Alric sputtered for a moment, obviously trying to backpedal. From the look in the guard’s eyes, it was obvious that talking their way out of this was an impossible challenge. Others were noticing the confrontation as well. Only one man had his weapon draw, but that was going to change very fast.

“What are you here for?” the guard demanded. “Who are you?”

“You heard him,” Hirrus said, pushing Alric behind him and stepping forward. He looked around at the assembled guards. The group stopping and gathering around had become a spectacle of its own, drawing more attention. “We’re here to kill Rumi and put an end to this whole monstrous affair.” He drew his sword and axe. “And you know who I am.”

There was a panicked pause from the guard facing him. Hirrus’s reputation was more than enough to give the man pause. But the ring of steel being drawn surrounded them. There were a dozen guards surrounding them. And two dozen more were just beyond that first ring of foes.

And beyond that, the entire camp.

As afraid as any one of them might have been of Hirrus, they outnumbered him. Why would they flee when they had him alone in the heart of their forces? Why would they surrender when they were so many and he was so few?

“I will give you all this one chance,” Hirrus said, raising his voice. He turned his back on the guard and faced towards the cart, where Rumi was hanging out of the rear of the cargo compartment, trying to see what was happening. “Stand aside. Scatter to the winds. Return to your homes. Give me Rumi and Rumi alone, and this doesn’t have to be a bloodbath.”

Rumi set eyes on Hirrus and visibly paled.

He didn’t know how Rumi recognized him, and he didn’t care. Hirrus raised his hooked sword, pointing it over the heads of the guards between them. He hoped his message was conveyed clearly.

This was beyond a threat. It was a promise.

Rumi had begun the last moments of his life.

“Kill that motherfucker!” Rumi bellowed.

To his credit, he sounded more confident and commanding than he looked.

Rumi’s army surged forward.

The inevitable moment had come.

Alric and Nidra had both appeared to vanish - no doubt using stealth abilities to let Hirrus take the brunt of the foe’s attention. It was just him against half a country worth of fanatical lunatics.

First and foremost, Hirrus needed to deal with the crowd. He needed to clear the ground enough for him to get to Rumi, and the only way to do that was with Arcana based damage. He could lash out with his weapons as much as he wanted, killing foes one at a time was not going to make headway. It would be hours before he had even made a dent in the forces arrayed against him. But the dramatic area of effect Arcana he had would unleash hell upon huge swaths of them at once.

X’ruhn’s Balance was the first Arcana to go out. Swapping his physical and magical stats would give him the base of power he needed for his magic damage abilities. Guards mobbed him as he cast, and their swords clanked against his armor. It was nearly ineffectual. Even those who had been freed of their decision trees couldn’t have been more than level two or three, and most of them had very little gear. Their attacks did between two hundred and five hundred damage each.

Slightly more threatening was their Arcana. A blue circle appeared beneath Hirrus’s feet, and on instinct, he body-slammed the guard nearest to his left. He stepped out of the circle before a blast of energy slammed out of the sky. Hirrus continued to amass his power, using Logarius Shroud to get a little extra ATT.

More Arcana-formed projectiles started to pelt in at him. A glittering arrow made of magical energies hit him for over a thousand damage. A conjured washbasin clanged into his shoulder for a little more than that. A stone the size of a fist nearly struck him directly in the face. He wanted to power up fully, and call forth a truly intimidating display, but there were so many of them now. It seemed that the camp was converging on him, and his foes grew more and more numerous. Every moment he delayed, the situation grew more and more dire.

Rumi pointed at Hirrus, and the sky began to rain little shards of glowing red metal. They only struck him for six hundred damage each, but a dozen struck him before he could shove armored foes aside and get out of the wide area the Arcana affected.

Someone put their hands on Hirrus’s shoulders, trying to shove him back into the rain of metal bits. Hirrus reached out and put both hands on their chest, unleashing Hopworth’s Rend. Whatever hero had tried to shove him back had been dramatically outmatched. The high-multiplier spell, combined with the ridiculous stat difference, slammed more than twenty thousand damage into them.

They didn’t just die.

They erupted.

Fragments of bone and armor rattled off of the armor of those around as viscera filled the air. Blood splattered across the faces of those around, and Hirrus suddenly had space to move. About half of the gore-spattered guards had looks of horror as they recoiled. The other half wore expressions of fear.

