[Do you wish to proceed?]
"We are going in."
One of the two guys Leo didn't recognize took a step forward and announced.
His eyes were filled with determination and hope as if he just stumbled upon the greatest opportunity he could ever dream of.
'He believes himself to be the main character of this whole thing.'
Leo only needed a single glance to recognize the young man's eyes. It was all too simple when he saw those very same eyes for the majority of his first lifetime whenever he glanced into a mirror.
This, by the way, was an extremely rare occurrence due to how hard it was for all the premodern worlds Leo visited to come up with a stable production method for those. And yet, even with that in mind…
This look couldn't be any more obvious.
Leo turned his eyes over to the other of the two guys, taking notice from the corner of his eyes how nearly all of those who he sent upstairs ended up frozen on the stairs.
'It seems that not going with them made them hesitate, after all,' Leo thought, sparing his family only a passing glance before turning his eyes back to the naively self-assured youth.
"You both can and are likely to die, you know that," Leo mentioned, giving the youth the look of an elder's polite dismissal.
The color, the presence, the aura around it… Everything about this portal couldn't make its insides more obvious.
And while it was beyond the now younger returnee to directly gaze into it to peer all the details of its secrets like local humans, monsters, and challenges…
He could pretty much tell the general, average output of the portal. And through calculating it over the local resistances of his mostly magicless home world, Leo could deduce the general threat level of the challenges that lay inside.
"I know."
The youth didn't allow even a hint of doubt within his gray matter. Or rather, he simply refused to acknowledge them, pushing it all aside in order to focus on claiming what he forced himself to consider a chance.
"I'm not going to deny you entry, so there's no need to put on airs like that," Leo shook his head as he casually revealed part of his intentions. "But once you are in, I will no longer give a shred of care if you are friends with those that I care for. In there," Leo raised his hand and pushed his thumb out, pointing it behind his back.
"In there, you are all on your own."
Leo stared at the two youths for a little longer before turning around on his heel.
Right after giving those two a lecture about the potential dangers of the portals, he headed straight for it.
'There's too much I need to figure out about all of this,' he thought, emotions washing away from his face. The cold, calculative mindset he developed over several lifetimes took over the naivete that came with the youthfulness of his restored brain.
Loud sirens suddenly cried out all over the city.
'Right, if everyone really saw it…'
There was a limit on how speed an organization of any kind could react to unforeseen events, even if they were on a scale big enough to alert everyone all at once, just like the appearance of the system did. And yet…
Leo slowed down his steps, coming to a complete halt right in the portal's face.
The sound of sirens and alarms grew denser and more pressing. The noise came from more and more directions as if the city itself was crying out in the face of the changing times.
Before three minutes could fully pass since everything started, Leo spotted reflections of the emergency services' lights in the windows of the nearby buildings.
'Is it just me, or did the government grow a lot quicker in those few years I was gone?'
Every organization needed time to take action.
From the decision on how to respond, through delegating jobs and roles, and so on. It could often take hours if not days before orders would reach those that were to put them into motion at the bottom of the hierarchy. And that was even in a perfect scenario when one disregarded all the delays of simply spreading the word!
The situation would be a bit different in a military zone, where everyone was ready to run for their lives or fight for the lives of others at any given notice…
'No, that's not it.' Leo squinted his eyes. 'I would easily see stuff necessary for it to be true.'
Leo took a deep breath and blinked his eyes.
The seconds trickled by and the sound of the sirens grew nearer.
Some of the nearby windows displayed many worried faces, their eyes generally focused on just a handful of different points, only one of which was within the range of Leo's view.
And it was Leo himself… Or rather, the green portal that he stood as close to as if he had some perverse desire to hug it.
'I have no idea how they are reacting so fast, but…'
Then, Leo saw it.
Some of the faces peeking out of the windows in the nearby buildings…
Some of them openly kept their phones by their ears.
'I guess that's how.'
Leo's face sank a bit. He then rolled his eyes, only to prove to be an even bigger pervert than anyone who saw him could believe.
Rather than hugging this huge, green-glowing portal… Leo went in.
The world around the young man swirled as if he fell down the warping fissure in the fabric of the world itself.
Which, in all honesty, was the very essence of what this green portal was.
A familiar, disorienting feeling invaded Leo's head, bringing forth intense nausea as his vertigo went crazy.
Those unpleasant effects lasted only a short moment, before the strange distortion of Leo's surroundings came to an end, displacing him from the small, concrete forest of an apartment neighborhood into the middle of an open plain.
A plain filled with a scattered swarm of extremely familiar, hunched, green fiends.
They varied in size, from the tiny adolescent goblins, through middle-sized green-caps all the way to several, towering orcs.
It wasn't their size that drew Leo's attention, though. For with a quick glance, he confirmed the insides of the portal matched the upper strata of the range the young man assigned it from a mere glance.
Each of those green fiends carried a weapon.
They were all small and crude, ranging from stone and bone daggers, through slightly fancier picks or pikes all the way to the orc's clubs the size of Leo's waist.
All of that didn't matter in the slightest, though. Not when compared to the discovery he made with his very breath of the otherworld's air.
Upon doing so, Leo's limps trembled before forming a small smile.
"Well, that's a relief," he muttered under his nose right as nearby monsters finally took notice of his presence.
This place was as full of mana as the worlds Leo visited during his first lifetimes. Abundant with mana, making it easy for anyone to restore their stock of it to its full capacity with mere hours or days of rest and meditation. And it was unlike the latter and more extreme of Leo's lifetimes, where mana became as precious as one's own health.
With a single breath he took, Leo gathered enough fuel to safely bring out the cores from the bottom of his soul and feed them enough juice to start at least a few of them up. Others, sadly, required far more in terms of preparation or even Leo's physique, especially with the curse of seventh grade or whatever somehow cutting down all of his stats to a mere fraction of what they should actually be.
The fabric of the world behind Leo started to warp.
The nearby monsters fixed their stares on their new target
And as if Leo didn't have enough things to think about already, this criminally late system dared to spit out a few more message screens.
[Detecting lineage]
[Detecting innate ability]
[Detecting deviation]
[Detecting abnormal deviation]
The messages swarmed Leo's vision right as the monsters jumped to charge him down, right as the space an inch behind his back spat out first and then second of the two youths Leo warned just before entering this place.
And below the initial warnings, a few more messages came into view.
[Early awakening possible]
[Do you wish to proceed?]
[Assimiliation of the detected boons]
[Do you wish to proceed?]
[Status reset to clear abnormalities]
[Do you wish to proceed?]