The ground shook as the Twin Boulderback Behemoths slammed their stone fists against the outer walls of Ashford. The metal plating groaned; the rivets popped under the strain of the siege units.

Viren didn't wait for the walls to be breached. He knew the guards couldn't handle the Titans or the other creatures, so the job of killing as many of them as possible fell on him.

<This Miller bastard!>

He stepped off the ramparts and dissolved into a streak of darkness, using his spells to reappear outside the base, right in the middle of the horde of monsters.

He raised both hands. The shadows cast by the light-generating spells elongated the shadows, which also increased their strength and made it easier for them to solidify into the razor-sharp spikes he wanted them to be.

Abyssal Thorns.

The surrounding ground erupted. Black spikes skewered three hundred skeletal warriors in a single second. Bones shattered, and the summons dissolved into mana mist. But of course, his target wasn't the skeletons.

Reidar watched from the ridge, his eyes locked on the Deacon. He checked the System tag again.

—[<<Mikko Viren—Level 335>>]—

Reidar's summons were scaled to his level, boosted by his perks to do more than a simple level 308 summon would, but there still was a twenty-seven-level gap.

In the past, Reidar had bridged gaps like that with numbers. But he knew the math changed after Level 300.

A Level 335 creature wasn't just numerically stronger than something under level 300; it operated on a different tier of physics, and while Reidar crossed that threshold too, the gap between levels was higher compared to when he was still under the level 300 threshold. The monsters' skin was harder, their reflexes faster, and their spells more efficient.

"He's fast," Reidar said. He didn't look at Lena or Jake, who were currently sneaking their way to the base and pushing the guards. He kept his eyes on Viren. "Maybe a little too much."

Below, Viren moved as a blur of motion while a Cinderheart Efreeti hovered above him, unleashing a Fireball that turned the air into a shimmering haze of heat.

Instead of dodging, Viren cast Umbral Cloak, blocking the fire from striking him and then vanishing, absorbed by the darkness wrapping his body.

He retaliated with a Void Slash, sending a crescent of black energy tearing through the air that bisected the Efreeti, causing the elemental to explode into sparks and vanish.

Viren spun, and as he did, he moved his hands. With every gesture he made, he claimed dozens of lives, which quickly turned into hundreds.

Although the Vorathid Foragers tried to swarm him with clicking mandibles, he simply expanded his control over the shadows, causing the insects to be impaled by shadow constructs before they could even touch him, until the Twin Boulderbacks finally turned their attention toward him.

This was all part of Reidar's plan. He needed Viren to believe the goal was breaching the walls—so the Deacon would position himself between the army and the base to grab his attention. In reality, Reidar wanted him exactly there: trapped in the middle of the swarm, unable to protect Ashford, and right where he was at his strongest.

When one of the stone giants raised its foot to crush the Deacon, Viren looked up but chose not to block, knowing his physical defense was not enough to tank a direct hit from such a siege unit. He was a mage, after all.

Instead, he cast Shadow Bind, summoning thick tendrils of darkness that wrapped around the Boulderback's legs and shattered them when he clenched his fist.

As the giant crashed to the ground with enough force to shake the valley, Viren jumped onto the fallen Titan's back and used another spell, Implode, to collapse its head into gravel.

This was repeated many, many times, and while Viren stood on the corpse of the last titan he killed, scanning a battlefield littered with bone shards and dissipating mana, he expected the enemy to pull back after losing thousands of units. Instead, the ground rumbled again as more Twin Boulderbacks clawed their way out of the earth.

Viren frowned at the sight, reasoning that the immense mana cost of summoning Titans should have exhausted even a dedicated summoner's reserves by now.

Yet, the swarm on the ridge was thickening rather than thinning; Spectral Legions reformed instantly, and when Viren cast another one of his skills, Shadow Wave, to clear a hundred-meter circle, the space was filled again within five seconds.

He looked up at the ridge. The swarm wasn't thinning. It was getting thicker.

"This doesn't make sense," Viren said to himself, checking his mana and realizing that while he was using it efficiently, given the slaughter he was making, he used quite a lot, and his mana wasn't endless.

Then he turned to the horde trying to kill him, and he felt a cold drop of sweat slide down his back when two Bark Behemoths replaced the one he had just destroyed, forcing him to acknowledge that he was fighting a tide that didn't care how many buckets of water he scooped out.

At that moment, Viren realized that the only way to stop the onslaught was to kill Reidar Miller.

He was killing the summons, but the summoner was safe somewhere else. So, Viren looked around, trying to spot the summoner through the chaos.

"If I kill him, all of this will end."

He prepared a Shadow Step to move around.

But before he could move, three Twin Boulderbacks surrounded him. They didn't attack. They simply fell on him.

They threw their bodies forward, creating a collapsing wall of stone.

Viren was forced to cancel the teleport and cast Dome of Night, the same skill he used inside the ritual chamber, to protect himself from the crushing weight.

The stone giants slammed into his barrier, burying him under tons of rock.

Inside the dark dome, Viren gritted his teeth. He pushed mana into the shield, hearing the stone grinding against the barrier.

He was pinned. He wasn't hurt, but he was stuck. To get out, he would have to blast the stone away, wasting more mana, or hop into the shadows.

And he knew that the moment he cleared the rubble, three more giants would be waiting to take its place.

For the first time since the apocalypse began, Viren questioned if his high level actually mattered. He had the power of a god, but he was being buried by ants, or at least that was his impression of the situation.

The ants weren't stopping either.

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