Of course, they moved in the way soldiers who had trained for a long ti would, the kind of formation that covered ground without rushing and maintained spacing without being told to.
At the front of the formation walked a Kytinn female.
Four arms. Compound eyes arranged in a broad cluster across her face. Her carapace was segnted armor plating across every surface, engraved along the shoulders and forearms with marks that Reidar knew from Xy'tharr were service records—decades of interventions, catalogued in lines too small to read at this distance but dense enough to cover every available surface. She moved like soone who had walked into dangerous situations many tis and had always walked out the other side.
Her natag appeared as she ca within range.
—[Lyra'xis Sola—Level 550]—
Reidar read the number and went still for a second.
She was only seven levels below him, which ant she was a threat.
The formation stopped twenty ters away. The 100 fighters arranged themselves behind the Legate with weapons not drawn but hands close to them, which was the correct thing to do for a situation where the threat was unclear and the level gap was significant with almost all the soldiers but one.
Lyra'xis Sola's eyes moved across the line of Terror Condors first and then ca to rest on Reidar.
She looked up.
—[Reidar Miller—Level 557]—
Her mandibles clicked once. The hostility in her posture did not disappear, but it beca considerate instead of reflexive. The 100 fighters behind her had also read the tag, and Reidar saw how these people reassessed him in real ti.
Though he could not tell if it was a good thing or a bad one at this point. So ti ago he would have said it was good, but now, based on what he knew about the Aegis and the Allied Worlds, Reidar wasn't so sure anymore.
"Reidar Miller," she said. "You have returned from the dead."
"I have," Reidar said.
"Without notification, With 110 high-level summons, and with an army of nearly 50,000 creatures already laying waste inside Kingsgate."
"Yes," Reidar said.
Her compound eyes did not blink. They could not, given the way Kytinn's eyes were built, but the steadiness of her gaze told him the sa thing blinking would have.
"Explain."
They did not move to a building. Lyra'xis Sola did not offer one, and Reidar did not ask—despite how delicate the matter was. The clearing was wide enough for those who needed privacy to have it, and what Reidar had to say did not need a table or map anyway.
"When I returned," Reidar said, "I tracked a church supply convoy outside Sweetwater. They were using an illusion barrier to hide a staging area. It was an outpost with a teleportation circle inside."
Lyra'xis said nothing and waited for Reidar to continue.
"The food they were moving has been infected," Reidar said. "They placed so kind of monster parasite's eggs in it." He paused. "They are small enough that you wouldn't see them without knowing you need to look or what to look for. Any inspection would pass it."
Hearing that, Lyra'xis remained silent.
"What was the intended distribution point?" she said.
"Kingsgate, of course," Reidar said. "The church doesn't just have contacts inside the city; they have bases here and thousands of troops. The plan was to get the infected food into the survivors' stockpiles here and wait for the eggs to hatch inside the hosts and then hit the settlent from the outside while your forces were dealing with monsters on the inside." He paused. "Your soldiers would have had to kill the people you were sent to protect."
Her mandibles clicked once.
"I interrogated five church priests from the outpost before I ca here," Reidar said. "They gave locations—buildings inside Kingsgate the church has been using as safe houses, storage sites, and coordination points. The Aegis Phalanx… You guys do not even know they exist, and based on your face, I think not even you knew."
The woman remained silent. Reidar was right; she and the rest of the Aegis had no idea what was going on, and that filled her with sha. How could these people, who started dealing with mana around a year ago, be so shrewd and have enough resources to pull this off with no one noticing?
And that was without taking into consideration how strong these people beca in such a short amount of ti. It was sothing unprecedented, sothing that made the Kytinn understand how truly dangerous humans were.
"There is one more thing," Reidar said.
Lyra'xis looked at him. "What?"
"Both the Progenitor and Jorik have been confird inside Kingsgate for at least two months."
Lyra'xis's mandibles clicked twice.
When it beca clear Reidar was done talking, she went quiet for a mont.
"The outpost," she said. "I assu you destroyed it, right?"
"Every church mber there is dead," Reidar said. "The infected food at the outpost has been secured, and it is under my control. The teleportation circle was used to move my army into Kingsgate. My summons have been operating inside the city since I ca through, which is not a lot of ti."
"How much of the infected food has already been distributed to civilians?"
"According to the church's priests, none," Reidar said. "The distribution had not started because they wanted to maximize the number of people that would turn so that they would have as many monsters as possible inside Kingsgate at once. But what the priests said was just what they knew." He paused. "Not necessarily everything that happened. There could be smaller caches I don't know about or individual church mbers who moved food independently of the main network."
"aning the threat is not quantified," she said.
Reidar nodded.
"It also ans that you need to check every food reserve in this settlent and in Kingsgate," Reidar said. "Every warehouse, every private store, everything the survivors have access to. And you need to tell the other survivor settlents in the area."
The female Kytinn's eyes ca up from the ledger and fixed on him again. "You are telling the Aegis Phalanx what it needs to do."
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