Three minutes thirty four seconds.
That was all it took Leo to kill the 122,000 soldiers stationed on this military base, for although the act unfolded with brutal speed, it never required him to draw even a fraction of his true strength.
Once his aura settled over the enemies, their will to fight back crumbled, and by the time he moved through their ranks, the resistance they should have offered collapsed into something soft and barely perceptible.
Their deaths arrived almost on their own, as if the universe itself had decided the outcome long before he performed the final, simple motions that removed them.
Yet even with a kill time this quick, even with an entire armed compound erased in a span barely longer than a passing conversation, Leo felt no sense of progress towards the far greater figure he carried as his ultimate goal, for two billion still remained distant enough to feel untouched by moments like this.
"I see... I can’t achieve it at this rate."
The realization came quietly, for the problem he faced now was no longer the speed at which he could kill opponents, since once his aura neutralized them, clearing thousands required only a few effortless seconds.
But rather the problem now arose from how to locate them together, since his concern shifted away from enemy strength and now circled towards the more troublesome question of how tightly were the enemies gathered in one place.
’It does not matter if I face one hundred thousand enemies or ten million.
Regardless of the number, the outcome stays the same as long as they are all Transcendents and below.
The challenge is finding them clustered as one.
For unless I strike a major urban city, where millions of civilians remain packed together, I gain no real progress, as killing at this meagre speed will mean I will miss my window to save Veyr.’
He concluded, for just by clearing this single battalion, he gained an unprecedented understanding of his own strength, and how enemy numbers no longer meant anything to him.
Yet in the same breath, he also gained a cleaner, sharper understanding of the limitations that still blocked his path ahead, as he quickly came up with a method to work around them.
"Well... if that’s how it is then I guess I can’t kill the Commander just yet...."
Leo muttered, as he patiently folded his arms behind his back and looked towards the sky, as he waited for the enemy Commander to show up.
—-----------
(Meanwhile Commander Yu Zu)
Commander Yu Zu sped towards the Sector Eleven military base as if there was no tomorrow, his internal thoughts giddy and optimistic as he thought about all the heroic praise and fame he could receive if he captured or neutralized the Evil Cult’s infamous Shadow Dragon.
’If I manage to capture him alive, I’ll become a universal hero!
My name will be said in the same breath as Commander Raymond, and I will be forever remembered as a legend!’
He thought, as a wide grin formed on his face as he flew towards his destination.
’I don’t know what his play is to come here alone. However, surely, I can’t let him leave now that he’s here.
If he’s come here alone, he must have some escape devices on his body.
However, I need to ensure that he can’t use them....’
He thought, as he rubbed his palms in anticipation.
"Stay right where you are, Skyshard... I’m almost there."
He said, as he cut through the air toward the Sector Eleven military base, his body gliding forward with effortless speed, as he excitedly grabbed the hilt of the sword attached to his hip.
The wind wrapped around him as he moved, carrying with it the familiar hum of energy that followed a Monarch in motion.
However, no matter how close he got, no sounds of explosions or metal colliding entered his ears, which felt weird to him as a veteran.
"No fighting sounds? Has Skyshard been neutralized already?"
He wondered, as it was not until he came within a kilometre of the base that the truth revealed itself before his eyes.
"Huh...?"
The sound slipped out of him, soft and uncertain, as he blinked and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.
For a moment he wondered if heat shimmer, dust, or pure disbelief warped what he was seeing.
Yet no matter how long he stared, nothing shifted, as only then did the truth finally sink into him.
"What the fuck?"
He muttered, as his mind at last accepted the overwhelming devastation that lay spread across the earth.
The entire landscape around the base was hollowed into a massive crater, its edges torn open by a force far beyond anything he expected.
And across that crater, scattered in every direction, lay the unmoving bodies of the garrisoned soldiers, tens of thousands of them sprawled across the ruined terrain as if struck down in the same frozen instant.
One hundred twenty-two thousand.
The full stationed force.
All of them gone.
And at the center of that crater, quiet and sharply defined against the desolation, stood one man.
Leo.
He stood still, almost relaxed, his posture composed in a way that felt completely out of place within the surrounding ruin.
His head tilted upward slightly, his gaze finding Yu Zu the moment he hovered into view, as if Leo sensed him the instant he crossed the horizon.
Yu Zu felt his stomach twist, a slow, rolling shock spreading through him as he tried to take in the impossible scale of what he was witnessing.
"No way... no way he killed all of them in the time it took me to get here..."
The thought echoed inside him, refusing to form cleanly, refusing to align with anything logical.
Between the communicator call and his arrival, only seven minutes had passed. Barely enough time for him to respond, let alone for an entire battalion to vanish from existence.
Yet...
Here it was.
The silence.
The crater.
The stillness of 122,000 fallen soldiers.
And Leo, standing alone at the center, as though this level of devastation were nothing more than a brief pause in his path.