Cordelia Allston burst out from the gates of the fortress, only to freeze at the sight before her. The sheer devastation stretched out in all directions; carnage painted across the landscape with such intensity that it nearly defied comprehension. She stared for a long moment, then exhaled, her voice edged with both awe and exasperation.
“This is seriously insane. And where in the world is she casting from?”
Overhead, the skies still flared red at regular intervals. Divine Slayer: Lance of Longinus, a secret art of the dragons, continued to fall from the heavens like burning meteors. Each lance streaked downward in rhythmic succession, crackling with energy before slamming into the earth in explosions of divine violence. Twenty spears. Thirty. Forty. Past fifty, Cordelia gave up trying to count. It was no longer worth tracking, only surviving.
The road ahead was drenched in blood. Ogres and Ogre Generals alike littered the ground in mangled heaps, victims of an unrelenting aerial massacre. Torn skulls, split torsos, steaming entrails; everywhere she looked, the red-soaked path was overflowing with the consequences of unchecked power. The air reeked of scorched flesh and shattered bone.
Whatever unity the ogre horde once had was gone. Their formations had crumbled; their discipline had vanished. Cordelia couldn’t have known the reason behind it—how Ryuto Maclaine’s phantom army had driven the monsters into a blind retreat—but she could see the aftermath. The moment they reached the fortress, thinking they might escape whatever horrors chased them, they’d been met with divine judgment falling from the skies.
Now, they were little more than terrified beasts, running wild in all directions. There was no order to them anymore, only chaos and fear. For those who could still think, Cordelia must have seemed the lesser evil. They knew she was powerful, ranked somewhere in the upper tiers of the Adventurer Guild’s B-class, but in their broken minds, facing her was a better gamble than turning back toward whatever force had ripped apart their rear.
But they didn’t know the truth. They didn’t know who she really was. Not yet. They had no idea what Cordelia Allston became when she stopped conserving her strength, when she abandoned tactics and let the wild core of her power surge forward. What they would see now was no knight, no noble prodigy.
They were about to witness a human-devouring Shura.
Cordelia stepped forward slowly, lifting a hand to sweep her long crimson hair over one shoulder. Her eyes burned with the same fire as the spears in the sky, deep and unrelenting, bright as blood. Then came the glow. It wasn’t a simple aura or loose magical leakage. It was a full-body ignition, an inferno of controlled chaos that wrapped around her limbs and torso like armor forged of living flame.
She had activated Magic Overdrive. Not the wild, frenzied version most spellcasters feared, but a perfect, honed manifestation of it, fully under her control. And with that, she launched herself forward, sprinting straight into the ogres’ broken formation.
Her blade rose overhead in a single, fluid motion. And then it came down—an execution, not a battle cry.
To the fleeing ogres, it was the return of death itself. A nightmare in the form of a girl.
And that nightmare’s name… was Cordelia Allston.
She swung her sword, and in the same breath, heads went flying. Blood surged skyward in arcs so violent they looked like fountains erupting from the earth.
She swung again; this time, torsos split open. Entrails spilled out or were flung through the air like discarded rope. Bodies crumpled before they even realized they’d been hit.
Another swing, and limbs detached, spiraling into the dirt. The guttural, broken screams of ogres rattled through the trees, sounding like trapped, feral spirits shrieking their last.
Each strike felled multiple enemies at once. With every motion of her blade, a handful of ogres died—slain not in duels but by the passing of a whirlwind. To any outside observer, her sword wasn’t just fast. It wasn’t visible. A red blur at the heart of a storm.
Cordelia moved like a blood-soaked hurricane, her every step leaving a trail of carnage. Corpses piled up in mounds wherever she passed: layers upon layers, grotesque monuments marking her advance.
And not a single drop of blood touched her.
It was absolute. One-sided. A slaughter without resistance or reprisal. Her aura alone seemed to part the battlefield.
She kept moving west, down the highway, carving a path through the heart of the ogre force. Everything that entered her vision died. Ogres. Ogre Generals. It didn’t matter. Her sword knew no distinction. Her presence left behind utter and total silence. There were no survivors. No escapees. Nothing breathing left in her wake.
Far above, spears still fell from the heavens; Lilith’s divine bombardment sculpting its own trail of ruin.
Lilith painted the skies with death.
Cordelia painted the earth.
Their enemies weren’t weak. Far from it. But this was why A-rank adventurers were called “tactical weapons.” Not people. Not assets. Weapons. Forces of nature shaped into human form.
And now, down the same bloodied road, another figure raced to catch up, her voice sharp with disbelief as she muttered to herself.
“Seriously. There’s brute force, and then there’s this.”
The girl, Lilith, had been cloaked in high-grade magical camouflage until moments ago, an intricate fusion of optical and spiritual concealment.
Cordelia, for all her monstrous strength, was a pure close-combat specialist. She had no affinity with magic, no detection skills to speak of. And Lilith’s stealth, enhanced by ancient dragon arts, wasn’t something just anyone could pierce.
Cordelia never sensed her. She hadn’t noticed. But the truth was, Lilith had been there the whole time, watching from only a few steps away.
Even more, it meant Lilith had unleashed those devastating Longinus spears across the battlefield without a single soul noticing she was even there.
At present, Lilith had been entrusted with Cordelia’s support. That meant one thing above all: she had to keep Cordelia within visible range. No matter what happened, she needed to be close enough to react, close enough to intervene the moment the tide turned.
That was why she’d stayed right at her side.
And that, in turn, meant she had witnessed Cordelia’s swordsmanship up close. With nothing in the way. No barrier of distance, no blur of battle.
“I’m a Mage,” Lilith muttered under her breath. “My job class doesn’t rely on brute strength… but even so…”
Cordelia was cutting down ogres in a blazing sprint, tearing through the horde like a living weapon, utterly relentless. Every enemy that entered her field of vision was drawn into the whirlwind and destroyed. And yet, what left Lilith speechless wasn’t just the raw violence.