They poured out in the hundreds. Decaying, mutilated corpses stitched together with crude, black magical threads. Their eyes burned with a hollow, malevolent purple light, their jaws snapping and grinding as they shambled forward. Some were missing limbs, others were horrific amalgamations of multiple bodies, but they all moved with a relentless, terrifying hunger.
For one agonizing heartbeat, the citizens of Kikka simply stared in absolute, paralyzing disbelief.
Then, a zombie lunged forward, sinking its rotting teeth into the shoulder of a screaming merchant.
The silence shattered. Absolute, pure pandemonium erupted across the capital.
The screams were deafening. Thousands of people broke into a blind, trampling stampede, desperately trying to flee the advancing hordes of the undead. Carts were overturned, crushing those unfortunate enough to trip in the mud. The festive atmosphere evaporated, replaced by the visceral, bloody reality of a massacre.
Lencar didn't freeze. The moment the portals had opened, he had dropped the half-eaten apple and shifted his stance.
A cluster of six zombies, dropping from a portal positioned directly above the stone archway, landed heavily on the cobblestones mere feet away from him. They hissed, their heads snapping toward a huddled group of terrified commoners—a mother trying to shield her two young children, and an elderly man who had fallen in the crush of the crowd.
The undead lunged toward the defenseless family.
Lencar moved. He couldn't unleash the devastating, building-leveling power of his true arsenal without blowing his cover, but he didn't need to. He relied on the terrifying physical density he had forged in the Thunder-Crag Peaks, subtly augmenting his strikes with highly concentrated, invisible bursts of Wind Magic to increase their kinetic force.
He stepped in front of the screaming mother just as the first zombie leaped through the air.
Lencar didn't draw a weapon. He simply drove his fist forward in a brutal, perfectly executed straight punch. His knuckles connected with the center of the zombie's rotting chest. The sheer, overwhelming physical force, backed by a sonic boom of wind, didn't just repel the creature—it obliterated it. The zombie's torso caved in with a sickening crunch, the necrotic magic sustaining it shattering instantly as the body flew backward, breaking into pieces against a stone wall.
Without pausing, Lencar pivoted on his heel. He ducked under the wildly swinging, decayed arm of a second attacker, drove his elbow upward to shatter its jaw, and followed through with a sweeping roundhouse kick that snapped the legs of two more zombies, sending them crashing to the pavement.
"Get up!" Lencar barked at the terrified family, his voice sharp and commanding, though he maintained the slightly raspy, unremarkable tone of his disguised persona. "Don't just sit there! Move!"
He grabbed the elderly man by the collar of his tunic, hauling him to his feet with effortless strength. He shoved the man toward the mother and children.
"The outer gates will be overrun," Lencar yelled over the horrific din of the screaming crowds and the snarling undead. He pointed toward the towering spires of the inner city. "Head deeper into the capital! Run toward the central plazas where the Magic Knights gather! Go! Now!"
The mother nodded frantically, tears streaming down her face. She grabbed her children's hands and bolted in the direction he pointed, supporting the elderly man as they ran.
Lencar didn't have time to watch them go. More zombies were pouring from the portals, drawn by the noise and the scent of the living.
For the next several minutes, Lencar became a brutal, highly efficient shepherd in the chaos. He wove through the panicked crowds, intercepting the undead whenever they broke through the lines of fleeing citizens. He fought with raw brutality. He shattered skulls, snapped spines, and crushed ribcages, acting like a highly capable but completely unremarkable brawler who just happened to be fighting for his life.
He dealt with dozens of the rotting monsters, his boots slick with black, necrotic blood, constantly pushing the terrified civilians deeper into the protective heart of the city.
He was just crushing the neck of a particularly large, heavily stitched corpse when a blinding flash of elemental light illuminated the street.
"Water Creation Magic: Holy Wall of Crashing Waves!"
A massive, surging torrent of high-pressure water swept through the avenue, crashing into a large cluster of zombies and washing them away like debris in a flood.
Lencar stepped back into the shadows of an overhanging balcony as a squad of heavily armed Magic Knights dropped from the rooftops. They wore the blue mantles of the Blue Rose Knights and the silver eagles of the Silva family's squad. They immediately formed a defensive perimeter, unleashing volleys of water, earth, and lightning magic into the advancing undead.
The cavalry had arrived.
Lencar wiped a splash of dark blood from his cheek. His objective here was complete. He had mitigated the civilian casualties in his immediate vicinity without drawing any undue attention to himself. Now, it was time to vanish.
As the Magic Knights engaged the horde, their flashy, destructive spells drawing the focus of everyone on the street, Lencar melted backward into the deep shadows of a narrow alleyway.
He leaned against the cold brick wall, closing his eyes. He needed to monitor the battlefield without exposing himself to the sensory sweeps of the elite mages flooding the city.
He drew upon his vast, integrated magical knowledge, weaving a highly sophisticated composite spell. He blended the Concealment Magic he used to hide his mana signature with a advanced, hyper-sensitive application of Wind Magic and Illusion Magic.
He didn't project his consciousness outward; instead, he turned the shadows and the surrounding air currents of the capital into an extension of his own nervous system. He felt the vibrations of every footstep, the shifts in air pressure caused by massive spell-casting, and the distinct, clashing frequencies of thousands of different mana signatures.
He became a ghost, perfectly hidden in the dark, watching the city unfold in his mind like a massive, violent chessboard.
For a few minutes, he monitored the localized skirmishes. The junior Magic Knights were fighting valiantly, but they were struggling against the sheer, overwhelming numbers of the undead.
Then, the true power of the Clover Kingdom awakened.
Lencar sensed a sudden, monstrous fluctuation of mana emanating from the very center of the city. It came from the banquet hall within the Magic Knight Headquarters. The sheer density of the energy was staggering, a blinding supernova of power compared to the flickering candles of the junior knights.
Through his sensory web, Lencar "watched" as the roof of the headquarters essentially exploded outward. Multiple streaks of brilliant, terrifyingly powerful mana shot into the night sky, dispersing rapidly toward different sectors of the besieged capital.
The Magic Knight Captains had deployed.
Lencar focused his senses on one particular streak of energy that was hurtling toward the northern district. It was a massive, roaring comet of pure heat. The mana signature was so dense, so intensely hot, that it felt as though a miniature sun had just been unleashed upon the city. It burned with a fierce, unwavering honor and an absolute, crushing authority.
Standing in the damp shadows of the alley, Lencar opened his eyes, a solemn, respectful expression settling onto his disguised features.
"The Fuegoleon guy is already here, huh," Lencar murmured to himself quietly.