“What is that?” Dawn asked while pointing at Lith’s colossal figure and his army that cleansed Kolga with each step they took.
Orpal had long fallen to his knees, ripping his hair out in envy until Night managed to regain control of their body and send him back to sleep.
“A shadow of what might come to pass.” Baba Yaga sighed while thinking back at her own long-lost proto-Guardian form. For the first time in centuries, she second guessed her choice.
‘If that’s the power Lith wields on his own, what will become of him once he gets Mogar’s true blessing and shares it with his tower?’
Meanwhile, the tides of the battle in Kolga neared the tipping point. The Awakened army had found and destroyed both the arrays needed to perform the daily rituals and the breeding camps hidden under the Light Torch department.
Tista wept as she ripped Khalia’s head off to put the merfolk out of her misery. The prisoners belonged to all races and were mostly females, kept for their ability to create new lives.
There wasn’t enough of their minds left to experience any pain during their final moments nor to protect their growing bellies. Without the arrays and the flesh factory, Kolga was already dead.
On top of that, with every Kolgan that Lith fell, the Forbidden Sun became weaker and Ykrah grew more desperate. The tower was seconds away from crumbling and the Hands of Menadion kept losing dominance over the geyser to Solus with each passing second.
Ykrah cursed himself for having never prepared for the scenario where he would find someone unaffected by the Forbidden Sun. Solus was stronger, faster, and her casting speed dwarfed his own.
By combining true and fake magic, she had two spells ready in the same time he needed to prepare one. Be them tier five or tier Nova, Solus always met them with double the power, turning Ykrah’s efforts into a waste of time.
With no other choice left, the King of Kolga resorted to his final weapon. The Hands of Menadion were a tool that the First Forgemaster had bestowed upon her disciple to give Kolga the same degree of control over a mana geyser that she had thanks to her tower.
It allowed Ykrah to Forgemaster powerful artifacts, to fuel his arrays, and also to help anyone he wanted to Awaken. The Hands gave him such a fine mastery over the world energy that he was capable of making it seep inside a body and create a mana flow.
Such power had never been meant as an attack, but Ykrah hoped it would work nonetheless.
‘In theory, by flooding an Awakened with too much world energy, I can force their core to burst. There’s only so much power even a violet core can wield. Worst case scenario, it should still cause her so much pain that her construct will crumble.’ He thought.
Ykrah focused all the power he had accumulated over time to expand Kolga’s borders and made it burst inside Solus’s body, flooding it with more energy than even a white cored person could withstand.
Solus gritted her teeth in pain since darkness fusion was useless against that kind of damage. Her body started to glow as her core failed to handle so much power at once. Ykrah grinned in joy as Elphin’s skin burned and her blood vessels popped.
Then, the sudden influx of world energy allowed her power core to manifest itself and turn the attack into nourishment.
“Bad move.” Solus said as she felt that she had become more than human. The power flowing in her veins gave her the confidence to face Lochra Silverwing, let alone defeat a filthy parasite.
Ykrah tried to stop the world energy, but found himself unable to. His last-ditch effort had opened a channel between the Hands and the tower that had allowed Solus to take over not only the geyser, but even the artifact.
Without the energy field generated by the Hands, the tower crumbled like a sand castle. The Eye of Kolga fell onto the ground and Solus immediately moved it in her pocket dimension.
Her move didn’t come from Lith’s greed rubbing off on her, or at least not completely since it had been her plan from the beginning. Without the white crystal, the Forbidden Magic ritual lost its stability and put an end to the battle.
The arrays protecting and fueling the city disappeared, the flying cars crashed to the ground, and the Forbidden Sun slowly fell apart. The delicate balance between light and darkness it needed to work couldn’t be sustained without the Eye of Kolga.
The flow of healing energy turned into Decay magic, shortening the Kolgans’ life span instead of extending it.
“As much as I’d love to see you suffer, I’ve got no time to waste and I’m not leaving until I’m sure you’re dead.” Solus double-tapped Ykrah’s head and heart with icicles, killing him on the spot.
Only after the imprint on the Hands disappeared did she store them inside her pocket dimension.
‘I’m using a tower warp to leave Kolga.’ She said to Lith via their mind link. ‘I can’t wait for my body to fade away and you can’t possibly explain my presence. See you back home.’
Solus conjured an ice mirror, to look at her real face one last time before moving back to Reghia.
As for Lith, with the Forbidden Sun gone haywire, the Demons of the Darkness that comprised his body suffered as much as any other Kolgan. Their pain was his own, yet he still refused to let them go.
One final burst of white Origin Flames twice the size of the Forbidden construct engulfed the artificial sun, making it explode. For one split second, the depths of the sea became as bright as the day to the point that Kolga became visible even from Zhen, the merfolk city.
Then, darkness reclaimed its territory, and even the silver pillar that had parted the waters during Lith’s tribulation disappeared. Without the Forbidden Sun fueling them, the Demons relied only on Lith’s core to be fed, forcing him to let them go.
The Demons of the Darkness and of the Flames turned into wisps of light that lit Reghia for a second before disappearing as well.
‘I’ll miss their power, but not their suffering.’ Lith thought as he Warped to the Light Torch to reunite with the strike team.
Merging the Demons with his body had made Lith not only capable of using their power as his own, but it had also forced him to share their burden. The experience had been far from pleasant, but it had given him more clues about what being a living Abomination meant and why he couldn’t get rid of Death Vision.
“I think we are done here.” Lith said
The pitch-black of Kolga didn’t hinder the Awakened’s Life Vision. A sea of glowing eyes made it easy to understand who was an enemy and who was a foe.
“Agreed.” Said the female Lich while looking at the cracks spreading throughout the barrier surrounding Kolga.
It was meant to keep the people in, not the water out. Without the tower and its mana geyser, the pressure from the hundreds of thousands of tons of water above the city would destroy the barrier in a matter of seconds.
