The first priority was the protection of villagers. For him, the Twilight Knight Order, including Modeleine, chose a protective formation surrounding the outskirts of Baskin Village.

Once the frontline Knight Order was breached, the mercenary corps were next in line. The mercenary corps were tasked with guarding the core and protecting the temporary garrison from the monster invasion.

Uooooh—!

The monsters’ roars echo through the air, and the ground rumbled with increasing intensity. The thunderous war cry of Modeleine was followed by the rallying cry of the Knight Order.

Cadel swallowed dryly as he watched the grand barrier of light envelop Baskin Village.

“Commander.”

Beside Cadel, who stared at the barrier with determination, Van approached. His eyes were red as if he had raised his aura in advance.

“If monsters break through the front line of defense and infiltrate, leave the first move to me.”

Van was nervous that his request would be denied, but Cadel nodded wordlessly.

Van Herdos was a berserker who thrived in blood. Unless a catastrophe in which all the incoming monsters were undead, there was no knight better suited to slaughtering monsters than Van.

Van smiled at Cadel’s permission.

“I can’t tell you not to push yourself. As we all know, there’s no guarantee of victory if we don’t give it our best shot. Lumen, focus on protecting the core while Van deals with the others, and Lydon’ll take care of any monsters that leak into the temporary garrison.”

“Sure.”

“If I didn’t have a seal, I would have wiped them all out!”

The best-case scenario would be that the Twilight Knight Order would slay all of them, but Cadel wasn’t counting on it.

‘They’ve already expended a good deal of their mana on defeating Ergo and healing technique, so they won’t be able to do their best.’

It would be nice if they could kill even a third of the monster legion, and the tension in Cadel’s heart was indescribable, knowing that any monster they missed would be on the mercenary corps’ account.

And.

Kkung—

The barrier vibrated wildly. An ear-piercing demonic roar mingled with the shouts of the Knight Order, signaling the beginning of the battle.

“....It started.”

Lumen put his hand on top of the longsword. His mission was to defend the core. With the speed faster than anyone else here, his responsibility was heavy.

The moment the core was taken, the game was over. Lumen’s senses sharpened.

* * *

“Stop them! Don’t let any of them live!”

Modeleine shouted, scattering the light mana on his sword. Before him was a seemingly endless march of monsters. Looking at the enemy’s charge, which blotted out the horizon, was like looking at a black sea.

‘Goblins, ogres, orcs, and wyverns..... These are independent races that wouldn’t normally act together.’

He sliced off a goblin’s head as it lunged at him without fear, then sent an X-shaped sword aura straight ahead. The intersecting sword aura split the monster’s body into four and it collapsed helplessly.

‘To be able to lead a monster legion of this size with only one heart left. What a powerful demon......’

If so, even more so. They couldn’t let him resurrect.

“Right side! The right side is breached!”

“Stop them!”

Each monster was weak, but the problem was the numbers. Three hundred monsters were the minimum, and that was literally the minimum.

Modeleine aimed his sword at the wyverns that dotted the sky like dark clouds. And the moment they spewed out flames, he fired the sword aura that split the whole flames.

A blast of heat. Modeleine cried out as he saw the falling wyvern.

“Knight Order! Deploy the Fifth Form of Holy Swordsmanship!”

“Yes!”

As prepared in advance, the six knights who were in charge of the deployment of the Holy Swordsmanship gathered together. The sword tips of the knights gathered in a circle pointed towards the sky. A pure white light began to condense above the point of the sword gathered.

A sharp resonance echoed from the swords of the knights performing the sword technique. Others sliced through the monsters that lunged at their comrades and pierced the chests of those that flung themselves over the barrier. The battlefield flashed with the clash of the hordes of monsters and the beams of light that pierced through them.

“Speed up the deployment! It doesn’t have to be perfect. Increase the maximum number of times even if the perfection is reduced!”

Modeleine parried an ogre’s punch to the face with the side of his sword, then shoved it back with all the force he could muster. The ogre staggered, off-center. Not missing a beat, he plunged his sword into the ogre’s throat. Hot blood drenched his face.

Wiping the blood from his eyes with the back of his hand, Modeleine pursed his lips. It had only been a few minutes and he had already slain dozens of monsters, and with no end in sight, this was only the beginning.

‘These many monsters are not all.....’

His face crumpled as he elbowed a goblin in the abdomen, aiming for the back.

‘He’s been turning humans into monsters to increase his power, and while there’s no guarantee that the monsters we’re seeing now were all humans in the past, it’s an assumption we can’t ignore. He might have been doing this to create minions even before the Demon Realm was sealed.’

If Cadel’s conjecture was true, it would mean that all the monsters now threatening the Knight Order were originally humans. But there was a big hole in this theory.

If so many humans had all been turned into monsters, there was no way that nations wouldn’t recognize the danger. They would have realized it sooner or later, but they didn’t.

‘If they were civilians at the time of the Demon War..... In that chaos, there must have been no way to know whether the people had turned into monsters or were killed by them.’

The people who had been turned into monsters, with no one to recognize their grievances, must have lived for eons as monsters, deprived of their human souls.

‘It’s unbearably disgusting.’

Even if they were human, no, more so because they were human. Modeleine slaughtered them without mercy. He wanted to give their disgraced souls rest.

“Vice Commander! We’re ready!”

He turned his blood-soaked head to see his men completing the technique. A single, sharp flash of light stretched from their raised swords into the sky.

Modeleine pointed out the direction where the wyverns were densely packed.

“Don’t care about the damage around you! Unleash maximum range to repel the wyverns!”

The tips of the knights’ swords moved slowly. The trajectory of the beam of light changed as the angle adjusted. The bold flash soon came to a halt across the swarm of flame-breathing wyverns.

Seeing the perfect aim, Modeleine exclaimed.

“Fire!”

Schwiiing—

An explosion of mana gathered at the tip of the swords, concentrated in a single point. A beam of light streaked across the wyvern horde, growing brighter and vibrating at the same time. Sensing an anomaly, the wyverns scattered to avoid the beam of light.

Of course, their movements were not faster than light.

[Holy Swordsmanship’s Fifth Form, Cosmic Flash Cannon]