Many in the crowd began believing that Reinhard was a god, a divine being who had descended to walk among them and deliver them from their suffering. This belief spread quickly through the ranks of his followers, and soon, people were dropping to their knees and praying toward Reinhard as they walked, clasping their hands and whispering words of devotion in his direction.
The act made Reinhard frown. He was no god, and he had no particular interest in becoming one either. But he said nothing about it and simply continued forward, leading the procession out of the city gates and into the open land beyond.
From the former guards who had abandoned their posts to follow him, Reinhard obtained a map of the surrounding area. Studying it as they walked, he identified a forest nearby called the Howling Forest.
It was a vast stretch of wilderness mainly ruled by wolves—beasts that had originally spilled out from a dungeon outbreak many years ago and claimed the forest as their territory. With six wolves at the eighth tier leading the pack as its ruling alphas, this forest was an area that people barely dared to set foot into. Adventurers avoided it, merchants rerouted around it, and the surrounding settlements treated it as a natural border that was not to be crossed.
But it was exactly where Reinhard wanted to build his city. The location was defensible, resource-rich, and far enough from the existing power structures that he could establish something new without immediately being crushed by them.
So, when the procession neared the edge of the forest, not long after departing the city, Reinhard broke away from the group and entered the Howling Forest alone, heading into the dense tree line to find the alpha of the pack.
[Gained a New Blessing.
Blessing of the Beast Tamer: He excels in beast taming to such a degree that even beasts many times stronger than him would submit to his rule. All beasts, be they weak or strong, wild or ancient, can be tamed by him without exception.]
***
"City lord!" The nobles—the higher-ups of Dwarf Crushing City—called out in panicked unison, their voices shrill with barely contained hysteria.
Yes, that was the name this city had been given, a title chosen specifically to mock the dwarves and remind them of humanity's contempt for their kind.
After Reinhard and his three hundred thousand followers had departed, what remained behind were the nobles who had woken up to discover that the world they had built on the backs of the powerless had been pulled out from under them overnight.
The slaves they kept locked away in their mansions, or chained in underground chambers beneath their estates, had all gone missing—vanished without a trace, as if they had never existed.
Many of their personal maids and servants had also fled, abandoning their posts and slipping away to join Reinhard's procession. Only those who were genuinely loyal to their employers—a remarkably small number—had stayed behind.
The nobles, left without the labor force that maintained their comfortable lives, ran to the city lord in desperation. The same city lord that Reinhard had knocked unconscious with a single backhand.
It was an amusing contrast, when one thought about it. Just a few hours earlier, Reinhard had needed to get somewhat serious before an eighth-circle mage like Thorin. But in the short time since then, his body had adapted and grown to the point where a casual backhand was more than enough to flatten another eighth-rank combatant without effort.
That was the terrifying nature of his growth—it never stopped, and the gap between where he was and where he had been widened with every passing second.
"Yes, I know. I will go deal with the citizens," The city lord said in annoyance, waving off the crowd of frantic nobles as he pushed himself upright.
It was truly exhausting being a city lord and having to deal with these people on top of everything else. Most of the nobles stationed in this city were nothing more than rejects—nobles who had been banished here by their families as punishment, or sent to this backwater for some other reason. They were the dregs of the aristocracy, and their constant whining made an already frustrating situation worse.
He got up from his bed… ground? Why was he sleeping on the ground? He paused for a moment, confused by the cold stone beneath his back and the open sky above him where a ceiling should have been. But he shook off the confusion and pushed it aside—he couldn't afford to dwell on trivial matters when over three hundred thousand people were apparently walking out of his city.
He sat up fully and immediately felt a sharp, throbbing pain in his left cheek, the kind of deep ache that radiated through his jaw and skull alike. He frowned, his hand rising instinctively to touch the source of the pain before stopping himself.
He looked around at the crowd of nobles and guards gathered around him, and his killing intent began spreading outward like a wave of pressure, heavy enough to make several of the weaker nobles stumble backward.
What bastard had gone and woken him up with a slap? Whoever had done it possessed one hell of a hand—his head and brain were screaming in agony, a pain that went far beyond the surface and rattled something deep within his skull.
Naturally, whoever was responsible for this was going to die. He didn't care about their background, their status, or their connections.
"Lord Father, the one who did this was the same person who stole the people from our city," His son said, stepping forward carefully and keeping his voice measured. The city lord frowned at this. How was that person able to strike him without him sensing a thing?
He was a Rank Eight warrior—his reflexes, his awareness, his combat instincts were honed to a level that should have made a surprise attack from anyone below the ninth rank physically impossible.
