The cavern had become a war zone.
Over the last ten minutes, the number of summons occupying the chamber had tripled, if not more. Reidar didn't stop summoning. He couldn't. Every time he poured mana into a skill, the Boundless Legion perk doubled the output of his batch summons.
Well over three hundred Vorathid Sky-Hunters scrambled over the walls. The Spectral Quadraginta maintained constant suppressing fire. The Apex Menagerie harried the Archdeacon from the ground.
To an outside observer, the situation looked like a waste of mana; after all, it didn't look like so many summons were bringing something to the table, especially considering that keeping these summons alive wasn't easy.
Every second, Silas almost vaporized three or four summons with casual waves of light. But the observer wouldn't see the numbers Reidar was seeing.
[Mana Siphon Triggered: +12 Mana.]
[Mana Siphon Triggered: +14 Mana.]
[Mana Siphon Triggered: +11 Mana.]
[Mana Siphon Triggered: +15 Mana.]
With hundreds of summons active, the Mana Siphon perk turned his army into a living battery. Each creature channeled a trickle of ambient mana back to him.
The Legion's Onslaught perk was fully saturated. For every five active summons, the mana cost of his direct damage spells dropped. With over five hundred summons on the field, his Chaos Storm and Event Horizon Javelin cost a fraction of their base requirement, and so did the summoning spells.
Reidar wasn't just fighting; he was setting up the requirements he needed to actually surprise Silas and deal the lethal blow.
Silas floated in the center of the cave, his white robes singed but his aura as strong as before. He looked annoyed rather than afraid, but he was far more annoyed than he had been when the battle started.
Reidar had not only proved to be able to bridge somehow the gap between their levels but also to be quite difficult to kill.
Like a fucking cockroach.
Silas raised a hand, and a shockwave expanded outward, pulverizing a Siege-Breaker and turning twenty Archon Rift Lords into dust.
"Quantity," Silas sneered. "Is this your strategy, Reidar? You throw chaff at a thresher and hope the machine chokes?"
Silas blocked a mana-spear with a flick of his wrist.
"You are at Level 379. You should know that power is not additive. It is exponential. A thousand ants cannot kill a god."
Reidar didn't reply. He stood behind the Avatar of Primal Convergence, surrounded by the Quadraginta that was still pelting the mutant human with arrows.
His eyes darted between the notifications and the battlefield. He wasn't listening to the taunts; he couldn't, because he had to focus.
Thanks to the Overmind Consciousness, he felt the position of every unit. He felt the Void-Claws coming in and out of the shadows of the ceiling and ground, trying to deal a good blow on Silas and breach his damn barriers. He felt the undead for his orders.
Reidar had held back his strongest debuffs and buffs until now because he couldn't risk revealing them and Silas finding a way to counter them. He waited for the time he was at his strongest. When all his summons were on the ground, when the mana siphon perk was at its strongest, when Silas was at his weakest but at the same time had his most arrogant mindset.
If Silas could hold off hundreds of powerful summons while Reidar seemed powerless to harm him, then even after expending considerable mana, the Archdeacon likely felt confident that Reidar posed no real threat.
But Reidar hadn't used Gaze of the Pariah yet. The skill reduced a target's Physical Resistance by 45% and Magical Resistance by 30%. It was a boss-killer, but it had a short duration. If he used it too early, Silas would just turtle up, shield himself with high-tier defensive magic, and wait it out.
Reidar would not be sure the skill would work on the barriers.
He also hadn't activated Presence of the Sovereign. This was his Tier 32 Domain skill. It gave all allies a massive +150% boost to all attributes and immunity to status effects under Tier 30. More importantly, it crippled enemies with a -60% attribute penalty and forced flying targets to the ground.
And finally, he hadn't summoned the Mana-Forged Dreadmaw.
The construct was slow. It was massive. If he had summoned it earlier, Silas would have kited it or destroyed it from a distance. The Dreadmaw needed to be a surprise. It needed to be the nail in the coffin, not the opening move.
Now, the trap was set. It was time to do it.
<Now or never.>
The [Summon: Undying Legion] Skill got activated again.
The ground around Silas erupted. Hundreds of Dread Shields clawed their way out of the crystal floor.
Once they were out, Reidar ordered.
<Block him!>
They simply rushed the Archdeacon as soon as they got the order. It was a tidal wave of bone and rusted metal that must have unsettled even Silas. He had been a normal human once, so seeing so many dead bodies, bodies reanimated by whatever kind of magic his skill was harnessing, must not have been simple to see.
Even Reidar felt weird every time he summoned them, and they were his.
But then, Silas must have seen their levels; he must have perceived their tiers and started laughing.
"Pathetic. Cannon fodder?"
He gathered light in his palms, preparing some kind of nova spell that would wipe them all out. "These things cannot even scratch my barriers!"
<I know, you idiot!> Reidar thought. <But that is not the point.>
There was no way for the Dread Shields, even if they were more resistant than the other kinds of units, to resist Silas and his damn spells for long. There wasn't even a chance for them to bypass his barriers and directly grab him.
But that was not the point. Reidar had many skills that made his summons explode at death, and all of them, coupled together, were going to do quite a lot.
It was at that moment that Reidar activated [Presence of the Sovereign]. All his summons got immediately strengthened, with their attributes almost tripled, at the same time as Silas's attributes decreased by 60%.
The man immediately found himself with less strength and, most importantly, far less mana. There was a reason Reidar activated [Presence of the Sovereign] now. That was because the Avatar of Primal Convergence had to be strong enough for what was to come.
Reidar looked at the summons.