Every demon beast upon the battlefield beyond Ragguard sensed the arrival of a catastrophic shift.
[SHREEEEEEE—ZING-ZING-ZING!]
Abruptly, a shriek rent the firmament. It was no cry of a living thing, but the sonic boom of over two hundred igneous lances as they tore through the clouds and the sky with frantic velocity. It appeared as if a nocturnal meteor shower had manifested directly over Ragguard.
Yet, this celestial descent of ordnance held no beauty. The solar radiance of the enchanted spears pulsated with a raw, destructive aura. Though these fire-lances plummeted from the zenith above the fortress, their serrated tips were angled with clinical precision toward the killing fields beyond the curtain walls.
An incandescent flare of solar fire erupted with an ear-shattering percussion that defied all mortal auditory thresholds. No soul within the fortress possessed the speed to comprehend the event, nor the time to seek sanctuary before the atmosphere itself buckled.
Hundreds of igneous lances transited the firmament with a velocity that mocked the laws of physics, impacting the northern and western killing fields in a single, catastrophic pulse.
[KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM—!!!!]
The detonation was absolute.
A seismic shudder seized the earth as if the very foundations of the world had been upended and violently convulsed.
A tidal wave of fire scoured the demonic theatre of war.
Mageia energies triggered a frantic chain reaction of explosions.
The systematic erasure of the abyss proceeded without pause.
The very masonry of the curtain walls groaned as fissures webbed across the massive ramparts like a shattered glass nightmare.
For several heartbeats, the solar brilliance remained so potent it threatened to permanently blind any witness.
A wall of infernal flame ignited beyond Ragguard, transmuting the grasslands into a sequestered dimension of the netherworld.
The thermal backdraft slammed into the fortress walls with a resonant, metallic thunder.
The primary blast carried enough kinetic force to drive thousands of sentry forces to their knees, yet it was the secondary thermal wave that sent the Ragguard host tumbling across the battlements. Scores of men found themselves with bleeding noses, their senses utterly fractured by the percussion.
The radiant heat from the exterior pyre bled into the city, as the western and northern frontiers were irrevocably claimed by a sea of fire. This enchanted conflagration roared with a predatory hunger, consuming the Demon Legion as the dissonant shrieks of a hundred thousand undead rose in a sepulchral wail.
None could fathom what madness had overtaken the world. Within the fortress, not a single soul sustained a terminal wound from the liturgy, yet even the hardened sentry veterans lay prone upon the flagstones with vacant eyes, their minds momentarily extinguished by the scale of the devastation.
Robin and the Bloody Hunting demon hunters remained the most intact, their primary injuries consisting of minor contusions sustained from being hurled against the masonry.
"…"
Struggling against a sudden vertigo, Robin hauled himself to the edge of the ramparts. He stared into the wall of fire beyond the city, his features fixed in a mask of silent, soul-stricken bewilderment.
The undead legion, a million-strong tide they had struggled so desperately to repel, had been incinerated and purged with terrifying ease by the young magis's solar liturgy. Though they loathed the comparison, they could not help but measure their own frail strength against the absolute power of Seraph.
'During the initial days of the Bloody Hunting mission... it was true that Lord Seraph's mageia power already eclipsed that of his peers, yet he remained within the established threshold of a Magister. However, the authority manifested before my eyes now must surely belong to the Warlock tier—a display of mid-rank spells at the very least! A magis is seldom a vocation noted for such rapid evolutionary leaps in power; in truth, it is usually only the venerable elders who attain such a profound mastery of the mageia power. Yet he, a mere young man, already commands such a zenith of power... and the sight of a magis wielding an igneous blade with the ferocity of a warrior is surely unprecedented! From what ancient well of knowledge does he draw such esoteric liturgies and martial techniques? To what heights will this young man ascend as the cycles pass? I can only pray that his faculties serve to bolster Prince Arthus in the days to come...' Robin mused in a fever of silent contemplation.
Amidst the wall of fire consuming the grasslands beyond the fortress, over a hundred Bigfoots—their thick pelts scorched into blackened, shrivelled tufts—loosed bellows of visceral agony. They leaped and thrashed their massive arms toward Ragguard in a display of impotent, primal fury.
Yet, no sooner had the giant primates vented their outrage upon the human fortress than they beat a frantic retreat. They lunged for the skeletal canopies of the great trees, swinging through the singed branches and vanishing into the gloom of the Ancient Battlefield with absolute haste.
The remaining tens of thousands of undead were gripped by a visceral terror far more profound than that of the Bigfoots. They broke formation, scattering in a frantic panic toward every direction; rather than retreating to the demonic domains, the large undead horde shattered demons simply fled across the landscape in a directionless exodus.
It was true that the Piercingspear liturgy appeared possessed of a god-like authority, yet it could not change the clinical reality that it remained a fundamental Art within the Magister tier.
The kinetic impact of a base-tier spell could excise a Bigfoot with relative ease, provided the strike achieved a direct impalement. However, given the Bigfoots' dense hides and a defensive threshold far exceeding that of a Crawler, the resulting wildfire and the wall of flame served only to scorch their pelts; it was insufficient to enact a total liquidation of the entire demon horde.
As for the undead—the most fragile caste within the Demon Legion—the wall of fire was indeed a terminal sentence, yet the mageia did not saturate the entire theatre of war. Since the detonations and the brushfire were localised, tens of thousands of the demons managed to successfully withdraw and vanish into the gloom.
However, the two hundred Crawlers who had sustained the full, crushing brunt of the igneous lances were utterly erased, leaving not even a charred fragment behind.
Every sentry of the Ragguard soldiers bore witness to the descent of the solar spears, while the Observation Crystals hovering above the fortress meticulously recorded the devastation, transmitting the data to the Arkflame high command without omission.
As the cycles passed, this particular engagement on the North-Western frontier began to be whispered across the Laurasia continent, immortalised in legend as the Battle of the "Wings of Solar."
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