He looked around more carefully now and realized he wasn't anywhere near his mansion. He was sitting in the wreckage of a collapsed house, rubble and splintered timber scattered around him in every direction.
"How did he sneak attack me? Is he an assassin?" He asked, genuine shock creeping into his voice despite his efforts to maintain composure. He couldn't believe it. His mansion was several miles from where he was right now, near the east gate of the city. So he had been attacked at his mansion and sent flying all the way here? But from the trail of destroyed buildings behind him, stretching in a straight line back through the city, that was exactly what had happened… no, he would have to have been hit twice. But from what he felt, he was only hit once.
'Did I get sent flying from my mansion? And he appeared near the gate and launched me from there to here? Some kind of magic had to have been used. Time magic? Someone who stopped time would have left me completely helpless. Or maybe he was simply that fast…' The city lord fell into deep thought, running through every possible explanation he could think of, trying to piece together how on earth this had happened to him—a mid-tier Rank Eight warrior.
"Report this matter to the capital immediately. Have any of you actually seen the person in question?" He asked, his tone shifting to something far more serious as the gravity of the situation began to settle in.
"...Father, you were talking to him." His son said in a low, careful voice, as if delivering the worst possible news as gently as he could.
The city lord was shocked. His pupils shrank as he registered the uncomfortable expressions on every face around him—the averted gazes, the nervous shuffling. They had all watched it happen. Every last one of them had seen the exchange, and none of them had been able to do a thing about it.
He looked back along the path of destruction that carved through his city like a scar, and with great difficulty, he forced his damaged mind to replay the events using the information he could gather. Slowly, fragments of things that had taken place played out in his mind, but enough to piece together the broad strokes of what had occurred.
"You went in for an attack. You were going to cut his neck. But at the last moment, he struck you and sent you flying." His son reported in a low voice, filling in the gaps that the city lord needed as he couldn't put together everything from simply looking around. And that account helped immensely in putting everything together.
He was able to determine that he had been moving at roughly the speed of lightning when he launched his strike—his standard movement speed, nothing held back but nothing enhanced either. And from the specific pattern of pain radiating across his face, the shape and spread of the impact… he had been backhanded. Not punched, weapon, or even a technique—backhanded, as one might swat away a fly.
This realization caused him to take a long, shaking breath. He had been hit so hard that he had lost his memory of the event entirely, his brain unable to retain the information through the sheer trauma of the impact.
From the looks of things, it could have been far worse. If the healers hadn't arrived quickly and repaired the damage to his brain while he was unconscious, he might have been left a permanent cripple—or worse, reduced to the mental state of an infant, his mind wiped clean by the force of a single, casual blow.
"Show me a projection of what happened… I will send it to the capital. This might be a ninth rank." The city lord said softly, his voice carrying a weight that silenced every noble in the vicinity. Only a ninth-rank individual could be this overwhelmingly powerful, could leave an eighth-rank warrior this helpless with so little effort. There was no other explanation that made sense.
One should understand that within both the circle mage system and the warrior rank system, there were significant internal levels within each rank. The gap between someone who had just barely stepped into a rank and someone who stood at its peak was not trivial—it was enormous.
For example, consider a second-rank warrior or a two-circle mage. A person who had only recently broken into this stage possessed roughly enough power to destroy a small building. But those who stood at the peak of this same stage could bring down an entire skyscraper. The gap between the bottom and the top of a single rank was massive, and this disparity only grew wider at higher levels.
At the eighth rank, the baseline capability was the destruction of an entire island. Those at the lower level of this rank could destroy a smaller island, while those at the peak could annihilate landmasses many times larger.
The gap between the weakest and strongest within the eighth rank alone was over fifty times in raw destructive output—a chasm so vast that two people of the same rank could fight and have it look like an adult disciplining a child.
The city lord himself could be considered a solid mid-eighth rank. That was precisely why he had been stationed here—he was strong enough to hold this border city and buy enough time for reinforcements to arrive if a large-scale attack from the dwarves ever came. He wasn't expected to win such a battle alone, merely to survive long enough for the real powerhouses to show up.
So, Reinhard knocking him out with a single backhand? That wasn't something even a peak eighth-rank fighter could accomplish, not even if the city lord had been completely careless and dropped every shred of his defenses.
The power behind that blow transcended the eighth rank entirely. Reinhard had to be at the ninth rank. There was no other reasonable conclusion. And if that was the case, then this situation had escalated far beyond what a border city lord could handle on his own.
This had to be reported to the king immediately, and he needed the projection of the event to serve as proof, because without visual evidence, no one at the capital would believe that a ninth-rank being had appeared out of nowhere in a backwater city and walked off with three hundred thousand people.