Wandering Knight

Chapter 463: Art of the Void

"Hold the line—long-range bombardment!"The charging knights halted in perfect unison. Fighting spirit surged through their bodies as they raised warhammers, longswords, and shields, forming a steadfast ring around the magicians and wizards. They guarded every angle and were prepared for sudden assaults, providing the casters with a safe, unhindered field from which to unleash their spells.

The low rumble rising from each squad layered together to form rolling thunder. All across the battlefield, vast fluctuations of mana erupted as the casters began their long-range barrage. In an instant, the ambient mana of the surrounding space was drained dry by the legion-scale casting—but the magicians carried plentiful stores of magic-crystals, more than enough to fuel their spells without restraint.

High above, an immense sphere of rock tore soil, gravel, and mud from the earth, swelling in mass and weight as it gathered material. Purple arcs of gravitational magic danced across its surface, compressing and recompressing the accumulated stone into an impossibly dense core. A heartbeat later, the vast reservoir of non-elemental mana coating the sphere ignited with sparks. The blazing boulder hurtled downward toward the Utopia's defensive line.

That colossal flaming meteor was merely one squad's opening salvo. Dozens of casters, all trained magicians, were unleashing devastation capable of shattering heaven and earth.

A tornado spun upward, dragging the broken remains of elemental creatures, trees, and debris into its spiraling throat while flinging blades of wind indiscriminately in every direction. The earth convulsed with eruption after eruption of metallic, spike-tipped lances of earth. Balls of moving thunder rolled across the ground, casting searing arcs of lightning at anything that dared draw near.

The deluge spells crashed toward the Utopia's entrenched positions, hammering at those berserk orcs who should have been fighting mindlessly but yet somehow retained their reason.

Even so, those berserk orcs did not flee. Instead, they each raised a uniform metal staff to meet the assault head-on.

Just as in their invasion of the Steelbristle Empire, they took advantage of composite spellcasting. Each orc formed a fragment of an immense spell, coordinating with the others in uncanny precision to shorten the spell's casting time and magnify its strength to the limit.

By the time the alliance's wall of spells descended, the orcs' own spell, an eighth-tier incantation, was already complete. A massive sphere of pure blackness hovered before their ranks, many times greater than the size described in classical records.

Certainly this was to be expected: over a hundred casters had woven it together. It was as if a single mage had cast the spell with the raw power of a hundred. Its force had been amplified beyond comprehension.

The eighth-tier chaos spell, Well of the Boundless, took the form of a pitch-black sphere that exerted a gravitational pull upon all elemental spells as if it were a black hole.

Every spell streaking toward the Utopia's defensive line faltered mid-flight, then was dragged helplessly into the sphere like a collapsing star.

"The Well of the Boundless—how do these orcs know this spell? And the casting speed... This is an eighth-tier spell! They look like warriors. How can they be such strong spellcasters as well?!"

For several moments, central command lost entire sections of its battlefield vision. The Well, constructed from hyper-dense mana, generated an irresistible pull on all mana-based structures. The surveillance orbs were torn apart and scattered. Even the alchemical probes flickered, the feed severed.

Only wizardry remained functional, and there was just barely enough view of the battlefield for central command to grasp what was happening. What they saw left them stunned.

"This is an eighth-tier chaos spell, Well of the Boundless! It'll pull in all elemental spells. Switch to hypermagic. This spell cannot affect hypermagic!"

A handful of veteran magicians shouted warnings to their comrades. The Well could devour elemental spellwork, but hypermagic, which worked on fundamentally different principles, would render its pull useless.

Several of the magicians had fallen into a brief confusion when their spells were yanked away. They had never even heard of this spell, let alone understood how to counter it.

This, too, was why central command was shaken: eighth-tier spells were jealously guarded secrets of the great powers. Even many non-orc magicians were unaware of its existence. How in the world had the orcs learned of it?

Scattered streaks of magic—those few hypermagic spells that bypassed the Well—continued to shoot from the Alliance's ranks toward the orcs. But only a tiny fraction of casters, mostly those trained in Skyborne City, had mastered hypermagic.

Every spell dragged into the Well shattered on contact with its surface, breaking down into raw mana that swelled and thickened the black sphere even further.

In the distance, the alchemical cannons roared again, providing critical fire to compensate for the lack of offensive hypermagic.

Scorching shells streaked across the heavens and pounded the orcs' formation alongside the few hypermagic spells. Yet the orcs continued sustaining the Well. To devour and neutralize that colossal volume of elemental magic, they had to keep the eighth-tier spell active.

But maintaining a spell meant being unable to cast others. That, at least, was an unbreakable rule. The perfectly timed bombardment, paired with the hypermagic barrage, finally seemed capable of breaking the deadlock.

Explosions shook the earth. Shockwaves blasted columns of dust skyward, briefly obscuring the orcish position. Then, the knights in the Alliance's ranks stiffened, their expressions shifting sharply. They felt something familiar.

As the dust was blown away by the force of the shockwaves, the orc encampment came back into view. The ground was gouged open with deep, charred trenches. Craters pocked the landscape.

