Colonel Quinn folded like a lawn chair when faced with the Lord General. The commander of the base essentially rolled out the red carpet for the Xian Lord to do whatever he wanted. Hector didn't judge too harshly. There was no point objecting when the power disparity was such that no one present could do a damn thing to stop an army of Xian ten thousand strong – fully two hundred of which were elites of level eight or nine.

For his part, the Lord General only cared about getting directions to military targets. His lack of interest in the colonel could not be more apparent. Hector cringed as he watched Colonel Quinn make a fool of himself with obsequious offers while the Lord General's attention wandered.

Eventually the show ended. The Lord General pointed to a nearby tower. "Someone fetch that schism beam and we can be off."

The colonel bristled. "Apologies, sir, but the schism beams aren't mobile."

"We can rip them free."

"Sir… why do you need a schism beam?"

"As powerful as my army is, we don't have any means of closing rifts, Jinn."

"I'm sorry, sir, but the power for our schism beams comes from the base power plant."

Thrakkar frowned. "So it won't work if we move it? How do you close rifts, then? Rituals?"

"That's correct, sir."

"Then send a team of Arahants to the rift. The path will be made clear." Without waiting for a response, the Lord General arranged for the ten thousand soldiers present to march on their objective. They didn't bother finding a gate, but vaulted up the rune wall and leaped off to land hard on the other side.

Hector, following Thrakkar's example, used a less efficient means of crossing over and flew.

They returned to the ground to jog at the heart of the small army. Thunder began to rumble as soldiers cast chaos bolts at their own volition. Their formation wasn't strict by any measure, but it gave Hector the impression of casual competence.

Individuals rotated towards the front lines and others stepped back in a manner that suggested some form of self-organization. It reminded Hector of his more experienced work crews in the warehouse. They anticipated each other and made appropriate decisions without exchanging any words. Only each of these soldiers was a killing machine instead of a box packer.

"Training only gets them so far," Thrakkar commented, having noticed Hector's interest. "The experience that teaches best is going to war. That forges soldiers into warriors."

"I'm interested to see what an army of Xian can do, Master Thrakkar."

"Whatever it wants, Hector. The chances of a worthy foe appearing in this area are slim. We are going to crush anything we encounter until we get bored. Then we'll leave."

"I'm not trying to be disrespectful, but why not join the Reconquest? They could use you."

Thrakkar wrinkled his nose like he'd smelled something unpleasant. "There is no point any longer. This world can never recover. There are places where the miasma lays so thick upon the land you can't see anything else for a hundred miles. Killing monsters doesn't do much to help that kind of mess. It just causes their corpses to rot into more miasma to poison the world."

Perhaps if the Xian had gone to war with the monsters instead of invading Volithur's world the Reconquest would have succeeded long since. There was no way to know what might have been if the people in power used their strength to improve the world instead of chasing their whims.

They reached the rift, cleared out the area fast, and moved on. The Lord General watched his soldiers with a critical eye, calling out noteworthy performances good and bad for clerks to record. Hector had never seen the man so energetic.

Scouts were sent out to locate more worthy opponents.

They found only victims to be chewed up by the massed force of a Xian army. Monsters large as city buses were torn apart in seconds. The larger ones lasted slightly longer. Only the centipede put up a semblance of a fight. It regenerated from wounds in real time, drawing forth fresh miasma to patch up flesh. The monster had a peculiar depth to its presence that screeched in Hector's mind with an offensive hatred.

The Lord General laughed as that one died. "It was a potent one. Did you sense it, Hector?"

"Yeah. It was louder than most, Master Thrakkar."

"I wouldn't call it loud." The Lord General lifted a finger as if he was about to say something brilliant. "More like insistent. The way it decayed spatial distance to suck pieces of itself back impressed me. Too bad it lacked offensive capacity."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The monster so casually dismissed would have torn through any of the patrols Hector had been part of. Even the special operations team might not have been able to defeat it. Only the Stronghold itself could reliably handle something like that centipede. And the Lord General's army considered it mere target practice. The monster couldn't even hurt them back.

To the best of his knowledge, not a single one of the ten thousand soldier died that day. He hadn't even heard a single cough from the army. Hector once argued with Greg while being driven to Bay Beach about the strength of Xian. Unsuccessfully, as he recalled – the man had not been willing to accept that anything could approach the power of the celebrity Arahants. Not long after arriving on Union Central, Zelda accused Hector of believing he was superior because he was a Xian. Experiences like those had made him question his assumptions about the natural order of the multiverse.

