"Councilor Ur! Guiltina's forces have entered Ishgar's territorial waters!"
At the Blast Sea defensive line in the far north of Ishgar, Ur stood inside a fortress built specifically for war, her expression grave as she studied the report delivered by her subordinates.
After years of constant harassment, Guiltina had finally launched a full-scale invasion.
"Send the order!" Hyberion shouted urgently at the communications officer beside him. "Every armed unit at sea is to stop Guiltina's forces from advancing any farther into our waters!"
He immediately used a Communication Lacrima to place every level of the Magic Council's military on full combat alert.
Ur threw on her councilor's robes and hurried out of the fortress.
In a sense, Kiria's earlier mockery had not been entirely wrong.
Ishgar's younger generation of powerful mages was not lacking at all. If anything, they were remarkably talented.
The Magic Council itself, however, possessed very few truly formidable mages.
When a crisis reached this scale, it still had to rely on the Four Gods of Ishgar to hold everything together.
"Report! Our aerial forces encountered an extremely dangerous mage! He… he turned all our airships to ash!"
The command center was already drowning in reports when another soot-covered soldier staggered inside to request reinforcements.
"That unit is exceptionally powerful. There appear to be three Dragon Slayers aboard their ship!"
"Dragon Slayers…" Hyberion muttered. "Can Richard hold them?"
"Those three are extremely difficult to handle. Richard-san may not be able to…"
Wolfheim gritted his teeth and rose to his feet.
"I'll go to the front. Hyberion, I'm leaving command of the rear to you!"
"Wolf—"
Hyberion tried to stop him, but the fiery little old man had already rushed out.
This was the price of having too few elite mages.
Ur had personally gone to command the naval battle, with only Richard—formerly Hoteye of the Oración Seis, whose sentence had been temporarily suspended so he could join the war—as a reliable assistant.
The aerial forces had no powerful mage overseeing them and were quickly torn apart, forcing Wolfheim to rush over and fill that gap.
Meanwhile, the number of wounded continued to rise.
Warrod's support division was becoming completely overwhelmed, while smaller enemy units constantly harassed their supply lines.
Despite being the defending side, Ishgar's forces were already showing signs of collapse.
"How far away is Cube?!" Hyberion roared over the thunder of long-range magical artillery.
A soldier immediately displayed Cube's current position.
The flying island was drawing closer by the second and would soon reach the defensive line.
"Damn those vultures, attacking us while we're already in chaos!"
Hyberion slammed his palm against the table in frustration, shattering several completely innocent table legs.
"Chairman!"
One disastrous report followed another.
Before Hyberion could decide how to reinforce the rear under these conditions, a blurry figure abruptly appeared in front of him.
"Doranbolt?!"
Doranbolt—whose memories remained sealed while he continued operating undercover within the Magic Council—spoke urgently.
"A riot has broken out in the central army! Mages from Guiltina have infiltrated the camp!"
Hyberion felt a throbbing pain in his skull.
He hastily ordered the Council officers around him to continue directing the battle, then hurried outside himself.
There was no other choice.
The Magic Council simply did not have enough fighters.
Whenever an enemy appeared who could disrupt an entire army alone, the ordinary troops were practically helpless.
Boom—!
Before Hyberion could even leave the fortress, the ground beneath him suddenly shook.
A deafening impact followed, like a meteor crashing into the earth.
"What now…?"
Hyberion was exhausted beyond words, but he could only anxiously order his intelligence division to investigate again.
They immediately projected an image of the central encampment.
The once-orderly military camp had been consumed by flames. Soldiers screamed and cried out everywhere.
One bizarre figure stood out within the chaos.
He wore a strange, skin-tight black outfit and clung to a wall like some demented spider.
His hair was swept into an exaggerated fringe, while his bulging eyes resembled a spider's glossy pupils.
A mouth full of terrifying shark teeth stretched across his face, accompanied by an unpleasantly long tongue.
Behind him, countless soldiers had been pinned to the ground and walls by disgusting streams of slime.
Sticky threads covered the entire camp.
Soldiers trapped within them struggled uselessly as the man wrapped them one by one into cocoons and suspended them in the air.
The revolting man appeared ready to continue, but the tremendous crash from moments earlier caught his attention.
He turned toward the newly formed crater with a puzzled expression.
After a long pause, someone finally climbed out of the pit, complaining as he went.
"So when that forbidden spell ends, it randomly throws you somewhere else? What a pain in the ass."
"Ankh!"
Hyberion's eyes widened inside the command center.
His initial shock immediately turned into overwhelming relief.
Reinforcements had arrived!
Ankh jumped out of the crater and brushed the dust from his clothes.
He frowned as he surveyed the slimy nightmare around him, wondering for a moment whether he had somehow been transported to the homeland of giant slugs.
"What the hell is all this…?"
As he looked around, Ankh suddenly noticed several familiar faces trapped inside the cocoons.
They appeared to be Magic Council soldiers.
"So I was teleported straight to the northern border?"
The cocooned soldiers nearly burst into tears of joy when they recognized him.
Back at headquarters, Ankh might have "bullied" the Council regularly, but now that they were on a battlefield, seeing him felt more comforting than seeing their own families.
"I see. So you're the enemy."
After listening to the cocoons desperately explain what had happened, Ankh calmly turned toward the man who had attacked the camp.
"That presence… Are you a Dragon Slayer?"
The man suddenly spread his sharp teeth in a grin and extended his long tongue.
Slime continuously dripped from his mouth, making his words difficult to understand, though the arrogance in his voice remained perfectly clear.
"I am Nebaru of the Sticky Dragon—one of Diabolos's Dragon Slayers!"
Nebaru drew in a deep breath, then opened his mouth and unleashed his attack without hesitation.
"Sticky Dragon's Sticky Roar!"
His breath attack resembled an enormous mouthful of revolting paste being sprayed across the battlefield.
Ankh's scalp crawled.
His eyes immediately turned cold.
The weapon in his hand blazed with scorching light. He raised the blade and slashed horizontally through the incoming roar.
The overwhelming heat vaporized every drop of slime in an instant.
Nebaru's heart jumped.
He had never expected his roar to be stopped so easily.
Then a sudden chill ran through him.
He lowered his gaze.
At some point, the blazing blade had already pierced straight through his chest.
Ankh violently tore the weapon free, then kicked him away with an expression of utter disgust.
"They really have a dragon for every damn thing now…"
"Disgusting."