‘Inform me as soon as you are done weaving your part!’ Friya knew that keeping the group together also meant offering a single, juicy target.
She kept Blinking away to keep Cruel Star at a distance, each time collapsing their entry point to force the enemy’s spell to slow down to restore the containment field and buying her priceless time.
‘Gods if I hate Faluel.’ Raagu was amazed by Friya’s ability to hold the makeshift Mass Blink together while also saving the residual mana from each jump to save strength for the next.
Friya was casting one-seventh of the Bastion while moving, using for the escape solely the mana she had stolen from Thaymos and that was contained within the Hands.
‘Ready.’ Each member of the group said at a different time and Friya stopped solely when the sixth voice echoed inside her head.
Then, she took a deep breath and conjured the anti-Guardian spell, Silverwing’s Bastion. It required seven violet-cored Awakened and they had barely enough power for that.
Raagu, Inxialot, Lith, and Ilthin held each a mana above the spell’s requirements while Bodya with his violet core was subpar. Tista and Friya only had a deep violet core and they barely qualified.
Solus was left out of the magical formation since with her blue mana core she was too weak.
She could have made up for it with the Hands of Menadion, the Sage Staff, and the Life Maelstrom she had received from Lith, but that would have aroused questions she couldn’t afford to answer.
‘By my Mom, I promise that I won’t mock Lith for his paranoia ever again.’ Solus thought as she passed her mana to him who in turn used it to compensate for Tista and Friya’s weak cores.
No one had expected trouble but since there was a lot of downtime while traveling on the Wayfinder and waiting for the Warp Gate to be finished, Lith had insisted that everyone practice Silverwing’s spells together, just in case.
The case slammed against the still-forming emerald barrier, but it held.
Each member of the group produced a different elemental sphere that the array-spell hybrid connected in a circuit, making their collective strength greater than the sum of the single parts.
The Bastion formed a six-pointed star that converged on Friya who acted as the final and seventh star in charge of producing the seventh element, Spirit Magic. She drew as much world energy as she could with her Hands to make up for her lacking core, but there was only so much the artifact could do.
The quantity of world energy was limited and she had to share it with both Solus and Thaymos. The lost city had the innate ability common to powerful artifacts of absorbing the world energy and unbeknownst to everyone, the Black Tide further tipped the scales in Thaymos’ favor.
Tista tried every function of the Mouth of Menadion, but there was nothing among its enchantments that she had recently deciphered that could help. Ilthin felt the Bastion’s imbalance as Cruel Star crashed against the barrier so she helped the others by fueling all the elements but light.
‘It would cost me too much for its worth whereas between my core and the Life Maelstrom I have left- What the fuck is this?’
The seven-pointed star of the Bastion had fully formed, connecting the mana cores of the mages that took part in the formation. Lith’s darkness element came enveloped in the yellow light of his eye.
When it reached Tista, it boosted her strength and triggered her yellow eye as well, further empowering the resulting mana flow. The rest of the group failed to amplify the mana wave but each one of them had their strength slightly enhanced.
On top of that, a layer of silver flames engulfed Silverwing’s Bastion, repelling Cruel Star and buying the barrier the time it needed to fully form. The Dread Flames not only ate at Cruel Star’s external layer but at the Tower Spirit spell as a whole.
The chaotic gravity waves were weakened as a result and their release delayed by precious moments. Yet they were still strong enough to tear the space apart, pulling at the fabric of reality like a kid playing with explosives.
There was no exit point for the entry points the spell opened. Gravity fluctuated with no rhyme or reason, bending space just to make it collapse in an endless, senseless chain.
The trail of destruction fed upon itself, the destabilized space spreading like cancer as cracks opened in the air as if it was a mirror that someone was punching from the other side.
‘Do you really want me to waste time finding an explanation right now?’ Lith put every iota of his focus into holding the Bastion together against the madness of Cruel Star.
The cracks in space had enveloped the emerald sphere and tore at it from every side. The gravitational waves changed the weight of the eight Awakened so quickly that their bodies would have been shredded even without the relentless explosions hammering at the Bastion.
Luckily for them, the spell’s defensive properties included keeping the space inside the Bastion relaxed and the gravity uniform. Any other barrier would have been helpless against the dimensional cracks and doomed its casters to a gruesome death.
“No/Yes!” Raagu and Inxialot said in unison, the latter with his notebook already at hand.
[“How can they still be alive?”] Thaymos was the most flabbergasted of them all. [“How can a hybrid between an array and a spell exist? I have so many questions!”]
The Dread Flames shrouding the emerald sphere burned at the energy built up inside the dimensional fissures while the space-relaxing effect of the Bastion made creating them mana expensive.
Together, they tripled the energy required to keep Cruel Star going.
The lost city couldn’t afford to spend so much of its power, not without first understanding if it was worth it. As soon as Thaymos stopped wasting mana, nature’s abhorrence for void made the cracks in space disappear.
‘Now!’ Friya thought while taking a deep breath with Invigoration.
The runes of the barrier were partly rearranged and partly replaced with offensive runes, turning the Bastion into Silverwing’s Annihilation. Seven pillars of elemental energy combined into one and struck the head of the corrupted titan.
Multiple layers of barriers enveloped the Eternal Fortress, from elemental sealing arrays to Spirit Barriers. The Annihilation pierced through them like wet paper, blasting the head off before moving down to the heart of the giant.
The beam of emerald energy destroyed everything in his path and left a searing hole in Thaymos’ chest before disappearing. Yet the damage didn’t last, the various pieces of stone, crystal, and glass returning to their original position as if time was being rewinded.
‘I don’t know how to say it, but the lost city hasn’t lost one bit of his strength.’ Solus checked the readings of the Eyes over and over, yet they kept making no sense.
The group was still half-panting half-using Invigoration to recover when a swarm of flying Wormlings moved to intercept them. The monsters had large membranous wings coming out of their back and bright light coming out of their mouths.
