"Wait, so you didn't come here to save us?!"

Despite everything that I went through during this life of mine in this world when I looked in the girl's eyes as she was crying those words out, it was the very first time when I was met with such a wall of disappointment, lost hope and desperation.

"I'm willing to do anything, I will be yours forever, I will give you everything I have, but please, PLEASE! SAVE US!"

Turning loud even before I would have any time to react to her question, the girl almost instantly managed to put me in a tough spot. with how the entire village was devastated to its current point, forcing all of its surviving inhabitants to hide in those strange hideouts that prevented the altered vision of mine from working.

"Let's all calm down, no need to panic. First, can you tell me where Jelleria is?"

No matter what was the situation here, the first thing I had to do was to make sure that I could get rid of the deadweight that this damned flat girl's sister was. Even though her innate constitution was of great value to me or literally any other cultivator, I wasn't willing to put her in the same type of life that she just escaped from!

"Jelleria? She should be hiding in the third basement, under that building. Please, now that I told you, will you help us?"

With the eyes of this girl already indicating that she was going crazy from fear, I could only shake my head in resignation. Just what the heck did she want to achieve by telling me what I wanted to know before actually asking her own favour? That was the perfect opposite of what one in her situation should do!

"Okay then, tell me what happened here."

With the basic morality of mine acting up, I perfectly knew that I wouldn't leave this hopeless girl alone in the village that was about to be massacred, especially after seeing in what kind of place the locals had to hide away in order to avoid the danger.

"Monsters' stampede… it��s been something that I only knew from the legends, but three days ago, endless waves of monsters came rushing, smashing right through our village and going somewhere further east. I believe that they will follow the coast all the way to the end of the peninsula, before turning back, ravaging the village once again and only then leaving us alone by hiding in the forest… But to think that it appeared right now, despite the last records of it being as old as the memories that my grandmother passed to me from her own mother's stories!"

As I was listening to the story of this girl, rather than taking everything at face value, I did my best to categorize her words into things that happened, things that she overestimated and things that her terrified mind used to fill the gaps. Yet in the end, there was one thing that actually managed to make me worried!

It was exactly three days ago when I killed off the entirety of the ancestors from the continent in the heavenly city. It was also three days ago when that stampede occurred. Were those two facts connected?

"Okay, I think I understand everything now. Can you tell me how long it would take those beasts to actually appear here again?"

Rather than jumping into the action, I wanted to gather just a bit more of this crucial information. After all, while this stampede might pose a great threat to the lives of the villagers here or in other nearby settlements, considering my recent burst of power, I could use them as dummies for training all the spells of mine, and checking how much did I manage to grow thanks to the evolution of Bonger!

Yet as itchy as I was to test my new limits in basically danger-free battle, I knew that there would be two or three people more interested in such festival!

"By foot, it would take me two days to reach the endpoint of the peninsula… Yet when we take into account that those beasts are running as if their life depended on it… I think we have only about three hours before those monsters return…"

Still shaking despite my questions clearly suggesting that I was thinking about staying here and protecting this place, this girl finally gave me the last answer that I required to put my plan into motion.

"Okay then, you can rest easy. While I will be going away for a moment right now, I will be back with some of my friends to stop this stampede. After all, we don't want all the villages at the circumvention of the island to vanish due to some natural yet strange occurrence, don't we?"

Speaking those words, I stood up and looked in the direction that the girl pointed in back when she was speaking about Jelleria's location. Nodding myself away from the hole I ripped a moment ago, I carefully lifted the mass of earth that I previously pulled out, before placing it perfectly back where it came from and using magic to glue it back to the surrounding soil.

In the very next moment, I already appeared above another group of energy bundles, before repeating the process of uncovering the entire group. Yet while the previous bunker I ripped open could house only five or six people at once at most, the hole that I created in another one, allowed me to barely see a small part of the entire cave!

"Hello!"

As I shouted into the hole, within just a few moments, a few reflected Hellos' of mine reached back to my ears, only further reinforcing my guess how enormously big that cave most likely was.

"I mean no harm guys, I got here to bring Jelleria's sister back as per our deal was. Also, I will be going off for a moment to bring some help, but I will be back before the stampede returns, so you can all rest easy. For now, can I ask you, Jelle, to come out?"