In the deepest, darkest chamber of the Mordus Citadel, Demon King Xylos stood before his grand scrying pool, a basin of liquid shadow that reflected events across worlds. With him was his Arch-Sorcerer, a withered demon whose job it was to interpret such things.
They had watched the entire event unfold. They had watched the Grokk, their sledgehammer of pure destruction, lumber into the town. They had watched it raise its fist. And then they had watched as reality itself seemed to flicker and break.
The scrying pool had not shown them the turnip. It wasn't fast enough to register the projectile.
All they saw was the Librarian—a tiny, insignificant-looking man—hide behind a cook and then feebly toss something out of a window.
The instant that object left his hand, their scrying pool had erupted in a violent explosion of pure white static, a wail of tortured aether.
SCREEEEEEEE!
The Arch-Sorcerer was thrown backward, his robes smoking, his scrying eye bleeding black ichor. "My King! The feedback! It—it's impossible!" he shrieked from the floor.
Xylos himself had been forced to shield his eyes as a beam of incandescent light, visible even through the chaotic static of the pool, had erupted from the point of impact and shot into the heavens.
Then, just as quickly, the static cleared. The image returned. The Grokk was a pile of rubble. The town was... intact. The Librarian was patting his cook on the head.
The throne room was utterly silent, save for the whimpering of the blinded Sorcerer.
Xylos stared, his brilliant, paranoid mind refusing to process the input. The Grokk had not been defeated in a fight. It had been... deleted. There was no collateral damage, save for the neat pile of rocks it had become. The entire, cataclysmic event had been surgically precise.
"What... was that?" Xylos's voice was a low, guttural whisper of disbelief.
The Arch-Sorcerer staggered to his feet, clutching his ruined eye. "It was not a spell, my King. A spell has a signature, a build-up of mana, a travel time. What we just witnessed... it had none of that. It was... an execution of a conceptual command."
He limped closer to the pool, peering at the serene image with his good eye. "He didn't cast anything at the Grokk. He... he revoked its permission to be there. The beam of light... that was a side effect. That was the universe's waste management system disposing of the energy that used to be a twenty-foot-tall demon of destruction."
The implications were soul-crushing. Xylos had sent his most unsubtle weapon. He had sent a being of pure, idiotic force, something that couldn't be philosophically disarmed. And the Librarian hadn't tried to disarm it. He had simply... erased it from the equation. He treated an engine of apocalypse like a grammatical error that needed to be corrected.
Worse, he had used his cook as a component of the "correction."
"The boy... the one he hid behind," Xylos mused, his mind seizing on the detail. "Malakor's report said he was acquiring new followers. Is this one of them? A living weapon, disguised as a servant?"
The Arch-Sorcerer shuddered. "Perhaps, my King. Or perhaps the act of 'hiding' was a part of the incantation itself. A symbolic gesture of delegating such a trivial task of annihilation to a subordinate component of his own divine will."
King Xylos had been playing a game of chess. He had just realized his opponent wasn't playing on the same board, or in the same dimension, and had just turned one of his rooks into a sentient plum pudding as a casual opening move.
His new strategy, the sledgehammer approach, had failed even more spectacularly than his subtle approach. He had just received his second, and much more violent, 'teabag dismissal.'
A chilling new thought entered his mind. They had attacked him. Twice. Once subtly, once brutally. Both times, they were met not with retaliation, but with effortless, almost contemptuous, neutralization. What if this was all a game to him? A test? What if he was inviting them to attack, just to see what they would do? What if he was... toying with them?
For the first time in five centuries, Demon King Xylos, Lord of the Seventh Gloom, felt true, existential fear. He was not an opponent. He was a curiosity. And the Librarian was a bored god, poking his ant-hill with a stick.
The reaction in the Imperial Command Bunker was no less severe.
"STATUS REPORT!" the Commander screamed as the aurora in the sky above faded and the threat icon on his map simply... vanished. One moment, it was a Class-10 Behemoth about to annihilate the sanctum. The next, it was gone. Not moving away. Not destroyed. Gone.
"Sir... the target is... it is no longer registering," the analyst reported, his voice trembling. "Scouts on the ground confirm a large pile of rubble in the town square. No survivors. From the rubble, I mean. There are no signs of the Grokk."
"What did we hit it with?!" the Commander demanded. "Did the Aegis Shield fire a counter-measure?"
The Arch-Mage himself patched into the channel, his voice shaky. "Negative, Commander! The Shield never fired! It was struck! By a beam of energy originating from the ground! The pulse nearly overloaded the entire continental grid! The flash you saw was the shield dissipating an attack, not delivering one! If that shield hadn't been active for the test... that beam would have carved a trench halfway to the moon!"
The Commander stared at his tactical map, his blood turning to ice.
The narrative was clear.
A monster had threatened the Librarian. Before their own mighty legions or divine shields could intervene, the Librarian had dealt with it. Himself. Effortlessly. The attack that had obliterated the monster had been so powerful that the side-effect of the blast had nearly shattered their ultimate planetary defense system.
Their entire multi-billion-gold-piece, Empire-spanning Tranquility Quarantine... had been completely and utterly irrelevant. A screen door in front of a hurricane.
The Commander put his head in his hands. A single, horrified thought dominated his mind.
He didn't even need us.
He grabbed his high-priority communication crystal, opening a direct line to the Emperor.
"Your Majesty," he said, his voice flat with dread. "There was an incident at Oakhaven."
The Emperor's voice returned, tight with anxiety. "Was the Master's serenity disturbed?"
"Yes, Majesty. By a Class-10 Behemoth."
A sharp intake of breath on the other end. "Report on our response."
"Our response, Majesty, was to be fifteen minutes too slow," the Commander stated bluntly. "By the time our forces were in position, the Librarian had... handled it."
"Handled it? How?"
The Commander swallowed hard. "Sir, it is my belief that the entity known as Master Lyno just engaged in a simulated act of war, both for the benefit of the demonic forces who sent the creature, and for our own. He demonstrated that he can and will defend his own solitude. He also demonstrated that the power he wields in a 'trivial' defensive action is enough to threaten the integrity of our most powerful magical constructs."
He paused, letting the Emperor absorb the terrifying message.
"It wasn't just an act of defense, Your Majesty," the Commander concluded. "It was a warning. A warning to everyone. It was him telling us, and any other power that might be watching... 'Stay off my lawn.'"