Wandering Knight

Chapter 465: The Sinking Kingdom

"Make sure it remains stable! Raise all defensive wards!"The order from central command rippled through every unit. Assembling the siege engine would not take long, but the defense couldn't falter at all during the process.

The magicians began to cast in coordination. One after another, they pulled out the spell scrolls they had been carrying, precious items that the Alliance would reimburse later, and tore them open without hesitation. A dense barrage of fifth- and higher-tier spells burst forth, layering shield upon shield over the Alliance encampment in a massive arcane bulwark.

Ironically, the very barrier the Utopia had erected, wrought from the void, now worked to the Alliance's advantage. It diverted the Utopia's resources: if it chose to maintain the shield, it was forfeiting the ability to strike at the Alliance. That was precisely why the Alliance had baited them into using the power of the void in the first place.

Members of each team trained in alchemy activated the components supplied by Skyborne City. Seemingly simple metal cubes unfolded under the hum of magitech mechanisms. Spatial seals faded as the cubes expanded to form full internal frameworks that had been stored within them, each a component of the massive siege engine forming before their eyes.

The artillery roared on without pause. A storm of alchemical shells hammered the void barrier in relentless waves. Unless that barrier was removed, the Utopia could not stop the Alliance's siege engine from being assembled. Yet if they lowered it, the explosive downpour would crash directly into their own lines.

A sharp, crystalline snap echoed across the front. The void barrier shattered into countless fragments. And in that instant, before the shards even had time to fall, an enormous flood of abyss-black tendrils surged from the breach. They shimmered in starlit hues, the unmistakable colors of condensed void energy. The tendrils slammed forward through the hail of shells, racing straight for the Alliance's construction zone.

In the end, the Utopia had chosen to give up on its shield. The threat of the structure emerging behind the Alliance lines clearly outweighed the bombardment of the magitech guns. Even if they were shelled directly, they could not allow that siege engine to be completed.

"Block them!"

The simple command drew an immediate response from every wizard present. Like the magicians had done moments before, they activated runestones etched with wizardry, each one pouring forth its reservoir of void energy. Those energies converged into a single locus, a nexus formed by the unified mental energies of all the wizards.

Compared to magic, joint wizardry was far simpler. Wizards did not need perfect synchronicity. It wasn't a precision craft; it required only mutual resonance and shared focus.

Where the wizards' mental energy met, void affinity pooled. A colossal surge of void energy collapsed into existence at that point and cascaded downward like a world-flooding waterfall. It crashed between the Alliance lines and the oncoming tide of tendrils.

Though it resembled flowing water, the deluge of void energy behaved like solid matter, an impenetrable curtain that held the tendrils at bay. No matter how violently they whipped or writhed, they could not pierce the barrier, at least in the short term.

Such was the nature of wizardry: void energy distorted the material world and thus manifested as an effect. All void manipulation obeyed this principle. Because the waterfall was forged of "claimed" void energy—energy that was owned by the wizard collective—no one could hijack or redirect it as they might ordinary mana. It was therefore an exceptionally potent shield.

The torrent falling from the sky, its strength determined purely by the volume of void energy poured into it, was the defensive spell Deluge of the Firmament. The Alliance's wizards had unleashed it to hold back the Utopia's surge of void tendrils until the siege engine could be completed.

The Utopia clearly recognized how effectively this spell impeded them. Without hesitation, its wizards increased the energy feeding into their tendrils.

A surge of power coursed through them, and they took on a translucent, violet radiance that shimmered like the true essence of the void.

Their tips exploded, splitting open into swarms of new tendrils. In the blink of an eye, their numbers multiplied tenfold. A dense ocean of void appendages pressing against the deluge until the far side of the downpour was nearly blotted out.

"What an immense concentration of void energy..."

The Alliance's wizards eyed the tendrils, their faces pinched. The tendrils now held more void energy than the entire deluge the Alliance wizards had jointly summoned. The tendrils were beginning to bore through, tentacle by tentacle, tearing small rents in the barrier.

Yet even so, the Utopia was too late to halt the assembly of the siege engine. Bringing unassembled parts to a battlefield and building such a machine there might seem foolish. Why not finish it beforehand instead of assembling it amidst chaos and danger?

If one commander alone had made the decision, it might have been deemed a mistake. But given that the full council had approved of the matter, that surely meant that there was a method to the madness.

The reason was simple. A pre-assembled siege engine, immensely destructive yet only moderately durable, would be a prime target for sabotage long before deployment. Protecting it in advance would be a nightmare. And beyond that, the assembly took place in barely any time at all. It was fast enough to be a surprise attack.

Metal rang out without pause as countless components snapped, locked, and fused together at impossible speed. Each piece, stored beforehand through spatial manipulation, was designated for one and only one specific part of the engine. With a given reference point, the piece would snap into place on the engine exactly where it was meant to go.

