"What—so we fight them on the ground?" Chris asked, looking to Ethan.

"Ground won’t work either." Ethan’s eyes stayed on the incoming swarm. "There are at least tens of thousands of them, and they’re all fire-type. If ten thousand of them breathe fire at once, even Henry’s shield won’t hold."

"...Then what do we do?" Big Mike asked, jaw tightening.

"You get Flint and the others out," Ethan said immediately. "Find somewhere to hide. I’ll handle them."

"Captain," Sean said, frowning, "these aren’t those Yamato idiots. This is tens of thousands of high-tier mutant beasts. A lot of them are Tier 17, and they can fly. Even you might not be able to tank this."

Ethan nodded once. "Yeah. That’s why you’re coming back to help."

He reached into his ring and tossed out a bundle of crystal cores. "Take these. I’m going to cut down some Tier 15s first. Chris—once I drop enough, you sneak in and grab the cores."

Chris’s eyes sharpened.

Ethan kept going, voice fast, practical. "You guys hide and level up. The second you hit Stage B, get back here and back me up."

Even Ethan felt a flicker of unease. Tens of thousands of flying, high-tier, fire-ability monsters wasn’t a joke—no matter who you were.

"Got it," Chris said.

Nobody argued. Nobody dragged their feet.

Flint and the other mounts dipped hard, carrying the team down toward the uneven mountain ridges below. There were plenty of slopes and jagged outcroppings to break line of sight.

Ethan teleported to the peak of the tallest nearby mountain, boots hitting hot stone.

The instant the others vanished into the terrain, the red monsters swept in.

Up close, they looked like a swarm of smaller pterosaurs—dark red from head to tail, long needle-like beaks, hooked claws that looked built to peel meat off bone.

As they approached, the sky dimmed under their wings. Heat rolled off them in a physical wave that made Ethan’s brow crease.

He lifted a hand.

Over a hundred daggers shot out at once, streaking into the front line of the swarm.

He had to drag their attention onto himself. If they broke off and went after Chris and the others, it’d be ugly. Flint’s group was fast for their tier, but not this fast.

Ethan could control about a hundred daggers at full effectiveness. More than that and his grip started slipping—and the damage dropped.

Normally he only ran a few dozen blades.

This was not "normal."

The daggers hit like gunshots.

The red fliers were charging forward, packed tight, and the blades were too fast for them to even register. One after another got punched through the chest, the neck, the skull.

Screeches tore through the air.

Bodies started dropping, falling stiffly out of the sky.

The swarm’s mood flipped instantly.

Enraged, the front ranks opened their beaks and unleashed a storm of fire, a rolling tidal wave of flames that swallowed the mountain peak and surged for Ethan.

Ethan blink-teleported straight up—appearing above the firestorm.

Then his daggers flashed again, drilling into a cluster of Tier 15s.

At Stage B peak, killing Tier 15 fliers was easy work. They didn’t even get a chance to dodge before their bodies went limp.

But the rest of the swarm didn’t pause.

Wings snapped.

And suddenly the air filled with fire—condensed into countless flaming feathers, a barrage so dense it looked like the sky was shedding burning rain.

Ethan had no foothold in midair. Once he attacked, gravity took over and his body started dropping.

The monsters noticed.

The lower ranks focused their fire, stacking the barrage exactly where he’d fall.

Ethan had to chain teleport nonstop—dodging, reappearing, dodging again—just to avoid being hammered into the magma-lit landscape below.

But with tens of thousands attacking at once, the entire zone was basically blanketed. Even with teleportation, he couldn’t avoid everything.

More than once, he reappeared and immediately ate a handful of flaming feathers across the shoulders and back.

One or two didn’t matter.

A dozen at once? It burned.

And when feathers from Tier 17 fliers clipped him, he felt real damage—skin stinging, heat punching deeper than he liked.

He didn’t use Absolute Stasis.

The cost was too high. Against tens of thousands, freezing them wouldn’t let him kill enough to justify the drain. He needed his mental energy for teleportation—right now, teleportation was what kept him alive.

He glanced toward the ridges.

