End of the Magic Era

Translator: Shiraishi  Editor: TheAlliance

It was rumored that the Grey Beastmen weren’t natives of the Raging Flame Plane. Their ancestors were from another place, but by now the Grey Beastmen had been living in the Raging Flame Plane for countless years. After having developed to this point, even the other Beastman races of the Raging Flame Plane didn’t feel that they were outsiders.

As for their fort, it was clearly inconsistent with the style of other Beastman races. It was a neat and tidy rectangular prism.

From a distance, it looked like the city walls had been cut from a huge grey rock. Metallic luster could be seen flickering on the walls, and wisps of mana fluctuations could be felt, even from several kilometers away.

Lin Yun couldn’t help being somewhat amazed. He didn’t know what material had been used to make the city walls, but the outside was covered with a layer of forged magic metal.

The dense patterns and runes of the small array carved into every metal plate formed a powerful defensive effect.

Moreover, after the ashen-colored metal plates were assembled, they formed a huge array formation covering an entire wall. This greatly increased the defensive effect and rendered any spell under the 6th Tier useless.

He could also see huge and strange puppets standing atop the walls. They looked like mana crystal cannons… with very long legs.

Sure enough, by the time those fleeing Grey Beastmen entered the fort, a few puppets immediately started emitting fierce mana fluctuations that could be sensed from a distance.

Glaring blazing light started gathering within the mouths of those cannon-like puppets, and five seconds later, loud noises echoed as huge fireballs spurted out at the pursuing puppet army.

Every cannon puppet let out a huge fireball that fiercely exploded on the ground within a few hundred meters of the city wall.

“Rumble…”

Explosions similar to rolling thunder echoed. The earth started bursting open, forming a deep ravine between the city wall and the sword puppets.

And just as these puppets had started casting, Lin Yun had the puppet army and the mage army stop their chase.

If he hadn’t, the huge fireballs would have destroyed at least a dozen sword puppets.

“Sir Mafa, what now?”

Xiuban anxiously looked at Lin Yun with worry. These Grey Beastmen were too fragile… If they weren’t careful, they would accidentally kill them.

Lin Yun waved his hand and said, “Let’s surround them first…”

As he spoke those words, a group of puppets and Grey Beastmen appeared on the metallic wall facing them.

The surface of the wall was like a mirror covered with patterns, and it also exposed various black holes from which the mana cannon puppets were aiming.

In an instant, a large number of Grey Beastmen started casting towards Lin Yun’s side. The earth-shattering spells were akin to multi-colored rain falling towards them.

As for those long-legged cannon-like puppets, they kept casting, and their flames were following right behind the rain of spells.

As the blazing flames came out, they turned into ten-meter-long bursting fireballs flying towards Lin Yun’s side.

The Grey Beastmen were using their geographical advantage to launch a powerful counterattack.

On this side, the casting puppets and the mage army joined hands to cast a flood of spells towards the Grey Beastmen on the city wall, but the patterns on the wall suddenly shone brightly.

A layer of faint light covered the surface of the city wall, and the spells falling on top of it only made the patterns on the wall’s surface enlarge a bit. They simply couldn’t damage the city wall.

As for the Grey Beastmen, they were casting without restraint. The rain of spells lasted half a minute until Lin Yun made his subordinates withdraw five hundred meters away. Only then did the Grey Beastmen calm their attack.

Unless one had the power of an Archmage, they would have difficulty aiming from such a distance. Among the puppets, only the roughly six-meter-tall long-legged puppets shaped like mana crystal cannons could have such an attack range.

But the attack frequency of those puppets was too low. After releasing a fireball, they would need to stop for a full minute before being able to cast again. The time needed to gather power after every cast was too long.

Also, after their trajectory had been set, they couldn’t alter it. They had too many flaws and simply couldn’t compare to actual mana crystal cannons. Although they were powerful, they were only useful in situations like this, where they had to defend the city walls. The Grey Beastmen seemed to know about these puppets’ flaws, so they hadn’t made too many of them. There were only a dozen.

