[Ouroboros' End]
Watching from a distance as the zombie dragon scorched the battlements, Darganth started to wonder where the enemy fourth ranks were. Melidra's army was slowly but surely tearing through the smuggler's forces, yet he still hadn't sensed their mana signature once after the cooperation in the ritual magic that had taken out the mutated zombie. Even with the wall's enchantments obscuring his senses, this was unlikely if they were using their powers for anything that required more mana than the simplest spells.
Thus, the fact that he sensed nothing gave him reason to be cautious. Centuries of experience told him that they hadn't simply given up and were waiting for the army to reach them. That simply wasn't the way mana users typically went out. Even more so than manaless people, they would struggle to the bitter end, rarely ever deeming a situation as truly hopeless until the last bit of their life force has faded.
However, for all that he was sure that there was some sort of trap or plan being prepared, Darganth had no idea what it was.
"Melidra, start sending your troops into the lower levels of the wall. Let's see how much pressure the defenders there can endure." Darganth said after a few moments of consideration. He had no interest in waiting for hours in the hopes that their enemies sallied forth on their own and this was the quickest method he could think of to try and speed it up.
"Already? The areas of the wall to the left and right of the breakthrough are still pressuring my troops from the sides." Melidra answered.
"I'll take care of that. Scalladras, Yldra, you with me in that?" Darganth asked.
Hearing his words, the dragoness perked up. Though surprised by his sudden decision, it didn't take long before a grin crept onto her face at the prospect of a fight.
"Always." Yldra said confidently.
"Let's go." Scalladras replied similarly confident, his eyes briefly flashing red as a literal fire ignited in them.
After this, Darganth briefly turned to the rest of their group before setting off. "I'll have to trouble you with watching our backs. If it's just the eight that participated in the ritual spell then we should be fine no matter what they have prepared. But if there are more, you'll have to handle anyone that slips past us."
Watching Allaire and Venrie quickly nod, shortly followed by the rest of their group, Darganth felt assured enough to turn his attention toward their foes. Unfurling his wings behind his back, he leaped into the air a moment after Scalladras. Following the latter as he quickly rose further into the air, Darganth and Yldra both flew after him toward the battlements.
Arriving atop the wall only a few seconds later, Scalladras landed in an opening that appeared in the undead's formation just before their arrival. Still treating everything that was happening quite casually, he lazily swept his gaze across the terrain on the other side of the wall first before glancing up at where Darganth and Yldra were hovering.
By then, the two of them had already turned to the sides. Respectively watching over one direction of the wall, they were overlooking the undead as they streamed toward what remains of the two broken towers, seemingly having found the openings that gave access to the lower levels of the wall in their smoldering wrecks.
For the ten minutes that followed, Darganth and Yldra simply hovered in place as the undead army slowly advanced into the lower levels of the wall. In the process, the battlements slowly cleared out, giving the smugglers on both sides of the breakthrough new confidence. Soon, Darganth even spotted the first third rank emerge from within the bunker construct inside the walls. As the man stepped out of one of the towers and onto the battlements, Darganth acted.
Enhancing his mobility with a flight spell to further increase his flight speed, Darganth burst forward with enough speed to cause a sonic boom in his wake. In an instant, multiple hundred meters of wall blurred past below him as he dashed toward where his target had emerged. Partially undoing his transformation and turning into a shrunken version of his true form at the last moment, his multiple tons heavy form slammed into the unfortunate aura user at still almost supersonic speed.
As the aura avatar shattered under the impact, the soldiers who had surged forth to charge after the aura user jumped back. Ducking back into the stairwell inside the tower, they scattered as Darganth folded his wings and shot through the gateway that encased the battlements path through the tower. In complete disarray from his sudden appearance, they collided with their fellow soldiers that were still in the stairway, causing chaos and quite a few instances of friendly fire as some soldiers tried to hit Darganth with spears or arrows as he passed through the gate.
Adjusting his trajectory upward as he finished flying through the tower, Darganth gradually let gravity bleed away his momentum. Coming to a stop a few hundred meters above the wall, he turned toward the tower he had just flown through before unleashing his dragon's breath.
From his maw, a cone of spatial and temporal magic burst forth. As this blast of magic struck the tower, magical barriers flickered into existence to meet it. Erupting into sparks as they clashed with the magical energies in Darganth's breath attack, barriers flickered and cracked as they were slowly pushed to their limits. Each defensive spell that failed sent a small shockwave through the tower, causing fear among the soldiers inside but also giving them a warning to start relocating to the lower levels.
Those few that stayed were mana users who instead tried to reinforce the tower's defenses. However, even as more power flooded through the enchantments and magical barriers reappeared as mages patched up spell formations that had been destroyed from the backlash of the collision with his attack, Darganth's attack soon reached the tower. And as it broke through the first wall, the delicate network of defenses that had almost managed to hold back Darganth's magic crumbled as half a dozen enchantments inlaid into these walls and equally as many formations in the room that had been struck were snuffed out in an instant.
In but a moment, Darganth's dragon's breath washed over the entire tower. Wood, stone, metal, and even the people caught in its blast simply ceased to be from one moment to the next. With it, a gaping hole was torn into the wall as parts of the battlements too were caught in the same fate as the tower, exposing the long corridors below and the terrified soldiers of the smuggler group that were crowded inside.
However, Darganth didn't continue to press the attack as he saw no need. Though his attack had briefly caused the soldiers to halt in fear, they were already being pushed back by the undead that were slowly filling the corridors, making it unnecessary for him to waste mana on further punching down at them.
Instead, he landed back on the wall. As he did, he spotted Yldra tearing through the soldiers at the opposite end of the undead-held area of the wall. Watching her do so with overwhelming raw physical might, Darganth's gaze momentarily lingered on her form as she moved on and off the wall to either side, cutting deep gashes into the enchanted stone of the wall with each approach.
Still, even as he was enjoying the sight of her fighting, Darganth didn't let his vigilance wane. Thus, when the mana signatures of the eight enemy fourth ranks in the area started to move a minute or two after he had landed, he was ready within the second.
When Scalladras reacted similarly a moment later, Darganth wasn't particularly surprised. Originally only glancing in his direction to adapt his battle strategy based on the fire god's positioning, Darganth became confused when he spotted his flame-clad form floating up and into the smuggler-controlled side of the wall.
Letting his gaze follow Scalladras' trajectory, Darganth's vision suddenly became filled with a flash of crimson light. Immediately averting his gaze, his vision nonetheless became blurry and filled with flashing spots as the blinding light was burned into his eyes. And though only the light-based spectrum of his sight was affected by this, the dizziness and disorienting effect induced by the loss of most of the main lenses through which he perceived the world still caused him to sway slightly.
And as he was still in the process of shaking off the aftershock of this, his instincts screamed a warning at him as two mana new signatures flared up on his mana sense. Though only barely keeping his balance as is, Darganth heeded the instincts honed by millenia of fighting and threw himself to his left.
Just in time, it turned out, as barely a moment after his feet left the battlements, the section of wall he had been standing on was consumed by an explosion. Feeling the eruption of mana that had caused it to slam into his side, Darganth leaned away, barely managing to lift his wings out of the way before the stones of the broken pieces of wall slammed into his side.
By the time Darganth caught his descent and stabilized his flight path, he was already halfway toward the ground. With no direct line of sight toward Scalladras and the wall's enchantments obscuring his magical senses, he had no idea what he was flying into as he quickly rose back over the top a few moments later.
As he did, he was greeted by two separate battles.
The first was happening all across the battlement. There, the eight fourth ranks that Darganth had sensed in the lower levels of the wall had teleported about a thousand soldiers onto the battlement. In the process, they had completely circumvented the skeletal knights that had moved into the corridors of the bunker system inside the wall, allowing them to quickly start contesting the battlements once more.
The second battle was happening further back on the other side of the wall. There, Scalladras and Yldra were clashing against the two newly arrived mana signatures. Though somewhat weaker than the former in raw presence, the two figures that Darganth could only track through their mana emissions didn't seem outmatched, nor did they show any signs of attempting to retreat.
Quickly deciding to join this second battle, Darganth barely started accelerating forward when he had to dodge a spell that came flying at his side. Easily dodging the attack, he at first wanted to just ignore the fourth ranks. With Scalladras and Yldra fighting two mythic ranks not that far away, they simply weren't a priority for him.
However, this changed when he sensed the initiation of a ritual spell.
Though he had nothing to fear from the fourth ranks on their own, even having dodged the earlier spell more out of reflex than due to any danger it presented, the five mages before him had already shown themselves highly proficient in ritual magic when they had almost struck down Cehlya's mutated zombie. While Darganth was reasonably confident that he would fare better against that same spell, especially as it wasn't supported by quite as many other mages this time, he wasn't willing to test this belief at that moment.
As such, he paused his advance toward the second battle before it even truly began. Spinning around in the air, he came to a stop and hovered in place with steady beats of his wings as he cast his own spell.
Compared to the massive undertaking that ritual magic with multiple participants was, his magic manifested in practically an instant. As he had no idea whether he'd be faced with the same spell that struck the zombie or if the smugglers were also trained in casting another spell as a ritual, his first priority was encasing himself in a stronger shield than those that he always kept active. In an instant, time twisted in a bubble around him, the distraction only visible for a brief moment before it adapted to the physical world it appeared in and vanished. Yet still, any sufficiently skilled mana user could sense how the flow of time there was disturbed, with the shield that caused it being ready to undo the existence of everything that is deemed an attack upon contact.
With his defenses strengthened, Darganth turned his magical might onto the five mages who stood densely by one another atop the wall. With a roar, he gathered flames between his claws as he raised his forelimbs before unleashing them in a concentrated blast.
A moment later, mana started to surge at the center of the five mages as they quickly fired the ritual spell to counter his attack. The moment they did, all light around them vanished. The resulting darkness then rapidly cascaded outward, quickly covering over a dozen meters in every direction before suddenly erupting into thousands of beams of light. Filling the sphere of darkness with focused beams that covered all colors of the rainbow, these beams all collapsed back into the center of the mage's formation, where they were reflected and fired against Darganth's spell.
As the two opposing magical forces came into contact a moment later, reality itself almost seemed to quake. Hundreds of different concepts, each one contained within a beam of light that gave it form and allowed it to affect the physical world, slammed into the fireball. With each impact, a different effect mixed into Darganth's spell and clashed with the fundamental concepts that made fire what it is. Furthermore, no two concepts in this clash were the same, causing hundreds of individual effects, some of which even strengthened the flames.
However, no matter how many beneficial effects were mixed in among the beams of light, the chaotic mixture of different effects quickly destabilized Darganth's spell. When this happened, the fireball erupted far before reaching its targets. Furthermore, it didn't do so with the typical characteristics of fire. Instead, the influences of the different concepts caused different parts of the explosion to take on a variety of traits. This ranged from some parts of the explosion healing instead of burning, to others taking on gaseous characteristics and quickly dispersing in the wind.
Through this explosion, Darganth could see the three aura users advance toward him. Likely believing him to be at least affected by the explosion, considering that it erupted barely a tenth of the way from him to them, they charged forth. The two third orders among them did so by imposing their will onto their surroundings through the world connection aura ability, using it to let air and mana lift them up. Meanwhile, the third one among them dashed across the battlements to get beneath Darganth.
Feeling the active domains of all three wash over him a moment later, Darganth couldn't suppress the sneer that crept onto his face as he barely felt a difference, so weak was their suppressive effect. Still, he unleashed his own domain in response. Powered by his vastly superior mana quality, it easily broke through those of his opponents and reversed the situation by suppressing the three aura users' mana.
In an instant, the two that had risen into the air had the magic they were using for lift ripped away beneath them, sending them plummeting back onto the battlements. The third one fared better, only stumbling slightly as the enhancing effect of his aura abruptly lost much of its potency. Still, he suddenly found himself far too close to Darganth with his power more than cut in half, leaving him in a precarious position.
Especially as, just a moment later, Darganth made his next move.