Now, though, he saw firsthand what an elite army of his kind could do. Closing the rift had been an operation requiring extensive planning for the Stronghold, yet it wasn't even a warm-up for this army. They had yet to find any challenge worth their time. Of course, some of their invincibility had to do with the fact that they were ten thousand in number. Combine that with enough body enhancement to ignore environmental miasma and the army was set up for easy victory.

"I think that's enough," the Lord General said after several hours. They'd slaughtered their way across landscape at a quick pace, drawing crowds of monsters to them with the sounds of battle and the flashy nature of their cosmic energy.

Perry nodded. "Send the troops back to the Stronghold and go out for some fun?"

The Lord General's grin grew. "You are reading my mind."

"You know I can't read, Master Thrakkar."

Everyone laughed as clerks ran to pass the word. The army turned itself back as the retinue formed up around their Lord. The Lord General clapped Hector on the shoulder. "I want to watch you kill something before the rest of us jump in."

Given that request, Hector launched into the air to get some distance from the army. He saw a horde of minor monsters trailing the retreating Xian. Those were not the foes the Lord General intended him to fight, he knew. This was supposed to be a demonstration of combat prowess. Hector had shown up with the core of a man one level his superior and talked about serving in the Reconquest, so there were expectations around his performance.

Eventually he spotted a snail sprouting a menagerie of limbs belonging to other beasts. There was a crab claw, a striped tiger leg, a talon from a bird of prey, several mismatched tentacles, and what looked very much like a human arm. That gave him a moment's pause. Hector had never heard of a monster using human form before.

Then he was diving towards the beast. Hector used a cable to seize one eye stalk and hold it steady. Another whipped out to destroy the visual organ. The moment he blinded that first eye, the stalk broke free of his restraints. It reoriented to point towards him and fired a solid glob of miasma like the eye stalk was a cannon.

Hector barely avoided the attack with a dramatic spin in the air that left him disoriented. He shot upwards to avoid another blast, relying entirely on the touch sense of his domain. Though he'd hated the necessity for it at the time, in retrospect the days spent traversing a mountain through a cave system may have been one of the best training opportunities of his entire life.

He had to descend once more to get close enough to put his cables to work. A quick glance proved that the Lord General and his retinue weren't making any move to assist. They either had a lot of faith in Hector or weren't very dedicated to the survival of someone who couldn't handle himself in a fight. Considering who these people were, it could go either way.

Hector came at the snail from behind, which was less of an advantage than he'd hoped. The remaining eye stalk tracked his position and the bird leg lashed out towards him with unerring accuracy, sharp talons clawing towards him.

In what may be a tactical blunder, Hector decided to eat the attack to return one of his own.

His cable hit hard, gouging a deep wound in the back of the snail, sending a spray of blue blood through the air. Then the talon struck. His flared aura dissipated and blunted the impact. That didn't do much good when the talons wrapped about and immobilized him.

Definitely a blunder.

He'd have to dig himself out of the proverbial hole. Hector sent several cables below to cut at the intersection of bird leg and snail body. The initial success of his maneuver stalled though, with flesh growing supernaturally durable.

Hector didn't put up with that. He shoved one cable into the deepest furrow he'd carved and kinked the end to cause an explosion. The bird leg toppled like a felled tree, claws still wrapped tightly about his midsection. A squid tentacle caught the severed leg and manipulated the angle to put Hector in reach of the crab claw. His cable could not slow the claw to any degree and he had to flare his aura dramatically to prevent his head from being crushed.

After a few moments of struggle, he managed to break open a chink in the armor of the claw and explode a cable inside of it. The attacking limb lost all strength, going limp. Then Hector burst free of the bird leg, which had begun to soften into miasma following its dismemberment.

He was about to fly free when the human hand hurled a gob of liquid miasma at him. The substance hit at supersonic speeds and drove him into the shell of the snail, where he was stuck by the tarry miasma. Without thought, Hector seized the miasma and yanked it away from him.

It shouldn't have worked.

Yet his savage effort caused the splatter of miasma to revert to chaos. It was a partial transformation only, lacking as it did the skillful application of his insight. No cosmic energy. Just an explosion of primordial chaos.

Hector didn't stay in one place to ponder his unexpected fortune. He shot forward to the back of the snail's head and began digging. Surely there would be a brain in there somewhere. The flesh began to harden, but Hector took advantage of that by exploding cables. The eye stalks collapsed as he undermined their bases, leaving the monster blind as it attempted to retaliate.

The tiger paw swiped around wildly, causing more self-inflicted harm than Hector did intentional harm. Soon, there was blue blood leaking everywhere, which darkened and puffed away to become black mist. The snail paused, wobbled in place, and then collapsed like a popped balloon, sending its fell poison exploding outward in a cloud.

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