I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 994: Street Fighting

As time passed, the situation on the battlefield gradually returned to its earlier state.

The three ninth-level behemoths were pinned down by Peyton, Alvis and Meridian in a region far from the main battlefield, their clashes constantly setting off terrifying tides of energy.

As the wizards gradually grew familiar with the behemoths’ way of fighting, and with the backing of Leap Power on top of that, the ground they had retreated from was taken back again.

Correspondingly, the behemoths’ side began to fall back.

It was not that they feared battle; they had realized that continuing to engage the wizard legion in open terrain made it very hard to gain any sufficient advantage.

By comparison, that main camp pieced together from countless plane fragments was their home ground.

And so the wizards soon advanced once more to the outskirts of the enemy’s camp.

The battle line stretched forward, and wizards numbering in the millions went into action according to their established organization.

The wizards in charge of long-range attack led swarms of cannon fodder in pounding the behemoths’ defensive positions without pause, while the close-combat wizards formed assault formations and pushed forward along the passages that had been cleared.

The auxiliary units at the rear followed close behind, recovering any plane fragments that could be used while bringing damaged arrays and energy nodes that had slipped out of control back under command.

Everything appeared to be developing in the wizard civilization’s favor.

However, after advancing less than half a standard unit of distance, the legion’s rate of attack dropped off markedly.

The reason was simple: the behemoths’ nest was simply too big.

Piled up here were the remains left behind by who knew how many shattered planes.

From land fragments as small as a few hundred kilometers to continent-level remnants large enough to hold a complete ecosystem, all of it had been pieced together by the behemoths in their crude fashion.

Still more plane wreckage had been compressed and twisted, then stuffed into the depths of the nest to form layer upon layer of internal structure.

The behemoths’ craftsmanship was quite rough, but there was no arguing with the sheer quantity.

Taken as a whole, this camp was even vaster than the world cluster containing Jack’s plane that Jie Ming had encountered before.

“Another core node.”

Up ahead, a seventh-level wizard hovered in midair, staring at the detection light screen before him and unable to keep from frowning.

In front of him, between two continent fragments, lay an almost enclosed space.

Countless behemoth servants shuttled back and forth inside it, carrying the energy minerals and other resources they had gathered deeper in.

Several behemoths of colossal build guarded the vicinity of the entrance, their bodies covered in heavy scaled armor, with some kind of dark-red energy structure linking the bone spines on their backs.

More troublesome still, the detection results showed that the core of this region had additional protection.

It was a defensive structure the behemoths’ side had built upon its own talents, one that linked the nearby plane fragments into a single body and dispersed the force of attacks from outside.

To destroy this place completely, the outer connection nodes had to be dismantled first; otherwise the wizards’ attacks would only keep being dispersed, and it would be very hard to do effective damage to the core.

“Keep attacking!”

Once the order was given, thousands of beams of light fell at once.

The light lit up a vast stretch of the void, and the chain of explosions blasted the outer plane fragments to pieces.

However, when the attacks landed on the core protection, most of their energy was swiftly conducted away along those dark-red veins, finally dispersing into the other fragments deeper in.

When the volley ended, the protective structure had dimmed somewhat, yet it remained intact.

And while the wizards were adjusting their method of attack, the behemoths entrenched inside had already begun to organize a counterattack.

They were in no hurry to charge out of the protected zone. Instead they had the servants under their command pour out from different passages, and joined with the behemoths farther off to mount a pincer attack.

They even made use of some plane fragments that had seemed utterly useless, suddenly ramming them into the wizards’ array from the flank and forcing the formations in charge of the advance to keep shifting position.

Every gap here might hide an enemy, and the wizards could come under attack from the flanks or even the rear at any moment.

The wizards had no choice but to commit large amounts of force to local fighting; the firepower they could once have concentrated was split into countless pieces, and the pace of clearing naturally grew slower and slower.

Dixon stood in the expeditionary force’s command area, his gaze sweeping over the constantly updating battlefield model, and could not help frowning.

“This won’t do.”

He pointed to the region of the model where the advance had gone deepest:

“The fighting on the outskirts is going smoothly, but the moment we push deep into these fragments, our advantage keeps being whittled away. The behemoths can rely on the terrain and the core protection to organize resistance again and again, while we have to mind our mutual support distances and bear the risk of plane fragments collapsing without warning.”

More critical still, there were three ninth-level behemoths in the distance.

Although Peyton and the other two had stalled them for the time being, no one could guarantee that the situation would hold forever.

If the main battlefield failed to make progress for too long, then once the high-level battlefield changed, the entire expeditionary force might find itself on the back foot.

“Then how about we concentrate our attacks and try to destroy these plane fragments one at a time?” a wizard in charge of battlefield analysis suggested.

Another wizard shook his head in rebuttal. “The legion on the outskirts of the camp has been doing exactly that, with little to show for it in the short term. For that method to work, it would take no small amount of time.”

