The dark embers fell down on the huge, black scar upon the otherwise green face of the huge plain.

The attacking horde…

It would be an overstatement to claim it was now nowhere to be seen.

Leo’s flames were not like the fireballs cast by one of the two youths that joined him in this portal, exploding in every direction upon impact. The spheres of his attack didn’t bloat only to rip at the top and unveil into a huge circle of flames that then fell down to the ground.

No.

Leo’s flames, following the first out of the three components they were made from, all shoot outwards, away from him, and into the ranks of the charging horde.

‘I guess this was even less cinematic than the fireball one of those kids threw,’ Leo thought, inspecting the result of his attack while the impact barrier he erected faded out of existence.

Rather than turning into fireballs, Leo’s flames turned into thin lances, burning through everything that stood in their path. And sure, he never bothered aiming them at anything in particular… but with their sheer number, there was simply no need for him to do so.

Some fiends were unlucky enough to be pierced with enough lances of Leo’s fire for their flesh to go straight past the critical temperature and explode in flames from just the tiny portion of the unleashed energy that transferred into their tissues upon impact.

Others, more lucky ones, only had two or three burning holes in their flesh. And in theory, with Leo’s very own flames cauterizing the very wounds they created, some could even still be alive…

But in the grand scheme of things, it no longer mattered.

The momentum of the horde was broken. All the fiends that had any means or intentions of attacking were now severely injured. And as if that wasn’t enough, the few fiends who burst into flames acted like torches that set fire to everything around them, whether it were corpses or merely their lethally wounded kin.

The fiends nearest to the young man were all dead, a result of receiving the full brunt of Leo’s overbearing attack. Those in the middle were now stuck between the corpses of their kin and the rapidly spreading flames. Only the fiends at the very back of the horde and a selected few of the most nimble monsters that joined it had any chance of escaping this gruesome fate, either by luckily escaping Leo’s direct attacks or by the benefit of not having their kin’s corpses obstruct their path of retreat.

All in all, however, the horde’s attack was dealt with, allowing Leo some hard-earned respite.

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‘It should be at least a minute or two before the next wave comes,’ he thought, falling down to his knees while already preparing the script for how to spin this situation around. ‘And I guess I went a little overboard, didn’t I?’

Leo’s face twitched when his knees struck the very edge between the black patch of the burned-out grass and the perfectly fine part of the plain, allowing him to hide the smirk that followed his thought.

“What the…” Behind him, one of the two youths turned to gaze either at Leo’s back or the field full of dead and burning fiends just ahead of him.

Using those words for his cue, Leo slowly turned his head over his shoulder, revealing a shocked expression that soon gave way to an uneasy, troubled smile.

“I think there’s something highly flammable on this plain…” Leo uttered, taking his time to produce just this simple sentence.

The young man then reached out to his chin and scratched it with just one of his fingers.

“And it seems like I’ve set it off…”

There was absolutely no need for him to act as if he knew what happened. Who here would be able to say if orcs weren’t actually so fat they could explode when ignited? Who was to say the brown-caps at the back of the horde weren’t carrying flammable materials to burn their enemies with?

Unless something extremely unexpected took place in this world, Leo was the one most well-versed in the study of the fiends, monsters, or magic. But there was absolutely no reason for him to act it out.

“What the hell was that?” the other of the two youths repeated what the first of them said, only to properly finish the sentence in his friend’s place.

Waiting for a moment, Leo gave the two of them some time for their attention to move from the hellish landscape ahead to his face, only to then squint his eyes and look away.

“Beats me,” he shrugged his shoulders only to look right back to the burning fields of corpses of his own making. “I… All I did was cast scattered fire, hoping I could stall them for a bit.”

Leo looked right back at the two youths as if he had just as many questions for them as the two of them had for him.

But as the rippling of the space nearby intensified, all three of them had little to no choice but to turn their focus over to see who else came to challenge the portal.

‘Fuck…’

This time, however, Leo felt so helpless an actual curse nearly escaped from his lips.

For the blemish on the otherwise perfectly fine fabric of the space spat out one of the very few faces he was familiar with.

‘What the hell is he doing here?’ Leo gritted his thought as he watched Rob emerge from the rift only to fall on all fours and spit out the half-decomposed content of his stomach.

Rob; the smaller yet older of his two younger brothers. The very same Rob that Leo witnessed acting perfectly passive in the face of Mark’s bullying just a few moments earlier.

Yet, the rippling of the space didn’t stop there, soon spitting out Mark’s solid and well-developed frame.

This time, however, the portal spat him out feet first and head last, taking a solid second before revealing the furious face of the youngest of the Pesterny siblings.

“…going?!”

Mark dropped flat to the ground.

With his body somehow moving perfectly horizontal through the rift in space, he struck the ground with his back the very moment he uttered the last sound of his fury-etched question.

But the rippling of the space continued, revealing yet another figure.

“Blergh…”

Contrary to Rob, who had enough willpower to hold back before he got into a proper position to empty his stomach out through the wrong end when a long and bare leg dug into Mark’s stomach, he ended up vomiting up, all over his own face and chest.

Despite the obvious disorientation of the spatial travel, the owner of the bare leg had wits quick enough to step away just in time to avoid the many projectiles of Mark’s retch that soon covered the golden child of the Pesterny’s family all the way over to his stomach.

‘To a degree… I could expect Rob to come. As unlikely as it was, I could see Mark coming too…’ Leo gulped his saliva down, genuinely shocked by the sight of the very last of the three guests who decided to pay the portal a visit.

Yet, staring at Milllie’s confused face and pretending not to notice the look of disgust she threw at Mark as she escaped his flying vomit, only one question popped in Leo’s mind.

‘What the hell is she here for?!’

One question. It was just one question.

A question that quickly doubled, when the rippling of the space continued… Only to grow in intensity before stabilizing into the form of the very same, green portal that all of the present has stepped through.

If the portal back home was the entrance, though, then the one that appeared in this world after Leo decimated the fiend’s horde couldn’t be anything else but an exit.