Inside a huge bedroom, a young man laid on the center mattress that was almost twice the size of a standard king sized bed. Gorgeous women surrounded him and none of them wore any clothes.

One of them picked up a grape and fed it to him, which he ate happily as his hands roamed her body. He just chilled there and let her drop more grapes into his mouth.

Then someone knocked on the heavy wooden door.

"Hero Reiji." a voice called out from the hall. "The Emperor requests your presence. He brought the subjects you need to convert into knights."

Reiji sighed and pushed the girls away.

"Time to get to work." he said as he smiled at them, "I’ll get back to you ladies as soon as I can, so wait for me."

He threw his clothes on and stepped out of the room. The servant fell into step beside him and immediately started delivering a military damage report.

"We lost contact with the vanguard at the Crestwall border." the guy said. "Four hundred knights are dead and the remaining ones are all missing."

Reiji frowned.

That made absolutely no sense. He had only been in this world for a few weeks, but he already knew that knights were incredibly rare. Even the garbage F rank ones were physically superior to regular men in every way. So losing an entire battalion meant someone stupidly strong was sitting on the other side of the border.

They reached a massive grand hall. It wasn’t the throne room, but it was packed shoulder to shoulder with ragged slaves.

King Lucius Avarice stood right at the front.

"Turn them all." Lucius ordered. "We are launching a full scale invasion soon."

Reiji looked at the miserable crowd and shoved his hands into his pockets.

"The success rate is ten percent." Reiji reminded him as he smirked. He looked at the group and continued, "They cannot rank up after this, and if the conversion fails, the subject dies on the spot."

"They are slaves." Lucius waved a hand dismissively. "Just do it."

"Fine." Reiji said.

The king’s servants got the crowd to form a line and began sending them towards Reiji one by one. The first guy that walked towards him was a scrawny, malnourished kid. Reiji looked at him and raised an eyebrow, but he honestly didn’t care. After all, this was just a job to him and nothing more.

He put his hand on the kid’s head and activated his skill.

A bluish light wrapped around the boy before it went straight into his body. The kid’s eyes rolled backwards and he dropped dead onto the floor after a few seconds.

"Move him." Reiji said.

Servants dragged the corpse away while Reiji just moved on to the next guy in line.

He did this for ten hours straight.

By the end of the long shift, the royal servants grouped up the survivors and confirmed the flat ten percent survival rate while Reiji looked at the knights he had made. These guys originally looked extremely malnourished, but now? They had a decent amount of muscle and they all looked pretty strong. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

He then rubbed his temple, feeling tired from all the work.

King Lucius kept handing him mana stones to refuel his mana, but mental exhaustion was a very real thing.

"I will finish the rest tomorrow. But once I finish this, I am heading to the border." Reiji said. "I need to see exactly where my knights vanished and how they actually died."

"Sure, but finish the job first." Lucius said and gave him a stiff nod and walked right out of the hall.

A few days passed and Reiji finally made it back to the exact same border town where he was summoned. He headed straight down into the mansion’s basement, expecting to find some clues.

But the room was completely empty.

The wooden shelves were stripped bare and even the massive summoning altar was just gone. So he went back above ground to get some answers and finally managed to find a few surviving guards who actually stayed awake and ran away from Adrian’s raid.

Those terrified men just pointed shaking fingers toward the thick forest right across the river.

Because that was where the slaughter happened.

Reiji grabbed a squad of armed knights and headed straight for the forest.

"Bring me anything unnatural that you find. Weapons, random objects that don’t belong in a forest, anything." he said as he looked at the knights while walking.

"As you wish, oh great hero." one of the knights said as he followed behind.

They barely made it a few hundred meters before they found the slaughter zone. Spears stuck out of thick tree trunks while dried blood coated the bushes.

They began searching and after a few minutes, a knight walked up and handed Reiji a small metal object.

Reiji stared at it and his blood ran cold.

It was a spent brass bullet casing.

His brain instantly jumped to two scenarios. Either some local genius invented firearms from scratch which coincidentally was identical to the one from earth, or another Earther was running around making guns. And he bet everything on the second option.

Armor in this world was basically useless against a point blank gunshot, which explained the dead vanguard perfectly.

In fact, wearing a traditional plate armor was even worse than not wearing one. This was because a regular bullet would pierce through and leave a small hole, but if an armor was worn, all the kinetic energy would spread in a small area instead of focusing on one point, which just dealt even more direct damage.

"Let’s go back." Reiji told his men.

He felt like puking on the ride back to the capital. He was just a normal college kid who did competitive Kendo. He won some gold medals swinging a bamboo stick around, ,but he didn’t know the first thing about chemistry or gunsmithing.

If he went up against a guy holding an assault rifle, his Kendo skills were completely useless.

’How am I even supposed to fight this person... guns? Seriously? Oh god, why did you even put me in such a world where I have to fight someone with such broken skills?’ he cursed as he kicked a stone in front.