Lith had killed over a hundred of Orpal's Thralls, but there were almost a thousand more left.
The 30 ters (100') tall Treants tackled the Engine while hamring at it with their battle gauntlets. The Titanias grabbed its arms, twisting them so that another shot would cause no harm.
Dryads, Thorns, and the rest of the plant folk trapped the Engine's legs with their bodies and conjured their best spells from point-blank range. At that point, Thunder Soul corrupted the world energy that fueled the tower.
The corrupted air elent carried the destructive power of the Upyrs' spells past the Engine and straight into Lith's body.
'Now!' Lith coughed a mouthful of blood, using the tower's Immortal Body array to rebuild his ruptured organs.
The Dread Knight acted as fast as lightning and as loud as thunder.
The communication array displayed the weak points in the enemy formation and the path to reach them that would inflict the most damage on their visors.
The Dread Knights had galloped the entire ti behind the cover of the Engine, and had built so much montum that their change made the Upyrs think the Requiem Blaster had shot again.
Small tornadoes originated from the speartips of the Dread Knights, and their steeds moved in a blur that not even Awakened eyes could follow. The cavalry hit like a supersonic tidal wave that uprooted the plant folk at the Engine's feet and tore the enemy formation apart, killing hundreds.
Lith exploited the mont of respite to split his arms and recall Ragnarök. The angry blade cut the Treants-Upyrs like firewood, and a barrage of ice spells from the Firing Range ensured their wounds would remain frozen open.
The Titanias were bigger than normal, but still ants to the size of the Engine. Lith stomped them as such and released enough spells from his feet to make sure the Titanias would stay down forever.
"What kind of cursed object is that?" Uragar, the Book of Knowledge, asked. "I don't recognize it, and I'm supposed to know everything!"
He unleashed a barrage of tier five Spirit Spells that Solus neutralized by activating one of the Bastions stored in the Cannon Vault.
"How?" Uragar scread in outrage. "How can it do what even I can't?"
As its na implied, Uragar's real form was that of a book, and it contained the best spells currently known to four of the five races. Unlike most of those who created living legacies, Uragar's maker firmly believed that magic would never stop progressing.
That stronger, better, and more efficient spells would always be invented as new branches of magic were discovered. It was the reason he had paid the imnse price that Forbidden Magic required to create the best possible version of a simple artifact as a spell-holding ring.
Yet the ability of the ancient Forgemaster, combined with Forbidden Magic, had created a masterpiece that only the Spell Hoarding Cube in the Royal Treasury surpassed. The pages of Uragar were empty until a spell was written upon them.
Such spells were not permanent and could be erased when a new, better one was learned. Such spells could be cast instantly and belong to all tiers and all branches of magic. Even Spirit Spells could be cast freely.
Usually, that was impossible since Spirit Spells required a Spirit Crystal and only its maker could tap into a Spirit Crystal's power.
Yet Uragar made it possible because the Book of Knowledge shared the energy signature of his host, making the mage who wielded Uragar always a match for the Spirit Crystal.
On top of that, a normal Spirit Artifact could carry a single spell, while Uragar could have one per each of his pages. Uragar's only limit was that he couldn't cast any spell that exceeded the combined might of Book and mage.
Unlike the Spell Hoarding Cube, Uragar couldn't store mana, so things like Silverwing's Spells were beyond him. The Book of Knowledge could cast Blade Spells, in theory, but that required a host capable of doing that, and Uragar had yet to find one.
The Book had joined Orpal not only to turn his current host into a Divine Beast and gain powerful bloodline abilities but also to learn the secret of Blade Spells. It was supposed to make Uragar invincible, yet the tower made him feel small and insignificant.
"Stop whining and kill him, Uragar!" Orpal roared. "We can always extract Leech's secrets when we study his corpse."
"Let's turn him into one, then!" Uragar's true body and his host released respectively a white and bright violet aura as they conjured together one of his best spells.
The Book of Knowledge had no white core. The light ca from the pure white crystals that fueled his enchantnts. Uragar's maker had used solely the purest and most powerful white crystals he could find to Forgemaster the Book of Knowledge.
There was no superior quality of crystals. Bigger ones could hold more world energy, but that was it. On top of that, white crystals replenished their reserves almost instantly. Size mattered only if two crystals differed by at least one order of magnitude in size.
It was another precaution the Forgemaster had taken to ensure that the passing of ti wouldn't affect the power of his masterpiece much.
The Dead King recognized the code phrase and released a powerful bolt of silver lightning to empower the cursed Book.
'Cursed be Life Maelstrom!' Uragar cursed. 'I now have the power of ten people and ten Books of Knowledge, but my total mana hasn't changed. If Life Maelstrom also expanded my mana reserves, I now would need but a few breaths to be as strong as twenty Awakened and cast three Annihilations by myself!'
The mont the silver lightning empowered him and his host, the Book of Knowledge released the tier five Spirit Spell, Numbing Hail. Usually, he would have released a barrage of tier five spells with that sa mana, but Uragar had already lost too many spells to the Yurial Guard.
Light gave the Numbing Hail the shape of countless cross-tipped darts while the fire elent brought their temperature to thousands of degrees. The air elent stoked the fire and focused itself into spinning air blades that surrounded each construct.
The combined effect of the three elents gave the enchanted arrows the ability to pierce through enchanted Adamant and lt their way inside anything weaker. Numbing Hail struck the Engine from head to waist, foiling Lith's attempt to swat the arrows away with upsetting ease.
The constructs dug deep into the black rock until half the shaft disappeared from sight, and then the spell released its true power. The water elent coated the fissures while the earth elent tore them open, keeping the self-repair enchantnts from nding the damage.
Last, but not least, the darkness elent seeped through the open wounds into the Engine's structure, destroying everything in its wake.
Were the Engine a living being, the arrow constructs would have been enough to kill anything up to the size of an Emperor Beast. Divine Beasts might survive, but then the joints of their armors would be jamd by the water and earth elents, turning them into helpless statues.
At that point, if the darkness elent weren't enough to finish the job, it would leave the prey weakened enough for Uragar to finish them off.
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