The first two immediately disabled the surveillance cameras in the entranceway, and the remaining seven lightly jumped through the air with weight-reducing magecraft and climbed the outer wall up to the ninth floor. With nimble lizard-like movements, five of them reached the fifth floor in the blink of an eye. The last two went up to the rooftop and prepared to intercept any attempts to escape through the air.

The next instant, they noticed the abnormality there.

The members of Zugzwang, who possessed the ability to equally share their perception without having to give orders, all spread out at once. It was a display of superb reaction speed that surpassed human limits. But Zugzwang’s combat skills only worked on enemies of the same status as them.

They were extremely skilled game animals who efficiently hunted every form of beast using equal power spread among them.

However—the enemy wasn’t a game animal like them, let alone a hunted herbivore.

“Ah—————”

When the enemy was a steel monster that didn’t even need to worry about the fangs of beasts, their spell which they had spent two hundred years refining didn’t work at all.

At first, the Pawns thought a cool wind had passed through. An innocent wind that passed through them—


Their field of vision suddenly changed. The ceiling became the floor and the floor became the ceiling. And they were falling. Even though there was no sensation of falling, the scenery alone fell downwards. As if they were watching a film moving at ultra-high speeds.

Did they understand that it was because their heads had been cut off? Either way, in just a slight fraction of a second, the ‘Pawns’ had lost.

Impossible… why, why is this…? How could this… be possible…!

The only survivor, King, understood he was just lucky just to be alive. He had merely been in a fortunate location. He just happened to not be in the path of it.

His heartbeat hammered in his chest. He hadn’t escaped death. What stood before his eyes was a walking disaster—a being that existed on a plane that couldn’t be reached by the power of a magus.