Chapter 720 720 Rank Four
It was only twenty minutes after Wolfe woke up that the moment of truth arrived. The Witches were all on the cusp of advancing, and the mana input was ready to push them over the brink.
Wolfe didn't have any sort of clues about how their aura would change at Rank Four, as he hadn't actually seen a Rank Four witch for himself. Rank Two and Three, as well as the Rank Five Generals were with the One World Army, but the Rank Four Witches seemed to be noncombat officers, focused on their career and power advancement, and they weren't sent to the front lines.
As their aura condensed again, withdrawing into their bodies in preparation to be remade, everyone's anxiety levels built in the mental link, stabilized only by Wolfe and the Demons, who had been through plenty of advancements before, and didn't hold the nervousness that the Witches did about what was to come.
For an instant, their aura vanished, and their bodies underwent an immense change, pulling mana into themselves desperately. That was Wolfe's cue, and he began to push as much mana as possible, the limit of his ability, including the emptying of his mana cores, and then even adding in a trickle of mana from the hundreds of witches with Servant bonds until the need for mana was not only sated, but fully saturated with power.
None of them were in public, so none of them were aware of the spectacle that ten witches hitting Rank Four along with the massive vortex of power usage was causing, or the betting that the Fae and Demons were doing on what the outcome of such an immense mana environment would be.
The Fae underwent a similar transformation at Rank Four, that they called the Awakening, where their bodies were remade in balance with the natural laws of the world, extending their lives and renewing their appearance. The Witches normally underwent the same thing, but what Wolfe and the girls didn't know was that this was normally a week-long process, not something that you were supposed to commit to with overwhelming power.
The Demons thought that it was a great idea. The more power you could commit, the better the outcome, in their opinion, but the Fae were quite certain that there was going to be a side effect to all of this flagrant abuse of natural power.
Ten immensely powerful auras released from the underground rooms of the Den at the same time, shocking all the residents who were eating lunch at the underground cafeteria, and making flowers bloom and grass grow wildly in the town above them, while the Fae cheered and celebrated.
The Demons were celebrating as well, as they believed that they had won this bet with the Fae. The infusion of massive amounts of power into the process not only saved time, it gave the witches a considerable head start toward Rank Five, and even now that their auras had formed, they were continuing to grow at a noticeable pace.
Then their bodies hit the limit, and the excess power that Wolfe had been infusing needed somewhere to go, It fed back through the link, pouring into his sixth mana core, forming it and expanding it into a perfect sphere.
Then the influx was blocked. The Sixth Core was complete, but there was still a process to complete before a seventh could be formed, and a huge amount of mana imbued into the link that needed a home.
None of the Pentacles could take it, they were all equally saturated with power already, so Wolfe sent it to the only place he could.
The Servant Bonds.
The connection between Wolfe and the Servants glowed with traces of power that even the Fae could see, an intricate latticework of mana that linked hundreds of witches together all over town, and then overwhelming power poured into the mostly Rank One members, while the Rank Two witches did their best to grab hold of what they could for their own growth.