Despite the immense power the column radiated, even from the distance Orion was watching, it showed no signs of weakening anytime soon.

  It was a silver-white spear stabbed through the clouds, vaporizing the rain on contact, and humming with such strength that Orion’s eyes watered even behind his protective spells and glasses.

  The belt below had turned into a living creature, writhing under the light as heavy, suffocating clouds of steam rose, obscuring what was really going on.

  Around him, witches wobbled on their brooms, as the enchantments weakened just by being near such a structure, forcing them to readjust their spells to protect the artifacts.

  Orion, too, clenched his tights as he felt his own broom begin to buck, the interference too much for it, and wrapped it in an expensive but necessary lattice of mana, overcharging the levitation spell until it settled back down.

  “Easy,” Pauline muttered beside him, eyes still fixed on the column. “Don’t fight the light. Use it to your benefit.”

  “Kind of hard when the enchantment is—” he started, then swallowed the rest as the column pulsed again, forcing him to spin the excess light mana around him into the levitation spell, straining the CC’s adaptability to let the foreign energy fit.

  Fortunately, it was primarily designed with light mana in mind, so even if what he was trying to do was a bit of a stretch, it managed to stabilize the new flow, allowing him to finally breathe a sigh of relief.

  When he looked up, he saw that the column was still going strong. It was difficult to pinpoint anything nearby because of its overwhelming intensity, but he was fairly sure he could roughly guess where his mother should have been, and let [Hypotheticism] tell him the rest.

  His mind was flooded with information moments later, a cascade of numbers and relationships, constraints stacked on constraints, a majestic structure built on a single ruthless premise: to bring judgment.

  Orion hissed, tensing, and nearly tore his gaze away, but [Hypotheticism] flexed and adapted, shedding certainty it couldn’t hold, and reducing the focus until it could start parsing the data again, allowing patterns in the mana to surface.

  Surprisingly, the first thing he discovered was that the column wasn't being supported by Asteria and Candra alone. Even for tier four witches, the amount of mana falling from the sky was simply too overwhelming.

  Maybe if he hadn’t been able to see their stats, he would have believed they could do that, but he knew his mother’s limits, and no matter how strong she had become, even she couldn’t sustain the level of output he was seeing.

  Which meant they were doing something different. Focusing [Hypotheticism] to figure out exactly what that was took some time, but eventually he gathered enough data points to piece something together.

  While a regular caster used their Mind to connect to the Local Field, and their Attunement determined how much mana they could channel through their Body, the two witches were using a different method.

  The chant they performed before the column appeared wasn't directly linked to it. It was a spell intended to open a doorway into a subsection of the Field, a separate yet connected energy dimension where only light mana existed.

  The mana they channeled was enough to power the opening, which was nothing to scoff at, but it was still an order of magnitude less than what was needed to directly replicate the column.

  That wasn’t to say that what they were doing wasn’t impressive, no. If anything, it was even more incredible, since they were not only connecting to an extremely distant sub-dimension but also shaping its power through the opening they maintained, giving it purpose without actively channeling it.

  It was unlike anything Orion had ever seen, but after thinking about it for a moment, he realized he shouldn’t have been that surprised. His own method of casting was different from what the Sanctum taught, so who was to say they only had one?

  You know what… I might be able to use that.

  The column pulsed again, forcing him to adjust his defenses and steady his broom, but he didn’t take his attention away from the duo, too awestruck.

  It wasn’t long before the effects of such a unique method became apparent. It may have allowed them to cast what was essentially a tier five spell in raw power, though probably not in complexity, but it was also very draining to maintain, as shown by Asteria’s tense shoulders and her clenched jaw. Candra looked like an old woman again beside her, hunched over and mumbling constant prayers.

  And when he focused on what was at the core of the column, he saw that Behenien was still fighting.

  The dragon was now barely visible, just a silhouette, a darker patch within the light, as she curled up, her wings shielding her body defensively.

  She had no time or space to roar her defiance, as every fiber of her being was focused on surviving an attack that could have destroyed a city.

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  But Orion could feel the deep, ancient reserves within her blood, the way her draconic body had been built to endure long centuries and all kinds of strain, and knew she wouldn’t fall anytime soon. Her scales alone were worth a legend of their own, reflecting enough mana to cast a tier four spell.

  Behenien was not a Matriarch without good reason. No matter what drove her into this furious rampage, it couldn’t be denied that she was standing up to the combined strength of two Veil Priestesses.

  For a time, her resistance succeeded in blocking any divine punishment from penetrating her scales. If it hadn’t been so terrifying, it would have been awe-inspiring.

  The column remained constant, but her silhouette persisted, refusing to be erased.

  Minutes crawled by, and Orion had to reinforce his flight spell again as gravity hiccuped under the sustained pressure. His legs shook from holding the position for so long, and his stump was buzzing.

  No one dared move, neither witch nor wyrm, all frozen in place by the titanic battle unfolding before them. Whoever emerged victorious would determine the fate of the fight. Nothing they did here would change that.

  Absurdly, several minutes into the column being projected from the heavens, it brightened even further as the two witches reached a peak in their chanting. The amount of light being shed became so immense that Orion was sure he could cast basic light spells simply by stating their names, without even needing to guide the mana into a shape.

