It Begins

Chaos ensued at the center of the city. Tens of 6th stage mages were all attacking the palace's barrier dome at the same time. Attacks reigned down from liches, mages, magic warriors, and even the occasional attack spell from the two 6th stage healers present in Palatine. Kayn watched this scene from the shadows with an expressionless face, but the anger in his eyes was evident.

Ever since he let Wrath take the reins, he seemed to only think about his revenge and how to best eliminate his enemies. The occasional thought of loss and loneliness crept in, but it was quickly washed away by the drive to get stronger to kill those who had wronged him.

It was almost time for his personal wrath to devour these people. He was the judge, jury, and executioner, and mercy was not an option. Whether the army members were conscripted or joined willingly, they would die all the same.

Kayn began shadow hopping from one place to the next as he made his way towards the sealing formation. Along the way, he activated the All-Seeing Eyes with a focus on trying to detect and see any formations or arrays along the way. While he was still a complete amateur when it came to array and formation sigils, the All-Seeing Eyes gave him a tremendous cheat as he could view what wasn't visible to the naked eye.

As soon as Kayn saw the edge of a massive formation, he stopped. From what he could tell with the small portion of the massive formation in front of him, it was a detection formation. He knew where to poke and prod if he needed to get through without it detecting him, but his Shadow's Embrace spell was a godsend in this situation.

He stepped into the formation and continued heading inward towards the specific building where Talaro and his experts assumed the sealing formation's core sigils were placed. Attack formations, defensive formations, concealment formations, you name it and there was one set up around this area. At one point, Kayn even walked straight through a building after he realized it was just an illusion formation at work.

Eventually, he arrived at a barrier dome similar to the one at the central palace, albeit much weaker. As this was hastily set up, it was a lot smaller, but the power it gave off was quite impressive. The dome was situated in a fortified underground bunker of sorts. Kayn was able to sneak in because of his spell, but if he didn't have Shadow's Embrace, he would have had to fight his way in.

Rather than thanking his lucky stars again, he was elated that all was going according to how he theorized it. He didn't expect a barrier dome to block him, but he didn't just spend the last year in seclusion eating cores and meditating without any thought.

There were two 6th stage magic warriors and several weaker beings on guard outside the dome, and as of now, Kayn didn't know if there were any inside of it, but he guessed no. The dome was small and purpose built, so it probably didn't have anyone inside of it and was only housing the sealing formation core sigils.

Attacking the guards would most likely lead to an alert being sent off somewhere, and that would ruin what Kayn wanted to do in the first place. So, it was time to put to action something he had been working on for the last year.

Odin had once said that the All-Seeing Eye essence would give him the ability to see through all things. He hadn't fully grasped his meaning until he began to test his abilities while secluded in the Mana Gathering room.

At first, he tried to see through the walls but he didn't get far as that seemed to require much more mastery of the essence than he initially thought. But what he was able to do was see through spells and mana. If he put up a curtain of sheer darkness, he could look through and beyond it with the essence of the All-Seeing.

That was exactly the skill Kayn needed in this situation. He stared directly at the barrier dome, focusing his sight to what lay beyond the veil of mana. Kayn smirked at he saw several pillars with rune beast core stones of S-class beasts or higher placed upon them. An intricate pattern glowing a faint blue was carved into the ground and filled with core stone dust and mana before each pillar.

There was also a separate pedestal containing a single SSS-class core in the center, something Kayn had never seen before. This one had another pattern drawn around it with the pedestal at the center, but it glowed with a bright golden light. Kayn assumed this to be the sigil keeping the barrier active around the sealing formation active.

However, Kayn's plan wasn't to bring the barrier down as that would alert the guards. He was going to shut down the grand sealing formation right under their noses. If they couldn't see inside and they didn't have their own means of communicating within the formation, they shouldn't know that it wasn't working properly, until it was too late at least.

Kayn almost drooled at the feast set out for him. Core stones were not nearly as powerful or helpful to his growth as a true mana core was, but at the S-class and higher quality, they would still help a little bit.

With desire to obtain the core stones before they were drained of all the mana they had, he looked around inside the dome for what he needed to get in, a shadow. Thankfully, there were plenty due to the stone pillars and the light coming from carved formations. Finding one that he could move into, he stepped towards it.

