‘Who?!’

This one question was enough to send Leo’s soul spiraling down into the abyss.

The space twisted and warped in exactly the same place that portal spat Leo out, only to follow it up with the two youths the names of which he couldn’t be bothered to remember.

It was too early for the exit of the portal space to appear too, given how they have yet to accomplish anything meaningful inside. And that implied this twisting of the space could only bear one meaning.

There was someone else in the process of getting inside!

‘Authorities?’ Leo recalled the sight of the police sirens and lights on the other side of the portal.

And while that alone would be problematic…

‘Or did they decide to take the plunge?’

This was the arguably worse possibility, that someone from Leo’s family would put their life on the line by stepping into this portal. And with the alien circuit openly encouraging if not outright pushing people to enter those unknown portals…

‘But all of that means just one thing,’ Leo thought, forcibly calming his thoughts and focusing on the charging horde of monsters. ‘I need to kill them all before anyone appears.’

The two youths were still busy with the remaining few yellow-caps. While this kind of a challenge wasn’t enough to decide whether they were worth being called humans or were run-off-the-mill human garbage… It still forced them to focus all of their attention on their task.

As weak as the yellow-caps were, if even one of them managed to get a good shot at them, the damage would be real, regardless if it was inflicted by a child-like creature or not.

Whoever was coming into this portal’s space, would still need some time to finalize the process.

And the monsters…

They were all charging him down right this very moment!

‘Fuck it,’ Leo cursed under his breath while squeezing the bunch of the freshly harvested monster cores in his fist and instantly pumping the mana into the circuits of the second layer of his second legacy core.

If the first layer was an over-engineered masterpiece of telekinesis, the second layer was simply a spell-book containing all sorts of invocations and functions of the basic tier.

In the strictest of terms, all of those spells were an evolution of telekinesis taken to all sorts of extremes.

A fireball was nothing more than the function of friction described within a formula of a sphere that was then coated in an air-tight barrier and propelled either by the caster’s hand or, in the case of second-grade fireball, launching function stacked on top of the first-grade spell.

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A wind blade, rocky hand, earth-wall, even something as esoteric as life drain… All of those spells could be made by twisting and pushing the limits of telekinesis combined with Leo’s understanding of physics.

If the first layer of Leo’s second legacy core was all about imposing and then abusing the coding logic of a modern world onto magic, then his second layer cast all of this arrogant attitude away and openly used the spells of Leo’s second lifetime the way the natives designed them.

Or, to put it in even simpler terms, if the first layer was a program Leo wrote himself, then the second layer was a list of software he simply copied and repurposed for his own use.

‘Gather it up,’ Leo thought, jumping back a few steps to avoid the furious attacks of the fastest of the fiends within the horde.

The mana surged through the young man’s flesh, pulled into Leo’s second core and following the patterns of the combination of spells he envisioned at the moment’s notice.

The monsters were just ahead. Leo’s desperate jump to the back only bought him a split of a second, before another fiend managed to catch up to him and swing their short, crude sword at his side.

This time, however, the young man didn’t even attempt to dodge… Nor did he attempt to use the knife in his hand to dodge.

Now that he regained the basics of his versatility… How could he block with his knife? In doing so, the blood still stuck to the blade would likely fly off and cover his clothes, making up for a whole other topic Leo would have to deal with after leaving this place.

The fiend attacked, swinging their short sword with all the might of their short arms… Only for the blade to suddenly come to a stop, a mere inch away from his skin.

It didn’t bounce off as if there was a solid barrier separating the man from the fiend. No, it cut straight through the air… But by the time there was only an inch of a space left, the green-cap’s attack lost all of its momentum as if the air itself grew exponentially denser and stickier the closer the blade drew to the young man.

Pac!

An orc’s wrist cracked when it executed a simple, overhead bash with his wooden club… only for its weapon to meet the same fate as the green-cap’s sword.

‘Are those brown-caps?’ Leo thought, calmly arranging all the spells in the fleeting moments of peace he bought at a cost of nearly half of the mana he obtained from the cores while actively scanning the horde of raging fiends.

Brown-caps; goblins that pretty much reached the same threat level as an orc, albeit for all the different reasons.

‘They are still far, so it doesn’t really matter,’ Leo concluded right as the last of the spells he invoked merged into the magical construct of his making.

And for a single instant, everything calmed down.

For but this one, fleeting moment, Leo’s soul merged into the greater whole of the universe.

Everything was in its place. The raging fiends, followed by a bunch of actually dangerous monsters; likely attracted by the smell of blood and a prospect of a great feast.

Twenty massive orcs, hundreds of goblins, both adolescent and cap-colored ones, even the two trolls deeper into the horde…

For but this one, fleeting moment, they all appeared to be right where they should be. Right where they were predestined to be at this very precise instant. And Leo, standing alone against this murderous horde of fiends, wasn’t any different.

He too was right where fate designed him to be.

It wasn’t a moment, though. It could barely be called an instant too. In fact, this experience was so fleeting, it was hardly any different from an illusion, a mere figment of Leo’s imagination.

And in this precise moment, fully at peace with the slaughter he was about to unleash, Leo relaxed the trigger.

‘Release.’

The first invocation he called upon from the second layer of his second legacy core. And due to its nature, it was also the last invocation he influenced with the dominion of his will. A mere framework that held all of the spells he combined into a seed of extremely nasty mayhem.

With this simplistic thought in his mind, Leo reached out, as if to offer a handshake to the orc right in front of him.

The mana sparked from the top of the young man’s fingers.

Each of the thousands of sparks that appeared ignited a predestined array of tri-basic spell.

Press ahead, charge, and ignite.

Move the whole of the magic construct ahead. Condense the mana according to the pattern of the main element of the construct. Ignite the mana, releasing its condensed energy into the physical manifestation of the main element.

Or - in layman's terms Leo would get endlessly scolded for using in his second lifetime - a fireball.

The fleeting moment came… and went.

And while seemingly all Leo did was reach out with his hands to the charging horde…

It was met with a near-instant manifestation of close to two thousand separate fireballs, each exploding and releasing its fiery energy into the depth of the horde's ranks.