The Guardian System: The strongest Summoner's quest to save his family-Chapter 400: The Last Stop (5)

Reidar spurred the wolf forward, and the beast leaped over a pile of rubble. The wind was getting worse.

It whipped against his face, carrying stinging particles of ash that forced him to squint.

The mana concentration was dropping fast. Reidar sensed it clearly. The oppressive density that had weighed on Kilovar since he'd arrived was now draining northward, pouring toward the portal like rain spiraling into a drain.

<If the summons fails, I'm about to have a very short and excruciating meet-and-greet with some very angry monsters.>

It was just a fact. He had left fourteen thousand Archons and many other Vorathid Sky-Hunters behind to create a diversion.

If the Ignis or the Titans broke through that line before he reached Mara, they would run him down. He was Level 530, but that meant nothing against Level 650 titans or patrols of Level 570 Ignis. One hit would be enough.

He urged the wolves to go faster.

<Damn it. Hurry up before I become the world's most over-leveled chew toy.>p.>

While the mana in the area thinned more and more, and the wind increased. Reidar was not only worried about his summons failing their job in luring the monsters. That wasn't the only problem.

With the mana thinning and increasing where the portal was, all monsters would be attracted to the castle, so Reidar had to be fast, and at the same time, his summons had to do a flawless job.

Besides, that would just buy him minutes, not hours. Eventually, the charm of the portal would override their territorial instincts, and they would go to the palace.

The stakes were actually higher than just Reidar and Mara's lives because if a horde of level 500 and 600 monsters reached the palace while the portal was open, they wouldn't just kill the two.

They would follow the portal back to Earth. The thought made his stomach tighten. Even with the Aegis Phalanx and the Church going hand in hand, Earth's defenses could not handle a single one of the Titans sleeping in this city, let alone an army of elite Ignis.

Reidar looked up at the sky. The vortex above widened with each passing second, pulling ash and debris into its spiral, and the larger it got, the larger was the portal below it.

—***—

Miles away, the streets of Kilovar had turned into a grinder.

The Archon Rift-Lords did not feel fear, which was lucky because they were dying by the hundreds every second.

The Feral Ignis had smashed into the front lines of the summons like a hammer hitting glass. The difference in attributes was overwhelming in a direct confrontation. When an Ignis swung its sword, it didn't just kill the target it hit; the shockwave of the impact shattered the Archons standing behind it.

The Archon Rift-Lords died in droves, but that didn't mean they didn't stand their ground.

The street was choked with their bodies, corpses piling atop one another in twisted heaps. As the Feral Ignis carved through the ranks, the Archons responded with a barrage of spells, which created sparks in the sky that made everything look like a celebration.

The air shimmered with heat, cold, and mana residue, and the smell of burning corpses mixed with ash, creating a suffocating miasma that clung to everything it touched.

Fireballs, lightning bolts, and void spheres slammed into the Ignis, but the elite monsters barely slowed down.

One Ignis waded through the spell-fire, crushing skulls and ribcages with brutal savagery.

However, the Archons had numbers. It was going to be difficult even for the Ignis, which numbered no more than a couple of thousand, to go through so many summons.

An Ignis swung its blade-arm through many Archons at once, destroying the summons and dispersing their mana into the air.

[Your Summon (Archon Rift-Lord) has been destroyed.]

[Your Summon (Archon Rift-Lord) has been destroyed.]

[Your Summon (Archon Rift-Lord) has been destroyed.]

…

[Your Summon (Archon Rift-Lord) has been destroyed.]

[Your Summon (Archon Rift-Lord) has been destroyed.]

[Your Summon (Archon Rift-Lord) has been destroyed.]

…

[Your Summon (Archon Rift-Lord) has been destroyed.]

[Your Summon (Archon Rift-Lord) has been destroyed.]

[Your Summon (Archon Rift-Lord) has been destroyed.]

But the Archons were not fighting alone.

Thousands of Vorathid Sky-Hunters dived, aiming for the monsters in suicide attacks that could at best slow them down and allow the other archons to land one or two hits before getting killed themselves.

However, most of the Sky-Hunters were swatted away like flies, resulting in explosions that dealt damage to quite a number of monsters.

Yet for every bug that died, two more were summoned by the archons. The strategy here wasn't to win, after all. It was to keep the monsters focused on them and not on the portal, not on the castle where Reidar was going.

The Vorathid Sky-Hunters swarmed a Level 580 Ignis, covering its face to blind it while stabbing it with their stingers. The creature thrashed, killing dozens of them with each sweep of its arms, but the insects kept coming.

The battle shifted when the debuffs took hold.

Gaze of the Pariah had been cast on every enemy in range. The red sigils glowing above the Ignis's heads lowered their physical and magical resistances by half. That helped, and quite a lot at that.

A group of fifty Archon Rift-Lords focused their fire on an Ignis, and as a concentrated beam of energy struck it in the chest, the monster stumbled and fell, and the Sky-Hunters descended on it.

They drove their stingers into the exposed flesh beneath the buckled plate. The Ignis thrashed, killing a dozen insects with a swipe of its weaponized arms, but the damage was done.

The poison and the magical bombardment overwhelmed its massive S.H.I.E.L.D., and the monster, unable to move, got struck by another volley of spells. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

[Level 580 Elite Feral Ignis defeated.]

One down. It was the first Ignis Reidar's army managed to kill, but given the level difference, it was bound to give him a lot of C.L.A.S.P. points, and Reidar desperately needed more power.

The notification flashed in Reidar's vision, and he dismissed it without a second thought.

Another group of Archons engaged a titan, though the Level 610 creature ignored them at first because there was far better prey in the area. Then a Lightning Archon struck it in the eye with a Thunder Strike, and the titan roared and turned, sweeping its tail to kill at least 300 Archons.