  Behenien’s silhouette buckled for the first time, clearly not having expected the pressure to intensify once again. She tried to push back, struggling fiercely and using every advantage her biology gave her, but, as it turned out, it was all just too much.

  Her form spasmed as the defenses keeping her safe finally failed.

  Orion watched a wing edge fade away into nothingness, then more, as layer after layer of her body disappeared under the divine judgment.

  Behenien tried to roar again, to voice her anger and defiance, but the sound never fully formed as her muscles spasmed.

  And then, after one last minute that felt like a lifetime, Behenien’s silhouette collapsed inward like a star imploding, and the column fulfilled its purpose, unleashing all its power upon her.

  Behenien vanished.

  The light lingered for several more seconds, as if to ensure that nothing of the defier remained, before finally flickering out once the pathway to the sub-dimension closed, as the two witches stopped chanting.

  Gradually, the clouds that had split apart began merging back together under the high winds, and the rain resumed, though it was weaker and more natural now that the dragon’s presence no longer sustained it.

  Below, the basin of the Belt boiled. Steam erupted in huge bursts, and the river’s surface folded over itself multiple times. Water and vapor battled, and the air twisted from the heat released by the molten bedrock beneath.

  “Don’t lose yourself now, it’s not over,” Pauline warned him.

  She was right.

  The remaining wyrms, leaderless and stunned, hesitated, clearly struggling to decide what to do, until their instinct to attack finally overpowered any intelligence they might have had.

  Wyrmlings screamed. Drakes surged. What few sea serpents survived the heat bucked beneath the surface, confused and furious.

  Asteria and Candra turned together, and without Behenien’s presence holding them back, the battle became something else entirely.

  Silver runes stretched across the sky in broad arcs, layered so thickly that Orion could barely follow them. Candra’s influence rippled through reality as sections of air folded, snapped, and exploded into effects Orion couldn’t identify. Entire clusters of wyrmlings vanished where the spells touched them, their bodies torn apart by light and pressure.

  The tide had already favored the Sanctum, but now it was a complete rout.

  Orion wrapped pebbles in the gravitational sleeve, tuned the Higgs coupling, and fired into the densest groups of wings. Wyrmlings' sternums collapsed, skulls were punched through, and bodies pinwheeled down into the steam.

  SYSTEM NOTIFICATION

  +8,400 Exp

  Again.

  SYSTEM NOTIFICATION

  +6,900 Exp

  And again.

  SYSTEM NOTIFICATION

  +11,550 Exp

  The numbers were smaller now, but they came quickly enough to keep his blood hot, yet he still managed to notice that something wasn’t quite right in the Local Field.

  It was flooded with Light mana, saturating the air after the column, making his skin prickle and his hair lift.

  Orion blinked rain out of his eyelashes, raised his left hand, and cast without overthinking. “[Infinite Laser].”

  The beam snapped out more powerfully than ever, lancing through a wyrmling’s wing and continuing onward, piercing through a second body, then a third, before dissipating in a hiss of steam.

  Orion stared for half a second, startled.

  He didn’t have time to enjoy his most trusted spell’s last hurrah, as another group of blue-grey wyrmlings chased after a fleeing barge, and Orion launched a gravity-charged pebble through the lead one’s throat.

  SYSTEM NOTIFICATION

  +9,200 Exp

  Pauline’s shadows opened safe pockets in the air, intercepting stray breath attacks and slicing apart anything that strayed too close. Once, a drake tried to climb toward Orion specifically, smart enough to notice the repeated impacts, and Pauline snapped a darkness spike through its wing joint, forcing it to tumble, where three witches turned it into a falling torch.

  An hour went by, maybe two. Time was hard to keep track of with adrenaline so high, and while he wouldn’t praise the wyrms openly, their tenacity was impressive.

  Eventually, the last drake was struck by a beam of light. The last sea serpent was forced to the surface and turned inside out by a spell. The last wyrmlings scattered, only to be hunted down by silver arrows, and finally, silence returned.

  Below, he could see floating bodies, shattered barges, cracked pieces of the docks, slick streaks of ichor, and steam that refused to fully fade, as the molten rock still released heat.

  Orion’s stump ached. His pockets were nearly empty, and he hadn’t even leveled up again, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

  He looked toward Stillport. Its walls were still intact, and the wards, though strained, scuffed, and riddled with stress fractures, still held.

  Surprisingly, the fighting inside seemed to have stopped. There was no clear winner, but he could tell that the massive battle just outside their walls had given the men pause.

  Asteria and Candra moved toward the highest point of the wall, leaving the other witches to spread out and watch for any late threats. The two Veil Priestesses stopped just outside the battlements, where the wards were strong enough to create the illusion of safety for anyone sent to speak with them.

  A few minutes later, a figure stepped forward to meet them, and even from this distance, Orion could tell he was too neat.

  Thin and austere, with straight shoulders, the man wore his coat smoothly, his hair tidy, and his face pale and hard like carved bone. Clearly, this wasn’t just an ordinary lieutenant.

  Orion couldn’t hear their words over the distance, but he could see their body language.

  The man spoke. Asteria responded. The man’s jaw tightened, and he nodded sharply, as if he was forced to give in.

  And then, in a ripple that moved along the walls like a shiver, the wards over Stillport flickered and collapsed.

  The witches who had stayed behind to give their leaders the space needed to speak surged forward as one, pouring toward the city like a silver flood.