Once inside the barrier, Kayn examined the pillars for traps or alarms. Fortunately, his enemies assumed no one would be able to get through all of their protections and hadn't set up any alarms on the core stones. They had prepared just about everything else, but not having alarms would be their fatal mistake.

Kayn swiftly grabbed each core stone, only leaving the SSS-class one powering the barrier in place as if he removed it, it would alert the guards to the situation. As soon he stored the last rune stone into his Void Loop, the soft glow from the pattern carved into the floor slowly began to fade. Kayn estimated that it would lose power in a couple of hours.

Talaro had given Kayn a top-quality crystal to communicate with him once they were successfully teleported, but Kayn didn't want to risk trying to call him once the formation deactivated as it was possible their enemies had something to detect communications. He didn't know if something like that was possible with mana-based communications, but it wasn't a risk he wanted to take.

He told Talaro to trust him, and to Kayn, it seemed that Talaro was going to follow his instructions and believe in him. Kayn needed the time before the barrier was supposed to break in order to prepare the next phase of his plan.

The barrier would fall as soon as Talaro and the rest of the group used the teleport formation. However, Kayn wanted to time it so that it looked like the enemy had finally broken through. During their victory rush they would find nothing and nobody, and that was when Kayn was going to rip the hope and joy of finally winning the war right out from under them.

Kayn entered into the shadows once more and made his escape from the building. His destination, the skies high above the central dome where no detection formation or eye could see him.

…

It was a cloudy and rainy day, but the noises echoing below were relentless. Kayn could see light flashing constantly through the cloud coverage underneath him. He was high above the clouds themselves, the sun shining down upon him as he breathed in the cool air.

The time had finally come to begin his final preparations for his attack. It took him around an hour to escape the city and all of the detection formations placed throughout it so that he could take flight without being caught. Along with the couple hours he used to find and deactivate the sealing formation, he had approximately seven or so hours left before the barrier would fall and his finale would begin.

He was going to spare nothing with this attack. Every hour, every minute, every second he had left was going to be used to power something that this world had never seen before. An attack so powerful that if used on Earth, would probably wipe out a good portion of the population and land mass.

Thankfully, this was Talgonoth. The land was filled with mana and could withstand powerful explosions without affecting the planet itself. Kayn only hoped he had calculated things correctly and he could get himself out of the explosion range before it went off. He wouldn't have long, a few seconds at most. He would need to, once again, push every little bit of his remaining mana into escaping, much like he did after killing Grog.

Kayn took a deep breath as he removed the bow he acquired from Talaro from the Void Loop. However, he didn't take out the arrows as he didn't need them.

The bow was black with lava red veins running along its limbs. There was no string, but the bow appeared braced with one. It was only when Kayn did a test pull that a fiery string appeared as he pulled the bow taut.

Satisfied, he used Analyze to double check that this bow would do what he was hoping.

[Blazing Wing (Ancient): A bow crafted from the wing bones of a Fire Dragon, imbued and enchanted with its core. Several passive abilities exist:

-A special type of arrow must be used to fire the bow properly. Alternatively, the wielder can fire the bow with an arrow composed of fire mana. Speed of the projectile will be 5x faster than if cast without using the bow.

-Only those with fire elemental aptitudes can use the bow. The higher the affinity of the wielder, the more powerful the bow's bonus becomes.

-Empowerment of Flame (Passive Skill): When firing the Blazing Wing utilizing an arrow made of the wielder's mana, Blazing Wing will increase the output of the spell by up to 100% depending on the spell caster's affinity to the fire element.]

Kayn grinned as he read the last portion of the information. This bow probably wouldn't have been all that great to most people, and would have even thought that its power was underwhelming. However, to Kayn, this was going to be the key to ensuring everything went according to plan.

A 100% increase to a fire arrow spell wasn't all that impressive if one used the fire arrow spell traditionally. But, what about if someone, who could use mana freely as well as adjust spell parameters freely, shot a modified fire arrow from this bow?

An evil smile crept upon Kayn's lips as he drew the bowstring once more, an arrow of fire set onto the string. For the next few hours, he was going to pour as much mana into this single arrow as he could all while restoring his mana through breathing and circulating the Void Star technique.

Hellfire was soon going to engulf Palatine.