From the moment they appeared, the fireballs kept firing without pause, like a raging rain of fire sweeping sideways across the sea.

The fireballs might not have been powerful enough to worry about, but their rate of fire was terrifying. The mages’ stamina drained rapidly, and within a few breaths they had already used up nearly half.

Their leader, a senior mage named Labra, knew his underlings’ condition well. He nodded to them and said:

“Prepare to counterattack!”

After saying this, Labra set the holy power within him flowing and raised his hands slightly.

In the Empire’s past campaigns against enemy forces, there had been several occasions when only his personal intervention—the strongest mage’s—could solve the problem once and for all.

Labra felt this time would be no different.

A vast quantity of magical energy condensed between his hands in an instant, then surged above his head.

A moment later, a pitch-black vortex had formed over his head.

This was Labra’s most lethal finishing move, a highly unusual spell that combined space magic: Dark Burst (what an embarrassing name).

It was Labra’s signature technique, and its power was in a completely different league from the spells his side had used earlier.

Even with his formidable strength, casting this spell took time.

But just as he was about to finish forming it, a point of white light suddenly ignited on the end of the distant Sea Knight facing them.

Then, in an instant, the white light swelled into an enormous sphere.

The sphere shone with astonishing brightness. Even from this distance, it looked dazzlingly bright, yet strangely, it wasn’t all that harsh on the eyes.

The moment Labra saw the sphere condense, his hands shook, and the power within him nearly slipped out of control.

He stared at the distant sphere in shock, a powerful sense of danger rising in his heart.

The next moment, the sphere burst open.

A massive white beam, several meters in diameter, shot from the flagship. It crossed the vast distance in an instant and struck a ship beside the Mermaid Princess.

When the light faded, a long trench had appeared across the sea, as if the water had just been plowed like a field. It was more than twenty meters wide and several meters deep.

And where the warship had been a moment ago, there was now nothing at all.

The entire Imperial army—including the mages—was left gaping at the attack, speechless.

On the Sea Knight, the ship that had unleashed the attack, there was just as much silence.

After a long while, the loud sound of someone gulping broke the stillness of the utterly quiet deck.

“Good grief... Was that really an attack we fired?”

The three rulers and the other crew members looked at one another, unable to believe what they’d seen.

It took a while for Anlexi to recover from his shock. He cleared his throat, then said gravely:

“All right, quit staring and get ready for the next phase of the battle. Our enemies haven’t disappeared!”

“Yes, sir!”

A chorus of replies rang out, and the people on deck immediately got back to work.

At that moment, the Grand Mage Labra was hovering in midair, with more than a dozen high-ranking mages who had accompanied him.

They looked down at the sea, which still hadn’t calmed, and not one of them looked happy.

What had that white light just been?

A beam swept past, and an enormous warship simply vanished?

That terrifying power was almost on the level of a lesser divine miracle!

If the enemy could casually unleash magic like that, it would be terrifying.

An attack so outrageous it was practically cheating would be impossible to defend against—not only for ordinary soldiers, but even for high-ranking mages like them.

Even Labra himself had no way to deal with magic like that.

He might be able to escape after the enemy cast it, but facing it head-on and enduring the attack was practically impossible.

“Are we... still supposed to keep attacking?”

A high-ranking mage suddenly asked Labra. His question struck a chord with those around him.

Feeling the other mages’ uneasy, almost panicked gazes on him, Labra slowly raised his head and looked toward the Kingdom fleet in the distance.

The flagship that had unleashed that terrifying attack wasn’t firing again. It was moving at high speed across the sea alongside its escort ships, attacking the Imperial forces.

After what had just happened, the Kingdom army’s morale was soaring.

The Imperial soldiers, meanwhile, looked dispirited because the troops they had placed such high hopes in had performed poorly.

In this situation, without support from the mages, the army led by the Knight Commander would be forced onto the defensive.

With things this dire, the mages couldn’t possibly hold back.

Besides...

The palace had paid and treated these foreigners well over the years to secure their full service, and their families had enjoyed comfortable lives because of it.

