"The devil appeared earlier than expected."
These words, which Sarah had just spoken to Luna in the attic, were now spoken softly by Hermione, who was standing on the roof of the east tower.
Obviously, this is not good news.
"It's too late... The magic power at the core of the formation is not enough. If we suffer a powerful attack now..."
Hermione looked up at the extremely oppressive whirlpool in the sky, clenched her hands tightly into fists, and her arms even trembled slightly due to excessive exertion.
However, after muttering a few words like this, she still took a deep breath, turned to the two wizards who followed her and calmly warned:
"Immediately remind everyone in the stronghold—next, we must start to prepare to evacuate the stronghold at all times. Everything will still be executed in an orderly manner according to the plan!"
"okay, got it."
The two wizards immediately realized the seriousness of the situation, but Hermione had inherited Macca's habit of planning a retreat in advance, and had already made plans to retreat before that. After all, no matter how reluctant they were to give up here, human lives were more important in the end. When the time came to have to abandon the defense, the dead Percy probably wouldn't want so many more people to be "buried" with him.
Enough people have died.
Watching the two wizards in charge of communicating leave from the tower platform, Hermione looked up to the sky again. Obviously, even though she was under great pressure to stand under this whirlpool, she would rather just keep staring. If she didn't stare, she would be even more uneasy.
At the same time, in the center of the vortex above the head, the dark figure had slowly left the clouds, as if supported by an invisible force, and was still slowly descending in mid-air at the original speed. Come.
By now, the guy's appearance can actually be seen completely - a height about the same as that of an ordinary person, a slightly lean but still muscular body, dark skin with a texture and texture like crocodile skin. There are slight edges on the shiny, bald head, and there are no gender characteristics on the body.
This is the "arrogant" appearance of the devil. Apart from the darkness as deep as night, it has almost nothing in common with several other devils Hermione has seen before. But overall, people who have seen demons can realize at the first glance that they are indeed the same kind!
Delphi's cooling regular beams were constantly washing over its body. For a moment, the light was flowing and frost was flying everywhere, but the effect was not satisfactory.
Just as Hermione gradually frowned, holding the wand in her hand, she looked directly at the figure slowly descending from the sky. Suddenly, the demon's eyes, which had been slightly closed since the beginning, suddenly opened.
Oh no... I'm afraid those can't be called "eyes" anymore, because hidden behind its double eyelids are actually two deep holes.
However, the moment the other party opened his eyes, Hermione... and everyone inside and outside the stronghold felt the illusion that they were being watched.
Just when everyone was subconsciously stiffening, they saw the "arrogance" suspended in mid-air slightly raised his chin and pointed lightly towards his body.
In an instant, the zombie army that had stopped moving around the stronghold had their souls ignited on their bodies, and blazing black flames erupted. Then in the next one, they rushed towards the silver barrier protecting the stronghold.
"Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom..."
One, two, three... A large number of living corpses rushed into the barrier one after another, and then decisively threw themselves on the barrier and exploded. Soon, the protective barrier shook violently.
"Go back and defend! Don't worry about that high-level zombie - go back and defend!" Delphi, who was still continuing his magic of rules, couldn't help shouting when he saw this.
…
Just when the second protective barrier of the stronghold was attacked by the living zombies, although Hermione and Delphi looked bad, the most uncomfortable ones were Hannah and Ginny in the basement of the Burrow. .
In fact, because the formation is designed to continuously absorb natural magic power from the surrounding space and convert it into active magic power that can be used by the array, the magic barrier can be effectively and permanently maintained. However, it is expected that the army of living zombies... or the demon "arrogance" behind them will inevitably launch a powerful offensive in the later stage. Simply taking and using it will definitely not be enough.
To this end, Hermione also designed a part of the array to store magic power to reserve room for withstanding high-intensity attacks.
However, because of the action of the high-level living zombie that suddenly appeared before, the timing of "Arrogance"'s appearance was greatly advanced!
"boom-"
In the basement, bursts of magic power were oscillating in the core of the array, and the radiance released by the various symbols and lines in the array began to flicker.
In an instant, the expressions of Ginny and Hannah who were waiting on both sides changed drastically.
"So fast... why? With Miss Geofine and the others here, why do high-intensity attacks come so fast -" Ginny murmured nervously, "Harry... Harry should be... okay?"
According to the plan, Harry and the others were responsible for responding to the first few waves of attacks with their strong personal strength outside the stronghold, in order to reduce the pressure on the protective barrier as much as possible before enough magic power was stored.
And now, since the barrier suddenly began to be attacked to such a degree, Ginny couldn't help but wonder whether Harry and the others had been injured, or even...
Ginny didn't think about it anymore, because she understood that this was no longer the time to be distracted.
"Hannah, change formation!"
"good!"
Both of them have studied the new ancient magic literature with Maka, and they were both fully involved in the layout of this formation. Because of this, Hermione asked them to be responsible for the core of the formation here. task.
The most difficult one among this "important tasks" is to respond to such emergencies - to temporarily change the formation.
Hermione designed a total of two sets of runes for absorbing and converting magic power, but for the sake of stability, only one of them was used during normal operation.
It's good to be able to double the magic power storage, but if it collapses due to instability, it's not worth the gain.
Therefore, Hermione treated it as a contingency plan.
Due to the accumulation of magic power in this basement, the pressure on wizards would be doubled. In addition, there was a need to temporarily add magic transmission lines when the formation was running. Ginny and Hannah soon had beads of sweat on their foreheads. .
But the hands of the two drawing the lines of the formation diagram did not dare to tremble in the slightest.