The black dragon roared!
That was the evil dragon!
In legend, the mighty evil dragon that guarded a treasure rivaling the wealth of the entire world.
Toward the aura of that black dragon, the God-King Zeus felt something strangely familiar.
But he was certain he had never encountered a dragon that evil and powerful before.
After all, in this era Rome was not even close to taking shape.
Even Zeus, the god-king who would one day be the god of Rome's civilization, did not recognize what this form of the Roman dragon actually was.
The dragon factor was roaring.
Faced with this overwhelming and terrifying force,
Even the Amazon queen, who had already steeled herself to fight with everything she had, felt crushing pressure beyond anything she prepared for.
And in order to fully enjoy this battle, as well as to help build Troy's combat strength through the fight,
Night said, "From here I won't use any weapons." I will suppress my physical strength to the same level as yours, and we will fight on even terms!!
What?
Everyone felt a jolt.
Penthesilea: "...!! Why?"
"Why, you ask?"
Like the teaching of the red dragon queen, who helped him understand his own nature through battle.
"Because I'm afraid of accidentally killing you!"
Boom!!
He vanished in an instant, and in the next moment appeared directly in front of Penthesilea.
One hand pressed down onto the queen's head in the middle of her contracted pupils, and then,
She was hurled away and slammed into the sand, carving a deep trench through it.
"Don't keep me waiting too long.
What I want is a proper fight against a demigod at full strength.
If it drags on, I may lose control of the urge to kill and end that way.
After all,
After you, there is still Hector, the strongest warrior of Troy, waiting as the main course."
Although she was treated like an appetizer, Penthesilea felt no contempt or humiliation in it.
Instead, she found herself completely in agreement with the assessment.
Even though she just took that attack, she had not been seriously injured.
She could feel that Night genuinely had kept his strength at the same level as her own.
If that was true, and she still could not satisfy him,
The name of Ares, the war god, would be shamed.
The noble bloodline of the Amazon queen running in her veins would be shamed.
"...!"
Penthesilea rose and braced herself.
"Why are you still standing there?"
The next moment, Night's voice reached her ear, and in her field of vision, he had already vanished again.
Thud!!
That speed!
Penthesilea's eyes went wide as she was sent flying once more.
After another crash landing far away that sent a massive explosion through the earth,
What followed was one-sided combat.
And very quickly, everyone watching realized,
Even with Night suppressing his strength to match Penthesilea's, in both speed and power he was still clearly and steadily ahead of the Amazon queen by one full level.
Just as the heroes were about to assume he was secretly using more strength than he claimed,
Up above, the god Hermes said with surprise, "Oh my, that seems like a deception. He said he suppressed it to the same level, but this is completely one-sided."
And a voice contradicted him immediately.
Not anyone unexpected either, but Ares himself, watching his daughter struggle below, who spoke.
"No. The strength is identical."
As the collective faith of all warriors, the one most qualified to evaluate whether a fighter was truly using their full strength,
His word was authoritative.
The moment he said it, the gods immediately believed him.
Hermes: "Then why is Griffith, with the same strength, able to completely overpower Penthesilea?
Is it simply that the Amazon queen is too lacking in ability?"
Another god saying that might have been a genuine surprise at not understanding.
But for Hermes, who had the sharpest senses of any being in existence, claiming he could not perceive what was actually happening, Ares did not believe a single word of it.
But facing that teasing, Ares showed no anger at all.
He let out a breath instead,
And said with genuine admiration: "Penthesilea has experienced too few true battles. Compared to a warrior genuinely forged through countless fights like this, she still has far to go."
It was not only the experience either.
There was something else, an instinctive battlefield sense.
Ares did not name it directly.
The reason he felt no anger was that he was watching a genuinely beautiful fight.
Honestly speaking, relying purely on inherited blood memory to transform a musician into a warrior more like a born fighter than any trained soldier,
What kind of terrible baptism of blood and fire would it take to forge that kind of gift into a bloodline?
Even he was a little moved by it.
If his own descendants could combine with someone like this and produce heirs carrying that trait,
If this immense power etched into the DNA of one's very nature could be carved into the blood of future generations,
His descendants, Ares's lineage, would from that day forward carry the name of born warriors as their birthright.
At this point, the divine messenger Hermes, who loved watching chaos unfold, actually flew down to the earth himself and hovered in the air over the Amazon queen and said,
"Amazon queen, your father Ares just said..."
He told Penthesilea the exact words that had been exchanged between himself and Ares.
This sent everyone on the battlefield who heard it into shock.
So it was true.
Genuinely suppressed to the same level?
How was that possible?
Even Penthesilea, who had been gritting her teeth and taking hit after hit without a sound, felt a massive wave of shock roll through her.
She had initially assumed Night was using greater strength but thought that absolute fairness did not exist in battle, and she had no grounds to tell someone else not to use their own power.
So she simply fought back with everything she had, trying to release as much of her own strength as possible.
And yet,
He had been at the same level as her the entire time?
This dealt a significant blow to Penthesilea's heart.
And at this moment, Night also paused.
Looking at the Amazon queen who had gone blank with disbelief, visibly reeling from one blow after another,
He considered it for a moment, then suddenly called out.
"Penthesilea! I have a question for you!"
Being called by name directly, she instinctively looked up at the young man in front of her.
"What is the difference between a king and a king's mount?"
"What are you saying?"
"I'm not talking about obvious stuff, like one's an animal and one's a person or one has two legs and one has four. Form, ability, and power! That's what's puzzling."
In the stillness of the battlefield, a wind carrying the smell of blood blew in from the open field, sending a chill up everyone's spine and raising goosebumps on the back of their necks.
Heroes and gods alike felt that Griffith was about to say something extraordinary, and all of them looked toward Night.
Some even held their breath.
Could this be,
The answer to why two people with the same level of strength showed such a completely different performance in battle?
With that question in their hearts,
Penthesilea, who desperately wanted the answer and wanted to know if she was simply inferior, looked at Night.
And through the depths of Penthesilea's heart, he perceived the nature of those like himself through his dragon instinct...
Specifically the battle-born part of that nature.
He could feel another existence within her, growing closer and closer to being set free.
And so smiled.
Let him give her one final push.
.
.
.
(End of the Chapter)