Damian did not feel like he had achieved some feat here. Half the pigmen soldiers still had to leave. Another 5–7 minutes were needed, minimum.
Damian pulled out two giant steel pillars from his spatial storage and threw one to the left and the other to the right, among the millions of black pigmen monsters. He connected over a hundred mana threads to each pillar and flew in the middle of the two. The pillars had the same spell Damian had weaved in seconds and activated with more than a hundred mana threads of his own—a giant golden shield came alive. It was slightly bigger than the wall itself and three times as wide as its height.
Damian had to exert a lot of mana to create it—but more than that.. three enormous dark swords landed on top of it. It cracked slightly, but Damian immediately poured in more mana and fixed it. More than creating it, maintaining it took more mana and constant focus. He had to take aid from the pillars to make it bigger, diverting his focus to just creating a small part while maintaining the whole.
The golden shield spell Asher had shown him was not a simple one at all. And it showed—Demon Lord's three massive dark swords were repelled back, unable to break it. The Demon Lord did not wait to get surprised at such an outcome, though, and landed several punches from multiple dark hands right behind his sword attacks. Damian held on. His liquid wave of mana was constantly being used up—whatever the eight mana cubes created was consumed immediately, leaving no surplus for Damian to weave and launch extra spells.
The shield was too big. But so was the Demon Lord. Too much mana was being used up.
A couple more minutes. Almost 70+ percent of the pigmen were gone by now. Sam, Maelor, and others were constantly opening waygates to different checkpoints on the wall to get all of them back.
Blocking all the attacks of the Demon Lord at the cost of running dry of his own mana pool, Damian counted second after second for everyone's departure. Suddenly, among the strong, loud, explosion-like attacks of the Demon Lord, Damian heard a strange rhythmic sound that was getting louder and louder. Instinctively, Damian looked up and saw thousands of flying monsters diving from high up in the air—directly toward him.
Damian hastily started to weave more runic circles, but the mana was not enough to do anything big. Even his skills demanded massive mana output. In the end, Damian summoned his spear and connected a few sparing mana threads to it, preparing to launch his black flames to defend himself. He had prepared a wormhole for himself to escape if it became too much, but he could not let go of this position until the very end—or the pigmen soldiers gathered behind him would die alongside the wall crumbling down completely.
He had to endure till the very end.
The monsters came closer. Damian held his spear in hand—he could not divert his focus from the golden shield, but he could still move his hands to create a barrier of fire around him. But before he could aim at the nearest group of nose-diving flying monsters—an enormous bolt of bright lightning descended from the dark sky above and disintegrated all the nearby monsters about to reach Damian. On his other side, a giant wave of icy stream was released, freezing all the monsters' black blood to solid ice.
A few remaining monsters still made it to Damian, but they were barely less than hundreds—his powerful stream of black fire, launched from the red-tipped spear, turned any that came closer to ash.
Damian kept his focus on only the nearby monsters and left Sam and Lucian to protect all three of them. He just needed another minute, and it should be done. Most of the pigmen were through—only the last 10–15% remained. All checkpoints on the wide ice wall had been emptied of any pigmen soldiers. Now the long line just had to pass through the two waygates Damian had created.
The Demon Lord saw the two helpers coming to his rescue and started spamming even more decay energy spheres—absorbing a wide range of dark energy from the black army nearby. He produced an additional pair of arms, each with a sword in hand, and increased pressure even more on Damian's already cracked-in-several-places giant golden shield.
However, this time the energy of the black army monsters that the Dark Lord took from did not remain unaffected as they had before—over a hundred thousand black monsters, small and big, in a circular space around the enormous Demon Lord fell down unconscious, and their color turned back to red and blue.
They were not dead? But Damian could not sense a single thread of mana from them before.
Now, he could sense varied degrees of normal mana from them, and it was not as rotten and ominous or dark-feeling as the black monsters around them. Damian removed the distracting thought from his mind. The unconscious thousands of pigmen were crushed beneath the feet of the marching black army—going past the broken ice wall in lines, with no emotion on their black faces.
Damian's focus peaked as he repaired the golden shield in milliseconds as powerful hit after hit crashed onto it—any two or three of such attacks could easily shatter the golden shield, but Damian repaired it within milliseconds—getting it back to peak health. Yet it was back on the edge of breaking with another hit.
As a transcendent and with over 500 INT, his focus was beyond impressive, and still blood seeped out of his nostrils and eyes, dripping down from high in the air. He could not keep this up.. last few thousands of pigmen.
Suddenly, a giant lightning bolt landed on the massive Demon Lord's body, followed by a giant water sphere that, after landing on the Demon Lord's body, turned to ice—frozen by Lucian's cold ice stream. It barely stopped one of several attacks the Demon Lord was unleashing at once. The two beside Damian could see him struggling—they were using too much of their mana and focus to do this. The flying monsters, finally grabbing the opening, swarmed all over them.