The Max Level Hero Has Returned!-Chapter 1102

The Max Level Hero Has Returned!-Chapter 1102

Chapter 1102
The knights' expressions darkened as they watched the Aura Blade radiating from Reina’s sword. Unless they were complete fools, it was impossible not to recognize what it meant. After all, a Swordmaster possessed power that could be considered a national strategic asset.
Of course, the title had lost some of its weight since many countries had their own Masters, but the woman standing before them far exceeded that standard.
If someone were to ask who the strongest person in the world was, her name was always mentioned. Those in the know might point to Davey O’Rowane, the Prince of Rowane Kingdom and the only Saint of the Continent, but people were more inclined to believe what they saw with their own eyes.
Unlike Davey, who had remained secluded for the previous two years, Reina had roamed the continent spreading her name far and wide. Her feats were well-known even among minstrels.
“Damn it! Attack!!”
Judging that they couldn’t back down now, the knights raised their weapons.
“The enemy is just Hero Reina! Use everything you’ve got!”
The knights pulled something out from their waists.
“What’s that?”
Without hesitation, they stabbed the needle-like object into their necks.
“
Grrr.
”
“
Gaaa.
”
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Immediately, the mana in their bodies began to twist violently, and Reina’s expression darkened. She instinctively knew she had to stop them, but the transformation had already begun.
“What in the world is that?”
From the point where they had stabbed the needles, dark blue veins began to bulge, and their bodies convulsed violently. Their eyes began to fill with madness, and the mana within them condensed before they began absorbing more at an alarming rate.
“Are those the modified humans Davey mentioned? They seem different from what I heard.”
“They’re probably failures. Maximus, I’ll hold them off, so you take the others and get out of here.”
“Hurry up and follow me.”
When Maximus slung Morziana over his shoulder and started to run, the knights moved to pursue him. Yet just as they did, deep slashes, like those made by massive claws, tore through the ground in front of them and sent them flying back.
“Where do you think you’re going? You’re not taking another step.”
Seeing an explosive force surge from her body, the knights all charged toward her at once.
* * *
Ever since Reina had taken on the title of Hero and begun her journey, she had never killed someone lightly, only when it was an extremely special case.
Of course, that didn’t mean she had reached a true state of pacifism, but to her, human life was something she considered a painful burden.
“
Graaah!!
”
The knights screamed and collapsed, only to recover quickly and charge again like zombie soldiers. Of course, that tenacity didn’t last forever. Many of them eventually sustained enough damage, unable to get back up. Whenever one of them dropped their weapon from exhaustion, Reina never missed the chance to snatch it up and float it with Sword Telekinesis to make it her own.
Half a dozen swords hovered in the air, along with the one in her hand. The knights watched the pale woman standing calmly before them with caution and trepidation, as if she were a monster.
Sword Telekinesis was a realm above the Master-level, equivalent to the transcendental level of blade control in the Central Plains.
Only a handful on the continent were known to have reached that level. Most well-known was the Firefox of Lyndis and Grand Duchess of the Lyndis Empire, Hero Reina. Illyna had since also reached that level, becoming the subject of countless rumors.
As for Davey, not many truly understood the scope of his abilities. He possessed such a variety of powers that it was difficult to define his exact level.
Kaang! Kang!
A loud rumble echoed from afar. It was an indication that a pursuit force had caught up to Maximus and the others, who had left first.
Reina had a defensive artifact she’d gotten from Davey, so it wasn’t a huge issue for her, but the others couldn’t exercise the same disregard.
She heard the sound of something fracturing when she hit an enemy, yet they persisted nonetheless. The enemies were clearly willing to die as long as it meant stopping them, so she knew a prolonged conflict wasn’t an option.
“Sorry, but I can’t waste any more time here.”
Once her presence began to shift, the knights grew tense and started to surround her slowly.
“
Hrahhh!!
”
Zzzt. Crack!
Following Maximus’s fiery roar, an immense wave of mana exploded from the distance. The mana jamming should’ve prevented anyone from using magic properly, yet the reality defied expectations.
Crack!! Boom!!
Then the invisible barrier shattered. The mana that had been sluggish just moments before surged violently to envelop Reina. Her irritation over the defensive artifact failing to fully block the attacks vanished completely. Naturally, there was no way a few modified humans could stop a full-tilt Reina.
“S-Stop her!!”
Following a frantic shout, the knights charged as Reina took a deep breath. At the same time, an illusion of translucent wings bloomed from her back, and resolve burned in her eyes.
All at once, the floating swords lost their force and fell like rain, embedding themselves in the ground around her. Amid the thumping downpour of blades, she slowly raised her gaze.
[Davey Style]
When she calmly gripped her sword with both hands and took a deep breath, the knights shouted, “Attack her! Something’s coming!”
Alas, it was already too late for them to do anything.
[Space Slash]
The moment her blade slashed through the air, everything around her froze as if time itself had stopped, then violently shifted. The ground split open, and a massive dust cloud swallowed the collapsing buildings.
Once the dust cleared, they saw the slanted remains of the sliced-off tower, behind it a massive scar carved into the space itself. It was similar to Illyna’s Continuum-Attacking Blade, but precisely speaking, it was a derivative that used her power as a Celestial.
If Illyna could learn it, there was no reason Reina couldn’t. Seeing that same logic, Davey had created the sword technique just for her.
The destruction went beyond demolishing buildings. It left a massive wound in space itself, a sight so surreal that even seeing it could hardly lead to believing.
“A... A monster.”
“If you insist on getting in the way, I won’t stop you. Just know that from this point on, I won’t be holding back.”
In other words, if they didn’t want to die, they needed to get out of her way.
Confronted by a power that defied all reason, the knights who had tried to stop her lost all will to fight.
* * *
When Reina finished and headed once more toward where Maximus’s group had departed, she soon found him smashing through the knights with merely a single gauntlet.
“Hey, Reina. Fancy seeing you here.”
“Did you disable the jamming?” she asked.
“No? Wasn’t it you?”
“Of course not.”
They hadn’t even managed to locate the jammer, yet the jamming had already been lifted. It would be nice to think the King of Vatan had changed his mind, but that didn’t seem to be the case.
A sudden voice rang out as several figures appeared from beyond the half-destroyed royal garden, “I’m the one who disabled the jammer.”
Reina didn’t recognize them. “You are...?”
“Please help save our country, Miss Reina. You’re our only hope.”
“Weren’t the royal family of Vatan just trying to kill us?” Maximus pointed out.
The boy leading the group—Vatan’s youngest prince—shook his head vigorously. “No! This was never Vatan’s decision!”
“Then what is that supposed to be?” he said as he pointed to the fallen knights.
They, too, had taken modified human ampoules, dark purple veins bulging across their skin.
“Most of the royal family, including my father, have been brainwashed. If this keeps up, the entire royal house will be turned into modified humans! We need to act before it’s too late.”
Reina sharply said, “Hold on. Modified humans? Explain it in a way that makes sense.”
“There’s a long-standing project in Vatan called the Transcendent Being Project,” the boy said while grinding his teeth. The Transcendent Being Project had been developed through secret research on ancient ruins discovered in the land of Alberta. The goal was to inject special genetic material into humans to create superior living beings beyond ordinary humans.
“It all happened in Alberta?”
“Yes. The Alberta royal family didn’t even know about it, but by our king’s orders, Vatan secretly smuggled research materials and continued developing modified humans.”
Maximus gestured toward the fallen knights with his thumb, as if to ask if they were the results of that so-called project.
“They just took some of our failed samples. The real ones are elsewhere.”
“So let me get this straight—the entire royal house is collapsing because of this modified human project? Reina, are you buying this?”
“It’s hard to believe outright, but I’ve heard of modified humans. What I don’t understand is how that project led to the current chaotic state of the royal palace. How are the two related?”
It was a reasonable question. After all, there was no clear explanation for why a project like that would cause the royal house to make such extreme decisions.
“It’s because of those who are pushing for war. This project isn’t just tied to Vatan—it’s also connected to a certain noble of the Lyndis Empire.”
‘A noble from the Lyndis empire?!’
Even a single high-ranking noble from there could wield immense influence over a kingdom like Vatan. Such was the power of an empire.
“The ones behind this crisis are a few war-hungry nobles from Vatan, a couple of nobles from Alberta, and that high-ranking noble from the Lyndis Empire.”
The King of Vatan had supported the idea of warring with Alberta, but he didn’t have the guts to blindly start a war with no justification. Seeing that, those who wanted war took matters into their own hands. They had injected the King with a specific drug derived from the modified human samples, letting them use a special wavelength to manipulate him.
Reina recalled the moment she first met the King of Vatan. That strange disconnect she felt at the time made sense with the new information.
As the youngest prince explained all this, Reina’s eyes narrowed at him. “You’re saying you’ve remained unharmed in the middle of all that?”
“Their evil influence nearly reached me as well, but I managed to escape by sheer luck. Still, with just my strength and that of my knights, it’s impossible to take back the royal family from those warmongers,” he said while locking eyes on Reina.
“I see. So you’re the one who disabled the mana jammer.”
The prince confirmed and pleaded, “You’re the only ones who can resolve this situation.”
Maximus cracked his knuckles and looked at Reina. “Just give us the order. We’ll follow your lead, Commander.”
3 min
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“Let’s trust him for now,” she said, then turned to look at the prince. “What do we need to do?”
“The wavelength controlling His Majesty and the key envoys is coming from the ruins on the outskirts of the capital. We need to destroy it.”
She nodded. “Then let’s move.”
The youngest prince firmly nodded in response and quickly led the group.
Some knights spotted Reina’s group on the move and began gathering like a swarm of zombies, but they weren’t fully modified, so they couldn’t stop her.
The royal palace of Vatan had been recently rebuilt with new structures. Behind it, however, remnants of the old palace still stood.
“Creepy place.”
“We had planned to demolish this place as well, but rumors of ghosts started and kept anyone from touching it,” the prince explained.
Iro shivered, her hidden gaze trembling behind the mask. “I really don’t like ghosts...”
“Of all people, you in particular shouldn’t be afraid of ghosts.”
When Maximus pointed at her masked face, Iro turned to look at him. At the same time, she smiled coldly. He could feel the chilling, sharp gaze beyond the mask.
“Mr. Maximus, keep talking like that and you’re going to die.”
“U-Understood.”
Reina took a step forward. “When I was young and visited, I thought this place really was haunted. I’d hear strange screams and cries at night, but in hindsight, that seems ridiculous.”
“Yes. I was able to escape safely only because I knew what was really here.”
The modified human project was a classified secret, beyond the privileges of even a prince to see. However, the curious youngest prince had explored the place on his own and discovered traces of the truth. In anticipation of a situation like they found themselves in, he had prepared countermeasures in advance.
He was lucky, to say the least.
“If you hadn’t come here first and instead gone straight to the palace, the warmongers would’ve likely accelerated the situation by assassinating His Majesty or staging a similar incident,” the youngest prince explained with clenched teeth, leading the way. “They don’t care about patriotism at all. They're nothing more than a brutally selfish, inhumane, and profit-driven group formed under the hand of one man from the Lyndis Empire.”
“Sounds like the Illuminati.”
“The Illuminati?”
“Don’t worry about it. It was just an organization Davey wiped out a long time ago.”
Hearing that Davey had already destroyed them, Maximus didn’t press further.
“Your Highness, please be careful. From here on, we don’t know what could—” A knight on guard had cautiously approached the prince, but Reina grabbed the knight by the scruff and pulled him away.
“Stand back,” she said calmly. She then unhesitatingly pointed her sword at the prince’s throat.
“W-What are you doing?”
“You can’t fool me,” she said with a smirk. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’ve been pretending on the outside, but you're the one overseeing this cursed research.”
The youngest prince’s expression twisted. “What are you talking about?”
“There are hundreds of non-human elements in your body, and yet all of them are stable.”
The atmosphere instantly shifted following her words.
“Disabling the mana jamming to lower my guard wasn’t a bad move. So, what were you planning to do once you got us here?
The prince stayed silent and looked away.
“Hero Reina, what are you saying?! He’s the one who first noticed something was wrong!”
“That was probably all part of his plan. You’ve been like this for a while, haven’t you? There’s no way the nobles could’ve injected the King with mutated genes so easily without inside assistance. Only another member of the royal family could do such a thing.”
The idea of him being the only one unaffected, when everyone else had gone mad, made no sense to her.
The prince kept his silence.
“To be exact, you’re not even the same prince. What I see is a corpse walking around.”
Something else was manipulating things inside the body of the dead. The knights all gasped at that single revelation.
“
Haaah.
What a pain! Just a little further, and it would’ve all worked out.” The prince gave a dark smirk. “This is why I hate sharp-eyed bitches.”
One of his eyes turned black, revealing an ominous inverse eye as he chuckled softly, “Doesn’t matter, though. I can still make it work.”
His hand writhed and grotesquely transformed before piercing the wall. The impact area trembled like a mass of flesh.
