Different shouts erupted across the plain, a chaotic chorus of desperation and disbelief, yet John wasn’t fazed in the slightest.

When he heard Zockair’s name ripple through the air, he couldn’t help but turn his gaze toward Ricky. The two shared a momentary, silent glance; Ricky, as if reading his friend’s mind, pointed with a trembling sword toward the crest of a distant hill.

There, silhouetted against the fracturing white sky, John saw two bodies sprawled on the grass. With the help of his Wireframe Sight, he could see their nature. One was undeniably human, pulsing with a volatile energy; the other was a fallen cyborg.

"Mark," John muttered, his voice a low growl. He clenched his fists before he started to move.

He didn’t give a single moment of heed to the enemies rushing to intercept him. To John, they were no longer obstacles; they were background noise.

With a flick of his wrist, he deployed lots of defences, taking out his mobile fortresses. The massive, metallic behemoths slammed into the earth with a ground-shaking thud, their boarded defences whining as they locked on different targets, ready to kill.

"This... How is this possible?!"

"How can he still get access to his storage device?! The suppression field is absolute!"

"Impossible!! The woman’s sacrifice should have locked everyone’s storage space!"

John didn’t care about their confusion. He didn’t even bother to build a full-scale outpost or lay down many defences. He could tell, just by the way they moved and the density of the code clusters in his vision, that these folks were roughly on par with Ricky’s level.

They possessed a few dozen special white codes. They were dangerous to a normal student, to Ricky perhaps. To John, they were just harmless flies.

However, out there on that distant hill, the sight was different. Zockair was made of something John had never seen before: clusters of deep, pulsing red codes. He had never encountered red clusters in a human before, and that told him everything he needed to know.

Zockair was the real deal, mistaking him as the source of the power that had demanded such a high cost to breach the dungeon.

Oblivious to the exact mechanics of the backlash, why Zockair was lying on the ground twitching like he was being tortured by invisible lightning, John refused to risk a single moment. It was his luck to find that strong foe in such a weakened state.

Removing the king of this board was the top priority. As for the fodder closing in from behind, he left them to the roaring muzzles of his mobile fortresses and the vengeful blades of Ricky.

When Ricky saw the mobile fortresses manifest and John’s direct sprint toward Zockair, he knew exactly what was going to happen. While the brothers were fixated on the metallic behemoths, their eyes wide at the sudden appearance of walls, weird towers, and deadly cannons, Ricky moved.

He was a blur of movement, a silent shadow cutting through the distraction. He dashed forward, slashing his swords left and right with a ferocity he had been forced to suppress while cornered. In the first breath of his counterattack, he killed five of his kin before they even realised the prey had turned into a hunter.

"Let’s stop both of them!" one of the brothers shouted, trying to regain control. "Ten with me to hold the line! The rest, go and stop that outsider! Protect Zockair at all costs! If he dies, that outsider will turn his blade next upon us, and we will lose the ritual!"

Ricky knew his window to fight freely was over. The ten brothers turned their blades toward him, but he didn’t feel the crushing pressure he had felt before.

He began to dance between their strikes, engaging them just long enough to draw their focus before retreating in a deliberate, curved path. He was kiting them, leading them directly into the kill zone of the mobile fortresses.

Just as Ricky’s brothers divided their forces, the mobile fortresses finally roared.

BOOM!

The first heavy attack landed right in the centre of the approaching group. It left behind a wide, blackened crater, a fierce trembling in the ground, and a terrifying wave of fire that engulfed three of the brothers who had just moved to intercept John.

The sight of their kin being vaporised by weapons they had never seen before froze everyone in their tracks. Their scalps went numb with an instinctive fear.

"What the hell was that?!"

Before anyone could break free of the fear spell, the mobile fortresses roared again.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Five more terrifying explosions rocked the plain. Eight more enemies were wiped from existence. If the first attack was a shock, the second wave was a massacre. It broke their spirits; they were fighting a war they didn’t understand against an enemy who played by different rules.

During the carnage, Ricky never stopped. He was like a shark in blood-clouded water.

"Snap out of it, or else we’re all going to die here!" one of the remaining brothers screamed, seeing Ricky kill three more of their ranks. Out of the thirty brothers who had entered this ritual with such arrogance, only eleven were left alive, and Zockair was still a crippled mess at the top of the hill.

There was no time left for hesitation. The brother who had shouted took the lead, rallying the survivors. They abandoned their latest strategy and adopted a new one. They charged toward a single point: John.

"Coming for me? Hahaha!" John laughed. Through his Wireframe Sight, he spotted the ten enemies activating their secondary abilities. A forest of tentacles erupted, different sizes, some slick with slime, others covered in chitinous scales. He was genuinely curious to see what each variation had to offer, but he had a bigger threat to kill first.

"Lightning Dance!"

John didn’t waste a second on them. He instantly activated his sword’s special effect. Multiple lightning-tinged shadows of his blade appeared in a flash, slashing against the charging brothers.

The speed was beyond their perception. In one move, the lightning shadows devastated the group, killing them in a single, flickering heartbeat.