It wasn’t a matter of “repaying” that kindness. Labra was simply considering this:

If the mage corps, himself included, ultimately failed to live up to the Empire’s expectations—or deserted in the middle of battle—their families back in the Imperial capital would surely pay a terrible price.

Before the war began, the royal family had already sent people to gather their relatives and keep them under guard.

That way, the mages wouldn’t have to worry about what might happen to their families. More importantly...

If these foreigners betrayed the Empire, then there was no question about it: their entire families would be wiped out.

Of course, this approach wasn’t foolproof.

What if some mage suddenly stood up and said:

“So what if they die? My parents, wife, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, cousins—if every last one of them dies, it’s got nothing to do with me!”

If anyone could be that cold-hearted, the Empire could only accept its bad luck and admire the guy for being even more ruthless than a werewolf.

Unfortunately, not everyone could reach that level.

The mages might usually be in it just to make a living, but they hadn’t quite reached the lofty state of caring about no one—not even their own family.

That being the case, they had no choice but to grit their teeth and fight.

Even if they died in battle and were posthumously honored as heroes by the Empire, that was still better than being branded traitors and getting their whole families killed.

The Grand Mage Labra watched the flagship that had launched the attack for a while longer.

When he saw that the other side still wasn’t doing anything, he secretly breathed a sigh of relief, then told those beside him:

“Keep attacking! There’s no way they can launch the same attack again.

“Besides, that attack isn’t anything to fear. We can dodge it easily—we just need to stay alert.”

He had only just ordered his subordinates to resume their attacks when he suddenly sensed an unusually powerful surge of magical energy in the space around him.

Labra was startled. He flashed away, immediately putting more than ten meters between himself and the spot.

The other high-ranking mages’ senses were far weaker than his.

By the time they sensed anything, a huge black vortex of magical energy had already appeared high in the sky.

The two mages closest to it were swallowed up before they could even cry out.

The remaining mages drew on all their strength and fled as fast as they could.

A moment later, a gray-robed figure strolled out of the black vortex, as casually as if walking across level ground.

The two mages who had just been swallowed floated motionlessly beside the figure, their fates unknown.

Labra’s gaze swept across the shaken mages before him, then finally settled on the gray-robed figure opposite them.

“Are you the one who sank our ship?”

Labra sensed an intensely dangerous presence from this sudden opponent, like a fierce wolf coming face-to-face with a tiger.

Labra realized that the black vortex of magical energy resembled his own spell, Dark Burst, in some ways.

But it was obvious that the other person’s mastery of space magic was far beyond his own.

At the very least, Labra couldn’t freely come and go inside a magical vortex he had created himself.

The moment his gaze met the gray-robed figure’s, Labra noticed the undisguised killing intent in the other person’s eyes.

His heart gave a jolt. He immediately plastered on a smile and spoke first, with a touch of politeness:

“My friend, we’re all just out here trying to make a living. Let’s just go through the motions. Why take it so seriously?”

When you run into a beast, act like a little rabbit. When you see something that eats grass, puff yourself up like a big shot!

It was precisely this wisdom that had kept Labra alive and well to this day.

“I didn’t want to get directly involved at first, since that would disrupt the balance of the battlefield too much. Before the Empire deployed its mage corps, I only planned to act as a purely strategic advisor.”

Then Labra heard the gray-robed figure say something utterly incomprehensible.

He didn’t know that although the gray-robed figure was helping Dibiles, she wasn’t actually part of their faction.

Of course, she wasn’t on the Empire’s side either. She had chosen to oppose Inran only for the sake of her own plans.

So it didn’t matter to her how many people died on Dibiles’s side.

If she’d truly cared about the casualties, the gray-robed figure would have revealed herself before the Kingdom army lost half its ships.

She was helping Anlexi because her ultimate goal was simply to make Inran lose. She just needed that outcome.

Once you took that into account, everything she did made sense.

If the Imperial army didn’t use magic, the Kingdom army could win the war under her command.

But once the mages entered the fray, the Kingdom army—which had no corresponding forces—would be left to take a one-sided beating, and before long, defeat would be inevitable.