The unremarkable little orb of light streaked from Wang Yu's hand like a meteor, arcing into the swarm of enemies conjured jointly by the two Utopia spires. A heartbeat later, the fuse Avia had built inside it caught—and the world lit up.

Despite its size, the orb erupted with impossible force. Magic surged outward in a roaring torrent, an endless, bottomless flood funneled straight into the chain-reaction array Avia had inscribed within.

From that single point, the reaction branched off, splitting, doubling, spreading with every second, turning magic into tangible, supercharged matter.

With the orb feeding it near-infinite power, the spell enclosed within no longer needed to rely on ambient mana. All constraints fell away. Within a bounded space, high-energy material simply kept piling up without limit, decay, or pause.

The energy density within the supercharged core rose at exponential speed. What began as a shattering orb of light swelled in mere seconds into a glowing azure mass over ten meters wide.

By the time the Utopia troops realized something was wrong, the sphere had already outgrown a small hill, and it was still accelerating. The expanding mass erased entire blocks of soldiers as casually as a tide swallowing up footprints in the sand.

"..."

Those engulfed by the supercharged matter didn't die, not immediately. They tried to break free.

Surprisingly, the interior of the sphere wasn't particularly destructive—it felt no worse than a severe burn. Mages and grand knights barely saw it as a threat.

The problem was how rapidly the supercharged matter was expanding.

They could outrun it for a hundred meters, but by the time the sphere grew over a kilometer wide, it was expanding at a rate faster than they could outrun even with teleportation.

Half a minute was all it took for the mass to blossom into a titanic sphere over ten kilometers wide, its base scraping the earth, its body suspended in the sky like a second sun, an azure star At that scale, the growth finally halted. Everything—every Utopia fighter and both spires—lay swallowed within the deceptively gentle light. Nothing died. Nothing yet.

But as the sphere stopped expanding and the towers began channeling void energy to counter it, the spell matrices hidden at its core finally awakened. The orb's true purpose unfurled.

The sphere had stopped growing not because the reaction had ended—it truly would continue indefinitely—but because the source of all that energy, like a narrow faucet, simply couldn't pour out fast enough. Maintaining this colossal shell was already its limit.

So far, there were no signs that the energy was about to go nuclear—not yet.

It was then that the core array activated, igniting the second part of the spell. The sphere began to contract. Power surged inward. The titanic mass of supercharged material began folding, collapsing, compressing toward a single point with overwhelming force.

Avia's goal had been to convert near-infinite mana into something usable. The second part of the spell involved crude alchemy that traded mass for energy.

Individually, each unit of matter carried little energy, but when they were compressed to such an extent, the result was enough to scar the world.

The collapse consumed energy nearly as fast as the earlier expansion, causing the sprawling blue sun to contract inward at impossible speed, ramming mountains of energy back into a confined space, compacting, crushing, and applying pressure to that matter as if it were a dying star.

The colossal blue sun vanished. In its place hovered a sphere barely ten meters wide. Its radiance alone was causing the earth to melt. Anything foolish enough to meet its glare went instantly blind. And within that blinding orb lay the total output of the former sun, compressed to its utter limit.

No one needed to be told how unstable it was. At this point, it wasn't the failing core array keeping it from detonating outright, but rather Wang Yu's Chariot pushed to its absolute brink of control.

The Utopia's spires finally grasped what they were dealing with. Void energy surged at full throttle as a colossal rift yawned open around the blazing sphere. They meant to hurl the thing into the void—to bury this "magical warhead" before its apocalyptic force could scour the material world clean.

But no matter how fiercely the spires strained, the sphere refused to budge. It was as if some unseen wedge had jammed it in place. The sphere's ridiculous physical density made budging it all but impossible, even for the Utopia.

"Sorry," Wang Yu said, smiling for once in the midst of battle. "That spot's already occupied."

Indeed, something was blocking the way. The sphere sat squarely atop the stretch of domain belonging to Wang Yu, the part of the void where Avia resided. No one was shoving anything into the void through that barrier.

He pressed a palm over the narrow rift through which the Chariot's power spilled into the material realm. Golden radiance flared across his skin as he braced the makeshift barricade. Then, without hesitation, he withdrew the Chariot's power that had been suppressing the primed magical warhead.

He let it detonate.

The world convulsed as its very frame vibrated with the resonance of a power beyond mortal scale. It was pure annihilation. Fire, void, raw mana—everything dissolved into a single, pure vector of destruction. A sublime panorama of ruin painted itself across the sky.

The mages' shields and the knights' barriers of fighting spirit were meaningless. They were no sturdier than the soil and stone that turned to dust beside them. In the face of such absolute power, everything was erased in an instant.

The warhead took a bite out of the world, ripping away everything in reach—flesh, stone, spellwork, steel—gulping it down and grinding it to nothing.

By the time Wang Yu stepped back out of the void, the swarm of enemies that had once choked the battlefield was utterly gone. The sky above was completely clear. All the clouds were gone. A colossal crater marred the earth, with fractures spider-webbing a hundred kilometers out. The terrain that had existed minutes ago was simply... gone.

Nothing remained. The magical warhead had scoured the battlefield bare. Only two ruined Utopia spires still stood in the distance, cracked from crown to foundation, barely held together after expending everything they had to weather the blast.

The spires listed like dying beasts. Even connected to the network, they could no longer receive or bear the power transmitted through Utopia's arcane grid. Void energy tried, feebly, to mend them—but a cup of water couldn't save a burning cart. Their collapse was inevitable.

Even if Wang Yu walked away, they would have fallen on their own. But he wasn't one to skip a finishing blow.

With footholds of void energy blooming under his steps, he sprinted unhindered straight toward the two spires. Power roared through his body as he drove a fist into each one. The twin detonations of force shattered them instantly.

"Third Utopia spire confirmed destroyed."

The Alliance battalions, who had been teleported to a safe distance and witnessed the destruction from afar, relayed the message to Skyborne City's communication officers. From there, it spread to every allied unit still battling the remaining Utopian spires.

The network was broken. Three towers had been erased in moments. The remaining ones were weakened to a shadow of their former strength. The balance of war tipped sharply toward the Alliance.

"See? Exactly as I said," the white-haired youth murmured. "With just the power of three nodes, defeating someone who operates outside our entire conceptual framework is virtually impossible."

He stood in a sealed pocket of space alongside the orc Barsaka, watching three spires wink out on their scrying map.

"You were right," Barsaka admitted with a nod. "Trading three spires to shepherd him to that location was well worth it."

"Of course it was. He may be beyond us in some ways, but a man's habits can still be read. Once you understand how he acts, guiding him becomes trivial.

"Now, our next step is to acquire the second node."

The youth tapped one point on the map, a location encircled by the remaining spires in a strange, deliberate arrangement: the theocracy of the God of Light.