The thick, magical smoke that had been lingering in the air suddenly swirled violently, coalescing into sharp, jagged shapes. A massive, roaring column of superheated ash erupted from the grimoire of the Red Hood leader, shooting twenty feet into the night sky like a miniature volcano.
Rades stumbled backward, his manic laughter dying in his throat as the sheer, terrifying heat washed over him, singing his eyebrows.
The Red Hood leader took a single, heavy step forward. When he spoke, his voice was no longer a hollow, mechanical drone. It was vibrating with a raw, visceral anger that seemed to shake the very mud beneath their feet. It was the anger of a fanatic who had just been subjected to the most grievous, unforgivable insult imaginable.
"You dare..." the Red Hood leader growled, his voice a low, rumbling earthquake of fury. "...You dare compare us to the dogs of the Capital?"
Behind him, the other eleven Red Hoods stepped forward, their spells completely abandoning defensive formations and shifting into highly aggressive, lethal postures. Twin swords of vibrating mana ignited with blinding light. Serpentine coils of white-hot fire hissed in the damp air.
"We are not Magic Knights!" the leader roared, the volume of his voice cracking the remaining glass windows in the nearby cottages. The ash swirling around him glowed with a terrifying, dull red heat. "Do not ever insult us by associating us with those corrupt, pampered swine! The Magic Knights are the shield that protects the rot! They are the enforcers of the noble class who bleed this land dry!"
Rades froze, his eyes going as wide as saucers. He stared at the roaring column of ash and the twelve furiously glowing grimoires. The sheer hatred radiating from the Red Hoods toward the Clover Kingdom establishment was palpable. It was a hatred that felt remarkably similar to his own.
"We exist to purify the noble bloodlines through fire," the leader continued, his voice dripping with venomous disgust as he glared at the necromancer. "We are the true cleansers of this kingdom. Our Master has pointed us to a higher purpose—to strike down the bloated, corrupt aristocrats who gorge themselves while the commoners starve. We despise the Magic Knights. We despise the King. We despise everything the Royal Capital stands for."
The Red Hood leader pointed a finger shrouded in swirling, burning ash directly at Rades's chest.
"If you ever call us Magic Knights again, necromancer, I will not simply burn your dead. I will turn the blood in your veins to boiling ash."
Rades Spirito stood entirely paralyzed. His jaw went slack, and he blinked rapidly, his brain completely short-circuiting as it tried to process the information.
The terrifying, highly coordinated unit that had just annihilated his army wasn't a squad of Royal Guards. They weren't agents of the Wizard King. They were a radical, extremist faction that hated the Clover Kingdom just as much as he did, if not more. They were fighting the same enemy. They wanted the same destruction.