Just when absolute despair threatened to break the final remnants of the Warrior’s morale, a sudden shift occurred in the atmosphere.
It wasn’t exactly a physical sensation. It was a profound, terrifying change in the ambient spiritual pressure. The air grew instantly dry. The hairs on Sol’s arms stood on end, and the spirits within his own core suddenly retracted, as if bowing to a superior, older force.
"HOLD!" a new, incredibly powerful voice echoed over the din.
It wasn’t Veylara.
Sol looked up toward the apex of the gatehouse.
High Shaman Zephyra had finally stepped forward.
She stepped to the absolute highest pinnacle of the central watchtower.
She had thrown off her heavy ceremonial robes, revealing arms covered in glowing, intricate, cyan tattoos. Her eyes were rolled completely back into her head, shining with a blinding, ethereal light. She looked small, frail, and incredibly old against the backdrop of the bruised, lightning-torn sky. She didn’t hold a weapon. She rely raised her gnarled, petrified-wood staff high above her head.
She slamd the butt of her massive, petrified-wood staff into the floorboards.
The sound wasn’t loud, but it rippled across the battlefield like a drop of water in a still pond.
She began to chant.
It wasn’t the Veynar tongue. It was a mysterious, ancient, and deeply resonant language that sounded like grinding stones and howling winds. The words seed to vibrate not through the air, but directly through the minds of everyone on the battlefield.
Sol stopped swinging his blade, his silver-crimson eyes wide as he looked up at the High Shaman. In fact, it wasn’t just Sol, all living beings whether Humans, beasts or sothing entirely different being stopped, no, not just stopped they had to stop due to a msytical, mysterious force present in the air, that was weighing heavily on their bodies, pushing them to kneel in reverence.
Suddenly, the sky above the massive beast horde began to change.
The dark, bruised storm clouds ceased their chaotic swirling. They rapidly and violently converged, spinning at a terrifying, unnatural speed. The dark purple clouds turned a blinding, luminescent white. The ambient wind, which had been a freezing drizzle, suddenly amplified into a howling, deafening gale.
The atmospheric pressure dropped so rapidly that Sol’s ears popped.
"Spirits of the Orrath!" Zephyra’s voice bood, no longer frail, but carrying the wrath of a god. "Cleanse this rot!"
From the center of the spinning clouds, a massive, swirling tornado of pure, concentrated wind and brilliant, jagged lightning descended upon the battlefield. The light and sound almost blinding and deafening everyone present. It was the sound of absolute fury of nature.
It didn’t strike the walls. It dropped directly into the densest concentration of the beast horde, right where the massive Layer 3 behemoths were marching.
The destruction was beyond visceral, it was biblical.
The storm tornado acted as a colossal, elental at grinder. The sheer, overwhelming gravitational pull of the vortex lifted massive beasts off the ground as if they were dry leaves.
Thousands of high-tier Essence Born and On Blood beasts were ripped off the ground, screaming in terror as they were helplessly sucked into the vortex. Inside the swirling funnel, atmospheric pressure and localized lightning strikes tore their armored bodies to bloody shreds, raining a horrific mist of blood and bone fragnts back down onto the earth.
Sol was shocked.
He stood frozen, the dreadwing balde humming uselessly in his hand, his mouth open wide. He was genuinely, utterly stunned.
He knew Zephyra was a High Shaman. He knew she possessed so mystical, supportive abilities. But this? This was an Area of Effect attack of such massive, catastrophic scale that it defied everything he understood about the power ceiling of this world.
This wasn’t just amplifying physical strength or swinging a sharp sword. This was actively rewriting the laws of nature. This was magic.
Through the deafening roar of the tornado, Sol watched in absolute awe as five of the massive, suspected Layer 3 beasts shadows... were caught in the gravitational pull of the storm.
These were beasts the size of longhouses, weighing dozens of tons. Yet, the wind lifted them off their feet. They roared in fury, their massive essences flaring in a desperate attempt to anchor themselves, but it was useless, the magic of the High Shaman was too potent.
They were dragged into the vortex, battered by thousands of lightning strikes, the relentless, concentrated lightning cooked them alive inside their own indestructible armor and soon their massive, armored bodies slowly, agonizingly was being torn apart by the sheer, unyielding fury of the High Shaman’s spell.
Massive, charred chunks of high-tier beasts began to rain down across the battlefield, slamming into the mud.
Sol was utterly paralyzed.
Magic. This was fucking magic. This wasn’t just hitting things really hard or moving really fast. This was altering the fundantal reality of the world to erase an army.
But alongside the profound shock, a different emotion entirely hijacked Sol’s nervous system.
Excitent.
A wild, burning, euphoric excitent flared in his chest.
He had thought that the Sun core power system, binding the spirits, was the absolute peak. He had thought that mastering them would make him an untouchable apex predator. But seeing this... seeing a single, frail woman command the sky itself to obliterate an army... he realized his vision had been far too narrow.
Sothing like this is possible, Sol thought, a manic, exhilarated smile cutting through the gri and blood on his face. If I can master the Sovereign essence completely... if I can learn to command the world like that...
He had just been handed a brand new, infinitely higher goal.
If this kind of magical, reality-bending power was possible in the Great Orrath, then the ceiling of this world was infinitely higher than he had calculated. And now that he knew it existed, he had a brand new goal. He wouldn’t just be a physical juggernaut; he would learn to touch the sky itself.
The battlefield was bathed in the blinding, cyan light of the tornado. The beast tide’s montum was utterly shattered. The lesser beasts shrieked in terror, turning to flee the magical at grinder, trampling each other in their desperation to escape.
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