Seeing the tide of battle already tilting toward the adventurers, Leon knew what had vanished.
If he didn't leave now, all kinds of trouble would come looking for him later.
So, catching a moment when no one was watching, he swiftly dropped his ice armor, stepped back a few paces, and slipped into a back alley, disappearing from public view.
Heith ran an enemy through with her blade and wiped a smear of warm blood off her face.
Watching the last foe drop in front of her, she let out the tension in her whole body and instinctively turned to look at the spot where Leon had been.
"Huh? Mr. Leon..."
"???"
"Where'd he go?"
But...
There wasn't a trace of him anywhere.
"Ais, Heith. Both of you, over here!"
Just then, hearing Riveria's call, the two had to push down their confusion for the moment and jogged over to her side.
They were about to speak up, but seeing the way the two kept glancing around, and noticing Leon's disappearance herself, Riveria thought it over for a second and figured out what was going on.
So the hooded man didn't want too much attention, huh? That did fit his personality...
...
The battle in the town of Rivira had already been turning in the adventurers' favor, and with Riveria's arrival, Evilus's line collapsed completely in an instant.
"N-N-Nine Hell!"
"First-Class Adventurer support has arrived, fall back! Retreat, now!!!"
The moment the small-squad leader caught sight of Riveria, his pupils shrank and terror twisted his face. He didn't even bother with his subordinates anymore, just spun around and bolted in the opposite direction for his life.
"This isn't right, this isn't right at all!"
"That's not how the script goes. Didn't Lady Valletta say that from the moment they got word, even a First-Class Adventurer would need at least a few hours to reach Floor 18?"
"But it's been less than an hour, so why is Nine Hell already here!?"
"Could it be..."
"No way, no way!"
"Run, we have to run back! We have to report this to Lady Valletta!"
"Thud..."
The moment he turned to flee, his entire face slammed solidly into a chest that felt like it had been forged from steel.
"You fu..."
Clutching his throbbing nose, the curse barely out of his mouth, his gaze traveled up that bronze, powerfully built pectoral...
When the face that sent shivers through every member of Evilus, whether soldier, operative, or commander, came into full view...
"Ot... Ot... Ot... Ottar!!!!!!!"
Gack...!
The next second, the squad leader's eyes rolled back in his head, and he was scared straight into unconsciousness.
The adventurers: "..."
Riveria: "..."
Gareth and the others who had just arrived: "..."
Jeanne and Rose, who were still searching for Leon's trail and had stopped in their tracks: "..."
"H-he fainted!?"
Ais and Heith exchanged a glance, and Heith was the first to lose it. She cracked up with a loud snort.
"Pffhahaha... hahahaha, hahahahaha!"
"Ot... Ottar... you... you scared the guy... unconscious!"
She was laughing so hard she couldn't catch her breath, pointing at Ottar, bent double, hand on her stomach, completely convulsing with it.
"Hahahahahaha!"
As Heith cackled uncontrollably, the people around her were trembling from holding in their own laughter, cheeks flushed bright red.
They wanted to laugh but didn't dare, and it was agony.
After all, the man in front of them was Ottar, the Warlord of Freya Familia, the city's only Lv. 6.
Heith, sharing the same familia as Ottar, could afford to be brazen. But if they dared to laugh along...
Beside Heith and Ais.
Even Riveria's noble, aloof features briefly betrayed a flicker of a suppressed smile.
But to preserve Ottar's dignity, she forced the amusement down and led the two girls over.
"Ottar, thank you for coming to support us."
The boaz youth calmly swept his gaze across the surroundings.
Wherever his eyes fell, the adventurers who had just come off their life-and-death fight instantly went cold as if doused with ice water, silent as cicadas in winter.
Ottar ignored those "outlaws" and let his gaze fall on the Evilus corpses sprawled haphazardly across the ground. His eyes flickered faintly.
