“You would just reach a state in-between the white and the bright violet core. To actually reach the white you would need to become one with Sunrise as well.” Baba Yaga said.
“Remember what I told you after your fight with the Mad Queen, my child. A tower is the equivalent of a white core. Combined with two bright violet cores you just obtain a power one notch above the bright white.”
“Could I defeat you, then?” Dawn’s voice was devoid of malice. There was only confusion and curiosity in her tone.
“Again, you wish. You would surpass me in raw power when I’m away from my tower, but my mastery of magic would still be above yours. Also, you would gain no bloodline abilities by reaching the white core that way and I have a mage tower of my own.
“When I’m near my hut, I can access its enchantments and my power is much greater than just two bright white cores, just like it happens for Lith and Solus.” Baba Yaga pointed at the hybrid.
“If what you say is true, why haven’t they reached the white already? You just said that’s a perfect fusion.” Tista asked.
“A perfect fusion between a broken man, a broken woman, and a broken tower. Neither of them is anywhere near their full potential.” The Mother stared at the battle that was taking place in front of them, clenching her hands in excitement.
“Yet they complete each other. They heal each other. With each passing second, what has long been broken is becoming whole again.”
Through the surveillance mirror, Tista watched the flaring white fringes of the hybrid’s aura become stable as the battle unfolded. More than once she found herself inwardly thanking the gods for Dawn’s foresight.
Even from a great distance, the shockwaves from the exchange of blows and the conjured spells by both sides reached the spectators in the form of violent sudden gusts of wind. Some just ruffled her hair but others forced her to raise her arms to protect her eyes.
***
While Dawn brought Tista to safety, the colossus looked at the exhausted cursed objects and at themselves with the Eyes of Menadion. They exploited the first respite from battle to formulate the best strategy to permanently put an end to the new threat that Night had put on their path.
‘Compared to our human form, our current body doesn’t give us any advantage.’ They thought. ‘Sure, it’s big and that makes it hard to reach our vitals but at the same time, it makes the Voidwalker armor useless.
‘Our bare scales don’t offer much protection against Davross and the wind pressure generated by limbs this big against creatures that small pushes the cursed objects back before we can hit them.
‘Also, it’s better for us to move the fight to close-quarter combat. Spells give us the range advantage but at the same time cause a major flaw in our plan. Fighting from a distance also means that they have plenty of space for maneuvering and that they can retreat and recover whenever they want.
‘On top of that, if they bolt away at the same time in different directions, no matter how powerful we are, we can’t chase more than one at a time. They only need to sacrifice one of them to escape from the area we dimensionally sealed.
‘Once outside, they can use a Warp Steps to get away from the geyser and we wouldn’t be able to follow them. Since the shield is a dimensional mage and he is skilled enough to open short distance Warps despite the tower’s array, we must get rid of him first.’
The colossal figure of the hybrid shrunk in size until it was a bit over 2 meters (7′) tall. The skin, flesh, and bones had become compressed. None of the mass of the titan was lost, making them as durable as before.
Lith and Solus kept standing on the mana geyser to activate the Workshop for what they hoped would be the last time that day. The gold-veined white marble from the restored tower merged with the Voidwalker armor, enhancing its hardness, enchantments, and giving it resistance to magic.
The huge Double Edge was dispelled so that the Davross could now be used to forge a smaller version of War’s exoskeleton entirely made with the precious metal. What was left of it was used along with the Darwen to create a tower shield, using more gold-veined white marble to fill the voids.
It took them several attempts to successfully enchant the Davross and properly mix the metal with the stone and the anti-magic impurity. Usually, those experiments would have taken them days and drained their strength.
Yet with the Eyes bringing out any evident flaw in their design and the Workshop Forgemastering them in an instant, Lith and Solus only had to provide the blueprints for the tower to do the rest.
The Hands both fuelled the Workshop and enhanced its spells while the Mouth conjured a specialized Forgemastering array for each step of each procedure, making them faster and more efficient.
The artifacts kept fading in and out of existence, reaching an optimized form in a handful of seconds.
In their compact form, the new temporary artifacts had their power focused and their surface was covered by white crystals boosting the power cores.
Bigger wasn’t necessarily better. A shield the size of a Divine Beast needed lots of crystals and a power core of proportional dimensions.
Otherwise the enchantments would spread unevenly throughout the surface of the artifact and when simple pseudo cores were put under stress they might fail. It was the reason humans had prospered for so long and could hold their ground against any opponent.
The bigger an artifact, it not only was way more expensive but it also required a much better Forgemaster. To make matters worse, the power of an enchantment, just like a mana core, wasn’t proportional to the size of the body but depended solely on the energy it possessed.
Hence a Divine Beast’s armor needed tons of ingredients just to achieve the same abilities of a human-sized armor, leaving the human mage plenty of materials to craft all the different tools they would need.
The moment the living legacies had regained their form and enough of their strength to start regenerating their respective hosts, Lith and Solus moved to the offense to capitalize on their advantage.
They used air fusion to become faster, fire fusion to bolster their strength, and water fusion to make sure that their four arms wouldn’t hinder each other in the heat of the battle.
Without gravity fusion, each one of their steps still carried the momentum of dozens of tons but the pressure was now focused on a much smaller area. The hybrid crossed the distance separating them from their prey in quick strides that made the ground quake and produced a boom of thunder.
Only the light shining bright on the now white Voidwalker armor heralded the arrival of the hybrid. Dust and sound were too slow, starting to reverberate only when the hybrid was already a hundred steps away from the point of origin.
