One Last System

"The real fight is about to begin!" I called out when the anti-mana monsters broke past a single kilometer left before they would reach us.

And they were closing in fast.

Just like one would expect from those formless beings, they didn't have a set appearance. Instead, they would morph their bodies to suit whatever purpose they were targeting.

And just like that, I could see monsters with tens if not hundreds of legs. Others would decrease the number of their limbs while taking on aerodynamical shapes. There were even some that went as far as developing wings...!

But not a single one of them managed to fly. The most the winged monsters could do was leap forward, and dive through the air with their wings spread out as much as they could with all the other monsters around them before landing and repeating the process.

And it was those winged monsters that currently led the charge, simply due to how their movement speed turned out to be the greatest.

"Why are they worrying you so much?" Levi then asked, looking at me with genuine confusion on his face. "Didn't you just prove that you are way too strong for such folly to bother you?" he asked, glancing over at the approaching monsters without even a hint of fear in his eyes.

I squinted my eyes and leaned my head to the back, as if to look at Levi from a slightly greater distance. It was a stupid and pointless thing to do, as no matter whether I could see him perfectly or not, it would not help me to decide on the thing that now puzzled me.

'Is he serious?' I asked myself in my mind, unable to figure out the answer to that question on my own. So, I did the one thing that had the greatest chance of providing me with an answer.

"Are you serious?" I muttered, my voice turning out too low for Levi to properly hear it.

"What did you say?" he asked.

"Wait, no, nevermind," I said, shaking my head. "Just in case I'm wrong, tell me," I then requested. I raised my eyebrows and looked at the man with my eyes wide open, ready to intercept even the slightest hint indicating he was making fun of me. "You do realize those monsters are made up with otherwordly spiritual energy?"

"Other... what?" Levi's face turned even more confused than before.

'To think that we would end up wasting time because of this topic,' I complained in my thoughts while rolling my eyes.

The clock was ticking. With every word we said, the monsters were getting closer and closer. Yet, in order to avoid any further misunderstandings, I had to clarify this topic.

"Those monsters are made up of the type of spiritual energy that you could find in the borderlands," I explained. "In the future, I will refer to it as anti-mana as opposed to calling our spiritual energy by mana."

"Okay...?" Instead of letting Levi understand, I appeared to only confuse him even further. Yet, he wasn't a stupid man. After taking a second to reiterate everything I said before through the knowledge I just gave him, Levi's face twitched. "So they are a product of someone's failed ritual," he somehow came to a strange conclusion, bringing it up as if it was obvious. "But what does it have to do with anything?"

The monsters already crossed half of the remaining distance, leaving only five hundred meters and roughly fifteen seconds before they would catch up to us.

'They are like cars speeding through the highway,' I thought, somewhat familiar with their momentum thanks to my experiences from my life on earth.

"They are not," I quickly denied Levi's idea of what was going on. "To put it shortly, they are cultivators from a mirror dimension. Their world fell apart and their desperate technique to survive the disaster turned into the monsters we can see," I revealed what I should've talked about long ago.

"Wait, the technique turned into monsters?" Levi raised his eyebrows.

The monsters only had two hundred meters left to reach us.

"That's right," I said, nodding my head. I then turned my eyes toward the approaching horde.

Even if I was far stronger than when I first encountered them, I wasn't naive enough to take a victory for granted.

The outcome of the fight would only be ever decided after the fight would end, after all.

"Just try not to kill every last one of them," I then requested, raising my wardens and putting them on the highest possible alert.

Contrary to the weak and stupid monsters of this world that came in the first wave, the anti-mana monsters retained most of their hosts' intelligence.

As such, there was no telling how quickly they would learn about my method of fighting them off. Or in other words, if I wanted to make the most out of it, I had to keep my cards to myself for as long as possible!

"And how the heck am I supposed to kill them without killing them?!" Levi asked in an anxious voice while lowering himself to his knees and getting ready to intercept the horde.

They were just fifty meters away by now.

"Just shear off all their mana," I revealed the method right as I pushed the mana in my formation circuits to its maximum capacity and passthrough rate. "That mana of theirs... will come in handy later on!"

There was no time for any further explanations. I couldn't spare any attention to formulating my words either.

BANG!

The first of the monsters crashed into the barrier of my mana created by two of my wardens.

Contrary to the wardens' bolts, the barrier was something that they could put in place, allowing me to use formations to make up for the drawbacks of using pure mana for it.

It was also the only reason why the monsters didn't bounce off the barrier like they would do if it was made from normal mana. Instead, the impact released part of the pure mana from the formations.

Normally, this release aimed at instantly repairing any cracks that would appear in the barrier. This time, however, as soon as freed pure mana interacted with the negative mana of the monsters...

"REEEEEE!"

A devastating cry came out of the three monsters that crashed into my barrier first.

Instead of annihilating each other, my pure mana simply bounced their violet, anti-mana, causing it to turn into its mirror form of positive mana.

This, in turn, caused the two types of mana to suddenly mix within the fully mana-based bodies of those three unlucky monsters like some sort of lethal poison, causing them to quickly shed all of their power only for their hosts to drop unconscious on the ground just behind my barrier.

But the rest of the monsters kept on coming and I had no time to spare much mind for those poor survivors.

"FIRE!" I shouted, using my voice just for morale's sake.

Prompted by nothing else but my thoughts, my wardens dropped the pretense and unleashed the furry bolts at the next layer of the approaching monsters.

'SCREEEE!" This time, the pained cries were far smaller, but as they came out from tens of mana-based throats at once, they ended up making a similar noise as the three monsters that lost their life first.

MY bolts cleaved right through the violet flesh of the monster, either leaving holes in their mass or simply cutting away entire chunks of liquified anti-mana from them.

Yet, despite all of the damage that I unleashed upon them like some sort of storm of daggers, the monsters kept on going.

One of them created a long arm with three long claws at its end and swung it against me.

Just in case, I pushed even more of my pure mana into my barriers, even going as far as activating the few formations of the mage tower to do so instead of relying on wardens alone.

The attack never reached me, though. And it wasn't because my barriers proved to be effective. It was never aimed at me to begin with.

"Ugh..." a small, dull cry came out from the mouth of just one of the survivors on the ground when the claw penetrated right through the man's lungs. The other two didn't even make a noise.

And before I could do anything, the three of the people that I hoped to save ended up as nothing but a mass of tangled blood and meat, scattered over an area far greater than the size of a human being.