Chapter 3810: Hidden Weapon (Part 1) The pilots strafed Ruugat with the gatling wands attached below the chassis of the vehicles while the soldiers on the passenger seats emptied their dimensional amulets. Barrels filled with acid and all kinds of alchemical tools hit the lost city and detonated on impact. One fire seed produced the power of a fireball, something that a creature the size of a lost city wouldn’t even notice. Yet one fire seed was no bigger than a bean, and one barrel contained hundreds of them. The resulting conflagrations blinded and deafened Ruugat of the Earth while also flooding his detection arrays with threat notices. The lost city stumbled again, and his enemies exploited his moment of weakness. Dawn impaled him from the front with the Lightpillar spells after turning them into high-speed drills, Lith slashed at him multiple times with Double Edge, and the Awakened hit him with Silverwing’s Annihilations from every side. The Demons of the Darkness wasted no mana on spells that Earthly Vault would neutralize. They shapeshifted themselves into black pools that spread over the orange aura and drained its power, making it their own. The foot soldiers, elves, and people of Zelex retreated as fast as they could, knowing that the lost city would far from defeated. They were still within Fountain of Death’s area of effect when Ruugat lost it. He channeled the power of the mana geyser inside his body, trapping the weapons hurting him and thickening his orange aura until the Annihilations couldn’t pierce through it any longer. "I’m done playing with you!" A knife-hand shattered the Lightpillar spells, and another would have broken Double Edge in half if Solus didn’t store it inside their pocket dimension in time. "I’m done being stung by a bunch of mosquitoes!" Ruugat’s body shone with endless mana as he started to consume the energy that he had accumulated during the months he had spent over Detemer’s ruins. Until that moment, he had played a zero-sum game, putting behind his attacks only as much power as the geyser provided him with. In Awakened terms, he had never stimulated his mana core or consumed a spark of mana, considering his enemies unworthy to witness his true power. Living beings, undead, and even other lost cities suffered from the same limitations. Their bodies had a fixed mass and density, while their cores could contain a fixed amount of mana once their bodies fully developed or had been Forgemastered. A bright violet core held the same amount of mana, no matter if it belonged to a human or a Divine Beast. Similarly, Ilthin’s and Vladion’s full-red blood cores were equally powerful, no matter if their living and undead races differed. As for the maximum output a cursed power or pseudo core could produce, it depended on many factors, like the Forgemaster’s skill, the materials used, and the number of sacrifices performed to fuel the Forbidden Magic. Yet once the ritual was over, the cursed core was a fixed entity. It was the reason the mad Forgemasters of the past had created unique powers to overcome the limits that their creations were bound to have. Thaymos the Eternal Fortress needed willing slaves, Auros the Bringer of Unity bonded with endless hosts, and Argantyr the Elemental Lord infected every mana geyser he came in contact with to form the Divine Right array. Yet such paltry tricks relied on external sources that could be cut off or killed. They increased the lost cities’ magical prowess, but the cursed cores remained the same as the day the cursed objects had been crafted. Ruugat, instead, had no limit to his growth and had changed so much that the Warlock King wouldn’t have recognized him anymore. Every part of his original body had been replaced by much sturdier and denser materials that kept being refined even amid the chaos of battle. The Adamant veins that ran under Ruugat’s stone skin had partly turned into Davross, while patches of gold-veined white marble punctuated the surface of the granite he had plundered from Detemer. Ruugat was much heavier and denser than on the day of his birth. His magical resistance and conductivity had also been greatly amplified by other abundant but less precious materials the lost city had extracted from the mines below Vladion’s fortress. Ruugat’s pseudo cores had also considerably expanded thanks to the countless mana crystals he had integrated into his body, using them to build auxiliary cores that weren’t part of his original design. The white and violet crystals, carefully placed inside and outside the lost city, formed a network that carried the world energy coming from the mana geyser and bent it to Ruugat’s will akin to body casting. It was the reason when he cast the tier five Spirit Spell, Mana Storm, no one recognized it, not even the most ancient members of the allied forces. To cast Mana Storm, an Awakened was supposed to trace an arch of light with their finger that would release a barrage of tiny emerald bullets made of pure mana, each one with the power of a cannonball. Ruugat’s chest, instead, spun on its midsection while keeping his legs still and forming an emerald dome that spanned as wide as his extended arms. Projectiles the size of a cannonball and carrying the power of a small missile erupted from the surface of the dome. The spell pushed the Demons off Earthly Vault by ripping their body to shreds faster than they could regenerate. Mage Knights could do nothing against Spirit Magic. They absorbed only a fraction of a projectile before being tossed away from the impact like ragdolls. Most of them survived, but many had their hearts destroyed and fell into true death. The water element field of Fomors and Balors was just as useless. With no world energy to affect, they could only run for cover like everyone else. "Shit!" Dawn poured all the mana her tower bestowed upon her into the hard-light shields she used to protect her allies, but Mana Storm shattered her constructs as if they were made of crystal. "Fall back! He can’t maintain a spell that powerful for long!" Vladion conjured his tier five Blood Magic spell, Immortal Ruler. Blood Magic was what an Awakened undead unlocked instead of Spirit Magic, and it packed as much of a punch. The First Vampire converted part of the mana and life force stored in his full-red blood core to manifest a rain of blood-blades as big as a drop and as sharp as Adamant. Yet instead of using Immortal Ruler to attack, Vladion shed all the blood he could spare to form a protective barrier that shielded the humans, people of Zelex, elves, and undead on the frontlines. ’At least I hope Ruugat can’t sustain such a powerful spell for long.’ He actually thought. ’The last time we fought, he was nowhere this strong, and not just because he wasn’t standing over a powerful mana geyser. ’The Warlock King feared Ruugat’s potential and kept him weak. Back then, Ruugat had but a fraction of the mana crystals he now possesses. Otherwise, even Dawn’s help wouldn’t have been enough to defeat him. ’Luckily, my current army is much stronger than the one I led against him in the past and magic has progressed by leaps and bounds since then."