Chris and the others were long gone from sight.

Good.

Ethan stopped trading blows.

Instead, he teleported hard toward the distance—one jump, then another—pulling the swarm away.

As expected, the red fliers stayed locked on him, fury and hunger dragging them forward.

The entire cloud of monsters pivoted in unison and chased him across the dark-red sky.

Ethan kept hauling that massive flock farther and farther away, leaving a carpet of red corpses behind for Chris and the others to harvest.

But it didn’t take long before he felt the strain.

His mental energy was running low. Chain-teleporting like that was brutal. It chewed through him fast.

And he couldn’t just ditch them entirely—if he escaped clean, this swarm would loop back and go hunting for the others.

Right as he was grinding his teeth through another teleport, an idea sparked.

Ethan flicked his mind.

A dagger shot under his feet.

He stepped down onto it.

Under the raw grip of Telekinesis, the blade stabilized in midair—steady enough to hold his weight.

Ethan’s eyes lit up.

"Go—"

He pushed with his mind.

The dagger launched—

—and Ethan’s body promptly dropped straight down.

"Fuck," he blurted. "Wrong again. Retry!"

He teleported back up, heart thumping, and snapped a different dagger under his feet.

This time he didn’t let it burst forward instantly. He ramped it—slow to fast.

Even so, that half-second of learning time cost him. Pain flared across his back in a rapid series of stings.

He didn’t have to look to know it.

He’d just gotten turned into a pincushion.

But Ethan learned fast.

In seconds he found the rhythm—how to accelerate without losing the "platform," how to keep the dagger aligned under his center of mass, how to lean his body with it instead of fighting it.

The speed climbed.

Then climbed again.

And within moments, he was ripping through the air so fast the red flock behind him started shrinking.

Before long, he’d completely shaken them.

The swarm of red birds hovered midair, dumbfounded.

How the hell was he that fast?

They had wings. He didn’t.

And yet they couldn’t even see his tail-light.

What kind of joke was that?

They screeched in frustration, circling a few times in pissed-off confusion, and finally—defeated—turned back.

They needed to retrieve their dead.

And then... eat them.

This world was barren. Cannibalism wasn’t a taboo—it was survival.

They only ate dead packmates, not living ones. Normally they hunted other creatures, but a free pile of meat was a free pile of meat.

They’d barely started heading back when—

A shadow streaked in again.

The guy who’d "escaped" had returned.

"Hello," Ethan called cheerfully, voice carrying over the heat haze. "Miss me? Haha!"

He was in a ridiculously good mood.

Because he’d just unlocked a brand-new "skill":

Telekinetic flight.

What Atlas Federation guy didn’t grow up dreaming about flying? It was always something from movies, comics, novels—never real.

And now he was doing it.

Sure, his version was bootleg as hell—standing on a dagger like some bargain-bin superhero—but the result was the same.

Before, he’d always had flying mounts, so he’d never even tried thinking in this direction.

Today he’d been forced into it.

And it worked.

His Telekinesis could push a dagger to insane speeds, which meant—at least in theory—he could fly insanely fast too.

Theory was theory, though. With his body adding massive air resistance, he’d never match the raw speed of a dagger flying solo.

But even so, he was still faster than most flying mutant beasts.

These Tier 16 and Tier 17 red birds couldn’t even dream of catching him.

And that feeling?

Was amazing.

The flock saw him come back and immediately blew up with rage. They snapped their wings and unleashed a sky-filling barrage—countless flaming feathers whipping toward him like a burning blizzard.

Ethan arced away in a smooth, lazy curve, drifting to a new angle—

Then he accelerated.

Gone.

The swarm screamed, furious.

Getting speed-gapped this hard was a straight-up insult to their pride.

But reality didn’t care about pride. They couldn’t catch him.

So they turned back again.

They hadn’t gone far—

when that annoying bastard flashed back in.

"Hi," Ethan called. "I’m back again!"

As he spoke, a wave of daggers shot out and dropped dozens more of their flock out of the sky.

Ethan wasn’t about to let them return.

Not while his people were still powering up in the mountains.