The Guardian System: The strongest Summoner's quest to save his family-Chapter 401: The Last Stop (6)

[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.]

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

…

The Archons didn't retreat. They couldn't. Their orders were to stall. To delay. To die if necessary.

They died.

The titan crushed, swatted, cut, and tore them apart.

But it was slowing down at least. The constant attacks, the shared buffs from Emperor's Decree, and the healing from Wellspring of Vitality were working. The Archons were buying time.

Further down the street, a similar scene played out. Two Feral Ignis had been separated from their pack by walls of minions.

Their weapons blurred as they held off the tide, but the Emperor's Decree buff allowed the summons to survive hits that should have been fatal. The Archons, reduced to 1 HP, were healed instantly by the Legion's Immortality effect, allowing them to keep fighting.

Despite the Ignis being very adept at avoiding attacks, the sheer volume of attacks eventually found purchase. An Archon landed a Frost Nova on the leg joint of one Ignis, making it extremely hard for it to move, and Crushing Presence made it even slower.

A swarm of Sky-Hunters descended on it, blinding it. The monster could only respond by swinging its weapon wildly, which made it decapitate its partner by mistake in the chaos.

The injured Ignis fell seconds later under a tsunami of elemental bolts.

[Level 574 Elite Feral Ignis defeated.]

[Level 567 Elite Feral Ignis defeated.]

Three total. Three out of thousands.

The army was decreasing slower than Reidar expected. The Archons could summon more of themselves.

It was something, though. The strategy was working—barely.

—***—

Reidar lifted his head upward and saw that he had arrived at his destination—the palace.

The structure was finally before him. Up close, the building was even more impressive; in fact, it was so huge that it actually dwarfed everything around it.

All the other buildings in the city seemed small compared to this monstrosity, and yet they weren't.

The walls rose for at least a hundred meters high, and it was made of white stone carved with patterns that showed the Ignis weren't just good at fighting but also talented in arts.

<Like humans…>

The spires pierced the sky like broken teeth, their tips lost in the swirling darkness above, and while their summit was much higher than the walls and intimidating to see, nothing was as big and as imposing. No… as scary… as the vortex above the palace was.

The vortex dominated everything. It stretched most likely across the entire city, a swirling maelstrom of purple and black that blotted out the sky.

One would expect rain to fall from such a massive cluster of clouds, but it didn't. Instead, wind churned out from it, concentrating the clouds even more rather than scattering them.

The clouds spiraled inward, rotating the same way they had during the apocalypse on Earth. Only this vortex was far smaller than what he'd seen on the day of the catastrophe.

The center was darker than the rest, a void that pulled at his vision. He couldn't look away. A chill ran through him because of the wrongness of it. The vortex felt alive, like it was watching him, waiting for him. His heart hammered in his chest, and for a moment, doubt crept in. What if he wasn't strong enough? What if this was where it all ended?

At that point his wolf stopped at the entrance to the palace grounds.

Reidar had pushed his wolves to their absolute limits, driving them forward without respite, and now the magnificent beasts were showing signs of exhaustion. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

<Sorry, guys…>

Reidar didn't have a choice, though. Mara was here; of this there was no doubt, and she was opening the portal right at this moment. If Reidar didn't leave now, he would be stuck in this godforsaken place for the rest of his life, or at least until he figured out how to make portals himself, if he could do it at all.

<That could happen in years… What would become of Earth during that time?>

Reidar dismounted from his wolf and checked his surroundings. Twenty-two wolves surrounded him, and twenty-two Shadow Sovereigns stood beside them.

He didn't know what he'd find inside the palace. In theory, Mara should have been weaker than him because she was lower level, but that was just theory, and theory had a habit of getting its ass kicked by reality on a regular basis.

Mara didn't have the system—that much was certain. Which meant she absorbed mana from the environment, plus whatever she gained from the monsters she killed. If she did it at all, of course.

And this planet had millennia for the mana to seep into its every crevice, saturating the air, the stone, and the very fabric of reality itself. How much power had she accumulated in the time she'd been here? How much had she grown while he was still struggling to find her?

Forty-four summons should have been enough.

<Probably. Maybe.>

Reidar had absolutely no idea. At the same time, he couldn't just dismiss his army of archons—because the second he did, every monster they were babysitting would come stampeding here like it was Black Friday and the palace was the last TV on sale.

Summoning the archons inside the palace meant the ones still in the city would vanish. The moment he called forth new forces here, the summons outside would disappear. But Reidar still had his 22 Shadow Sovereigns, and they could use the skills he shared through his trait. He wouldn't go into this fight alone.

Plus, his mana was full. With all the summons he recursively brought to this world, his mana regeneration was impossibly high.

He just needed to give the order to summon them, but not yet; first, he had to figure out what he was dealing with inside.

And so, Reidar stepped in, followed by the giant wolves and the ephemeral shadows.