The Guardian System: The strongest Summoner's quest to save his family-Chapter 442: Kingsgate’s Operation (2)

There was a room on the third floor of a building that had once been a hotel, back before the system turned the world into something that killed people for a living. Jorik had taken it over six weeks ago, clearing out the other tenants, killing them, of course.

The walls were bare now. The furniture that hadn't been useful was pushed into a corner. What remained was a table covered in maps, a chair, and a cot that Jorik rarely used because he didn't sleep the way he used to.

He stood at the table, tracing a route on the map of Kingsgate, when the door opened without a knock.

Two of his people came in at the same time, almost crashing in the doorway. That alone told him something was wrong, because his people did not rush usually, as things went bad only when Reidar was involved, but he was not there now.

They had also been instructed not to rush, because rushing made noise, and noise attracted attention, and in Kingsgate that attention could come from the Aegis Phalanx or from the monsters still circling around the city.

The first one through the door was a woman named Sable, one of his best field commanders, a level 310 who had been with the church long enough to even get Silas's attention.

The second was a younger man, Ferren, who ran the eastern safe house and whose skin had just started to show the first signs of mutation, since he got rid of the system not long ago.

Both of them were breathing harder than they should have been.

Jorik lifted his finger from the map and looked at them.

"What's going on?"

Sable was the first to speak. "We're under attack. The northern warehouses were hit five minutes ago. We lost contact with everyone there."

Jorik's expression didn't change. "From whom?"

"We don't know the full picture yet," Ferren said. "The runners from the northern district said they started seeing monsters in the streets."

Jorik kept his eyes on Sable. "There are always monsters outside." Jorik paused. "How many?"

"We don't know either," she said. "The runner said the streets were full of them. He counted at least a few thousand before he stopped counting and ran."

Jorik looked at Sable. He did not like where this was going. He kept his face still to maintain the illusion of control, but his mind was racing with the reasons for this, none of which were good for him or the church.

"Tell me what he saw," Jorik said.

Sable pressed her lips together, then spoke. "Undead, mostly. Armored skeletons, some kind of dead warriors in full plate. But there were also flying monsters—large ones, he said. Black and multi-limbed."

"And the other report?" Jorik said, looking at Ferren.

"The same," Ferren said. "But from the southern quarter near the granary. Many of our people there said they saw animals in the streets. Not normal animals. They said one of them was the size of a building and had seven heads."

Jorik turned back to the map.

Seven-headed animals. Undead warriors. Large flying creatures.

He knew what those were. If the creatures weren't attacking each other, it meant they were together, and if they were together, there was just one possibility: a summoner was behind this. However, there was only a summoner that could pose a problem to the church.

<But Reidar Miller had been pulled through the portal.>

Though it was clear it was him. This was Reidar's army, not an army of wild monsters.

Jorik's jaw tightened. He kept his hands flat on the table because lifting them would have let Sable and Ferren see the tremor that had moved through his fingers when he realized what was going on.

Reidar Miller was alive.

That should not have been possible. The portal that Mara opened at the outpost had been designed with one purpose—to pull Reidar through and drop him somewhere he could not come back from.

The magic circles that connected to whatever planet he should have landed on were one-way by design; building one in normal circumstances was hard enough, but making a circle on the other side to return was something that needed materials, knowledge, and time that no one on that planet should have had. The monsters should have been too strong, at least in theory, even for Reidar to survive.

<Yet he is here.>

The trap had worked. Jorik was there. Damn, he barely escaped that time. Reidar had clearly gone through the portal. But gone was not the same as dead, and somewhere between then and now, the man had found a way back.

Which raised a question that Jorik did not like to think about.

Mara had been the only one who could open a portal between worlds between the two. The magic circles she designed were hers—her knowledge, her craftsmanship, her understanding of how ambient mana could be shaped into a bridge between two points in space that had no business being near each other.

Jorik knew the theory, too. After all, the origin came from the progenitor, a man so smart that he could do something like that two months after the start of the apocalypse.

He had studied it enough to understand what he was looking at when he saw a magic circle. But despite it being possible to create one, it should have been hard, especially for someone like Reidar, who had no training in magic circle building and lacked the skills in free-form mana manipulation.

Reidar had no training in magic circle building. He was a summoner, and his power came from the system in ways that had nothing to do with the kind of free-form mana manipulation that portal building required, which made his success in creating a portal even more surprising.

Even with months of study, he should not have been able to build a circle capable of getting him back to Earth.

This implied that either someone had assisted him, or Mara had personally opened the portal.

Both options were bad, but for different reasons. If someone had helped him, then Reidar would have found allies that Jorik knew nothing about, who had a comparable level of knowledge as the church had.

Not that the Allied Worlds didn't, but based on what his spies said, the Aegis refused to go rescue Reidar wherever he landed, so their help had to be excluded.

If Mara had opened the portal herself, then she betrayed the church.

Jorik put the question aside because the army in the streets didn't care about his conclusions.

"How many locations have been hit?" Jorik said.

"At least 20 that we know of," Sable said. "Including the northern warehouse, the Carden Street building, the relay point near the survivor's camp, and the secondary storage near the eastern road."

Jorik looked at the map. Those four locations covered most of the area under their control inside Kingsgate. The Carden Street building was where the teleportation circle was. If that was already gone, then the outpost on the other side was also gone.

He pulled his finger back from the map and straightened up.

"How many of our people are dead?"

"We don't know," Ferren said. "We've been getting runners in for the last ten minutes. The ones who made it out said they barely got ahead of the undead, and it was just because they didn't chase. The streets are filling up fast."

Jorik looked at the two of them standing in the doorway, still breathing hard, waiting for him to tell them what to do. He thought about the Progenitor. He thought about the food in the warehouses and how much of it had been destroyed and how much was still sitting in storage waiting to be used.

He thought about Reidar Miller, who had just dismantled months of careful work.

Then he stopped thinking and gave the order.

"Execute the emergency plan," Jorik said.