The settlement’s outer barrier flickered as another wave of portal monsters hit it. Lyra’xis stood at the front line with 200 of her soldiers arranged in a defensive arc between the barrier’s edge and the survivor shelters.

The monsters that they were fighting were level 460 at most. Some kind of six-legged creatures covered in bony plates that fought in packs.

Even one of them taken alone was strong enough to kill most of the survivors in the settlement, but they were not strong enough to kill her.

A pack of seven monsters broke through their defensive perimeter, and Lyra’xis moved to meet them before her soldiers could even react. Her upper right arm drew a curved blade from her back while she activated a skill that created a mana shield.

When the first creature reached her, trying to ram her, she sidestepped and brought the blade down across the base of its neck, cutting through the plates in a single strike.

The corpse slid forward across the ground, trailing blood.

A second and third creature came together, flanking her from both sides. Lyra’xis planted her rear foot and pivoted, catching the left one with her shield and driving it sideways into its companion.

The collision staggered both creatures long enough for her to close the distance, and two strikes put them down—one through the chest cavity and the other through the skull.

The remaining four hesitated. Their instinct told them the target in front of them was dangerous, but their hunger pushed them forward regardless, and they charged.

Lyra’xis killed them in six seconds. Her blade carved through the first creature’s throat in a single diagonal cut that opened the artery beneath the bony plating, and the body collapsed before the blood even started to flow.

The second died when she drove the tip through the gap where its front shoulder met its chest, angling upward to puncture whatever passed for a heart in its anatomy.

She pulled the blade free as the creature sagged, then pivoted to meet the third, which had closed the distance while she was occupied.

Her strike came down across the joint where its foreleg connected to its torso, severing the limb entirely, and the follow-up took it through the base of the skull.

The fourth lunged at her exposed side, but she caught the movement in her peripheral vision and twisted, bringing her blade up in a rising arc that split the creature from sternum to jaw.

She flicked the blood off her blade and turned back to the line.

“Close that gap,” she said to the nearest squad leader. “Redistribute our forces to the eastern section and put up some more barriers.”

“Yes, Legate.”

The squad moved, and Lyra’xis took a position on a raised platform that gave her a view of the surrounding area. The settlement was holding, but the pressure was constant, as every few minutes another group of portal monsters found a weak point in one of the many barriers that the Aegis Created and pushed through.

That happened most of the times when

Her soldiers handled most of them, and the ones that slipped past were caught by the secondary line of defenders—a mix of Aegis Phalanx reserves and the strongest survivors, who stood at roughly level 300 and could manage to support the others against the weaker creatures if they worked together.

The real fight, however, was happening elsewhere, and from her position, Lyra’xis could see it. Reidar’s army was spread across the city and moved with a coordination she had to admit was impressive.

Through her tactical display, she saw the feedback of his summons as they faced the portal monsters at each of the portal locations.

Reidar even managed to close one at that point.

The eastern portal had collapsed. Lyra’xis had seen it happen—watched the dimensional tear fold in on itself like a wound closing. The light that had been pouring through it, that sickly green glow that turned the street into something out of a fever dream, had vanished in less than a second.

The monsters that had been halfway through the threshold when it happened were severed cleanly, their front halves tumbling forward while the rest were left wherever the portal had led. Blood sprayed across the pavement in arcs, and the bisected corpses slid to a stop against the barrier wall.

Five minutes later, a second portal collapsed. The dimensional tear folded in on itself in the same way the first had.

The sickly green light that had been bleeding through the threshold vanished in less than a second, and the monsters caught mid-crossing were severed at the boundary.

A third portal went down before she had finished processing the second. The collapse was visible even from her position—a brief flare of distorted light, then nothing.

Three of the seven portals were now closed, which meant Reidar’s forces were already moving toward the next targets.

<He is faster than anyone I have seen at this kind of operation.>

The thought was not a compliment; it was an observation that was grim in the woman’s mind. The speed at which Reidar destroyed the church’s portals while providing troops across the entire city told her something about the man’s capabilities that the raw level number alone did not reveal. He was not just powerful—he was efficient, and efficiency at this scale was scary.

Lyra’xis pulled her attention away from the tactical display and back to the perimeter. Another group of monsters had appeared at the eastern edge of the barrier.

Dark shapes were moving through the haze of displaced mana that hung in the air following the three portals’ demise. She stepped off the platform and moved to intercept them before they reached the defensive line.

These were different from the earlier groups, as they were some kind of taller, bipedal beings with elongated limbs and mouths that split open in three directions. Their levels ranged from 470 to 490, which made them harder targets for her soldiers but still well within her ability to handle.

She killed the first before it reached the barrier, her blade taking the lead creature through the center of its split mouth and the second through the joint where its arm met its torso.

One even managed to swing at her, and she caught the blow with her mana shield, feeling the impact travel through her arm and into her shoulder.

It was a strong hit, stronger than most of what she had faced today, but not strong enough to break her guard.

She drove her blade upward through the creature’s chest, twisted it, and pulled it free as the monster collapsed.

Her soldiers engaged the remaining ones, and the line held, but at that point it was clear that the monsters rushing to this side were getting stronger by the minute. The creatures breaking through now moved with more precision, their attacks more coordinated, and their levels consistently higher than the waves that had come before.

Most likely, those that reached Earth first were those that were closest to the portals when they opened on their planets, but now, those that were farther, those that were stronger, were finally reaching the portals and crossing them, and there were still four of those portals open.

Each minute that passed meant another wave of increasingly dangerous threats, and each portal that remained active was a pipeline funneling the worst of what those worlds offered directly into Kingsgate’s streets.

Lyra’xis was about to return to the platform when the communication device mounted on her left lower arm pulsed with an incoming signal. She activated it with a tap and heard the voice of one of her soldiers, who was running the long-range monitoring station from the command building.

“Legate, we have a situation.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep