Published: February 1, 2026
He watched the gathering people with an undercurrent of irritation, yet a smile still on his face as he took in the scene.
People showing terror, people panicking and shouting in confusion, and the military police running around to calm them all down.
The sight of the human tide filling his vision—shrinking back in petty fear and trembling at what he himself had wrought—was more than suitable to elevate his pride.
Seeing the people dancing in terror, and feeling as though he had seized control of a city rivaling a nation in scale, filled him with deep satisfaction.
The only reason he was not drunk with ecstasy to the point of losing himself was simply because he held absolute confidence that, if he wished to, he could seize the True Nation itself.
Information came to him on its own.
Every time some great achievement was made in their attempts to ease the people’s anxiety, it was announced from the mouths of the military police.
What was a great achievement for them was, for him, the trigger to adjust his approach. When he heard that the golem, the keystone of the East, had been defeated, his brows twitched slightly.
He had placed the “heads” of his tamed forces in the four directions; with one of those lost, the control over the lower ranks would warp.
Still, there was no way he would be shaken by something of that level. He simply shifted the base of his taming to the next monster in line. Its effectiveness dropped, but that did not mean his control over the monsters had been severed.
“(So the weakness of a tree-structured control system is that if the core at the top wavers, the effect propagates to the very bottom. Yet if you wish to control a large number of monsters, you must have the higher ones command the lower.)”
It was an experiment from the very beginning, and any degree of distortion was still within his margin of allowance.
Even that distortion was nothing more than something he had predicted in advance. He had never expected mere monsters to possess power worthy of realizing his lofty ideology.
However, he gave a small, exaggerated shrug.
That such an adventurer, capable of defeating that giant golem, just happened to be here of all places—coincidence or not—was quite something. As expected, superior talent tended to attract superior people.
Because right now, he himself was here.
The eastern side was being pushed back.
There was someone capable of slaying a golem over there; it would be no surprise if the line rallied around that person.
Adventurers were all muscle-headed fools who couldn’t use their brains, but they should still be able to ride a wave of momentum and at least hack down whatever monster stood before them.
Yet they had no grasp of the big picture at all. Smiling as if making a biting remark, he shifted his focus toward the device installed on the western side.
Passing through the device, his commands were amplified, and the core monster under that device’s control relayed the order to the lower monsters: charge the gate. At the same time, he had them destroy it.
It was a shame he couldn’t see the military police panic at the sight of monsters flooding in, he thought, pulling his cloak more deeply over himself.
“Let’s see how well a horde of monsters—my little plaything—can fare against a nation.”
Among monsters, there were those that were nocturnal.
One would assume that once inside a labyrinth it wouldn’t matter, but for some reason, even within a labyrinth, there was a clear distinction between day and night as time passed. In other words, it was bright during the day and dark at night.
It was hard to tell in cave-type or maze-type labyrinths, but in forest-type or castle-type ones, the light outside the windows felt so natural that you could almost believe the sun was really shining there.
Generally, monsters were more active during the day. One might think it should be the opposite, but this was a labyrinth; it was only natural that things be strange.
Since the great invasion was caused by the labyrinths themselves, the monsters coming toward them followed the life cycle of the labyrinth they belonged to.