Chapter 3249 Opening Fire (Part 2) The dimensional passageway looked similar to a Warp Steps but instead of leading to another place it opened on the other side of the Fringe. "Incoming!" The elves patrolling the borders of the access point to Chalal aimed their weapons and opened fire. A barrage of spells erupted from staves, rings, arrows, and splayed fingers for a devastating effect. There was still no stable connection with the outside world so everything that hit Mogar's veil bounced back. The spells hit their casters first, but since a mage couldn't be hurt by their own mana, they phased through the front line of elves, leaving them unscathed. Those behind them, however, weren't that lucky. The bombardment knocked many elves off their feet, inflicting grave injuries, maiming some, and killing a few. The aftermath would have been carnage if not for the casters of the spells steering them to empty areas as soon as they realized their mistake and the protection offered by the Yggdrasill's arrays. "Stand down, you fools!" The World Tree roared. "Attacking Mogar is like spitting at the sky. It can only hit you in the face." "What's happening, my liege?" A Chronicler asked. Their ranks had suffered no damage or casualties thanks to the fragment of the World Tree in their bodies warning them timely and making them raise their Spirit Barriers instead of attacking. "I don't know!" The words were filled with bitterness to the point of sounding like a curse. The Yggdrasill was the descendant of Mogar's First Awakened, their mind and libraries a repository of knowledge encompassing everything. Ignorance was not something the World Tree could condone lightly, even from themselves. "Nothing like this has ever happened before. Hold your fire until I give you the order to attack. Use this time to treat the wounded and replace the lost spells. We are the ones waiting in ambush. Being caught unprepared is unacceptable!" The Librarians and common elves were shocked, many of them exchanging sideways glances. First, the kidnapped woman had managed to escape and wrecked their villages. Then, an entire squad of Chroniclers had failed their mission to eliminate Verhen and their death throes had shaken the entire Fringe. And now, the sanctity of their home was being violated. Too many unprecedented things had happened in what for an elf was the blink of an eye and the World Tree had proved to have no control over the consequences of their own schemes. The elves' trust in their host was getting as shaky as their knees. They had hidden inside the Fringes to escape the War of the Races and now their host had brought it back to their doorstep. On the outside, Lith kept pouring more and more mana into the world energy. As the area he controlled expanded, however, the burden on his mind increased beyond what he could bear. The Fringe was a displaced space, its dimensional coordinates were inside the boundaries of Mogar yet as foreign as they led to a different planet. Lith had to dominate the veil, establish the connection with the other side, and keep the dimensional corridor stable enough to allow passage without it imploding and killing everyone. Lith's mastery of magic was great and thanks to his seven eyes there was no elemental force he couldn't subdue yet he was no dimensional mage. Tezka was. The Suneater looked through the rift forming in the eye of the vortex, grasping the Fringe's dimensional coordinates and aligning them with those of the space in front of him. As Tezka rearranged the space and bridged between the two dimensions, the small hole in reality stabilized. Lith felt the burden on his mind disappear and shifted his focus on expanding the rift while the Suneater stabilized it. To those witnessing the phenomenon, the rules of physics seemed to have lost meaning. As the dimensional ripples spread, the air froze upon their passage, the scenery unchanging aside from the expanding vortex. The wind had stopped blowing through the grassland but the plants remained bent like the subject of a painting. The clouds all around the Divine Beast came to a halt and the sunlight reflecting on their armors didn't dim when covered by the shadow of the wings of their neighbours. Lith grunted with effort, pulling the curtain separating the Fringe from the rest of Mogar. He had never manipulated so much world energy at once. He had never even attempted to replace the planet's will with his own. Now he was doing both and he only had one try. Tezka wasn't faring any better. He was the inventor of dimensional magic and maybe the best dimensional mage alive on Mogar. Yet rewiring space and time, altering Mogar's design to fit his agenda was something only Guardians could do. They were Mogar's chosen and had the planet's tacit approval on many things. The Suneater, instead, was one of those on whom the planet had turned their back. Mogar rejected him at every step of the way. Both the Fylgja and the Tiamat stood defiant like the day they had defeated death. "Don't worry, brothers. You are not alone." Nandi the Minotaur hadn't spent his time idly. He had conjured and stored through the bio-crystals on his body so much world energy that his pitch-black skin now emitted the blinding radiance of a small star. The Orc-Eldritch hybrid placed his hands on Lith's and Tezka's backs, sharing his power with them. "Fuck you, rib steak! Why didn't you do this sooner?" The Suneater said with a laugh as the vortex expanded faster and faster. "For the same reason you haven't used your Suneater spell, fur coat." Nandi replied. "I was saving it for later." Lith roared as he pulled the veil open one meter (3'3") across, then three, ten, fifty, and finally one hundred meters (330'), wide enough to let an army of Divine Beasts in human form in quickly. "Now!" The World Tree ordered and the elves unleashed the spells they had at the ready. Tier five spells of all kinds, mass destruction arrays, and several Silverwing's Annihilations bolted towards the rift while Lith and Tezka were still focused on stabilizing it. A single bolt of black energy as big as a small house erupted from the other side, taking the prismatic catastrophe head-on. Orulm's Break Annihilation was true to its name, taking apart spells, arrays, and everything in between. Its power was nothing compared to the flood of incoming attacks but that was true only until contact. Then, the runes of the enemy spells would be erased from existence and the finely tuned balance that kept the destructive energies together would crumble. Tier five spells contained different elements that if not harmonized properly would destroy each other. Arrays require lengthy strings of runes to execute complex tasks and a magical circle to store the mana necessary to sustain them for an extended period of time. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖 Even worse, Silverwing's Spells required seven people to synchronize their wills and energy signatures. The anti-Guardian spells used all seven elements of magic which had to be perfectly balanced not to implode. Orulm's Eldritch ability, Break, was the bane of all that. It made runes disappear, erased the borders of magic circles, and turned unity into disarray.