With the all-female group changing locations back to town (save for the disguised Hiro), they made small talk on the way back. Vila materialized a green cloak which covered her entire body with the hood up, so that she could hide her appearance. Once they got back to town, a guard recognized Eileen and passed on a message that she was to return to the castle for her duel, which had been decided for the afternoon.

Therese and Leona decided to go with her. While the two of them felt slightly like they should stay with Hiro, he just waved the group off as Avemir, giving a knowing nod to Vila who responded in kind before following the group. Once they were out of sight, the carefree smiling on his face disappeared as a more stoic and unreadable expression plastered his looks. With his cloak fully on, he walked back towards the Drinking Bear as he let his illusion unravel out of side, returning him to normal.

Back at his temporary house, he went back to his room and cleaned up. He didn’t care to stay in this town for much longer. No attachments, no unfinished business. That’s how he wanted to live. Well, if it was a story that was trying to keep reader, he would probably go to a dungeon. Not that he knew whether those existed or not.

Sitting down in meditation in his room, Hiro closed his eyes and felt for all the unborn seeds he had spread. He wanted to get them done before getting down to wandering. Merchant? Nah, couldn’t be fussed anymore. Spreading out his mana as if they were umbilical cords, he started supplying his seeds with their much needed mana. This would speed up the process, so he kept a regular feed going while making sure he kept at least Magus-level strength reserved for his own protection.

…

……

…

The next few days were a repeat of each other. Three meals a day, daily physical training, daily mana exercises and spell development, listening to soundtracks in his head from memory, feeding the seeds, and sleeping. Like this, he filled up his mana right after finishing the growing of his doppels. As for his mana and aura cores, it seems that him not being at full capacity had stalled its growth, so there was probably a month or two until those would finish.

Well, he felt a sense of foreboding about that. Or maybe foreshadowing would be closer to what he felt. With everything he had read and seen in his life, there were too many cases where something would happen at certains times.

It was around this time, that he felt the shattering of a pendant. This particular one was a bit of a distance away and was in the direction of Brigantium, meaning it was the mercenary he had employed, Viktor. Looks like there was something occurring there after all. He would leave it to one of his doppels, but they were all given their own jobs to do. Not only that, the doppels still hadn’t had enough time to turn knowledge into experience, so their combat capabilities wouldn’t be refined at all.

Putting the cloak on and covering himself up, Hiro let a fog leak out from under the cloak to obscure anyone’s vision of him and make him seem more mysterious. Only that. There was no other function to it.

Like that, he answered the call, letting the mana sealed in the pendant be the catalyst to a summoning formation. Taking a crouching position, he made sure the fog was wrapping around his entire body to mask him in the event anyone could see under his cloak, and also covered his non-standard clothes with the fog. Better safe than sorry.

As he vanished from his room in the Drinking Bear just before lunchtime, he reappeared in the middle of a battlefield. The sounds of orcs and goblins and… trolls? Their roars reached his ears, as well as the distance sound of humans shouting. There weren’t any sounds of weapons clashing, so it seemed the two sides hadn’t engaged in battle yet.

Standing up, he was in a small clearing in a flat area, surrounded by monsters. Looking around, it seems that they had been blasted away by the summoning formation. Looking behind him, he could see town walls surrounded by looked like a magic barrier. Not only that, the barrier was falling. On the walls, he could see soldiers and mercenaries and adventurers, all lined up and shooting bows. Magic users seemed to be doing their best at reinforcing the barrier.

But as he watched, large fireballs from the monster side were being launched and were piercing the barrier, possibly because it wasn’t holding well enough. On the wall, he could see Viktor and his company.

Deciding it was time to start, he first stomped his foot, letting out a pulse of pure mana which blasted away the now approaching monsters, on top of reverberating across the entire battlefield. Immediately after that, he held out a smoky hand towards the town walls and released a large amount of mana. Right after that, a new barrier began to form with a slight blue tint, surrounding the entire town and protecting it from both magical and physical attacks.

As more fireballs were launched, they striked against the new barrier, and splayed across it before dissipating, unable to penetrate it. The barrier itself remained unshaked despite this hit.

Next order of business was the monsters that seemed to number in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands. With his back to the wall, he struck both palms outward and held them there as he released a massive amount of dense, black fog. Might as well stick to the theme of fog.

Like that, the fog started to spread around the town and encircling it, and engulfing below the town walls so that any enemy that had already gone past him, would be dealt with. The fog itself didn’t look threatening, but whenever a monster could be seen through the fog, there was only death. He figured a neurotoxin would be best. Least amount of environmental damage, and no lasting damage on the bodies, so even if someone ate orc meat later, they wouldn’t die.

Well, orc meat is supposed to taste like pork or boar, isn’t it? That’s usually the standard in fantasy worlds.

With an AT (Absolute Territory) zone established, he stopped emitting fog and stepped forward. Now he could let loose and test out some magic he had been dying to use practically. Or rather, Thaumaturgy.

First attack he decided on was against those in his immediate vicinity. Condensing fog over and over until they were as dense as metal, he refined them into straight one-handed blades, with sharp edges. And of course, since it was neurotoxins, even a non-fatal hit would still cause death.

What? Fog didn’t have any special properties? Well, that was true at the time. Shut up. Things change. Now its practical and cool at the same time.

Lining up dozens and dozens of these swords behind him, he raised a hand, and lowered it.

“Gate of… ahem… Bladeworks.” (Hiro)

With his voice modulated to have both a deep man’s voice dualed with a soft feminine woman’s voice, he left out those words. Anime and whatnot would always be an influence on what he would create. Why? Because it’s cool.

After lowering his hand, all of the blades shot forth, each one finding their own target and, probably due to the lack of skill of his opponents, they went straight into the chests of the monsters. A second after hitting, they would turn back to fog. It was kind of disappointing, because in under a minute, he had massacred everything within 200m diameter of himself.

As for how he could accurately form and land strikes with all of those blades against so many moving targets. By layering several magics, it wasn’t too hard. First magic was 【Spatial Detection】 which mapped out the area around him to whatever distance he chose. Second was 【Target Lock】 which recorded the location of each enemy within his detection range, and created a unique ID (eg.: 0001 ~ 9999), and saved the location to the ID, constantly tracking and updating in real time. Third was 【Parallel Processing】 which was more of a buff for his mind, to allow him to do a variety of things. In this case, assigning an ID to each blade, and matching it with an equivalent target ID. If there wasn’t enough blades, he would create more until it matched.

Though it sounds complicated, it was all being carried out in his subconscious. It was the same as being able to look at a screen of red dots on a blue map, and watching each thing move separately. Imagination is an amazing thing.

When bigger monsters came along, he used more than one blade against them, and if a skilled opponent managed to avoid or block the fired blades, he would just spam more blades against them. Quality? Not needed against these small fry. While walking forward slowly, he kept making more and more blades and shooting them off. Quantity, especially with his mana, was more than enough to overwhelm them.

The blades did well getting through leather armor, but for metal armor that some monsters were wearing, he just had to aim for vitals or just use more and more against them. Truly, he was an OP character.

And then just as he had finished maybe half of the enemy army, time stopped. No, it had slowed down so much that it seemed as if time had stopped. The things in front of him had lost their color as well.

How did he know all of this? In his lectures with Max, there was a topic about magic resistance. With enough mana within him, he could easily resist certain things, such as spells which were like debuffs. As if a pebble had tried to move a boulder by tapping it.

Playing along, he kept looking around, and eventually, a cloaked figure started approaching him. One of those people from that council of twilight or whatever it was. He had already forgotten the name of them. The person stopped in front of Hiro, looking at his face, but seemed unable to look through the fog that obscured him.

Just as they were about to open their mouth, Hiro’s hand shot out and grabbed their throat. Unable to react, the mage struggled, confusion and horror on their face as they didn’t know how he could still move. Not letting them speak, Hiro spoke first.

“You know… This magic? Appalling. This time magic of yours, which only slows time. It’s useless and flawed, especially against me. Let me show you real time magic. 【Stop】 and 【Decay】.” (Hiro)

With those two words, two magics were cast. Stop was used on one of the man’s arms, causing it to stop completely, even in this ‘stopped’ time. How did he do it? Hiro thought of time as particles. Particles that move. All he did, was stop them from moving in the man’s arm. As for Decay, it sped up the time particles, causing it to quickly age and undergo muscle atrophy from lack of nutrients, before becoming skin and bones, and then dust. No blood form the wound either, as it naturally healed itself.

A nasty thing he had made. After the man tried to scream from the pain, Hiro finished him off. Gathering knowledge? Can’t be fucked. That would mean having to do something later.

With the mage dead, time started moving at normal speeds again. Hiro resumed his murder spree, this time, increasing the amount of blades to about two hundred which was his current limit without enough practice and refinement in the individual processes.

The monsters had started to run, most likely due to having lost their leader. Seeing the orcs and trolls and goblins working together, it shouldn’t have been possible without one leader to connect them.

And like that, within 20 minutes of him appearing, the battlefield had been cleaned up. All that was left, was a field of monster corpses. Only because Hiro couldn’t give a rats ass about the bodies and didn’t want to dismantle them. Not that he knew how much he’d get for them.

Looking back at the wall, he could see the dumbfounded and scared faces of everyone, whereas Viktor had a thousand mile stare. With a hand raised, he swiped sideways, and the barrier and fog he had made began to scatter and disappear. Along with that, he also cloaked himself with magic, sending a whisper into Viktor’s head.

“I’ll meet you later for dinner. Keep a spare seat open.” (Hiro)

Following this, Hiro tailed Viktor for a while, watching over him as he let his company gather corpses for funds, and to help out with the restoration project that would no doubt happen now.

With an ear out, he mostly heard people talking about his appearance. Wondering if he was an enemy or not. Some in awe, some fearful, and so on. Not that he really cared what they thought. He was just protecting his investment. Looking inside the town, there were people desperately working to put out fires.

With a sigh, Hiro dispersed magic into the air, making clouds form in a natural process, and begin to rain. That would put out the fire in due time.

Checking out other things, he found that Viktor had stuck to his word, and was establishing a mercenary troupe on a large scale. They blended in well with their surrounding groups well. Not that they could hide from him. They numbered close to 400. Hiro hoped for at least a thousand, since that would make the minimum for a group that could tip scales, in his opinion.

When night began to fall, he followed Viktor to a tavern, watching him and a couple of the others he knew take a seat in a secluded spot. The place seemed to double as an Inn. Taking a seat in the empty spot out of people’s eyesight, he undid his invisibility, reappearing in front of Viktor.

Without the fog, his appearance was back to normal, though he still had his cloak hood up.

“Seems it’s been busy here, as expected.” (Hiro)