The Extra is a Genius!?-Chapter 605: Roberto Moves
Beyond the mountain range where Noel had spent those last months training, Roberto walked at an easy pace as if he had nowhere important to be. The air was colder there, thinner, touched by the same wild mana that had shaped the beasts of the range for centuries, yet he moved through it with the comfort of someone returning to a familiar road.
Behind him, far enough to blur into shifting silhouettes between stone and fog, something vast was moving. Many things, in fact. Heavy bodies. Crawling shapes. Wings passing across broken moonlight. An army, if one insisted on calling it that, though there was nothing human in the rhythm of its advance.
Beside Roberto, a stone golem kept pace with slow, thunderous steps. Its body was rough and asymmetrical, built from dark slabs of mountain rock fused into a crude humanoid shape. It had no face worth naming, only a heavy head with dim light buried in the cracks, yet it turned slightly toward Roberto every so often as if listening.
Roberto let out a low breath and smiled to himself. "I’m nervous." His voice was light, almost amused. "I haven’t felt this alive in a long time. Not since I put a hole through Nicolas." He tilted his head slightly, looking up at the sky between the peaks. "That was the first time I did that in all the cycles too. A nice change, honestly."
The golem seemed to dip its head once. Roberto laughed under his breath and gave it an affectionate slap on the back.
The construct shattered instantly. Its torso burst apart first, then the rest collapsed into a rain of broken stone that rolled down the slope in heavy fragments. Roberto didn’t even slow down. He kept walking with his hands in his pockets, stepping past the rubble as if nothing unusual had happened.
"For better or worse, it all ends tomorrow." His smile thinned, though it never disappeared. "Either Noel wins and I finally die, or Noctis dies, Elarin keeps his word, and he takes Noel’s body and I get my freedom back."
He was quiet for a second after that.
"Either works," he added, more softly. "But if I’m being honest with myself... I want to live. A good life. A quiet one. I still don’t know what that feels like." His eyes drifted toward the distant line of land ahead. "I’d like to know. Just once. I’d like to know what freedom actually is."
The farther Roberto walked, the clearer the shape of his army became. It was not a single species. Not even close.
Great draconic bodies moved through the higher air above the range, some broad-winged and scaled in dark iron colors, others leaner and pale, their shapes cutting slow circles through the sky as if waiting for permission to descend. On the ground below, creatures that looked like ogres in the broadest sense lumbered forward in packs, but even they were inconsistent, some thick and swollen with stone-like skin, others tall and half-starved with long arms that nearly dragged across the earth. Between them advanced skeletal figures, not the clean bones of simple undead, but warped remains still wearing fragments of armor, broken antlers, horns, or claws from whatever they had once been before death failed to keep them.
And mixed among them were wolves. Too many of them. Massive mountain wolves padded beside things that would normally tear them apart on sight. Black-furred shadow wolves moved in near silence between their legs, purple lines faintly visible across their bodies, their eyes bright in the dark like pieces of trapped malice. Some of them were close enough in kind to Noir’s species that the resemblance would have been unsettling even without everything else around them.
None of it should have worked. Predators from different habitats. Flyers from distant peaks. Grave-things that should not have been moving. Creatures that should have ripped each other apart long before reaching the edge of the range. But they didn’t. They advanced with an unnatural calm, as though some single pressure held all their instincts by the throat and pushed them forward together.
Roberto glanced upward toward one of the lower-flying dragons and smiled faintly. "Noel did well," he murmured. "Preparing Thorne Territory was the correct choice." His hands remained in his pockets as he stepped over a cracked ridge. "It still won’t be enough, but I’m glad he tried."
A shape larger than the rest moved closer from the left. It was not a dragon and not an ogre, though it stole something from both. Its body was tall and hunched, plated in dark natural armor, with two massive arms and a horned skull-like head whose jaw opened too wide. Chains dragged from one wrist, fused into bone and flesh alike, and each step it took sank deeper into the stone than anything else around it. Even that monster kept pace quietly.
That was the worst part.
By the time the broken mountains began giving way to the outer wilds leading toward Thorne Territory, the pressure of the advancing host no longer felt like movement. It felt like a storm front.
At last Roberto reached a rise high enough to see it. Thorne Territory stretched in the distance beneath the deepening sky, no longer peaceful, no longer simply the domain of a noble house. Even from there he could make out the smoke of watchfires, the thin lines of defensive formations cutting across roads and open ground, the occasional flicker of distant light where patrols moved and mages worked through the night.
Roberto stopped and looked for a while without speaking. The troops were spread well, not clustered stupidly around the manor. The outer approaches had been cleared, the terrain broken into layers, the forest edges trimmed where they would have become traps. Whoever had organized it understood that if the fighting began only at the main house, it would already be too late.
A smile touched his mouth. "Good," he said softly. "That’s much better."
He meant it. A one-sided slaughter would have been tedious. Predictable. Empty. This had weight to it. Noel had taken the warning seriously and made the world bend around it. Roberto could respect that much.
Behind him, the monstrous host kept gathering across the slopes and broken wilds, spreading farther through the landscape than the eye could comfortably measure. Dragons circled high above. Shadow wolves slipped through rock and brush like stains moving against the earth. The larger things, ogre-like giants, skeletal war-beasts, twisted abominations that had no proper shape to compare against, stood in waiting silence.
Even the world around them had begun to react. Small animals fled through the lower brush in blind panic. Birds had long since stopped singing. Trees trembled where the ground pressure grew too heavy, their leaves shaking despite the lack of wind. Above it all the sky itself seemed heavier, as if the night had thickened over the land in anticipation.
Roberto stood there a moment longer, eyes fixed on the prepared territory ahead. Then he took one step forward. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺
Behind him, the army moved with him.