Etched upon every component was a pre-inscribed spatial array. The instant the core of the engine pulsed, all the arrays would activate in unison, relocating every part to its designated position.

It took barely ten seconds to unpack the components, five more for the core's magical signal to reach them, and another ten for the spatial matrices to calibrate their locations and trajectories. The very next heartbeat, the teleportation sequence engaged.

In that single instant, space overlapped, wavered, and snapped back. By the time the rippling distortion cleared, every component had ended up in its rightful place. A colossal siege engine now stood abruptly upon the battlefield. As the magitech energy conduits between its sections locked into place, its internal power systems roared awake. The entire construct lurched seamlessly into operation.

The total elapsed time for the construction of the Colossus was a mere thirty seconds. Nearly twenty meters tall, it towered far above the Bloodfang Empire's city walls. Its silhouette resembled a titanic turtle, featuring an immense armored carapace, four short but impenetrably sturdy limbs, and a "head," the forward energy-focusing emitter.

"Alchemical Cannon Array, maximum output! Load special rupture shells! Cover the siege engine's charging sequence! Magicians, prepare for bombardment! We'll be taking down their fortress today!"

The overarching command filtered across the army. With the siege engine assembled, the next task was to blast straight through the Utopia's refuge.

The alchemical cannon array, positioned at the rear, had docked with the Colossus' power core. Fed by its energy furnace, they fired specialized shells. Streaks of violet shot across the sky, arcing downward toward the heaving ocean of void tentacles tearing at the cascading deluge that protected the Alliance's ranks.

The magic circuits inscribed within each projectile flared to life under the furnace's charge, unleashing spells amplified far beyond their natural limit. The instant the shells detonated, jagged rifts ripped open in space. Around those fractures writhed blinding purple arcs of lightning, the unmistakable sign of gravity magic.

Pulses of gravity surged outward, seizing everything within reach and dragging all matter toward the unstable cluster of rifts. These were not stable portals, but rather raw spatial turbulence—pure, howling chaos. Anything pulled in was obliterated into dust.

The bombardment blanketed the field before the Alliance lines from sky to earth. Unstable rifts carpeted the terrain, and the overlapping gravitational snares filled every inch of that lethal expanse. This was precisely why the Alliance could not advance outright. The brutal spells spared no one, friend or foe.

The sea of purple tentacles—matter twisted by void energy—took the full brunt of the bombardment. Vast swathes were annihilated outright. Wild gravity hurled tendrils toward the rifts, where spatial turbulence shredded them mid-flight.

Endless and continuously regenerating though the tentacles might be, their assault was halted for the moment. The Colossus would be able to charge up for an overwhelming blow without further interruption.

The enormous shell on the siege engine's back split open and folded outward, revealing a colossal mana reactor humming at its core: siege mode engaged. The external mana-gathering manifold unfolded as it began to charge up energy.

The magicians of the Alliance had already identified the reactor's intake points, technology identical to Skyborne City's Magiweb. The Colossus could draw magic from the environment, and the charging process could be accelerated by saturating the environment with energy.

Magicians poured waves of mana into the reactor. The density grew so extreme that the formless essence of mana condensed into shimmering liquid. The furnace swallowed every drop, converting and channeling the amassed power toward the emitter.

Pinpricks of starlight shimmered within the focusing aperture as stray energy bled outward. Mana was being converted into pure destructive force, a method far removed from traditional spellcraft. It resembled hypermagic in shape, but was something else entirely: it bypassed the elements and manifested power directly in its own right.

War was no longer an arena for knights and magicians alone. Advancing technology elevated spell formations to absurd magnitudes, and alchemy fused with magitech allowed destructive power no individual could hope to match.

To breach walls, indiscriminate spellfire was crude and wasteful. True efficiency lay in penetrating power: gathering every shred of power and unleashing it as a single devastating beam that could melt any obstacle in its path. That was the purpose for which the Colossus had been designed.

The entire sequence unfurled smoothly without delays or hesitations. Accumulation, conversion, convergence, release—each step flowed smoothly into the next. A roaring column of energy erupted from the siege engine's maw. The heat alone melted the emitter into slag.

The beam, condensed past critical mass, possessed terrifying substance and weight. Spatial rifts and gravitational fields meant nothing to it. It punched straight through them, its sheer mass overwhelming gravity, its sharpened substance drilling through the sea of void tentacles like a titanic reality anchor. It shattered and vaporized everything in its path before slamming directly into the void domain shrouding the Utopia.

A wild, roiling plume of energy blossomed outward at the point of impact. A mushroom-shaped surge of spent force rose slowly into the air. The field of void energy field, once impenetrable and opaque, splitting the Bloodfang Empire from the outside world, cracked open like a walnut under a hammer, revealing the world hidden within.

The Bloodfang Empire was sinking. The entire nation was descending. The land itself rippled like the surface of a lake as the empire slipped downward into another world.