Supreme Magus

From the moment Lith had stepped inside the room, he and his Demons had released his Tiamat Fear, injecting his will and power into the world energy. The Demons and the Tiamat were bright violet Awakened while the Beasts were bright blue-cored and only one of them was Awakened.

As the conversation went on, the world energy had seeped inside the bodies of the Emperor Beasts and carried the Tiamat Fear straight into their mana cores. Lith had kept talking until there was enough to stop the mana flow inside the Beasts' bodies.

Without the protection of fusion magic, they had no defense against the invisible tendrils of mana that Lith used to control them.

"You really want to know who I am and what is happening, don't you?" Lith voiced the thoughts he read in the canine's eyes. "Too bad."

A snap of his fingers snapped the Emperor Beasts' neck and signaled his Demons to release streams of compressed darkness magic. With no life force or mana to fight the Plague Storms, the corpses of the beasts turned into piles of ashes before they had the time to revert to their original size.

"Not a word." Lith raised his hand, stopping the cheers and questions of the soldiers. "We might encounter more situations like this and these people are still alive only because the enemy has no idea who I am. Let's keep it that way."

"I just wanted to say thank you." A man with the sergeant's insignia on his shoulder said, and the rest of the soldiers nodded.

All the training and discipline on Mogar couldn't drive away the thought that their own families might one day find themselves on the other side of such an impossible situation and come out alive thanks to Lith.

"Don't mention it." Lith shook his head. "Someone bring these people outside. Keep them quarantined until they are declared clear from parasites. The rest of us, with me. Let's resume the s-"

"Please, mister soldier, save my mom!" A young boy, barely six years old rushed to Lith the moment the tendrils of Spirit Magic blocking him disappeared.

"I'll do everything I can, kid." Lith nodded. "If she's on this floor, we'll find her."

"She's not here!" Lith read worry and frustration in the boy's eyes, a weird mix that stopped Lith from dismissing the boy's words as a tantrum. "The beasts have taken her away. They don't care about me. They don't care about any of us.

"They keep me here to force her to stay alive! She's still alive. I'm sure of it because otherwise I'd be dead."

The boy's words made no sense to Lith and there was not one person in the room calm enough to explain what the boy meant. Most of the hostages were as panicked as the boy and some too stricken with guilt to help.

"It's my fault. It's only my fault." They sobbed.

Even after being rescued by the Knight Guard, there wasn't an inkling of hope in the room, only despair.

"Please, find my mom!" The boy bawled his eyes out. "Save her. I don't want her to suffer anymore!"

"What's her name?" Lith asked, receiving a confused look in reply. "I need to know your mother's name or I won't recognize her when I find her."

"Chyrsha." The boy sobbed. "Her name is Chyrsha."

"And you are?" Lith said. "I need to tell her you are safe, no?"

"Rolam." The boy said amid sniffs, relaxing just so slightly under Lith's protective aura. "My name is Rolam from Zeska. Mom brought me here during the war. She promised me we would be safe here. She…"

The glimpse of hope only made the boy's fears grow. Until a moment ago, he was trapped in despair and resigned to die in that room. Now Rolam knew he would live, but the thought of never seeing Chyrsha again, of being left alone in Kophar, was no consolation at all.

It was worse than death.

Rolam broke out crying, the shock of everything he had endured until that moment and what might come next crushed him.

Lith tried to console him, even fixing Rolam's body with Invigoration, but to no avail. The better the boy got, the worse his mental condition became.
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'Fuck me sideways. At my level, a mind link is no interrogation technique. I can only transmit information, not probe minds. I have no time to wait for someone to calm down enough to make sense.' Lith thought as Solus and the other soldiers shook their heads, having no better luck with the rest of the hostages.

Three units of the Knight Guard left the room first, one ensuring the way to the exit was clear and the other two securing the corridors to keep the hostages safe while they were being brought out of the research facility.

The first room Lith found after resuming the raid was filled with healthy people. They were all well-fed and with at least a bright orange core. A few Emperor Beasts guarded them and tried to use the humans as a bargaining chip.

Lith killed them with Tiamat Fear and Spirit Magic like earlier, without spilling one drop of blood.

"What are you doing here?" The hostages were in a much better condition and higher spirits after being rescued.

"Waiting for our turn." A man shook Lith's hand after thanking him. "I don't know what these monsters had in mind for us. I can only tell you that they gave us plenty of food and even healed us.

"It would have been almost a vacation, if not for the fact they kept us locked up in here and that no one who has been brought out of this room has ever returned."

"Did they capture you with someone or alone?" Lith asked.

"Alone, why?" The man replied.

'Because it means you were the disposable ones.' Lith thought. 'The beasts must be conducting two kinds of experiments. One long-term that involves a certain degree of collaboration from the test subjects and another short-term that only needs a healthy individual.

'Otherwise, there would be no point in keeping people like Rolam and the others prisoners.'

"To have an estimate of how many more people we need to rescue." Lith actually said. "Is there anything helpful or weird any of you has heard or seen during your imprisonment?"

"No." The hostages shook their heads. "I've never left this room since they brought me here."

Taking the second group of hostages to safety was quick and easy. They were healthy, needing no help from the Knight Guard, and couldn't wait to escape that nightmare.

The second half of the first underground floor turned out to be a storage facility as well. Yet while the first half was filled with spare parts for the alchemical machines and magical ingredients, the second half hosted the test subjects for the experiments.

Clearing it took longer because the Emperor Beasts bargained and died before the Knight Guard could rescue the hostages.

Once they reached the stairway for the lower floor, Lith checked the surroundings with the Eyes of Menadion, Life Vision, life- and array-sensing spells for traps.

"The area past the first five steps is shielded." He said to the other assault teams' members.