The warrior's pupils reflected the countless spells and alchemical charges raining down from the heavens onto the towering spire. The detonations filled the entire basin. He had survived the first crusade against the Utopians; he knew their strength and their thods better than most.
"Those who return from the Void will only grow stronger."
That was the solemn warning delivered by the scholars of Skyborne City. They had reached this grim conclusion by drawing upon their understanding of the void and their analysis of the Utopians' motives.
To enter the void bodily ant that, to a large degree, the void had accepted them. The power wielded by wizards acknowledged by the void far surpassed that of ordinary practitioners.
A sharp hum split the air. The spire, which had risen past the boundary of the material world, released a tidal wave of void energy that distorted matter as it expanded.
The spells, alchemical bombs, and wizardry crashing down upon the spire were instantly caught in that storm of concentrated void energy. Fireballs guttered out. Rays dissolved. Bombs disintegrated. The Alliance's wizardry was overwritten by the Utopia's superior surge of power.
The energy siphoned from the void burned itself away with terrifying speed, neutralizing every strike of the Alliance legions, scattering them, and preserving the spire's steady ascent from the "waters" below.
"They've grown stronger. Their handling of void energy has gone far beyond crude distortion. They're dismantling our magic precisely."
An Alliance wizard spoke coolly as he observed the scene, reporting to his companions how the Utopians had changed since returning to the material realm.
The tower's manipulation of void energy—its thod of distorting matter—was beyond even that of the modern theory of wizardry. It responded to incoming attacks not with brute force, but with ticulous and refined counterasures.
Spell structures collapsed at targeted nodes; alchemical charges were stripped down from within, their explosive reagents neatly excised. As for wizardry, there was little to analyze there. Overwhelming power simply crushed the Alliance's spells.
"The Utopians know far more than we imagined. They understand the composition of our offenses at a glance. They can handle everything flawlessly with void energy."
The wizards' conclusions were dispiriting. The Utopia had always displayed uncanny skill with the void. Even the orcs among them had been fearso spellcasters. Now, all that knowledge was being applied to unmake the Alliance's assault piece by piece.
"A terrifying foe indeed. All the more reason to bring forth our full strength—and vanquish them!"
The knight at the head of the formation had heard the wizards' analysis. Still, he neither flinched nor faltered. He put on his rune-etched helm, gripped his uniquely massive weapon, a colossal scythe, and stepped into the ranks of his fellow knights, who stood at the ready.
No matter how strong the enemy, the Alliance couldn't afford to be terrified of their enemy given the stakes. In a war like this, there was only one kind of defeat: falling at the very end. Surrender was not an option.
"Prepare to charge. The other unit led by a legendary knight is en route. They're close enough that they chose not to teleport here."
His command spread across the formation. Every knight behind him bent their knees slightly, ready to rush forward.
A massive teor tore open a spatial rift, its bulk even greater than that of the spire. Wreathed in blazing, molten fire, it plumted toward the Utopia's spire, which had risen halfway into the material world. A legendary mage had finally made her move with the eighth-tier Dinsional teor.
Dragged forcibly from a chaotic plane, the teor's nature was unpredictable. No one knew what lay sealed within its core. Even if the Utopia understood the spell and its structure, they would still struggle with the entropy inherent to the magic.
The legendary mage's devastating blow signaled the knights' forward charge. Their fighting spirit boiled over. The aura of every knight in the formation surged and intertwined, forging a single unified current as they stord toward the Utopia's spire.
Across the basin, on the opposite side of the spire, were the second legendary knight's forces arrived. Their position mirrored the first group's, forming a perfect pincer as they raced for the spire rising from the void.
As the knights charged forward, another vast spatial rift tore open above them. From within erupted a colossal mass identical in nature to the teor summoned by the legendary mage, hurled straight toward its twin. The Utopia might not be able to dismantle the spell's structure, but there was another simple, brutally effective solution: pit the sa magic against it.
The two eighth-tier teors collided in mid-air, their flaming shells grinding and shearing off in slabs. The falling fragnts of the gargantuan teors rained down like boulders onto the knights' path.
