205: Intelligence

"Everyone, get over here, now!"

With fire raining down from the sky as well, I frantically sketched a Defense Formula. Olynn immediately reinforced it, and Tura and Lilith followed suit. We all poured every last drop of our Mana into the spell.

The ground was gouged out, and the forest began to incinerate. It felt like a literal carpet bombing. As I watched our defenses crumble before my eyes, I pushed the deployment of my Inviolable Domain even further.

Even then, everything we built was being torn to shreds. We’d burned through over half our Mana just to keep ourselves from being vaporized. The landscape around us had been stripped bare—not a single scrap of cover remained.

But the nightmare wasn’t over.

Beside the Fire Dragon, two more silhouettes emerged: an Earth Dragon with mud-colored scales and a Wind Dragon wreathed in gales.

"...Are you kidding me, