Watching the pile of various herbs grow in the middle of the clearing, I sat down beside it, not caring for anyone who would want to escape. I couldn't dictate other peoples lives, and if they decided it was better for them to brave through the dangers of the forest instead of following someone who obviously had a use for them, it was better to just let them die among the trees.

But that didn't mean I would allow the random beast to just thin the numbers of my underlings who were actually following my order!

By the time the pile turned big enough to fill your usual sack, I sensed the first disturbance to the delicate flow of the mana in the area. With the humans following the way of the beast with just reinforcing their bodies with the world's energy, the only way to actually break the fragile balance of the mana was by moving an object filled with the energy at a high speed.

With my muscles tensing up, I released myself from my sitting position, instantly launching my body towards the source of the disturbance.

Covering more than a hundred meters in less than a second would make mortals confused about their surroundings, if not kill them by smashing into a random tree on their way, but with all my stats maxed up, my perception was on par with my strength and agility, allowing me to precisely perceive all the details required to launch my attack against the magical beast instead of killing everyone in the area, with my subordinates included.

Smash!

Not even bothering to see what the beast looked like, as soon as I locked myself onto its energy signature, I unleashed just a tiny amount of my strength, channelling it through my fist right into the beast body!

Crack.

Under the pressure of my attack, not even the bones of my target could hold itself together, giving up and shattering after a brief moment of tension.

Landing down on the ground, I stood in between my subordinates and the beast, smashed into the ground a few meters away. Only at this point, I could give any fuck about checking how it even looked in the first place.

With its muscles bulging under its thick, yellow skin, it gave out unhealthy vibes. Looking at the dent in its breast, I could tell where my previous hit landed, but from the looks of it, I went a bit too easy on it.

Using my fireballs was a no-no, with how easy it would be to cause this entire forest to go down in flames. With how I planned to use it to harvest all sorts of resources after getting rid of the overlord, this sort of overboard action was impossible.

Thinking about this, all of my personal spells outside of the poor ability to manipulate entropy, had a big area of effect, making them rather useless in situations like this one, where I had to take the presence of others into the account!

Since that was the case, I had to simply smash it to death with my own fists!

Lowering my centre of mass, I bent my knees to gather the required energy and jumped at the enemy.

Using the momentum of my dash while supplying way more energy into my body than in the previous attack, I sent my fist right at the beast's head. But it wasn't just staying there, waiting to be killed!

Roaring furiously as if to add courage to its own actions, it raised on its back feet, slashing at me with the claws of its right paw, hoping to smash me to the side, before my attack could endanger its vital points.

Preposterous!

Unable to use entropy since I hoped to use its remains as yet another source of food for the future villagers of mine, I had to withdraw my attack if I didn't want the dirty paws of the beast to spoil my face! To be honest, with how my current real strength was based on all sorts of exploits and the fact that I could use entropy, I wasn't so sure if I could survive this slash if it landed squarely where the beast aimed it!

Forced into the corner, I had to use basic shockwave to push myself to the ground, with no other option to change the trajectory of my jump midair.

Fuck, I didn't expect the fight with this small fry to be so hard!

As my body smashed to the ground, I felt a wave of the pain, something I didn't feel in a long time already, sweeping through my entire torso as all the air I held in my lungs got squeezed out of my throat by the force of the impact.

But it didn't matter, as my previous momentum was simply too strong to be cancelled by the downward force of shockwave pushing me downward. No matter how annoying it was, I banked on it to slide through the ground under the beast raised belly, before pushing with my shoulders against the ground.

This unorthodox way of changing position apparently worked, mostly because of the insane difference between my potential strength output and the overall weight of my body.

Suddenly flying to a straightened position, I added yet another shockwave behind my elbow, coating most of the area around the place of impact with a think layer of entropy, in order to bottleneck as much of the power into a singular direction.

SMASH!

With the beast torso about a meter thick, my fist submerged itself into its flesh, only to burst through its skin on the side of its back, all bloodied from smashing right through its body!

As its heart got removed from the existence by my attack, the beast only twitched a few times while still trying to reach the back of my body hugged tightly to its belly with its claws, before losing all the remaining strength and relaxing, with the life leaving its corpse.

Pulling my hand out of its remains while kicking at it in order to push it away from over me, I swept my arm with a quick bout of entropy, in order to dissolve the blood that tainted my skin into nothingness.

"W-we…"

Only after staring at the corpse for a prolonged moment while trying to calm my heart, did my consciousness returned to its usual state as the small group of five that was unlucky enough to be the first to attract the attention of the beast pushed forward one guy, looking like the youngest one among them, in order to deal with the monstrosity that they had to take me for now.

"Don't bother yourself with it. Your job is to follow my orders, while my job is to protect you while you do so. When you are done gathering herbs, try to drag this pile of meat to the clearing where we gathered up before."

As if the beasts couldn't look at the overall situation in this relatively small area of the forest, right as I finished my part, I felt yet another strange movement of the energy, on the opposite end of the area in which my people spread out for the sake of gathering the herbs.

It seems it will be a long day.