"Damn human! How dare you deceive me! Didn't you say they were our allies?!"
The ancient green dragon was furious, his expression venomous and savage as his sour, blood-tinged breath blasted toward Rogan.
In the eyes of these arrogant chromatic dragons, the cultists were hardly allies at all. They were lowly slaves—and a slave that deceived its master had no reason to live.
Rogan's face was deathly pale. His legs shook, his throat bobbing as he swallowed hard. "Th-they are traitors who turned against Her Majesty the Dragon Queen! Lord Anselm, rest assured, I will make them pay the price!"
Making his desperate promises, he raised the dragon-headed scepter. An ominous, chilling light flared from the dragon head's eyes, expanding instantly outward to sweep across hundreds of meters.
In that single instant, every humanoid and dragon-blooded monster on the field stiffened, freezing in place as though a pause button had been pressed.
Their breathing turned ragged, their bodies trembling, hair standing on end. Before their minds' eyes loomed a colossal figure blotting out the sky. Though hazy and shrouded in mist, the monstrous silhouette of five heads bearing five distinct chromatic colors was unmistakable—it was Tiamat.
"Th-that is..."
"It is the mighty, venerable Lady Tiamat!"
In an instant, all the cultists dropped to their knees in fanatical devotion, while Duke Franz's soldiers clutched their splitting temples, groaning in agony or rolling on the ground.
Even the newcomers who had emerged from the spatial vortex stared at the apparition in shock, momentarily stunned by its overwhelming presence. Several wyverns even tumbled out of midair.
Rogan stepped upon a dense cloud of black mist and rose into the sky, glaring down at the crowd below as he roared with all his might:
"Traitors! Her Majesty's noble blood flows within your veins! How could you willingly consort with these wretched humans?!
"Treachery! This is naked betrayal! You ungrateful curs have betrayed your own bloodline, your flesh, and your very souls!"
The cult leader spread his arms, howling at the top of his lungs and sending ripples of black light cascading downward. "Bow before me! Return to the Cult of the Dragon! The great and merciful Dragon Queen will forgive your sins and redeem your souls!"
Instantly, the eyes of the half-dragons and wyverns from the spatial vortex flickered, their pupils shifting between gold and black. Their bodies twisted and strained, veins bulging beneath their scales as if two clashing personalities were waging war within their minds.
"Holy crap, what is this?! An AoE crowd-control like that exists?!"
Tugging hard on the reins, Mantou struggled to keep his balance, but his mount still wobbled and fell toward the earth. A warning prompt popped up before his vision:
[Due to your Dragon Bloodline trait, you are affected by the Shadow of Tiamat. You must undergo a Will save.]
[If the Will save fails, you will enter the Dragon Servant state and fall under the control of the Cult of the Dragon for a set duration.]
Mantou's vision went dark. "No way, I don't wanna get brainwashed, mind-controlled, and corrupted!"
Watching the players tumble from the sky, their control shattered, Rogan's face twisted into a cruel sneer. "Behold the divine might of Her Majesty the Dragon Queen! You red dragon scions dared to defy Her? Pure delusion!"
Just then, a blazing crimson radiance erupted from the distant stone stele. Carrying a terrifying, suffocating majesty, the aura rippled outward with the monument at its epicenter, sweeping thousands of meters across the battlefield. A thunderous roar shook the heavens.
*ROAR—*
Rogan's expression morphed in sheer horror. Swept by the crushing pressure, his knees buckled and he collapsed forward onto the ground with a heavy thud.
"What is this...?"
He slowly raised his head, his throat trembling and his face white as ash. His slitted, reptilian pupils contracted into tiny needles.
A massive shadow engulfed the sky over Green Valley Town. It was an incomparably colossal dragon covered in blazing crimson scales, gazing down at him from on high. Within its pale golden eyes burned cold disdain and utter contempt.
"How could this be... That's... the Dragon... the Dragon Prince."
With that single roar, all the humans fighting on Green Valley Town's side snapped awake from their stupor, and the dazed players shook off the trance.
"Praise Cassius!"
Mantou gave his head a vigorous shake and patted his wyvern's neck. Noodles immediately understood, snapping his wings and climbing almost vertically into the sky until they hovered a hundred meters up.
Looking down across the battlefield, Mantou spotted Rogan kneeling in panic far below. He licked his lips excitedly. "That mass CC came from him, didn't it? That's a major boss! Noodles, let's charge! Let's bag this kill!"