Then he simply responded with a single nasal grunt:
"Mm."
Unsurprised, Riveria turned her attention to Gareth.
"Didn't expect an unreliable dwarf like you to be the one coming to support. Finn's idea?"
"Hmph, watch that long-eared mouth of yours, don't be ungrateful!"
Gareth grunted, displeased.
"This old man's pace may not match that boy Finn's, but I didn't hold up anything important!"
He swept his gaze across the battlefield strewn with wreckage and knit his rugged brows.
"But... the intel we got said Evilus was sending a large force for an adventurer hunt in Rivira. Looking at the situation now, though, something seems off?"
"The number of surviving adventurers in the town is quite a bit higher than we expected?"
"Riveria, what's going on here?"
Riveria's gaze drifted past Jeanne and Rose, who nodded at her from a distance before hurrying out of town, and she paused to think before explaining:
"This... you could call it a coincidence, I suppose?"
"Evilus's plan this time could very well have dealt a devastating blow to Rivira. But... well, you know how it goes."
She shot a helpless glance at Ais.
"Because a certain young lady snuck off early this morning, I had no choice but to follow her down."
"So..."
Hearing this, everyone suddenly understood.
Right. With Nine Hell already here, even if Evilus mobilized a massive force of soldiers plus elites topping out at Lv. 2, what kind of splash could they possibly make?
"Still... because Evilus was luring monsters into rampage and multiplying on Floor 19, I wasted some time down there."
Hearing Riveria bring up intel they hadn't known about, Gareth and Ottar both furrowed their brows.
"Floor 19? Evilus had that kind of backup plan in place too?"
By this point, Heith had sidled up next to Ottar. Hearing this, she scoffed, voice dripping with contempt:
"Their original calculation was pretty shrewd. First, they'd send soldiers to set up traps and ambushes on the perimeter. At the same time, they'd lure monster hordes from Floor 19 to smash into the town. Then, after the monsters had mauled the adventurers, they'd come in behind and mop up. The goal, naturally, was to cripple the adventurers' overall strength and completely demolish the entire Under Resort in the process."
"I have to admit, Evilus's plan this time was vicious. They came within a hair of pulling it off."
At that, a flicker of lingering dread crossed Heith's eyes, quickly replaced by mischief.
Thinking back on the heart-pounding, dramatic experience she'd just been through, she gave a light laugh, held up her thumb and index finger, and pinched them together into a tiny gap, almost invisible, saying cheerfully:
"They were just this close to getting away with it."
...
The disturbance Evilus had kicked up in Rivira gradually subsided with the arrival of First-Class Adventurer reinforcements.
At this point, all everyone had to do was wait for the rescue team from the surface to come down, give emergency treatment to the wounded, and begin the work of rebuilding the town, while the rest stood watch.
Compared to Riveria and the others, who only needed to dismantle Evilus's plan, Leon had quite a bit more on his mind.
Floor 19, near Floor Passage 4-9.
Having pulled out of Rivira early, Leon now appeared here once again.
After swiftly gathering up all the Magic Stones dropped from the monsters he had taken out earlier, he hid in the shadows of the dense woods along the hillside, looking down from his elevated position at the monster horde rallying once more below, stretching as far as the eye could see.
A smile tugged at his mouth.
"Evilus gives ten times the Excelia of grinding monsters, but how many of them are there, really?"
"And every last one of them is clever as hell. They dodge fireballs, and I have to burn brain cells outwitting them... fighting them is nowhere near as efficient as just grinding mobs."
He muttered to himself, weighing the pros and cons, all while calmly observing the monster horde's movements, waiting for something.
While pulling out of Rivira, he had spotted Ottar from a distance, the man having made it to the battlefield first thanks to his superior speed.
"If even Big Bro Ottar's on the scene..."
Before he could finish the thought, at the passage entrance below, two dashing "knight-maidens," one golden and one blue, came into his view.
"Leon!"
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