When calculating someone’s strength, their raw power often didn’t bear all that much of a weight.

Wielding an overwhelming strength without appropriate skill would often yield lesser results than using average strength but in a skillful way.

That’s why, while the yellow-caps were pretty much all on the level of adolescent goblins… Their threat level was that of an orc.

Yellow-caps rarely had any means of engaging the enemy at a long distance, forcing them to rely on stealth to mask their movements and presence. But again, with the strength of a mere adolescent goblin, even a teenager could outmatch them in a direct, face-to-face confrontation.

What made those yellow-caps such a menace on every battlefield they appeared, was how deviously they excelled at fights concluded at medium range.

The yellow-caps opened up their arms the moment Leo pushed the two youths towards them as if they couldn’t wait to embrace the two humans falling their way.

In reality, though, the very moment those fiends opened up their arms, they swung on their hips, pushing their rigid bolt-swings to the back, ready to then throw their arm forth, ejecting crude bolts from simplistic sling-type launchers.

All this tool did was give them better leverage over the power they used to throw the bolts, allowing their small unit to create a dense volley of extremely fast projectiles.

Then, again.

With the two youths falling right into the midst of their ranks, only about half of the yellow-caps managed to get their throws off. And with so many gaps within the volley, Leo didn’t even need to dig for another monster core to fuel his dodge.

The fumes remaining from when he powered his strike were more than enough for him to achieve that goal.

‘Scare for a scare,’ Leo thought, watching how the two kids, or rather two young men somewhere in their early twenties, scrambled to get up and fight off the desperately attacking goblins.

“I will leave those to you!” Leo shouted only to turn away and look over to where yet another wave of monsters was forming to charge him down. “With how small those are, I think you should be able to somehow manage!”

Despite not using it himself, Leo could easily see just how powerful the system-based powers appeared to be.

The fireball that one of the youths threw at the goblin just a mere moment ago wasn’t all that weak.

It was late to the party rather than insufficient to deal with the target. Sure, it might have lacked in the cinematography and showmanship department… But it was by no means a weak attack.

‘If that’s the baseline of what this system allows everyone to do, they shouldn’t have that much problem dispatching those annoying bastards,’ Leo thought, turning his attention back to where the next wave of monsters already formed up and headed their way.

There was a huge list of extremely important benefits to having those two youths die.

First, it was not yet time for Leo to reveal any details about his power, especially when it came from a source different than this alien circuit. That held true all the more with Leo’s growing anxiety over the true purpose of this foreign system.

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Then there was the point of making it a point how dangerous those portals are to his friends and family, hopefully discouraging them from ever risking their lives on the path Leo already learned not to be rewarding at all.

‘I’m long gone down this route, but if I can stop those brats from getting themselves hurt…’

Leo gnashed his teeth.

There were a lot more reasons, one more important than the other, for those two to lay their lives down in this portal. But not a single one of them would make Leo push them directly to their deaths.

There was no need for him to dirty his hands and plunge his soul even further down the abyss. All he had to do, was stay true to his own words and hold his hand back when the reality of this portal would inevitably bear down upon those two greenhorns.

“I still should have some time,” Leo muttered as he glanced in the direction of the next swarm of monsters rushing his way.

Even though the fiends were all over this huge plain… it took them time to notice, gather up, and then launch an attack. And by the looks of things, the young man still had more than enough time.

Wasting not a further second of it, Leo moved back to the field of green corpses, pushing his foot underneath the blade of a random knife only to kick up, tossing the weapon right into his right hand. Then, as if he was trying to rip open the packaging of a Christmas present, he plunged the knife right into the middle of an orc’s chest before dragging it up to open it up.

The young man’s hand shot into the bloody, stinky mess of the orc’s insides, easily tracking a slightly bigger monster core located above its spine.

‘I remember there being some theories of whether orcs are evolved goblins or if they are an entirely different species altogether,’ Leo smiled at his memories.

It took a random, middle-rank adventurer pointing out the different locations of the monster core within color-caps and the orcs for the egg-heads of that world to finally settle the dispute.

And now, with a single pull, Leo harvested the core that served as the greatest proof of those two fiends belonging to entirely different species.

‘I really hate this moment, after all,’ Leo thought, staring down not at the perfectly round core in his palm but at all the disgustingly green blood that covered his arm all the way up to his elbow. ‘I nearly forgot how much of a pain it is to harvest them by hand.’

Leo breathed out and closed his eyes, only to take a huge, steady breath right as he crushed the beautiful core in his palm.

This time, however, he directed the majority of the surging mana toward his second legacy core.

Or, to be more specific, the very outer layer of it, made up of the very simplest procedures and invocations he studied when merely taking a dip into the magical theory of his second lifetime.

And all of those, all of this codified knowledge boiled down to just a single, most basic ready-made invocation.

‘Come to Daddy,’ Leo called out in his thoughts, sending a second surge of mana directly from the crushed orc’s core into his second legacy.

The first layer of the second legacy core amounted to nothing more but simple telekinesis. The act of altering vectors of physical matter with just the use of magical power.

A power that one could invoke with a bunch of simplistic procedures and chants… Brought to the ridiculous level of over-complication, a fruit of Leo bringing all of his love for coding into a world ruled by magic.

Where others limited themselves to pretty much three words of invocation to make something move, Leo constructed a complex array of factors, functions, and variables. But where others could use telekinesis to move a specified object a certain distance by carefully managing the mana output for their invocation, Leo could just throw some mana at his logic construct to freely alter a huge array of items, all at once.

It was a power of endless potential… as long as it was used outside of the battlefield, where just the fluctuations of mana would bug this entire layer of Leo’s legacy out.

Out in the open, with nothing more but passive remains of the deceased fiends, though?

The bodies of all appeared to lift up, only for their chests to erupt as small projectiles shot out from their insides. Shooting through the air, those projectiles cast away all of the disgusting, green blood that covered them only to slow down and orderly fall into Leo’s open palm.

The second wave of the fiends was getting closer and closer, leaving Leo with no more than ten seconds before the deadly combat would ensue.

‘Now then, how do I make sure I won’t overdo it?’ he thought, taking a quick glance over his shoulder.

The two kids managed to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. And while there were some bloody spots on their hands and torsos… They now looked like bullies who suddenly found themselves in a room full of weak nerds and an absolute lack of responsibility for the outcome.

In simple words, after suffering through the initial shock of what happened, those two have now turned into an absolute menace to the now mostly powerless yellow-caps.

With those two in mind, Leo had to perfectly calculate the number of monsters he would slaughter, leaving just enough of them alive for those two to either die… Or prove that in dire times, they could become something more than the filth of the society, become someone responsible enough to allow wielding the power that the system offered.

‘That is, unless…’ Leo thought, only to turn his eyes back to the charging swarm… No, charging horde of the fiends.

The warm-up period of the portal challenge was now over. And rather than trickling monsters for its challengers to defeat, it now threw an entire crowd of them all at once.

And mere seconds before the second clash, Leo felt something about the space around him change.

Once again, the fabric of the portal’s world started to warp.