Among the Empire's active Crown Tier powerhouses, Manny Copperfield was not particularly outstanding in combat. He could neither apply additional formulas like the Ostan Duke to unleash near-devastating power instantly through a Magic Cannon, nor defend himself like Camille Island, the Wall of the Empire currently serving William, who could withstand a full-force strike from three enhanced Crown Tier powerhouses head-on.
The reason his Crown Tier ranking surpassed both of theirs was entirely down to his formula, Leyline Mastery.
As its name suggested, this Unique Formula of the Copperfield Family, one of the Thirteen Heroes Families, required leyline force to function.
After deploying his domain and connecting to the leylines, Manny could draw on the leyline force beneath his feet to recover and move through space. By controlling his formula, he could also manifest leyline steles of various attributes, imbuing them with four different properties-restraint, defense, purification, and silence-and extend each stele's effects across an area within ten kilometers.
By exploiting the flow of leyline magic, Manny could then easily impose powerful restraints and briefly prohibit magic use on enemies within his domain, or shield allied soldiers with barriers and clear their abnormal conditions.
In short, his role was that of a top-tier support specialist in large-scale warfare. He was also a Crown Tier earth Mage himself, and with the recovery effects of his Unique Formula, he was practically an unkillable cockroach.
Unless his attackers possessed spatial restraints, mental attacks, or other nonphysical means of assault, they could not inflict any meaningful damage on Manny unless their power could directly strike the core of the leyline force three thousand meters underground and blast apart nearly forty kilometers of land along with it.
Precisely because ordinary people could not kill him, and because he could act as an extraordinary support unit