"The prismatic wall! The first layer is already—"

The crowd is really roaring now!

Tencednil is focused on Takota's hammer. What is the doing with it? Is he acting strangely? This can't really be about just hitting things very hard, he must have some trick, and she won't get another chance to figure out what it is. Of course, she can't actually see it particularly well from this angle, but she'll watch what she can.

Takota backs up thirty feet and leaps again.

The orange layer of the prismatic wall shatters. If she's watching closely, Tencednil can see that the sledgehammer doesn't ever touch the wall. He stops the swing maybe a couple centimeters back from it.

Hah! It's not just force. Is he... hitting something which is supporting the spell? Is that how permanent spells work? 

Now that she has some idea of what's actually happening here, she can appreciate the skill he must have to figure out what to hit. Hitting hard is obviously part of it, but if he's hitting something magically important somehow, that can't be easy to find. That's much more impressive than just hitting really hard and having it inexplicably work.

Takota backs up thirty feet and leaps again.

A crackling yellow barrier breaks before his hammer. Again. Again. A smoking green barrier shatters, on his second attempt.

Again. Again. Again. Two walls break, ocean blue and shimmering indigo.

The seventh and final violet barrier stands before him.

Takota backs up thirty feet and leaps again.

It breaks.

"Ta-ko-ta! TA-KO-TA!" The crowd chants his name.

Behind the prismatic wall is a cloudy fog. Lightning crackles. Wind swirls. The cloud steams forth, swirling tornadoes and glowing eyes becoming visible.

Takota, wielding his giant's sledge, fells it in two mighty swings.

Two more elementals form and lunge at him.

She hasn't ever seen someone get this far! The dead magic area isn't as much of a threat to someone who's not relying on magic, but this is still the best showing against the walls in at least a decade.

She would be surprised if he then fell to the elementals, they don't seem like they should be much of a threat relative to the difficulty of breaking through everything before this. They just hit things, right? Still, it's always nice to get a more active show. And he is impressive with that hammer.

Within ten seconds he's slain both air elementals, but their sheer size forced him out onto the field.

Takota backs up thirty feet and leaps aga—

A wound opens across his side.

He roars and swings the hammer around wildly. It's impossible to tell if he's hit anything.

He suffers no more attacks.

Invisibility? Some sort of trap? A delayed consequence of one of the spells from before? Something that just happened too fast to see? There are so many possibilities! He's not completely invulnerable, though, and what the Hall can hurt, the Hall can kill. At this point it's a question of whether it will manage that fast enough.

Behind the clouds is a rippling wall of liquid metal.

Takota approaches and swings. His hammer bounces off.

He swings, again. His hammer bounces off, again.

The crowd waits with baited breath.

He turns away from the Hall of Wards and moves toward the edge of the field.

The announcer yells at him. "—hey, hey, wait! Get back over there! You got so far, you can't just walk away now?!"

Takota faces the announcer. "I'm not angry anymore."

He walks away.

The crowd is certainly angry, though!