POV: Arelia Elba

"I have sad news to bring from the battlefield!" the messenger said.

Everyone in the dining hall turned their heads to the man.

"Commander Lestul, as well as forty-eight of the soldiers that went with him... have been killed! The only survivors were his sister Grand Sorceress Elsa and Sarl Elkal, known around here as Smoke!" the messenger announced, his voice filled with sadness.

Wait... forty-eight... plus the commander... and his sister and the survivor... that's fifty-one... I thought fifty-two people left?

"The one to have killed them was one of the fifty soldiers that went with the commander to serve as backup. His name is Altair Oberon Lyrius, from this moment onward he is believed to be a demon lord candidate and is to be treated as a high-level threat to the church itself. His capabilities, while still unknown, seem to surpass those of a paladin!"

"What?!" someone yelled.

I looked around and saw the blue-skinned girl with two spikes on her shoulders and long hair that sort of liked like bright seaweed get up and walk over to the messenger.

"What did you just say?!" she asked.

The man looked at her with saddened eyes, after all, he was currently facing one of the most powerful people in this entire fort.

"I said that according to the reports we got from the two survivors the one that did it was Altair Oberon Lyrius," the messenger said.

"It's true," someone else said.

I turned my head towards the origin of the voice. Sarl, or Smoke, stood in the door to the dining hall, arms crossed and a tired look on his face.

"The only reason Elsa and I survived is that he's a fucking maniac that thought it might be fun to fight us in the future or something like that. Oh, and about your friend Ivory, he's the one who killed her," Smoke said, not much emotion in his voice.

The blue-skinned girl looked at him, anger on her face and tears in her eyes.

"Shut it Smoke," someone said.

The one-armed man walked up to Smoke, walking past the blue-skinned girl.

"What? Don't want to hear the truth about your friend? Don't want to hear how he crushed the head of that Signia boy while laughing? Don't want to hear how he drank the blood of our commander? Don't want to hear what kind of psycho you associated with?!" Smoke said with a smile on his face.

"I told you to shut it," the one-armed man said, his voice calm.

Silver energy suddenly began whirling around him like wind and he pointed one finger at Smoke.

"Just shut it," he then said.

I couldn't help but smile as I listened to the quarrel.

"Now we don't even need to find some convoluted reason to torture him..." my smile grew wider, "no one will mind if we just kill a demon lord candidate," I said.

"I like the way you think, but again, we don't stand a chance against him," Herkal said.

I sighed.

"Just shut it, alright? I don't need to hear that right now after I just received such good news, alright? And since when were you capable of thinking anyway?" I responded, annoyed by the very truth that I was facing every night.

I had only once felt the insurmountable mana pressure he had, and I knew that that was not nearly everything he was capable of. Every night I thought about different ways to beat him, but none could possibly work. He was like a wall that I tried to climb, a wall so slippery that every time I tried to get any higher I would just slip right off again with no way to get past a certain point... and right now that certain point was approaching him. If he truly wanted us dead he would have killed us before or after the tour he gave us of the fort, but no, he said that he would wait for us, that he would let us become stronger so that we might stand a chance. He was mocking us, and I hated it when people mocked me!

I hit the table, making the plates and such shake and making the tower of food that Sarah had carefully built fall over... just like my confidence at the moment Altair had revealed part of his strength. I sighed again.

"Someday we'll get there, and that will be the day we torture that fucker," I said, quietly enough so that no one else would hear me.

A smile crept across our faces.

"And if we just work our way through the church we'll run into him anyway," Sarah said. "So all we really have to do is train and wait."

I chuckled.

"Yes, eventually he'll come to us on his own anyway..." I said as I stared at the wooden table. "And we'll need to be ready then..."

This might have been the first time in both my lives that I was genuinely afraid of someone. Who knew what types of magic he would find in this crazy world, who knew what plans Nexus had... who knew when that man showed up again and changed everything? In this world I couldn't plan ahead like I could on earth, in this world I can merely hope for the best... at least until I find out more about it.

Once the three of us were done eating we went to the mana training chambers, walking past a crying blue-skinned girl and her one-armed friend in the corridor.

"How could he lie to us like that?" the girl asked at the moment we went past them. "I'll fucking kill him!"

I grinned as I went past them.

Looks like little old Ethan has made a lot of enemies already.