“Is that so…” Rob muttered while biting down on his bottom lip and looking down to the ground.

“This ain’t my first rodeo, kiddo,” Leo smiled, giving his brother a wink before reassuringly patting him on his shoulder. “I just need a room and peace of mind to deal with it.”

There was no fear in Leo’s eyes.

Or, to be more precise, there was no tension in his presence whatsoever.

Rather than playing a tough guy, someone courageous in the face of great adversity, he acted as if there was absolutely nothing for him to fear in this place.

As if the grotesque, bus-sized monster straight out of a certain, masochistic series of games simply didn’t classify as a concern.

“Fine,” Rob threw shortly, tightening his fists while digging his eyes into the ground.

Then, without even a moment of further hesitation, he glanced at the oversized fiend over Leo’s shoulder before turning on his heel and moving towards the portal.

This act of retreat was the straw that broke past the limits of what everyone else’s morale could withstand, especially after the surviving officer ran straight past them only to prove that return was, indeed, possible.

“I’m sorry… I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Millie cried out, hiding her burning cheeks underneath her hands as she ran off.

The two whose names Leo still refused to remember were next, followed by the hand-deprived cop and lastly Mark.

Despite growing into an accursed bully, Mark still stopped right by the portal, throwing one last glance at Leo before pressing his lips into a thin line and looking away as he crossed back to the familiar, real world.

‘I can only hope things aren’t all that bad on the other side…’

Now that the prospect of near return and parting with his kin came up, Leo had to face another possibility. The possibility that if some of the portals would claim the lives of all those who braved to challenge them, the monsters inside…

‘No, it’s better not to think about it. The quicker I deal with this thing, the sooner I will be able to go back and ensure things are okay back there too.’

Leo shook his head and turned to face the fiend that continued to slowly creep up on him.

“You really are one ugly abomination, huh?” he casually remarked, breathing out a sigh of relief when everyone’s presence started to vanish from the field… Only to then look back, upon realizing that there was one who lagged behind.

“I thought we agreed you are only a hindrance here,” Leo spoke in a flat, calm yet slightly cold voice.

‘With him here…’

There was a limit to how far Leo could go if he had to keep his brother’s safety at the back of his head. There was also a limit to how much of his powers he could exhibit.

The reason behind this artificial limiter was a smile.

‘If I go all in, just the aftershocks might hurt him…’

Leo took a deep breath.

For all the power in the world he had at his fingertips, it was useless if he couldn’t use it!

‘And there’s always the point of keeping my cards to my chest…’

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As uncool as it would seem to Leo during his first lifetime, flaunting his powers hardly offered any real benefits and often came bearing massive, long-reaching costs. And while Leo would never go as far as going out of his way to excessively keep a low profile just for the sake of the comedic release when he would reveal them and slap everyone’s faces…

The two hundred years filled with mostly bitter experiences taught Leo better than to seek pleasure in vain feelings, even with how his refreshed, youthful body would always lose the physical grit that affected the manner of his thoughts and rationale.

‘Wait, what the fuck am I even thinking about?’

Leo posed a serious question, keenly observing how the monster approached, slowly, steadily moving one arm after the other, each twisted at an extremely weird, seemingly unnatural angle.

A benefit of the third joint that a human arm lacked, which only amplified the sense of grotesqueness of this ugly son of a fiend.

“I left your side six years ago.”

Rob spoke out, still facing the portal, his eyes still digging into the ground while his fists tightened to the point of his fingernails cutting into the flesh of his hands.

Then, the young man turned and raised his face, directing his gaze straight at Leo’s face.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not going anywhere.”

Rob’s eyes were strangely empty, as if he separated his consciousness from the world around him, removing any and all possible stimuli that could induce a thought in his mind and thus affect his determination.

‘Fuck it.’

“Fine.”

Leo mirrored the very same word his brother used before.

‘For what fucking reason would I hide my strength from my family?’

Leo took a deep breath before using a sliver of his mana to crush the massive boulder-sized collection of monster cores he harvested from all of the fiends he slaughtered within the last two waves.

‘Since I was going to unlock those anyway, I can as well do it right away.’

The third and fourth layers of Leo’s second legacy core came with no direct benefit to Leo’s strength. They were nothing more but utilities that Leo abused to the heck of it to make the best use of the near-endless resources of the world of his second lifetime.

