Supreme Summoner Overlord: Rise of the Endless Legion-Chapter 408: The Ignis (1)

The passage through the portal was violent.

Reidar’s body twisted through a space that shouldn’t exist. He felt the same crushing pressure he faced when he first went through the portal that sent him to the Ignis world, squeezing his chest, his skull, and his bones as the cold bypassed his resistances.

The temperature was so far below zero that his lungs tried to breathe something that wasn’t air while his eyes saw colors that had no names.

Then it ended.

Reidar hit the ground hard. However, he didn’t end up on ash, as he feared; instead, he landed on actual grass—not ash, not stone, but real grass.

Though the impact was still strong enough that it knocked the air out of his lungs and made him roll for several meters until he came to a stop on his back.

He gasped, forcing air into his chest, and stared up at a blue sky with white, fluffy clouds drifting overhead, while the air no longer smelled like sulfur but instead carried the scent of damp soil and grass.

Reidar was on Earth. He’d been gone so long he’d actually forgotten what grass smelled like. His brain did a double-take. Wait, is this... freshness? What is this sorcery? It was so different from the sulfur and ash of the Ignis world that his nose considered filing a complaint.

He lay there for a moment, face pressed into the dirt, trying to remember how to breathe, then sat up. Though his head was spinning, since the transition through the portal had been violent.

The first time he crossed a portal, it felt like being squeezed through a tube, but this time, with the portal collapsing and the magic circle destroyed, it felt like being thrown out of a moving vehicle.

His vision was filled with notifications. They weren’t good, as they told him his summons were getting destroyed left and right. They died, crushed under the collapsing building or torn apart by the monsters that had breached the walls, wiping out his army. But at the same time, Reidar didn’t need to concern himself with them anymore, because he was on Earth again and the magic circle had been destroyed.

[Your Summon (Archon Rift-Lord) has been destroyed.]

[Your Summon (Archon Rift-Lord) has been destroyed.]

[Your Summon (Archon Rift-Lord) has been destroyed.]

[Your Summon (Siege-Breaker) has been destroyed.]

[Your Summon (Archon Rift-Lord) has been destroyed.]

[Your Summon (Verdant Sovereign) has been destroyed.]

The list went on and on, marking the collapse of the palace and the explosion of the magic circle that had wiped out his army; the summons he had left behind to destroy the anchor was gone.

Reidar swiped the notifications away, dismissing them without a second thought because they were just resources that had done their job—the connection was severed, and the portal was gone.

Plus, there was another problem—one that was as immediate as it was big, dangerous, and really inconvenient. Like "forgot-to-pack-a-parachute" levels of inconvenient. It was something that forced him to focus on it, rather than on the loss of his summons on another planet, who probably had a worse day than him. Probably. He remembered something important, the kind of thing one really doesn’t want to remember while lying face-down in grass.

He hadn’t been the only creature pulled through the portal.

Scattered across the field were the summons that had been sucked in with him. A dozen Vorathid Sky-Hunters were twitching on the ground as they tried to orient themselves. Three Shadow Sovereigns, who were already standing up. But there was something else.

His heart hammered against his ribs as he looked through the meadow, though the tall grass blocked his line of sight.

Reidar’s breath hitched.

"The Elite Feral Ignis."

He hadn’t seen it land, but logic dictated it had to be close. They had entered the event horizon at the exact same moment.

Reidar moved before his brain finished processing the thought. He didn’t have time to waste with panic or poetic dread. Panic would get him killed. He needed to move.

He pushed himself off the ground. There weren’t many of his summons around, but they had had to do for the fraction of a second he needed to get out of killing range.

"Attack!" he screamed at the summons in range. "Find the Ignis and kill it!"

The Shadow Sovereigns turned their gazes across the meadow. The Spectral Quadraginta drew their weapons. The Sky-Hunters scattered, searching.

But Reidar needed to get off the ground.

He ordered the nearest Vorathid Sky-Hunter through the Overmind Consciousness and told it to grow in size and carry him up.

The insect didn’t waste a second. Its body expanded, while its chitin plates stretched and reformed as it went from the size of a dog to the size of a horse.

Reidar didn’t wait for it to finish growing. He grabbed one of its spindly legs and hauled himself up onto its back just as its wings began to beat with enough force to flatten the grass below.

"Up!" Reidar yelled. "Go!"

They lifted off; the ground falling away. Five feet, ten feet, twenty feet, and from his vantage point, Reidar looked down and saw it.

The Elite Feral Ignis was standing exactly where he had been lying a second ago.

Its blade-arms were buried in the dirt; the ground was torn apart in a massive gouge that would have split Reidar in half if he’d been a moment slower. The creature’s head was tilted up, its eyes locked onto him as he rose into the sky.

The monster had ignored every single summon in the meadow. It had gone straight for Reidar, covering the distance from wherever it landed to his position in less than a second.

Reidar should have been dead by now. Splattered across the meadow like a failed science experiment. The only things standing between him and a very messy obituary were his Vorathid Sky-Hunter and the fact that his survival instincts had been paying attention in class while his brain was still rebooting from portal travel.

<Holy shit!>

If he had hesitated for even one second, if he had taken the time to look around or check his status, he would be dead. The Ignis would have cut him in half before he even knew it was there.

"Okay," Reidar said. "We have a problem."