Lydia raised her hand.

The four other members of her group came to an immediate halt, holding their breaths in perfect synchronicity.

Lydia, the scout of the team, slowly brought her hand down in a controlled motion.

"We're inside the enclave," she declared, turning to look at her four comrades behind her.

Ilya gulped. Her breath came slightly uneven.

"We should still continue underground until we reach the Saytan estate," the bearer of golden eyes said, looking at the phantom scout.

They all turned to the only one who could guide them to the Saytans' — Ilya.

With the former Warlord's memory of the place being century old, he is in no state to guide them through in a underground sewer.

The woman wrapped in Rune's coat exhaled deliberately. The expelled air seemed to strengthen her conviction physically.

"I will," she declared firmly.

Then she raised her head to look at the one leading them.

"But let's talk about the creatures wandering above first."

The doll-like face behind her glasses was utterly serious as she spoke those words.

'Creatures?'

Ilya's four companions thought simultaneously, each immediately understanding the implication. But the weight of that understanding was heavy enough to demand confirmation.

"...Creatures. Do you mean demons?"

The frost user was the first to speak the word aloud.

Ilya turned to look at the one sharing the lustrous coat with Rune, whose ice-blue eyes reflected concern in the darkness.

"Yes. The demonization..." Ilya paused, swallowing. "It wasn't in preparatory stages like we thought. It's happening."

She stood firm against the flood of unpleasant memories threatening to overwhelm her — memories of the grotesque creatures she'd witnessed herself.

The revelation shook everyone.

Everyone except the regressor.

His mind raced.

'Another variable...'

'Is this also caused by another system user?'

[No. This one has nothing to do with system users,] a blue window appeared before Rune, bearing the words of Nexar, the Warlord's Carnal System. Only his golden eyes could perceive it.

'What? Didn't you say systems are the only variables in a regression?'

The owner of the system asked, bewildered.

[Rune, I'm not allowed to tell you what happened outside your realm, nor can I tell you what will happen. Either way, whatever is occurring has nothing to do with us. It was a simple correction. The God's touch.]

The blue window bearing the words of his oldest companion still didn't make complete sense.

But Rune's brain pieced together fragments of previous conversations, assembling them into one sentence Nexar had risked telling him before.

'The thread of fate has been pulled.'

He remembered those exact words from Nexar when his ingot had reached the Duchess's hands.

[Yeah,] the S+ tier system confirmed.

[And the effects of it are making this world fall back into order.]

The wielder of crimson aura nodded slowly.

Understanding that he couldn't progress by dwelling on issues he had no access to knowledge about, the wielder of Blood Raven held his stunned companion beside him gently.

The silver-haired girl came back to her senses.

"The demons produced artificially are ranked in tiers," Rune spoke, watching three of his companions look at him from the darkness of the underground sewer.

He understood now. The changes had occurred after the thread of fate was pulled. That meant.... since this had nothing to do with systems, events should have taken place in the same order as his past life.

'If that's true...'

"The demonization project hasn't been running long enough to produce higher-tier demons," He declared with certainty.

The phantom and Ilya both nodded.

Lydia knew he was from the future. And the bearer of Omni-Aptitude(S+) was now certain of it too.

"The demonization is similar to how prismal conduits work."

The commander of Orcs recalled the functioning of prismal conduits during their encounter with Merin.

She glanced at Merin, who was visibly stunned by Ilya's revelation.

The former inquisitor from SBV didn't know about demonization either, it seemed.

The bearer of soft touch continued speaking.

"They were humans once. But not anymore. And there's no way to bring back their lost humanity."

His three companions froze.

Merin was an exception, she'd never valued human life particularly highly anyway.

But the other three weren't like that.

Even knowing there was nothing they could do to save the former humans... it wasn't easy to cut down creatures wearing the faces of their own race. At least not without decades of experience doing exactly that.

And none of his companions possessed such experience.

The former Warlord remembered vividly the trouble he'd faced when he'd first taken on demons alongside Kael in his past life.

He hadn't been entirely sure if killing them was the correct course of action.

But Kael had moved with absolute precision with no hesitation whatsoever.

She'd said just one sentence that had removed all his confusion on that battlefield.

And now he decided to repeat those exact words.

"It's not us who wrote the fates of these poor souls, nor have we written their families'. But we were fated to bear this task — the task of purging evil with our blades. Whether it's sin or virtue, that's for the gods to decide. Our job is to walk the path fate has laid before us... even if it means we have to color it crimson."

Ilya's composure began to recover visibly as the weight of Rune's words settled over her.

The three companions nodded, each finding their own resolve in his statement.

'Sorry, Kael. Gotta steal the credit,' he apologized inwardly... though there was no sincerity whatsoever behind the thought.

"Okay. Let's get out of this underground drainage," Lydia declared, already focusing her vampiric hearing toward sources of airflow and movement above.

Just like that, the five humans made their way beneath the Saytan estate under Ilya's careful guidance.

They decided to surface there... directly into enemy territory.

Ready to face the creatures lurking above.

Ready to discover what had transpired that led to the death of the most powerful figure in the Imperium.

All with just one weapon among them.

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