Luckily for Friya, the Tyrant was too busy trying to discover at least one bloodline ability to pester her. Too much.
As for Nalrond, he exploited the working frenzy to sneak away into a secluded cave away from prying eyes. He had tried everything from meditation to self-acceptance but nothing worked and Mogar was still silent.
He couldn’t hear a single word from them.
‘It can only mean that I’m far from a solution.’ He thought. ‘Solus and Friya have confirmed that my answer bleeds. Let’s see how accurate it is.’
The Rezar injured himself with a knife, opening mirroring wounds on both his bodies in the same way his echo in the Mindscape had done. He withstood the pain without using darkness fusion, in the hope that it would connect his halves and give him the clue he needed to finally receive Mogar’s guidance.
***
The locator spell gave M’Rael almost everything he needed. To get the rest he had to work hard and promise many favors.
Even with the knowledge he had extorted from the World Tree and the Sage Crown, he was no match for so many powerful intruders. He needed diplomacy to muster the forces he needed for his endeavor.
Elves were as greedy as any other race, but much more prudent. Their previous defeat by the hands of Morok’s group during their first visit and the power showcased by the three members of Leegaain’s Brood in front of the Parliament were a big deterrent.
It was the reason M’Rael didn’t assemble the representatives of the various clans but their seconds in command. They were close to absolute power but possessed very little of their own.
Their centuries-old frustration and the prospect of having to wait centuries before having a seat in the Parliament made them more willing to take risks.
In exchange for their help and discretion, M’Rael had promised them Awakening, the secret of the violet core, a position of power in his kingdom, and a share of the Dragon’s hoard they were about to acquire.
That on top of becoming the next representative of their respective Clans, of course.
Power was nothing without authority and above all the seconds in command wanted vindication for the wrongs they perceived to have suffered.
Convincing them to join his cause had been the easy part, especially after explaining to them the nature of the prize at hand. The hard part had been mobilizing the necessary troops without anyone noticing.
The hardest part had been unraveling Ajatar’s protections without triggering any alarm. The Drake’s workings had proven to be so complicated that even after studying them for a day there wasn’t a single elf capable of making heads or tails of them.
M’Rael had been forced to take the shard of the World Tree and make them spit out how to crack the array field. The Yggdrasill was still weakened from the previous torture so they had folded pitifully quickly.
‘Curse me and my own powers!’ The Tree thought. ‘If only the traitor didn’t have the Sage Crown, I could have just lied to him and made him walk inside the trap. My wood, however, allows him to understand my explanations so whenever I lie to M’Rael about magic, he never falls for it and just doubles the punishment.’
The High Chancellor had managed to put the World Tree under the next best thing to a slave spell. Something that he would have never achieved if not for the Crown and partial access to the Tree’s archives.
M’Rael had learned the hard way how difficult controlling a slave was and his first visit to the Yggdrasil’s mind had almost fried his brain. He now asked only brief and precise questions while the spell caused the Tree endless pain in case of lie or no answer.
Yet all that hard work had finally paid off and the array field was cleared.
Life Vision, Soul Vision, and arrays sensing spells didn’t perceive any more threats. Life sensing arrays gave the elves the precise number and position of the enemies, allowing the hunters to set the field to perfection before springing the trap.
‘Phase one, go!’ M’Rael said via the mind link connecting him to his generals who in turn were connected with their respective armed forces.
The elven warriors answered in unison, using tier three spells to make the network of caves where the enemies were hidden collapse while saving their strength.
“What the heck is going on?” Nalrond was the first one to notice the anomaly thanks to his sensitivity toward magical energy. “The arrays have suddenly disappeared and a huge mass of mana is attacking us!”
“Nonsense, I-” Only then did Ajatar notice that the telepathic connection with his magical formations only gave static. “Ambush!”
He established a mind link with everyone to not waste time talking while using Life Vision to confirm the nature of the attack.
Everyone was still confused by the sudden interruption in their respective experiments when the cave-in began. The ground started to shake and fissures opened everywhere, quickly growing in size with every wave of earth magic reaching their position.
To make matters worse, the elves were also piling up hundreds of kilograms of rock and soil over the caves so that the moment the roof collapsed, gravity would turn them into deadly projectiles.
‘There’s no time for casting spells strong enough to overpower those of our attackers and we can’t Dominate them all. There are too many.’ Faluel cursed.
Against someone with Dominance, quantity beat quality. Even though the spells employed by the elves carried no willpower, controlling even half of them was impossible.
‘We can only go up! Protect the small ones!’ The Hydra conjured her Royal Fortress armor and grew to her original size, using the protection of the Davross and the burst from her expanding body to hit the falling rocks away.
Ajatar did the same with his Wyrmguard armor and Lith with his Voidwalker armor.
Neither could compare with Tyris’ masterpiece but they still did just as well. The Drake used advanced gravity fusion to increase his density while Lith boosted with mana the Adamant coating the Dragon bones.
Three titans respectively 20 (66′), 20 (66′) and 25 (100′) tall rose from the ground like ancient gods awakened from their slumber, blotting out the sky. The others stood between the colossal beasts’ feet, using their hulking friends as shields.
The elves gasped in surprise, some even loosed their grip on their weapons, but the chain of command held still. Everything was going according to M’Rael’s plan.
‘Release!’ The confidence in his voice snapped his generals out of it and they relayed the order, restoring the morale.
Adamant-tipped arrows swarmed at the colossi from every direction, each elf nocking three arrows at a time, and each one of them was imbued with deadly spells.
Lith, Faluel, and Ajatar reacted by instinct, conjuring a wind shield to repel the volleys of projectiles but one of their enchantments allowed the arrows to pierce through the improvised barrier.
When they struck, they released the tier Five War Mage spell, Shattering Winter.
Water magic covered the Wyrms with a thick layer of ice, bringing their temperature below one hundred degrees Celsius and exploiting their natural weakness to cold.
