‘Why do I have to be here? Can’t they have another battalion complete this assignment?’ I thought in annoyance.

  I was riding the back of a dirty horse, one of the beasts that the empire sent to the army to use as transportation, a foolish decision if you ask me.

  The beast kept on trudging like it meant to bore a hole in the ground with every step, and I felt my annoyance grow with every footfall. Why couldn’t they give us nobler animals to use as transport, instead of these detestable things?

  It was almost as if the beast was trying to make me fall off of its back.

  ‘Fucking dung-walker.’

  It smelled too. It smelled like shit and cows and dirt. And the flies. The little fuckers kept on noisily flittering around like the horse was some sort of bug magnet.

  It probably was.

  “C-commander?” A soft voice asked from behind me.

  “Yes, Terence?”

  “Uh, w-we’re about to reach the target, sir.”

  “Thanks for telling me. Now, get back in line!”

  “Y-yes sir!”

  I stared at him as he slowed down his horse until he fell in line with the others, and then I sighed.

  ‘How annoying. Why do I have to babysit these kids all the time anyway?’

  I remember feeling proud and honored when I was accepted into the army as a commander until it turned out that I was in charge of taking care of a bunch of kids who never went to school. And they were commoners to boot.

  There was even one that was so untalented that he was discharged from the army two days ago on orders of the general. How ridiculous is that? A soldier discharged for being weak? That was unheard of in my father’s army. Everyone there was at least C rank, noble, and highly trained in combat. Yet here I am, a top graduate at Celeste Academy and a B-rank mage, in charge of a bunch of useless orphans.

  ‘And now we’re going to fight against some “X rank” mage. Hogwash if you ask me. He’s probably some A-rank mage who was down on his luck and decided to fight an empire, thinking himself powerful enough to do it. Well, even an A rank can’t beat an army. Besides, the X rank is just a legend, no one can get more powerful than S.’

  I shifted my body on the wretched beast, trying to get more comfortable.

  ‘I swear, if they don’t replace these things with proper transportation in the next two years, I will-‘

  “Commander! There’s something in the sky!”

  I swiveled around to face the kid and glared as menacingly as I could.

  “Stop jabbering nonsense at me! We’re still a few kilometers out from the front lines, there is nothing here yet!”

  Terence flinched back, yet quickly regained his bearings.

  “N-no, commander it’s true, look!”

  I turned my head to look at the sky in front of us.

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  ‘This stupid boy, he’s always chattering away to me, this that this, can’t you see I’m busy? He probably just saw a big bird or something-‘

  I gaped. There was a man, standing in the sky about a few hundred meters above us, looking down like some sort of god from the heavens.

  ‘What the heck?! The boy was right!’

  I hastily turned back towards the soldiers behind me.

  “Everyone dismount from your horses and get ready for battle! There is an enemy above us!” I yelled at them at the top of my lungs.

  “Yes sir!” They yelled in unison, and then alighted from their horses and got into formation.

  The figure in the sky continued to stare at us, and I grew weary.

  ‘How is he able to fly like that? He has to be at least a C-rank mage and a wind type too.’

  “Prepare your best spells! Hold, hold… fire!”

  From around me, hundreds of spells flew into the sky, lighting it up with a rainbow of colors. Most of them were small and weak, but there were a few larger ones in the fray. Those reached the man first.

  He didn’t move, didn’t even flinch at the display. Just as the first spell, a house-sized fireball, was about to hit him, it vanished.

  I rubbed my eyes.

  ‘What?’

  Every spell that came his way disappeared right before it hit him. It was as if he was absorbing them into himself.

  ‘What the fuck is happening? How is he doing that?’

  I turned towards the soldiers again.

  “Cease fire! Create a grand formation and pool your mana for a large attack!”

  “Yes sir!”

  They immediately stopped firing spells and began to pool their mana together into a grand formation.

  I turned back towards the man. He hadn’t moved. He just stood there, in the air, staring down at us.

  ‘Let’s see how you like this, you flying prick.’

  “Sir, the grand formation is complete!” Terence yelled.

  I smirked.

  “Good. Fire!”

  I felt the world crackle with energy, and a large torrent of concentrated mana suddenly flew from behind me up into the sky, straight towards the flying man.

  I smiled, imagining his screams as he was being torn to shreds, and was surprised when he was perfectly fine.

  ‘What? Where’d the grand spell go?’

  Abruptly, I felt a tingle on my back, and instinctively raised my mana shield up around me.

  The world exploded in a fiery blaze. My shield shattered, and I felt my skin twist under the extreme pressure. The ground below me melted into a burning sludge, and I fell to my knees from the pain.

  ‘What the fuck just happened?!’

  I turned my head to look behind me and saw hell.

  All one thousand soldiers in my battalion were dead, burnt to a crisp. Not even their flesh remained, only bones.

  ‘What the fuck just happened!’

  “That was your own spell, you know.”

  I swiveled my head to face the speaker.

  He was a man, roughly twenty years old in appearance, wearing a gray military uniform with no insignia.

  “You’re… the man in the sky.”

  “Yeah, and your “grand formation” is a joke. Creating a spell using the culmination of the mana of a thousand mages is just gonna make a chaotic and uncontrollable hunk of mana. You need to properly coalesce the different types of mana together and make it a uniform spell. The way you guys did it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.”

  “Wha- how did you do this? How did you destroy our spells!”

  He clicked his tongue as if chiding a child.

  “It’s simple, no? I just erased them from this physical plane. And that “grand formation” of yours? I sent it back to you, so you guys would realize how badly made it was.”

  “You sent it back to us? That’s impossible! No one can redirect a spell!”

  He placed his hand on my head as if trying to comfort me.

  “Of course, I didn’t redirect the spell, that’s impossible. I merely transported it back to you guys, a simple teleportation spell, nothing to gawk at.”

  I tried to pry his hand from my head, yet my body wouldn’t move. I looked down with my eyes and saw that the ground beneath me had swallowed my lower body whole, due to rapid melting and cooling.

  “You poor child. Let me put you out of your misery.” The man said in a soft voice.

  I heard a snap, and the world turned dark.

  ————

  “Hmm.”

  I looked down at the corpse below me as its headless body fell forward and landed on its chest.

  “This man was probably the commander of this battalion. Though he was quite weak, B rank I would estimate.”

  I looked around at the carnage that was once a beautiful grassy meadow.

  “Magic really ruins the world, huh? Well, you can only blame them I guess. After all, it was their spell that did this.”

  I raised my hand in front of me and increased the pressure of gravity in the area by a hundred times, liquifying the oxygen in the air and putting out the flames.

  ‘Now at least the entire meadow won’t burn.’

  With that done, I turned my head in the direction of the capital of the Trestian empire.

  ‘Sending such a weak battalion just to stall me is a foolish move to make. You’re going to regret that, and the people of your empire are going to feel that regret.’

  I gripped the waves of space that surrounded me and flew through the air.

  ‘The Reaper is on his way.’