Amidst the wind-swept outskirts of the village, the brilliant morning sunlight streamed down, yet it failed to warm Hegemon's freezing soul. He sat motionless, his hands clenched so tightly that his knuckles turned stark white.
The memory of his skull shattering under the magical beasts' fangs and the agonized screams of the sacrificed children still stormed inside his mind like a tempest.
"Hegemon? What is wrong? You look truly dreadful..." Lily knelt in front of him, her eyes pooling with deep anxiety. In this current timeline, she had not witnessed the tragedy, but a long-time companion's intuition allowed her to recognize that Hegemon had just experienced something deeply horrifying.
Hegemon looked up, his bloodshot eyes staring directly into Lily's. His voice was hoarse and strained: "Lily... the village ahead will be destroyed tonight. A covert faction of the Western Cult is going to abduct the children, sacrifice them to summon ancient magical beasts, and burn the entire place to ashes. I've witnessed it with my own eyes... twice."
Lily covered her mouth in shock, but she didn't doubt his words for a single second. The informational energy within her instantly surged to seek a solution. "If that's the case, we must return to the Capital immediately! We can enlist Count Rosali's help, or send word to Holy Swordsman Kenji. The royal military will definitely intervene!"
"There's no time!" Hegemon slammed his hand onto the ground, cutting her off, his face etched with absolute helplessness. "The distance back to the Capital takes nearly a full day on foot. Even if we run at full speed to deliver the news, convincing the royal military to believe two immigrants about an attack that hasn't happened yet, and then waiting for them to deploy troops here... it will take at least two to three days. By the time reinforcements arrive, the only thing they'll see is a pile of ashes, just like what I saw!"
"Then... what about Leviathan?!" Lily suddenly blurted out, her eyes lighting up with newfound hope. "You've already established a pact with the ancient divine beast! If you summon it, its absolute power could crush that entire cult in the blink of an eye!"
"I already thought of that." Hegemon shook his head, his smile laced with profound bitterness. He stood up, pacing frantically around like a cornered beast, his mind stretched taut like a piano wire about to snap. "The Sky Leviathan is simply too colossal. It's ten times larger than a normal whale. Do you have any idea what happens when a God-class entity abruptly materializes over a small, fragile border village? The sheer magical pressure radiating from its presence alone will shatter the village's weak protective barrier. Even a single flick of its tail or one roar would inadvertently trigger shockwaves that flatten every house and crush mortal bodies before it even touches the enemy. The cultists are hidden deep within a stone cave, while the villagers are exposed out in the open. Utilizing Leviathan here is no different from using a nuclear bomb to catch a band of thieves... it will kill the very people I am trying to save!"
That brutal reality struck like a bucket of ice water, completely drenching their hopes. Supreme power had now become entirely useless due to environmental constraints.
"So... we have to convince them ourselves?" Lily asked, her voice cracking.
"Yes. We cannot back down. I refuse to watch that child die another time." Hegemon's eyes flashed with a manic determination. "This time, we split up. You use your repository of knowledge, and I'll use my title as a butler of the Noble household. We must force them to fortify."
Two hours later, at the small border village.
A heated and grueling debate was unfolding right inside the village chief's house. Hegemon stood in the center of the room, both hands pressed firmly against the wooden table, confronting the chief and three local patrol guards. Lily stood beside him, continuously presenting analyses of the leaking dark mana strands from the forest as empirical evidence.
"I repeat, a splinter cell of the Western Cult is lying in ambush within the mountain cave!" Hegemon growled, forcing himself to maintain composure despite his chest heaving with suppressed fury. "Tonight, they will use dark arts to brainwash and lead the children away. You must immediately evacuate all children into the underground shelter and establish a defensive perimeter fortified with fire along the forest edge!"
The village chief, an old man with a worn, heavily weathered face, looked at Hegemon with an uneasy expression: "Young man... you claim to be a butler of the Noble family, and we deeply respect that. But demanding us to alarm the entire village and disrupt our daily lives based on a vague 'premonition' is truly unreasonable. The Western Cult was suppressed by the royal family long ago; how could they possibly appear in a remote border region like this?"
"The chief is right," one of the patrol guards sneered, lazily wiping his sword. "We patrol every single day, and there isn't so much as a ghost at the forest edge. Stop being paranoid. Or did someone from the Capital just come down here trying to show off his authority?"
"Shut your mouth!" Hegemon roared. The suffocating aura of a man who had stepped out of hell fifteen times erupted, causing the guard to flinch and pull his neck back. Hegemon glared directly into the chief's eyes, his voice trembling with sheer exhaustion from his failed attempts at persuasion: "I don't need to show off anything! I am begging you to protect the lives of your own children! If you do not act tonight, tomorrow this place will be nothing more than a blazing graveyard! How can you be so utterly indifferent to the lives of your own flesh and blood?!"
Seeing the situation grow dangerously volatile, Lily quickly stepped forward. She took the chief's weathered hand, her voice pleading desperately: "Please, Chief! I have verified it with analysis magic—the Mana frequency in the forest is bending unnaturally, which is a definitive signature of a large-scale brainwashing ritual. Please trust us just this once, just for tonight!"
Beholding the tear rolling down Lily's cheek and the frantic yet absolute sincerity burning in Hegemon's eyes, the village chief's resolve finally wavered. He let out a long sigh, glancing out the window where the children were playing: "Very well... I cannot evacuate the entire village because it will cause widespread panic. But I will allow families to gather their young ones inside the fortified warehouse at the center of the village tonight, and I will station two extra guards at the forest edge. That is the absolute limit of what I can do."
Stepping out of the chief's house, Hegemon looked up at the sky as it gradually shifted into the deep hues of twilight. Their agonizing efforts at persuasion had yielded a small result, but he knew that this alone was far from enough to halt the cruelty of the Western Cult. A life-or-death battle in the suffocating darkness was waiting for them, and Hegemon had to strain his mind to calculate every single move using nothing but his raw mortal strength.