Damian split another Legendary-rank monster in two—this time the cut landed from below its crotch midway through its chest. A rain of black blood spilled out as the monster lost its balance and fell down, screeching and convulsing wildly.
The condensed steel sword in Damian's hand turned to ashes as the attack ended. He could only do two attacks of this proportion before the weapon was destroyed—but he had enough made and stored in his storage. After all, he himself was now a source of iron. It wasn't that hard to transform the iron into steel; he took some help from the giant runic steel-making tools, of course, to do it.
The iron converted from the dirt and sent in exchange for mana was not enough at all—if he was just a normal transcendent relying on his own body's mana pool. But with the help of liquid mana generators, the only limit was dirt, sand, and his own focus and physical endurance when using a skill constantly.
Needless to say, there was no lack of dirt or sand in the barren land he had done all these preparations in. And focus, he was proud to say, had always been his strong point. As for endurance—with his transcendent body with 400 points in Strength and Defense? He could work for weeks without dropping a single bead of sweat.
There were still over a dozen Legendary-class monsters coming toward the wall, but they were farther away from the nearby ones attacking the wall, the cannons, and the pigmen manning them directly. Still, thousands of black army monsters were trying to damage the wall or climb on top of it, using their dead companions as stepping stones—but Damian ignored them. The pigmen army was already doing a good enough job of taking care of them. He had to finish his preparations before the Legendary-rank black ones from afar gathered near the wall.
Damian dived into a sphere of water he had conjured, washing off the black blood covering his body and shiny sacrium armor. Then he flew back to the ice wall—but did not land on it.
The teams of pigmen warriors handling the laser cannons were rotating after every few bursts of lasers. In a battle where weapons were everything and close-range fighting was only limited to the flying monsters that occasionally landed on the wide wall, the first- and second-ranker pigmen warriors who used up all their mana were nearly useless afterward. There were things they could do to help the rest, but it just wasn't enough in a battle of this scale.
Damian pulled out a giant 100-meter-high and 40-meter-wide condensed steel pillar from his spatial storage and buried it in the middle of the wide ice wall. The pigmen warriors looked on, but they had no idea what it was. Damian continued along the wall, flying at a constant speed, burying a steel pillar every 500 meters.
He flew back and covered the other side of the wall too. The entire ice wall, built atop this narrow mountain range, was over 40 kilometers long. Some places weren't as crowded with the black army as the center region where most of their firepower and the main fort were. The mountain range curved and spread all over the place, saving them effort in these huge mountain-covered areas.
Still, Damian kept his 500-meter distance constant as he placed the steel pillars all over the wide ice wall.
They were all inscribed with a new spell Damian had created after a lot of contemplation. Each pillar had a small wormhole that opened under 550 meters straight on both sides. Once Damian connected one steel pillar with his mana, it activated and launched these wormholes to connect to the next steel pillar. Other than the wormhole spell, each pillar had a new runic spell circle—it was a blend of a conversion spell and a continuous wind release spell.
Taking inspiration from Alex's secret family spell that enhanced a person's aura by forcefully pulling it out, Damian had managed to achieve a similar feat with his own liquid mana. It didn't pull mana, though, but instead released it—from condensed liquid form to a gaseous cloud form.
A smoke filled with mana.
Each pillar receiving mana clouds from the wormholes would use the mana to activate itself and release more mana clouds in return, until the entire linked ice wall, full of these steel pillars, released a constant stream of these mana-filled gaseous clouds.
The wind spell, using constant paused breezes of air, guided these clouds to circle all around the stone pillar and increased the volume of the circling mana gases more and more.
One by one, all hundreds of laser cannons mounted on the ice wall lit up from the front and back—the two places that had Damian's unique runic circles. All of these cannons were made by him—the old cannons were placed in the advanced forts that got destroyed as the black army charged in.
Earlier, only every second cannon mounted on the wall was being used by teams of four to six pigmen. There were hundreds of cannons but limited pigmen warriors—they were still pouring in through the waygate Sariel and others kept open and were taking their places. However, now the mana-exhausted soldiers who were leaving to make space didn't have to.
Over 300 thick mana threads behind Damian's back were powering the ten steel pillars as he made his way back to the center of the battlefield. Ten pillars released enough mana not just to power the hundreds of laser cannons—all inscribed with Damian's unique environment-mana-gathering runic circles—but even the hand cannons in every other pigman warrior's hand were now fully powered under the influence of the thick mana environment Damian's pillars had created on top of the wide, 40-kilometer-long ice wall.
The greatest weakness of pigmen? Lack of mana.
And he solved the issue in one move.
Nothing he built would be more influential on the battlefield than these pillars that used the manpower of all the living pathfinders to aid him in this dreaded war.