“What’s wrong?” Hirrus demanded, bellowing in challenge as he felt the bloodlust mount within his heart. “Is the violence not fun when it happens to you? Was it only fun when you burned towns to the ground? Ripped families apart and turned them into monsters? How dare you be surprised when your violence comes home to you!”

He thrust his hand up, activating Royal Levin. The sky darkened, and a purple beam of lightning ripped down out of the sky. Hirrus didn’t see where it hit, but there was distant screaming as an unfortunate low-level guard was fried.

As his foes surged forward to deny him further opportunity to call down destruction on them, he used Eyes On Me to empower his next series of attacks. He started with Mortal Ray, blasting the area in front of him. The wide variance in stats among the crowd made it difficult to gauge how hard the attack had hit, but a dozen foes fell dead at that one strike. The others were blasted back by the knockback.

The true benefit, though, was how many enemies he had just damaged with an Arcana. Hirrus’s Cosmic Barrette restored two thousand hit points per target hit. Dozens of foes meant that he was fully restored in an instant. The work of dozens of foes’ weapons and Arcana undone in a single blast.

He stomped forward into the space Mortal Ray had bought him, but his foes were just so numerous. Guards flooded into the opened space, stomping on the bodies of their own fallen to put themselves physically between Hirrus and Rumi.

Hirrus unleashed Leer into the new group. Another half-dozen dead in an instant. The rest took thousands of damage.

“Monster!” someone bellowed from behind Hirrus. “Merciless! Face me! I demand satisfaction!”

Hirrus turned and saw a man with twin daggers. At his direction, the crowd parted to make room for the challenger. He was clearly something more than the rest. He had an adventurer’s mismatched armor set, mostly heavy blue-black platemail with a ridiculous-looking phallic helm. Long golden hair ran from the bottom of the helmet and cascaded over his shoulder. He held his daggers in an unusual stance, more like that of a noble duelist than a knife fighter, even though the blades were the battered and unadorned weapons of a street thug or mugger.

“This has been a long time coming,” the man screamed, face flushed red with rage. “At long last, face your end by my hand!”

Hirrus had no idea who this man was. Was it actually an adventurer from Last of the Strong, here to avenge his friends? Was it one of the Awakened, blaming Hirrus for the torment Rumi had inflicted on him? Was it one of Fire’s underlings, looking for the glory of besting his boss’s killer?

Melisune’s Eye meant that it didn’t matter. The man took an impressively low nine thousand damage from the attack, but was locked into place, afflicted by the Calcified debuff. The edges of the gaze attack struck a couple of the people behind him, doing much more devastating damage to them than to the vengeful man.

He peered at the man’s features, frozen as they were in a rictus of hate. Who was he? He felt a genuine stab of curiosity. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Hirrus gauged the distance carefully before taking advantage of the cleared space around him to use Flames of the Apocalypse.

The ring of searing fire did ten thousand damage to the man. His death after less than twenty thousand damage meant that he wasn’t as high level as Hirrus had guessed, or was merely an Adventurer playing at being a threat. Meanwhile, it did devastating damage to dozens of other foes around him. The air filled with screams.

Nearby, Royal Levin struck again, the crashing sound of thunder filling the air as Hirrus turned. He pointed at Rumi again. More than four score of his shield of sacrifices were gone now. He still had to fight for every step, but he was getting closer.

“Someone get in the fucking truck!” Rumi yelled, pointing at the front of the cart. “Get me the fuck out of here, you goddamn fools!” His voice wavered and cracked with audible fear.

As his voice cracked, Nidra appeared on the cart above him, her wide dagger raised to strike. Rumi shrieked, throwing his hands up in front of his face. Her weapon glowed with baleful fire - the work of an Arcana that would let her obliterate Rumi in a single strike.

But before she could bring the blade down, someone interfered. A glimmering green tether whipped out of the crowd and latched onto her. Nidra cried out as it struck, but it wasn’t in pain at the damage, it was in fury as the effect of the Arcana ripped her off of the dented roof of the cart, denying her the blow that would kill Rumi and end this.

At the same time, the cart began to move. The wall of bodies separating Hirrus from his foe grew denser, and the space between them grew farther. Hirrus would have unleashed Civilization Buster on the spot, but he knew the cart was full of innocent townsfolk.

Rumi was slipping through his fingers.

And more than that, he was slipping through his fingers with the supplies he needed to rebuild and make this happen all over again.