“Unlike those Alberta pigs who only want to profit from war, I’m in it for pure research.”
“So who are you, then?” Reina asked.
He chuckled. “Does it matter? You’re already too late.”
The walls suddenly twisted before countless tentacles shot out, entangling everyone.
The creature wearing the face of the youngest prince screamed madly, “My one and only success, the one and only leecher of life! The perfect ultimate being!!”
“
Ah?!
My mana’s being drained!”
Maximus tried to cut the tentacles off, but he couldn’t put up any resistance as they sucked the mana from his body. Reina also didn’t struggle against the tentacles wrapping around her.
“I’ve actually already taken control of Vatan, though it was a long time coming. Those in Alberta who want war, and even that Marquis Alca of Lyndis, they’re all just looking to profit from conflict.”
However, he was claiming that he was different, that his goal was pure research. That was his essence.
Reina muttered at that moment, “Still, that’s a relief.”
“What’s so relieving?”
“It means that to save this country, we only need to take care of you.”
“I beg your pardon?
Hahaha!
You talk big for someone who can’t even move while having their mana drained!! I hate to break it to you, but the war is still going to happen even if you manage to kill me. No matter what, the ones craving war in Alberta won’t stop.”
Reina only had a sigh in response.
“You’re an incredibly dangerous variable, Hero Reina. I knew that if I had faced you outside, I would’ve never stood a chance.”
She finally interrupted, “Can I ask you one thing?”
“What is it?” the youngest prince answered smugly, confident in his victory. “The monsters attacking Vatan right now. Is that your doing? They look like the same kind of things as you.”
He shook his head. “No. I had no idea things like that even existed. Honestly, I don’t know why those mindless chunks of flesh suddenly came to life either.”
Reina sighed at his answer. “So there’s a lunatic who mutated genes with the totrias, plus a bunch of scums trying to make money off war. Things really got twisted in the worst way. Still, I guess it’s a relief that fixing the problem in Vatan is relatively simple.”
“What?”
“Maximus, duck.”
Sling!
Maximus had instinctively ducked his head once he heard her warning. A massive streak of light carved through the once-quiet building.
She calmly spoke to the monster, “You, and the ones you’ve partnered with... won’t accomplish a single thing.”
“W-What?” The youngest prince, now sliced in half, fell to the ground with his eyes wide open. What he saw was Reina with three pairs of translucent, pure-white wings spread behind her.
Her eyes were terrifyingly cold, her presence both beautiful and holy. “Nothing you do will ever succeed.”
“
Hah... Hahaha!
You think that’ll be enough to kill me? Sorry, but I’m not the kind of thing that dies just from being cut in half.”
Reina responded to his scoffing with a cold smile. “We’ll see.”
Swoosh!!
She drove her sword into his forehead, and a pale light began to glow in her eyes. At the same time, the entirety of the ruined old palace was engulfed in an immense light.
When that light finally faded, the palace was gone. Only rubble remained. Emerging from the debris, Reina spotted a black-haired girl approaching her.
The girl spoke, “Wow, I didn’t even need to step in.”
“I couldn’t become a burden to him, at least.”
“You’re awfully calm for someone who just took down a monster equivalent to an entire nation's military strength, all by yourself.”
“If not me, you would’ve done it.”
Verdandi shrugged her shoulders before pulling out a crystal. “Davey, it’s Verdandi. Vatan is finished. I’ll give you the details later, so you can just focus on your side for now.”
Soon, a frazzled voice echoed from beyond the communication crystal.
- Damn it. This power is such a pain to control!
Verdandi muttered with a twitch of her eye, “Davey?”
- Did you get him?
“
Huh?
”
She could hear an abnormally long echo in the call. Verdandi couldn’t help but wonder what in the world Davey was doing on the other side.
Boom!!!
From within the rubble, the youngest prince—who should’ve been dead—emerged in a grotesque, gray-skinned form.
He was roughly the same size as his original form, though suddenly sporting horrific, hook-like arms that made his new form far more menacing.
“Didn’t we kill that thing already?”
Reina sighed, “He’s got more vitality than I expected.”
She flashed her sword once more, severing the screeching creature’s head clean off.
The youngest prince had grown stronger than before, but her power was beyond anything he could imagine.
- Zzzt. Did you...
“Enough, just be quiet. Shut it, Davey.”
Verdandi promptly cut the communication crystal connection.

.
!
Chapter 1102