As a jarring vibration buzzed against his teeth and rattled his ribs.

He tensed, expecting an attack, not because of the Aegis Phalanx, but because of the adrenaline still coursing through his veins, but the attack never came, so Reidar didn't even bother looking up. Not immediately, at least.

As he sat on a slab of broken concrete, his lungs burned as if he had inhaled glass. The mana exhaustion was far from a vague fatigue, manifesting instead as a throbbing ache in his temples and a cold numbness spreading through his fingertips.

That was the result of his fighting so much and for so long.

Regardless, he didn't let his summons disappear; in fact, he was surrounded by thousands of level 299 creatures. Most of them were Twin Boulderback Behemoths, but they weren't the only ones.

The rubble was then ground into fine powder beneath the crushing weight of the Aegis Phalanx dreadnought's landing struts. A hiss of hydraulics cut through the air next as the ramp descended. Then Sub Adjutant Xy'tharr Kench came up.

<He must have been quite alarmed to send so many people here.>

It also meant that if there was just one ship here, it meant the other landed in different parts of the city. Of course, he didn't linger on them for too long since he was too tired even to do that.

Two dozen soldiers flanked the Sub adjutant. They were all Level 320 to Level 345, which was quite a problem for Reidar in case something weird happened. But of course, he didn't think the Aegis Phalanx would attack him; otherwise, they wouldn't have even come to the planet. If they had wanted humans dead, they could have just let the Progenitor do whatever he wanted.

Reidar's gaze shifted to the Thalassari female walking behind the Sub Adjutant, noting how her skin carried the color of a bruise. But it was the item in her hands that held his attention; he studied the strange device, racking his brain for any sign of recognition, only to realize with that he had no idea what it was meant for. Reidar watched Xy'tharr stop three meters away, the Kytinn's eyes passing over the gathered summons.

The Sub Adjutant didn't speak immediately, and in that silence, Reidar saw the thoughts swirling behind the alien's gaze.

It was a look of contemplation, heavy with a respect that hadn't been there before, but it was edged with a distinct tension.

Reidar realized Xy'tharr was worried—not for him, but because of him; he had become a variable himself. Too strong for the Aegis Phalanx to comfortably ignore. It was weird.

<They expected me to become strong enough to help them with the progenitor, but they are now worrying about me?>

"Quite a nice army," Xy'tharr said. "You could contend with a small Aegis Phalanx team based on biomass alone."

Reidar tried to laugh, but it came out as a wet cough. He wiped a smear of grit from his mouth. "They're low-tier trash, unfortunately. That became very clear to me in the past days. Against anything over Level 300, they're just ablative armor. I saw Silas tear through them like wet paper, and other monsters did the same when I tried to hunt them. They bought me seconds at best, nothing more."

"That is why we did not deploy mass-summoned infantry against the monster in the valley," Xy'tharr said.

Reidar nodded. "The World Carver Behemoth."

"Exactly. We don't have the numbers for that bracket. Level 700s are... freaks of nature. My elite teams are already stretched too thin across the sector." Xy'tharr's mandibles clicked together in frustration. "We're trying to herd it, but it's not easy, and certainly it takes away a lot of troops from the other objectives."

"I figured." Reidar paused. "What about the portals? Are they being closed?"

"We closed a few of them. For now," Xy'tharr said. "We collapsed the dimensional tear from which the World Carver Behemoth came to avoid another one of those things coming out of it. However, the Church is forcing new breaches, and there are quite a few left in the Valley. The influx of high-level monsters coming here remains constant."

Reidar's legs trembled as he pushed himself up. His muscles felt like dead weight. He dug his fingers deep into the bear's fur, gripping hard enough that his knuckles went white. Without the bear to hold onto, he would have collapsed back onto the broken concrete.

"You're losing," Reidar said. He forced his spine straight.

"We aren't…"

"Well, it looks like it to me…" He paused. Somehow he knew, based on what Morv'axil and Keth'moran told him, that even with the intervention of the mighty Aegis Phalanx, things would still go bad.

He looked at their forces and didn't see a savior as he did the first time he saw them, but a line stretched to its breaking point; he realized they simply didn't have the numbers to be everywhere at once, not with so many planets burning just like Earth.

They could not be everywhere at once and had to stretch their troops too thin, which often resulted in not being able to do much. They needed Earth to join the Allied Worlds because they needed fresh troops to plug the gaps, allowing them to save the next world on the list.

Which was noble, there was no mistaking it, but was it really the right choice? Wouldn't focusing more troops in fewer places be the ideal thing to do?

<Not completely. The creatures on the planet they would save would not have room to grow. They would just see the allied worlds as saviors, and being unable to do anything, they would just leech resources out of them.>

"You need to help everyone here increase their levels, Xy'tharr. As things stand, that's the only logical path to survival."

The Kytinn warrior shook his head. "We can't. Containing the breach and taking out the Progenitor come first. Wasting resources to power-level the locals this much would just be counterproductive since the monsters will just spread? It's not worth it."

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