Using Panoptic Vision to keep an eye on all fronts of the battlefield, I give orders to the taratect monsters by way of Kin Control.
Even if I don’t have the strength to fight on the front lines anymore, taking command from the rear is a fine job, too.
In fact, since things are happening all over the enormous Great Elroe Labyrinth, I can’t turn off Panoptic Vision even if I wanted to.
Frankly, I’m working my butt off here!
But it seems to be helping, since the battle is definitely leaning in our favor.
Most of the water dragons that were attacking the Upper Stratum have already been dealt with.
I was definitely sweating it out when Iena, the water dragon chief, started leading Sophia around by the nose, but it didn’t take long once Wrath came running and tapped into the fight.
Even I was at a loss for words when I saw Iena go down like that.
She was one of the stronger ancient dragon chiefs—the strongest, in fact.
As the supreme ruler of the seas, she could always drown any opponent under the crushing weight of the ocean.
And beyond brute strength, she also excelled at a wide variety of water-based strategies to cunningly keep her enemies right where she wanted them.
Her control over water was breathtaking, and nearly impossible to defend against, since water is a freely flowing liquid.
I once saw Iena fight unbelievably dirty by flooding water into her opponent’s body, then tearing them apart from within.
If she gets water into your ears, eyes, or anywhere else, there’s nothing you can do.
You’d have to avoid all of that water to defend yourself, which isn’t easy to do when she can maneuver it into any shape or direction as she pleases.
Back in my prime, I could’ve just swallowed it all away with Gluttony. Without a move like that, however, the only way to deal with her would be to dispel or erase the water through brute force.
And to do that, you’d have to be more powerful than Iena.
Otherwise, you’d just get swallowed up by the waves.
No one weaker than she was would be able to win, and even someone who’s evenly matched would be in for a hard fight.
That was my assessment of Iena, anyway…
So I can’t believe she got killed instantly…
I mean, Wrath probably did that because he knew it was his best shot at winning.
He correctly assessed Iena’s threat level and chose to end the fight quickly by risking the use of the Wrath skill.
That was the right choice, for sure.
Wrath’s fire and lightning wouldn’t be very good at defending against Iena’s water.
Sophia’s ice was much better suited to fighting her.
Since Wrath didn’t have a reliable way of blocking Iena’s attacks like Sophia did, he would’ve had a hard time winning if he didn’t resort to that strategy.
But still, an insta-kill…
Isn’t that a little extreme?
I guess I should just be grateful that the most dangerous of the ancient dragons went down, though.
Still, it’s wild that even someone who’s lived as long as an ancient dragon chief can still die so abruptly as that.
When you look at it that way, maybe I’m one of the lucky ones, since I at least got to take out Potimas with my own two hands.
I got to fulfill my role, at least to the minimum extent.
The flooding of the Upper Stratum that Iena caused is already being dealt with as Sophia goes around sealing up the holes.
Since she’s also defeating any water dragons she finds, the situation in the Upper Stratum will soon be solved.
It looked real bad at first, but when you look at the end result, the enemy lost a ton of their forces while we took minimal damage.
And now…I change my viewpoint to a different area.
The giant pit the queen created leading from the Lower Stratum to the surface.
An intense battle is unfolding there now.
Fire Dragon Nguyen and Lightning Dragon Gohka, the two ancient dragon chiefs who fought the queen outside, are attacking once again.
And what they’re fighting is another queen.
There were originally five queen taratects in total.
White defeated the one that was here in the Great Elroe Labyrinth, while Potimas’s weapons brought down another one in the battle of the elf village.
But the other three were still alive and well.
I summoned all three of them for this battle.
One lost her life in battle against Fire Dragon Nguyen and Lightning Dragon Gohka, which means two remain.
And now, one of those two is also battling Nguyen and Gohka.
Incidentally, the one that Julius the Hero defeated in the war against humanity was a clone that White created, not one of the original queens.
These two ancient dragon chiefs have already defeated one queen.
So this will just be a rehash of the same fight, ending with the queen’s loss…or so you might think.
Lightning Dragon Gohka thrashes, entangled in the web that was strung up across the pit.
Then the queen assails the trapped dragon mercilessly.
Gohka, who’s relatively small for a dragon, is blown away like a piece of garbage.
Nguyen flies around the pit breathing fire, trying to burn up all the spiderwebs, but he clearly can’t keep up since Gohka was captured.
A spider monster’s strength is using thread in a narrow space.
Since the previous battle was in an open space outside, that queen couldn’t fight with her full strength. This battle, though, is another story entirely.
The queen moves nimbly for such an enormous creature, bouncing every whichway around the pit, easily maneuvering whether she’s on a wall or in midair.
Aside from the webs she’s strung up everywhere, she can also make footholds in the air with Dimensional Maneuvering, leaving both Gohka and Nguyen several steps behind.
On top of that, the queen’s underling arch and greater taratects are adding in long-distance attacks from farther down the pit.
And the queen’s sticky spider threads prevent the two ancient dragons from reaching the arches and greaters.
Meanwhile, those threads also serve as both shield and scaffolding for the spiders.
Nguyen and Gohka’s respective dragon minions have joined the fray, too, only for most of them to get shot down and stuck in spiderwebs.
Since the pit goes from the surface to the Lower Stratum, it’s a quick way to get close to the Bottom Stratum here.
But we wouldn’t leave a shortcut like that unguarded.
The queen strung up her threads there in advance and was lying in wait to meet any would-be invaders with all her strength.
This pit is a fortress of sorts. An impregnable one.
It gives the queen a home field advantage as well as the help of her minions, and she was already stronger than Nguyen and Gohka in terms of stats.
On top of that, the two dragons had already fought another queen outside.