The third layer, a blueprint spell that worked like any programming language he learned before this entire summoning changed his life forever.

It was an endlessly overcomplicated set of logic gates of spells, allowing him to mold magic at a much greater scale without the necessary calculations.

In a sense, it was like the fabric that made up this alien circuit, simply deprived of all the fancy, visual aspects of it.

Just like with this alien system, the third layer allowed the young man to cast formulas he modulated in advance, saving on the often massive and overwhelming process of meticulously crafting every tiniest bit of a complicated array of smaller spells.

Rather than weaving magic into existence whenever he wanted to bring forth a change, with this layer of his second legacy core, Leo could simply supply his mana to invoke spells he crafted before.

As useful as this ability was, though, it only reached its full potential with the fourth and the last layer of Leo’s fourth core, the ability he desired for the entirety of his second lifetime. A skill he crafted by abusing the edge cases of the magical laws, all for the sake of the one element that… surprise, surprise, appeared to be a part of this alien circuit right off the bat.

‘Deep breath…’ Leo thought, his eyelids moving halfway down over his eyes as the huge stream of mana from the crushed cores flooded Leo’s flesh and fell down a crack in the fifth dimension anchored directly at the geometrical middle of his body.

“Haaaa…”

The monster ahead continued to slowly creep ahead, moving with its body at a slight angle, like an animal already preparing to escape as it approached a potentially dangerous curiosity.

The stream of fresh mana fell into the crack, feeding into a dimension not even Leo could directly access. A dimension that was above the laws of space or time.

And before the massive fiend could take another step, the fifth dimension cracked open directly within Leo’s first and fourth cores.

The mana radiated from Leo’s first core, feeding directly into his muscles and reinforcing his bones.

A set of nexuses appeared all along Leo’s key joints, stretching out into the crude sword in his hand. Nexuses, which were nothing more but points rooted in a physical manifestation of the first four dimensions, matter, that Leo predisposed to develop into tiny cracks within the fifth dimension.

“Hold on to your pants,” Leo threw back to his younger brother, a small smirk forming in the corner of his mouth as he lowered his center of mass and leaned his chest forward.

The boss fiend suddenly charged ahead, likely sensing that something had changed.

Its massive body, impregnable to most of the simple magic, rushed ahead, propelled by the frantic steps of the six pairs of its three-jointed limbs, serving both as its arms and as its legs. Its massive mouth opened up all the way from its chest to the hinge of its grotesque jaw near the top of its head, granting the fiend an additional meter of reach when counted from the very first set of sharp fangs at the top of its upper jaw.

‘Go.’

In a single instant, a selected few of the nexuses blasted open, creating an instantaneous set of magical forces created by the rapid movement of mana pouring out of the set of nearly made, dimensional cracks.

Even though Leo didn’t move a single inch, his entire body tensed up as if he had to flex his muscles to keep the world from falling apart.

This strange sense of magical energy imposing massive resistance lasted only for a second. Upon its release, though, freed from the overwhelming, opposing force, Leo’s body sprung forth with acceleration greater than what astronauts were ever supposed to handle.

Leo shot forth, the crude sword heavily weighing him down despite how light it should be.

The very moment Leo reached the massive fiend, his magic blueprint fired off the next set of nexuses. This time, rather than his whole body, they centered mostly around his arm and then his sword, pulling them in various directions at speeds greatly beyond what the human brain could process.

Just like a search engine would process billions of records and spit out thousands of results that matched the criteria in a matter of mere fraction of a second, Leo’s body completed thousands of violent cuts in the single instant it took for his body to pass by the fiend and then, with another flash of his nexuses, come to a complete stop.

Leo came to a stop… and the world appeared to stop with him.

The fiend halted. Rob held his breath…

Only Leo dared to exhale.

And the moment he did, reality finally caught up with the effects of what he had just done, as the twin shockwaves of his rapid acceleration and sudden deacceleration struck the fiend, revealing several thousands of deep cuts that shattered the fiend’s body into a myriad of evenly-sized bits…

Only to then scatter them on the ground while spraying the two brothers with a thick mist of vaporized, green blood.

Before the bloody mist could settle down to the ground, Leo casually raised his crude, goblin's sword and rested it down on his shoulder, only for the blade to shatter and fall apart upon touch.

The young man then turned around, and through the greenish, disgusting mist, he smiled over at his younger brother.

"See?"