Those huge fireballs could compare to the strongest 7th Tier Spells in terms of power. When facing a huge group of enemies, they would land on a ten-meter-wide area before exploding in a radius of several dozen meters. This kind of spell was an extraordinary deterrent.

Lin Yun ordered a retreat and surrounded the Grey Beastmen’s fort without attacking.

Before coming, Lin Yun knew that the Grey Beastmen’s fort would be a very tough bone to chew, but he hadn’t expected that they would be so fearless.

The city walls they built were thirty meters high and the surface was covered with a full layer of magic-resistant metal.

That magic metal was of excellent quality. It could be used to make magic-resistant armor and could be sold in alchemy shops, while they were used as bricks by the Grey Beastmen.

But to achieve that effect, the thickness of that alloy had to be thicker than an armor plate. Also, the alchemical processing, perfectly carving the arrays’ patterns and runes, and even connecting each and every metal plate as a whole… All those were something a true Alchemist could barely attempt.

And when looking at the city walls, just one wall was at least several kilometers in length. The number of metal plates needed to cover it all was extremely huge. Even if every member of the Grey Beastman race knew some amount of alchemy and the number of Alchemists was shockingly high, they would still need several dozen years to complete the magic-resistant plates for the city walls. Even then, that was if they had an adequate supply of materials and their entire race worked together.

In reality, they might take a few centuries…

Lin Yun couldn’t help letting out a deep sigh. ‘Truly extravagant…’

The resources spent to build that wall could make any Family go bankrupt. Every major force in the entire Andlusa Kingdom combined would barely be able to pull together the raw resources needed for this kind of wall.

And those arrays were clearly rarely seen, ungraded arrays. A metal plate carried the most common array, but when enough of them were piled together, the alchemy array’s grade would keep increasing.

In theory, as long as it was large enough, the array formation could reach an unlimited grade, and the power might also be boundlessly increased. Given another few centuries, they could keep on piling more and more metal plates and arrays. At that time, forming a Heaven Rank Array might not be impossible.

At that point, even a Heaven Rank powerhouse might not be able to destroy that city wall!

The stronger the attack, the greater the range of the array activated on those metal plates. As long as the attack didn’t surpass the reaction limit or the defensive limit of the metal plates, destroying the city wall’s plates was impossible.

This kind of excessive method wasn’t uncommon. Even when Noscent reached its peak, not many people felt secure.

‘I knew that those Grey Beastmen considered protecting themselves to be of the utmost importance. That’s the main reason that puppeteering has already blended with their lives and bloodlines. But I really hadn’t expected these guys to create such a huge tortoise shell…’

Lin Yun kept his group withdrawn. He wouldn’t pointlessly sacrifice their lives. The Magic Array had already caught onto the patterns of the city wall and was continuously combining those patterns and runes in order to figure out how to break the array.

Lin Yun didn’t attack, and the Grey Beastmen didn’t dare to attack, and thus, they were stuck in this stalemate.

The situation was the same two days later. So long as Lin Yun’s subordinates approached just a little bit, the patrolling Grey Beastmen would immediately go crazy and start casting.

Unless they could break through the entrance of the fort, a domineering attack wouldn’t have a great effect. It would only increase the casualties. Flying wasn’t an option, as the city walls had huge anti-air towers built every few hundred meters. Those were always operating and were ready to shoot down anything approaching their airspace.

The anti-air towers were mainly guarding the sky, and in order to reinforce that function, they were rendered unable to attack anything too close or on the ground.

Flying wasn’t possible, and they also wouldn’t be able to breach the city walls, so they could only think of a way to attack the gates.

On the 3rd day, the Grey Beastmen were still sticking to their turtling strategy and simply didn’t come out. But Lin Yun started to surround the fort.

The Grey Beastmen needed a lot of water. After all, it was a huge city, and they were in contact with alchemy puppets all the time. Drinking and washing aside, the water demand in other fields was several times higher.

If the entire fort was sealed, what water could they use?

The fort was bordering two rivers. During normal times, they wouldn’t need to worry about water supplies, but even though their fort was under siege now, they didn’t seem nervous at all. Moreover, the black smoke coming from the workshops’ chimneys could still be seen from outside the fort, showing that they were fully focused on the production of puppets.