Fighting spirit roared. Guided by their legendary leader, the knights' combined aura shaped itself into several enormous phantom scythes, which spun outward and shattered every falling slab before it could strike. Even when fragnts broke upon the knights' ranks, the barrier of fighting spirit surrounding the entire formation held firm.
The two teors shattered under the strain of the collision. As their shells ruptured, each exposed a wholly random core. The legendary mage's churned with a dense sphere woven from countless bolts of lightning. The instant its outer casing gave way, the lightning detonated and streaked straight toward the spire, guided by the mage's will.
Both teors burst at the sa mont. The teor conjured by Utopia's forces likewise released its hidden core: a surge of white frost so intense that it swallowed an enormous swath of sky in an instant. The coursing lightning plunged headlong into that abyssal cold.
Such absolute cold wrought unusual phenona. The lightning, fluid and serpentine, almost like a living dragon, was forcibly slowed and trapped in place.
The knights continued to charge en masse toward the spire, whose full bulk was now erging. In the skies above, the two shattered teors continued to clash with each other. Blinding lightning crawling sluggishly through a sea of freezing mist, illuminating the night before dawn with a stark, chaotic brilliance.
But the fleeting spectacle did not last. Both sides resud their assaults without pause.
A jet of gas compressed to its absolute limit tore forth, followed by countless others. More legendary mages from the Alliance's ranks had made their move. The jets cracked through the heavens like whips of coiled air, shredding the falling rocks before sweeping together into a single colossal gale. The gathered tempest surged straight toward the Utopia's spire.
The eighth-tier Zephyr's Wrath was the pinnacle of wind magic, featuring currents endowed with terrifying penetrating force and cutting power. The wind had been given a physical form so dense and swift that no rigid defense could fully bar its path.
Then, water appeared out of nowhere. Void energy surged. A titanic cube of water, vast as a mountain, crashed down before the storm as a liquid bulwark.
Ordinary water could never have withstood such a spell. Yet the windstorm failed to pierce it outright. While it was vaporizing the water with startling speed, the spell would clearly hold back the storm for so ti.
This was no natural liquid. Twisted by void energy, it possessed the properties of water yet with the mass of a high-density alchemical alloy. It was particularly formidable as a defense against certain spells.
Then, an alchemical bombardnt rained down. Small rifts into the void snapped open, stripping the bombs of their long-range detonation triggers before harmlessly discarding them into oblivion.
Every spell below the eighth tier that the Alliance unleashed was relentlessly unraveled, stripped to raw mana by the void's ceaseless erosion.
Then ca the counterattack. Orbs of pitch-black energy cascaded from sudden fissures in the void, sinking into the earth before liquefying into pools that shimred with deep violet light. From them burst tendrils that lashed out indiscriminately, distorting whatever matter they encountered.
The wizards of the Alliance tore the black spheres apart mid-fall, flinging them back into the void, then raised shields woven from void energy to intercept the tendrils' blows. The malignant pools were quickly excised and erased.
Thus the two forces traded destruction without end. The air and the ground were choked with chaos; their clash raged even beneath the soil, even within the void. Shockwaves of collapsing energy warped the surrounding space in pulse after pulse, scattering distorted light in every direction.
And yet there had been no casualties. In this phase of mutual probing, neither side suffered true losses. Only when one side faltered would death truly descend.
Both the Alliance and the Utopia were doing their best to shatter that tenuous balance between their forces.
The charging knights advanced lin a storm of fighting spirit, smashing apart anything that barred their path. They were within a kiloter of the spire.
A legendary knight could resist mana and the void by pure physique. An entire knightly legion unified in will and fighting spirit was pivotal in breaking through the Utopia's void defenses, or so the scholars of Skyborne City believed.
And so, the two legendary knights and their legions closed in on either side of the spire simultaneously. A colossal scythe and warhamr, wrought from pure fighting spirit, struck at its foundation.
At that sa mont, the Utopia's spire finally entered the material realm in its entirety. A deafening roar followed as a surge of void energy, far greater than any before, burst outward to et the knights' blows head-on.
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