Reidar gripped the Wolf's fur. The beast sped up, but there was no escaping, at least not completely. Above them, the atmospheric pressure plummeted.

<Shit.>

Silas found him again.

Reidar cast Summon Feral Pack. The space twisted, and a hundred crows materialized one after the other. They coalesced into a dense, screaming black cloud that directly charged at the Archdeacon.

Silas did not change his course. A deviation implied he would lose Reidar again, and he was not going to allow that; besides, these creatures were beneath him.

He wasted no time on individual targets; instead, he channeled mana and transformed the immediate area into a grinder thanks to mana friction.

Blue arcs disintegrated feathers and flesh on contact, yet the number of flock members was high, and it overwhelmed his sight.

"BASTARD!"

While the front ranks vanished into ozone, those behind capitalized on the opening the other ravens gave them.

They struck. Beaks of reinforced steel hammered against his shield, finding purchase where the mana thinned. Silas snarled as he was forced to swap pure mana usage for physical grappling. He caught a crow by the throat, crushing its vertebrae with the augmented strength of a level 370 human monster, tearing the mana creature apart to clear his line of sight. He had to do it multiple times.

Reidar pushed his mount.

"RUN!"

There was nothing else he could do. Flight in the open sky offered no cover, and speed dictated who would get killed and who wouldn't. Silas, at level 370, eclipsed him in such regards.

The air was a void where Reidar would die; the ground, with its jagged clutter of ruined buildings, at least offered some kind of protection.

The gap widened by meters, yet the situation remained hard. Silas was very close to level 400 now, and that was partly because of the mana released during Reidar's attack. The summons he sent were not going to do much, but he still needed to do something to at least gain some seconds.

Silas quickly reached him again.

"You delay the inevitable," the man said. "You destroyed months of effort, Reidar. For that, the payment will be extracted from your marrow. Your death will be a lesson for those who decide to fight the church!"

Reidar focused on the geometry of the ruins, seeking a way to escape the man's clutches. "You call it work. I call it mass murder."

"YOURS IS A NARROW VISION!" Silas gained more ground. "You cling to the System like a drowning man to a stone, believing it to be a raft. It is a cage. It throttles your intake, capping your potential to ensure you remain manageable. Weak. By getting stronger as we are, we sacrifice a few to protect the rest! It's only logical!"

"Logical my ass! You first want to sacrifice people and then turn others into monsters! At least the system keeps us human!" Reidar said, banking the wolf hard to avoid a lance of mana.

"SHIT!"

The attack missed him, but it basically erased the corner of a tenement building Reidar used to block the attack.

"Look at yourself, Silas! You aren't ascending; you are mutating. Without the System's filter to regulate the flow of mana, you are simply another monster absorbing mana until your mind breaks, and this is just a matter of time!"

"I am evolving!" The sheer pressure of Silas's indignation cracked the pavement ahead of him and made buildings explode. "The monsters outside do not follow rules! They grow without limit, governed only by their capacity to consume. To fight them, we must leave behind the shackles the Allied Worlds placed upon us. Only Mana offers salvation! I am not a monster, Reidar. I am the prototype, and I'm doing what I can to ensure that those that come after us will have a better chance to survive and to resist the allied worlds!"

"I don't want to turn into a monster, Silas! What would be the point of being alive if I can't even tell left from right?" Reidar said. "You think you're free? You are a slave of your own power. You are going to cease to be yourself once your human mind won't be able to resist mana anymore! The monsters were just animals, Silas! They lived by urges, and mana amplified that so much they lost all reason!"

Mana coalesced into multiple mana lances that sprouted at Silas's fingertips. "Humanity will survive through the strong. We, not you, not the allied worlds, will be remembered as the saviors of the human race!"

"YOU IDIOT!"

Reidar's grip on the wolf's fur tightened until his knuckles threatened to split. The frustration was a physical weight, heavier than the atmospheric pressure Silas exerted. It wasn't just the threat of death; it was the sheer, impenetrable density of Silas's delusion. The Archdeacon didn't see people; he saw fuel. He didn't see a future; he saw a consumption algorithm disguised as destiny. Arguing with a creature that viewed its own parasitism as salvation was mathematically futile, yet the rage demanded an outlet.

"You aren't saving the race; you're harvesting it!" Reidar screamed, the words ripping from his throat. "You define survival by who eats last!"

"Then you will die with them."

A high-pitched whine cut through the roar of the collapsing base. Reidar detected the mana gathering behind him—not the geometric structure of a System spell, but an unrefined projection of will. Observation cost time he did not have.

<Block it.>

Reidar shoved more mana out of his body. The air warped ten meters behind his wolf, and two Twin Boulderback Behemoths popped into existence, shoulder to shoulder. They weren't there to brawl, just to fill space between Reidar and Silas, and covering most of the space between the buildings, they did just that since they almost completely covered Reidar.

Silas's beam struck them soon after.

The stone didn't simply explode; it just got vaporized. Reidar watched, helpless, as the two giants vanished. It wasn't just that, but the attack also created a shockwave that hammered him forward, crushing his chest against the wolf's spine, but the beam itself dissipated into harmless static behind him.

"SHIT!"

"HAHAHAHAHHA TREMBLE BEFORE MY POWER!"

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