Yet the orc formation itself still stood. A barrier of fighting spirit—vast, radiant, trembling but intact—had intercepted the barrage. It had held, though barely. And the colossal black sphere of the Well of the Boundless had already finished consuming every last trace of elemental spellcraft.

Spellcasting did not interfere with the use of fighting spirit; the orcs, endowed with both the abilities of knights and magicians, could maintain the Well of the Boundless even as they raised a bulwark of fighting spirit to block the incoming bombardment.

"These orcs... Their spellcasting is staggering, yet every one of them also possesses the strength of a grand knight, allowing them to project their fighting spirit, with their berserk state strengthening their power even further... What is the Utopia hiding?"

At the forefront of the Church of Nightfall's contingent, situated in the mid-front ranks of the allied army, Gilbert stared at the trembling, flickering barrier of fighting spirit, unable to disguise his shock. The orcs' combined prowess was absurdly overwhelming. Even as a grand knight himself, Gilbert was forced to admit he could not confidently match any one of them.

The orcs' berserk state enhanced their fighting spirit, but in the absence of reason, it tended to manifest in a degenerate form: instinctive armor that clung tightly to their skin, greatly strengthening their defenses but impossible to be controlled with finesse.

Yet these orcs retained their sanity. They could project fighting spirit normally while benefiting from their berserk amplification. The strength of the orcish corps surged skyward; their fighting spirit alone exceeded that of human knight orders of the same rank by several tiers.

The instant the black sphere finished devouring every elemental spell, a tremendous surge of void energy swept across the battlefield. The wizards among the Alliance forces bristled.

Their wizardry, unaffected by the Well of the Boundless, could be deployed freely—but all intelligence reports agreed on one thing: the Utopia possessed terrifying mastery over the void. Thus, the wizards had remained in formation, holding their spells in reserve while awaiting the void attack that could strike at any moment.

With an ear-splitting roar, a massive rift tore open around the black sphere. It resembled a void rift, yet no torrent of void energy spilled forth. Or perhaps a spatial rift, but those tended to produce significant shockwaves.

"They shoved the Well of the Boundless into a void rift—damn it, who could've imagined something like this without seeing it firsthand?!"

Even the wizards, prepared as they were for incoming void attacks, could not suppress their curses. To force the Well of the Boundless into a void rift while preventing that rift from collapsing under the material world's pressure was an accomplishment bordering on impossible.

The Well, after all, was a hyper-dense aggregation of mana: immensely material in nature. Stuffing it into a void rift was like ramming a reality anchor into the void itself. Once again, the Utopia's command of the void shattered the Alliance's understanding.

"Suppress any forming void rifts! Do not let that sphere cross the void and emerge inside our formation. The consequences would be catastrophic!"

A wizard within central command transmitted the order instantly to every wizard across the battlefield. The Utopia's plan was obvious: once the Well had absorbed all their spells, it would transform into a monstrous explosive charge, its destructive force rivaling any offensive spell in existence.

The wizards sharpened their senses, communing with the void through mental energy and suppressing the increasingly restless void currents. Countless tiny void rifts quivered at the edges of manifestation. If they were to erupt en masse, the mana aggregate already inserted into the void would gain countless anchor points across the alliance's ranks, any of which could become its detonation site.

"This region's void-reality environment makes forming rifts far too easy—damn it, why are these rifts so active? Suppressing them is absurdly difficult!"

The wizards ground their teeth in frustration. The special environment crafted by the Utopia, though advantageous for communing with the void and casting wizardry, also made suppression nearly impossible. The void churned wildly. The material world's innate rejection of the void had been drastically weakened.

Teams of wizards struggled to seal the boundary between void and matter. The Utopia pushed back with equal force, attempting to carve open a stable passage to deliver the Well straight into the heart of the alliance's formation.

A sudden, massive pulse of mana flared within the alliance lines. Several tiny void fissures had slipped past the wizards' blockade, releasing surges of mana from the Well of the Boundless. Anxiety seized every soldier. Barriers of fighting spirit, spell-shields, and all forms of defensive magic flared to life at once, ready for the mana explosion that would follow a failed seal.

The wizards focused with all their might, pouring every ounce of strength into sealing the rifts, especially the cluster from which mana gushed most violently. That cluster marked the Well's location within the void; the breakthrough point would certainly be there.

Under the full force of the wizards' efforts, the leaking void rifts snapped shut. The Well lost its chance to breach into the material world.

Now all that remained was to seal the remaining fissures farther from the mana aggregate...

...or so the wizards thought.

The next moment, a thunderous stomp shattered the battlefield's tense silence. Every knight, magician, and wizard stiffened, their eyes widening in shock. From those tiny void rifts, a horde of frenzied orcs burst forth, their fighting spirit and raging mana crashing down upon the unprepared Alliance ranks.

The leaking mana fissures had captured the wizards' full attention.

None of them had ever considered the possibility of sending living beings through the void.

Together, these two factors had allowed for the devastating ambush that took place at that moment. The Utopia's command of the void was nothing short of an art.