“No, we can’t waste too much time here.” Dixon shook his head. “If we drag this out too long, we’ll be in trouble once the other side’s reinforcements arrive.”

With that, he turned his head toward Jie Ming, who had been observing the data at his side all along. “Jie Ming, what do you think?”

Jie Ming thought for a moment, then looked up. “Actually, I have a way.”

“I have a method that can deal with this camp directly. But I’ll need some time to prepare. Until the preparations are complete, the legion has to keep holding the current battle line, and the behemoths can’t be allowed to notice anything unusual. And once I formally begin casting, no one can disturb me.”

Dixon gave a slight nod, curiosity flickering in his eyes.

The reason he had suddenly asked Jie Ming was that fate had told him the solution lay with Jie Ming.

But honestly, the scale of the camp before them was simply too absurd.

Even an eighth-level wizard would have to expend a considerable amount of power just to destroy a portion of it in a short time.

To say nothing of the regions with core protection, where forcible destruction would only make the whole process more difficult.

“How do you plan to do it?”

“I know an engineering-type technique that can warp all of the matter in this region.” Jie Ming briefly explained the effects of Breathing Soil Creation.

This was precisely the advantage of Breathing Soil Creation as an engineering-type magic.

In theory, as long as there was enough material, the magic’s structure was stable enough, and the effect happened to fit, it could produce results far beyond those of a conventional attack magic.

The only questions were how much material had to be prepared, and how complex an auxiliary structure had to be laid out.

And this behemoth camp happened to satisfy the most important condition.

Plane fragments lay everywhere here.

Their mass was enormous, their matter came in rich variety, and large amounts of elemental energy that had yet to fully dissipate still lingered inside them.

To ordinary wizards, these things were obstacles that were hard to clear quickly, but to Jie Ming, they were merely raw materials.

What was more, these plane fragments were already linked to one another.

As long as he found suitable nodes, he could bring the scattered regions into a single magic system, using the overall structure to lower the difficulty of casting.

“How long will it take?” Dixon asked.

“Ten-odd days or so. It depends on how the layout goes.”

Jie Ming considered briefly, then added, “And when the time comes, you’ll have to help me hold the perimeter and keep the behemoths from charging into the preparation area. Once the array starts running, I can’t interrupt it at will, or everything invested in it before then, resources and layout alike, will go to waste.”

Dixon looked at the battlefield model before him, then slowly nodded.

With Peyton, Alvis and Meridian all pinned down in the distance by the ninth-level behemoths, he was now the de facto supreme commander of the entire expeditionary force.

As long as the operation could improve the efficiency of the war, he had the authority to mobilize the legion in support of Jie Ming.

The other wizards present exchanged glances and nodded in agreement as well.

In a sense, this was a benefit the Level-One Cultivation Protocol brought.

If an ordinary sixth-level wizard had dared to claim he could handle this, it would certainly have aroused suspicion.

But a genius who had been granted the Level-One Cultivation Protocol was naturally worth trusting.

“All right.” Dixon looked around at the wizards at the meeting and quickly made his decision.

“I’ll arrange for the legion to keep clearing the outskirts, and seal off every region you need. All formations will obey command, and no one is to enter the preparation zone without authorization. If the behemoths try to interfere with your casting, I’ll deal with it personally.”

“Then I’ll be troubling you.”

“No trouble. If anything, we’re the ones troubling you. This wasn’t your original mission, after all.”

Jie Ming smiled and said nothing more.

Over the ten-odd days that followed, subtle changes appeared in the expeditionary force’s operations.

On the surface, the wizards were still following the original plan: destroying the strongpoints of resistance on the outskirts one after another, recovering usable plane fragments, and steadily compressing the behemoths’ room to maneuver through local victories.

But in the unremarkable lulls between those battles, certain special wizard squads began to move quietly.

They no longer simply sought to kill enemies. Instead, they used the opportunities the fighting offered to enter specific regions and lay out array nodes inside certain plane fragments and at their junctions.

Jie Ming, meanwhile, stayed throughout in a concealed area at the rear, continuously checking the data with the Fate Subsystem and the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror.

As the last batch of nodes was laid in place, the model before Jie Ming finally began to stabilize.

On the light screen in front of him, energy circuits that had each been independent until now linked together, forming a colossal array that covered the behemoths’ main camp.

Jie Ming checked it over carefully, and recalibrated several nodes whose data was anomalous.

Then he closed most of the light screens. “Preparations complete.”

Hearing those words, Dixon let out a breath.

He looked toward the vast camp in the distance, where the fighting still went on, and raised a hand to send a new order over the command network:

“All forward formations, begin withdrawing from the designated regions. Contract outward along the established routes, and make sure all personnel and the fleet are entirely clear of the area the array covers.”