The next morning, Drex woke up to the smell of antiseptic and old stone.
He blinked, staring at a ceiling painted with fading frescoes of knights fighting dragons. It was a stark reminder that he wasn't waking up in his dorm room anymore. The realization settled in his chest, heavy and cold: his old life was truly gone. He sat up, bracing himself for the bone-deep ache that always followed mana exhaustion, but it never came. He checked his arms—the nasty bruises from yesterday were already fading into faint yellow smudges. He stared at them in disbelief. It wasn't just good medical care; it was the terrifying efficiency of healing abilities.
He swung his legs out of bed. The guest wing was quiet, but through the window, he could see activity in the courtyard below. It was a jarring contrast against the ancient stone architecture—soldiers were running diagnostics on glowing mana rifles and calibrating the hum of composite greatswords, while servants rushed past them hauling reinforced crates of mana crystals. It looked like an anthill that had just been kicked.
Drex found Sai standing on the highest section of the perimeter wall. The wind was whipping Sai's coat around him, but he stood perfectly still, looking down at the world beyond the battlements.
Drex climbed the stone steps and joined him.
"Morning, Sleeping Beauty," Sai said without looking back. "Enjoy your nap?"
"I'm still trying to figure out if I'm actually awake," Drex muttered, leaning against the cold stone merlons.
He looked out at what Sai was watching, and his stomach dropped.
Below them, the town was a ruin. The streets were a shifting, chittering ocean of monsters. They were piled up against the base of the estate's walls like a flood tide, clawing at the stone. Every time a monster tried to climb, a rune on the wall would flare violet, blasting it back down, but the sheer volume of them was overwhelming.
"There are hundreds of them," Drex whispered, squinting at the dark shapes prowling near the gate.
"Thousands," Sai corrected, his eyes tracking the movement in the shadows. "And these runes have maybe two days left before they burn out."
Drex looked at Sai's profile. The older Hero looked bored, but there was a hardness in his eyes that Drex hadn't seen before.
"Sai," Drex said, his voice quiet.
"Yeah?"
"Yesterday... you one-shot the Principal without breaking a sweat," Drex said, gripping the stone ledge until his knuckles turned white. "And Sai, I read a book about you. I know what you were capable of."
He looked intently at the older Hero.
Sai let out a dry, humorless chuckle.
"Oh, is that how you knew my name and where to find me?" he asked, tilting his head back to glare at the sky. "I guess that shitty Goddess is still in the isekai business."
"So why did you run away? Why did you stop fighting?"
Sai was silent for a long time. He watched a massive, millipede-like creature coil its segmented body against the heavy iron gates below, its mandibles scraping uselessly against the metal.
"I didn't run away because I was scared, kid," Sai said finally. "I ran away because I realized what the war actually was."
He turned to Drex, his expression grim.
"You think this is just a fight for survival? Humanity versus the Monsters?" Sai scoffed. "That's just the marketing. The truth is, this invasion is a proxy war between two Divine Beings. The Goddess and... something else."
Drex stared at him. "Two divine beings?"
"We are just pieces on a board, Drex. Pawns. Knights. Bishops. We bleed, we die, and we sacrifice everything just so two cosmic entities can settle a score." Sai looked back at the horde. "I got tired of being used. I got tired of watching good people die in a war they didn't start and couldn't understand. So I quit. I decided I wasn't going to play their game anymore."
Drex didn't know what to say. The world he knew—the glory of the Heroes, the heroism of the Awakened—suddenly felt very small and very fragile.
"Come on," Sai said, pushing himself off the wall. "Lucianna called a war council. Let's go see how we can fix this mess."
The war room was dominated by a massive round table made of black oak. Maps of the estate and the surrounding territory were spread across it, weighed down by daggers and mana crystals.
Lucianna stood at the head of the table. She looked like she hadn't slept, but her posture was rigid. The Captain of the Guard stood beside her, looking grim.
"The structural runes are failing," Lucianna said without preamble. "We have kept them at bay, but the mana crystals powering the walls are running dry. Once the runes fade, they will scale the stone in minutes. It will be a massacre."
"We can't hold them," the Captain said, his voice rough. "There are too many. Even if we funnel them through the gate, we'll run out of stamina before they run out of bodies."
"We don't need to hold them," Sai said, stepping up to the table. "We need to clear them."
The Captain frowned. "Clear them? There are thousands of monsters out there. We can't hunt them all down."
"Correct," Sai said. "That would take too long. We need to do it all at once."
He reached over and grabbed a marker, drawing a large 'X' in the center of the town map.
"I have a plan," Sai said with a smirk. "It's a specialized siege tactic. Aggregation and Extermination."
Drex looked at Sai. He recognized the strategy instantly from his history books—it was a surefire plan Sai had perfected during his time with Orion.
"The problem right now is that the monsters are spread out," Sai continued. "They're surrounding the walls, hiding in alleys, camping on roofs. If we attack one group, the others will flank us."
He looked at the group.
"So, we don't wait for them. We make them chase us," Sai said, dragging his finger across the map in a wide loop that ended in the center. "We need a moving Bait."
"Moving?" Lucianna asked.
"We don't just drop a lure; we take it for a run," Sai explained. "The Bait moves through the town, pulling every monster out of the shadows and getting them to follow. It leads the whole horde right into the central plaza. Once they're all clustered in the kill zone…"
Sai slammed his hand down on the table.
"Boom. We wipe them all out in a single strike."
The room fell silent. The Captain scoffed, looking at Sai with open disdain.
"You talk like this is a game," the Captain spat. "Run around? Make them chase you? These are monsters, not stray dogs. You think you can just outpace a swarm like that without getting torn to shreds?"
He turned to Lucianna, gesturing aggressively at Sai.
"This is reckless, My Lady. It's the desperate fantasy of an amateur who has never seen a real siege. I won't waste resources on a suicide run."
Sai didn't answer immediately. He was thinking of Orion. Back then, Orion used to suggest the plan and play the bait role himself—standing in the middle of hell with dead, empty eyes, drawing the aggro of entire hordes with the terrifying indifference of a machine, just so Sai could activate an ability.
But Orion was immortal. These people were not.
"I am not letting my men be suicide bait," Lucianna said firmly.
"Don't worry," Sai said. "I have something else in mind. We just need to set up the kill zone."
Lucianna looked at the map, then at Sai. She took a deep breath.
"It's madness," she said. "But it's the only plan that doesn't end in a siege of attrition."
She looked up, ignoring the Captain's glare, and fixed her sharp blue eyes on Sai.
"Alright. We will do it," she said firmly. "I will trust in your ability."
"But I need to know one thing," she said.
"If we are going to attract thousands of monsters to a single point... who's going to be the bait?"