Supreme Summoner Overlord: Rise of the Endless Legion-Chapter 439: The Outpost Behind the Illusion (7)

The tall Priest nodded so fast that blood dripped from the wounds on his face and hit the floor. The woman Priest was already trying to speak, though her words came out hoarse since her throat was raw from the screaming. The young one just nodded and kept nodding, as if stopping would bring the insects back.

"Good," Reidar said. He sat down on the crate again. "Start from the beginning. Tell me everything about the Church's operations in Kingsgate."

They talked. All five of them. They interrupted each other, corrected each other, and desperately competed for "Most Cooperative Interrogation Subject" like it was an Olympic sport—because apparently, spending an hour as an all-you-can-eat buffet for wasp-sized nightmares did wonders for one's willingness to share.

Reidar listened.

Half an hour later, he stood outside the stone building, and the five Priests were dead behind him.

He had killed them after the interrogation. Not because he enjoyed it, but because they were mutated humans—monsters, technically—and leaving them alive served no purpose. They couldn't be cured, they couldn't be trusted, and they would have gone straight back to the Church if he let them go.

Reidar stood on the corpse of the tall Priest, though he didn't look down because his mind was elsewhere, sorting through everything the Priest had told him.

<They confirmed it. The food plan is real.>

The Priests had verified what both Lena and Jake had told him. The Church of Unbinding was going to distribute the infected rations to the civilian population of Kingsgate.

The parasitic eggs would hatch inside the hosts, and over a period of several weeks, the hosts would transform into monsters that the Church could unleash. The plan was to turn Kingsgate's population into a weapon—an army of monsters that the Church would use to take control of the region.

But that wasn't the part that made Reidar's jaw tighten.

<Both the Progenitor and Jorik are in Kingsgate.>

The Priests didn't know where exactly the two were hiding inside the city, which was not a surprise since the Church operated on a need-to-know basis that kept lower-ranking members in the dark about leadership locations, among the many things.

However, what the Priests knew was that both the Progenitor and Jorik had been in Kingsgate for at least two months, coordinating the operation from within the city itself. That also meant that the church fuckers were preparing this since around when he got sent to the Ignis world. This was no doubt another one of Mara's plans.

<I wonder how Jorik is contributing in all this clusterfuck.>

That meant the head of the snake was right there, inside the walls of the city where Reidar's wife and son lived.

<Martha. Marcus.>

The thought hit him like a punch to the chest, and Reidar took a breath to steady himself. His family was in the same city as the two most dangerous members of the Church of Unbinding, and they had no idea.

Most likely, not even the Aegis had any idea.

The other thing the Priests knew was something Reidar hadn't expected. They gave him locations. Not just one or two, but an entire list of buildings, warehouses, shops, and underground chambers that the Church controlled inside Kingsgate without the knowledge of the survivors or the Aegis Phalanx.

Safe houses where Church members lived as survivors. Storage facilities where the infected rations were being stockpiled before distribution. Meeting points where orders were passed from Jorik's inner circle to the cells operating throughout the city.

<These guys knew a lot, uh? I wonder why.>

Reidar had memorized every single location; besides, he knew Kingsgate like his pockets.

<If I give them time to react, they'll distribute the food. If even one batch reaches the civilians...>

He didn't finish the thought because the implication was clear: if the Church found out their outpost had been destroyed, they would speed up the operation, and thousands of people in Kingsgate—including his family—would be at risk.

<I'm not waiting. I'm going now.>

Reidar stepped off the Priest's corpse and walked toward the building that housed the teleportation circle.

The teleportation circle glowed. The runes carved into the stone floor were complex, layered in patterns that Reidar recognized from his time on the Ignis homeworld, and the circle itself was large enough to accommodate hundreds of people at once—or, as Reidar was about to find out, a significant number of summoned creatures.

<The Priests said this connects to a basement in Kingsgate. A Church-controlled building near the eastern market district.>

Reidar stood at the edge of the circle and reached out through the Overmind Consciousness to his army. He had around 47,834 creatures, all waiting for orders, all packed into the ruins of the outpost like an army that had nowhere to sit. The Vorathid Abyssal Horrors could shrink, so teleporting them was not a problem at all.

<Move to the teleportation building. Form a queue. Enter the circle in groups as fast as they can cycle.>

The army moved.

The first to go through were the Night-Stalker Assassins from the Eternal Death-Host. Reidar sent them in groups of twenty because they were the fastest, the quietest, and the most capable of dealing with whatever security the Church had on the other side of the portal.

Their job was simple: kill everyone in the building on the Kingsgate side before they could raise an alarm.

The teleportation circle activated, and the first group of assassins stepped onto the runes and vanished in a flash of light. The circle reset in less than four seconds, and the next group stepped on.

More. Flash. Reset. More.

Reidar watched through the Overmind Consciousness as the Assassins appeared on the other side. The connection was slightly delayed—a fraction of a second of disorientation as the summons adjusted to the new location—but the Assassins didn't need time to adjust.

They materialized in a large basement, lit by torches mounted on the walls, and the Church members who were guarding the portal didn't even have time to draw their weapons.

The Assassins just killed them in less than two seconds, and the basement was silent.

<Send the next wave.>