Tucking his lance under his arm, Mantou guided the wyvern into a dive, howling through the wind straight toward the cult leader.
At the same time, Dawei Tianlong had his sights locked onto the cultist too. He stomped the earth, shattering the ground beneath him and kicking up a cloud of dust as the eight-armed monk launched himself into the air.
Even further back, Singo had drawn his greatbow to full draw, nocking a vibrant, shimmering arrow whose razor-sharp head gleamed with deadly frost and terrifying power.
*ROAR—*
A dragon's cry pierced the sky as Mantou and his wyvern tore through the air, his lance ripping the wind as it aimed straight for Rogan's head.
"Dragon fiend, prepare to meet your doom!"
With a booming bellow, Dawei Tianlong blurred into a massive afterimage, flashing directly in front of Rogan. A fist wrapped in raging ki wind crashed toward the cultist's chest like a falling meteor.
A sonic boom shrieked from above as the lightning-wreathed arrow arced gracefully across the sky, tracing a deadly trajectory toward Rogan's brow.
"What?!"
Rogan finally snapped out of his daze. Panicking, he desperately hoisted the dragon-headed scepter, summoning a dark shield of light before him.
An instant later, three devastating attacks struck from three different directions simultaneously, crashing into the cult leader before he could react.
With a sound like shattering glass, Mantou's lance, backed by the terrifying kinetic force of the dive, punched through the dark barrier and slammed into Rogan's masked face.
With a sharp crack, the dragon-beast mask shattered, revealing his hideously scaled countenance. But the lance tip punched right through his scales too. Mantou gave a fierce thrust, driving the straight spearhead deep into the flesh and piercing clean through the cultist's skull.
"Aaaagh!"
A shrill, ragged shriek rang across the battlefield as the bloodstained spearhead burst out through the back of his head.
Scales, brain matter, and dark blood exploded everywhere. Gobs of gory red and white matter splattered all over Mantou's face.
"Die!"
Simultaneously, Dawei Tianlong reached him. His fist, larger than a clay pot and wreathed in crushing ki, punched straight through Rogan's chest, obliterating the rib cage and the heart within. Mangled flesh and gore sprayed out his back.
Yet in the next moment, an eerie light flared within the vertical pupils of the dragon-headed scepter. Plumes of black mist billowed from the dragon mouth, coalescing over Rogan's shattered body. Flesh and blood began writhing madly, knitting the broken corpse back together at astonishing speed.
Rogan's twisted soul floated into midair, shrieking with venomous malice: "Lowly mortals! I am favored by Her Majesty Tiamat! You can never truly kill me!"
Just then, the lightning arrow whistled past Mantou's shoulder, striking directly between the eyebrows of Rogan's spectral form.
In a flash, the arrowhead detonated. Lightning burst forth with deafening crackles, brilliant arcs of electricity engulfing everything nearby.
Dark storm clouds roiled overhead as though gathering terrible power.
Rogan's soul twisted in sheer terror and despair, trying frantically to flee. "No! Nooo—!"
*BOOM!*
A deafening thunderclap ripped across the heavens. A lightning bolt as thick as a tree trunk plunged from above, instantly annihilating Rogan's body and soul alike.
Mantou's face was scorched black, his hair blown out into a frizzy afro. He whipped around and glared into the distance. "Sing-dog, do you even have a shred of conscience?! You'd steal a kill like that?!"
Dawei Tianlong rubbed his bald head with lingering fear, silently congratulating himself on having no hair to get blasted into a mess like Mantou's.
"Lord Rogan is dead!"
"Tiamat have mercy, Lord Rogan was killed by the traitors!"
The acolytes of the Cult of the Dragon were thrown into absolute panic. Under the combined onslaught of the players and Green Valley Town's soldiers, they had already been on the brink of collapse; now that Rogan had fallen, their retreat turned into a rout.
Amidst the surging crowd, Gangtie Kuangchao chased after the cultists like a tiger hunting sheep. He was soaked in crimson blood from head to toe, shreds of flesh and white sinew still caught in the seams of his armor.
"D-don't come any closer!"
A black-robed acolyte sprinted desperately, glancing back in pure terror as he shrieked.
"Hahahaha! Fantastic!"
Gangtie Kuangchao leapt into the air, landing directly above the acolyte. The chainsword in his grip roared down from above, its razor-sharp teeth whirling at dizzying speed.
*Slash—*
Sparks and lightning trailed the buzzing blade. The black-robed acolyte was sliced clean down the middle, even his dense skull cleaved apart.
Even the battle-hardened soldiers of Green Valley Town felt a surge of horror and disbelief watching such brutal butchery.
Gangtie Kuangchao kicked the acolyte's mangled halves aside and gave a sinister grin. "Still not satisfying enough. It gets boring just mowing down grunts..."
He tilted his head back, watching the green dragons flapping their wings in erratic fury above, his eyes alight with excitement.
"A useless pack of trash!"
Gazing down upon the chaos below and watching the cultists break into a rout, the ancient green dragon spat venomously, "Destroy them at all costs! Leave no one alive!"
"The Lord of the Rotting Bog commanded that Franz and his remnants must not leave this place breathing! We must crush their last hope!"
*Roaaar—*
The green dragons flocked together in formation, swooping down in wave after wave, unleashing torrents of intensely corrosive acid in completely indiscriminate attacks.
Soldiers from Green Valley Town, players from the empire, and Cult of the Dragon acolytes alike were caught in the acid deluge, dissolving into steaming sludge and bare bone amidst horrific wails.
Yet the players quickly adapted with practiced ease. Hauling rocket launchers onto their shoulders, they waited until the green dragons reached the lowest point of their dives before pulling the triggers.
*Whoosh—*
Rocket after rocket shot skyward, trailing thick plumes of smoke to detonate violently against the green dragons.
In the distance, players hoisted ballistas loaded with Arrows of Dragon Slaying—rare munitions nearly impossible to find within the empire—and aimed straight for the dragons' vitals.
Someone had even hauled over an anti-aircraft autocannon, sweeping bursts of rapid-fire shells across the sky and cheering in absolute delight.
*Skreech—*
Amidst piercing screeches of agony, several green dragons were shot down, tumbling helplessly to the earth.
The moment they crashed, surrounding players converged like a pack of starving wolves upon prey, swarming the miserable beasts to beat them to death.
To compete for the dragon kills, the players pulled out every trick in the book, unloading catastrophic bursts of damage. The green dragons that fell into their hands died gruesome deaths, riddled with bullet holes, slash wounds, and craters from elemental spells.
"Hurry, carve the loot!"
"Hands off, that scale is mine!"
The moment a dragon died, fanatical material merchants swept in like a flock of greedy vultures, stripping meat, scales, bones, and even visceral organs into their spatial bags.
In the blink of an eye, four adult green dragons were brought down and dismantled without even their carcasses remaining, leaving only pools of steaming dragon blood on the ground.
Seeing his kin—dragons bearing the very same noble bloodline—treated as game and literally butchered on the field, the ancient green dragon's face twisted in savage fury, his eyes nearly splitting at the corners as he roared:
"Insolent lesser beasts! How dare you desecrate noble dragons! I will make you pay with your lives!"
Summoning gale-force winds, the ancient green dragon beat his broad wings and swept across the ground. The incoming artillery shells, rockets, and ballista bolts were instantly shredded by the bladed gale around him.
Roaring ferociously, his vertical pupils flared with gloomy light. His wings whipped up a hurricane laden with toxic mist, dying the air an ominous dark green.
Players caught near him rapidly broke out in rotting sores, collapsing into festering, twisted corpses within mere breaths.
"Watch out! The boss is moving!"
"Wizards, cast Counterspell! Or drop a Wind Wall, anything!"
"This green dragon boss hits like a truck! As expected of an ancient dragon, its opening move is a full-screen wipe! There's nowhere to dodge!"
Confronted by this terrifying ancient green dragon, the players were caught unprepared. Before they could formulate an effective counter, over a hundred players fell dead on the spot.
"Tremble! Wail beneath the shadow of dragons!"
The ancient green dragon wheeled through the skies above the battlefield, stirring a colossal tempest of green acid like an emissary of plague, catastrophe, and death, his roars wild and uninhibited.
Veiled within the swirling hurricane, the dragon's silhouette blurred, rendering almost all ranged attacks useless against him.
"We have to slay that ancient green dragon."
Adrian and Franz, both drenched in blood from slaughtering dragon-blooded beasts, exchanged a glance. Without hesitation, they charged toward the ancient dragon, plunging headlong into the toxic fog that could rot flesh to the bone.
Yet at that very moment, from the massive magic vessel in the distance, a stout gun barrel half a meter in diameter slid out from beneath the ship's hull.
Charlotte stood at the prow in her robes. Pointing her staff toward the ancient green dragon raging within the acid tempest, she shouted with boundless fervor:
"Blow that thing out of the sky!"
Chapter 778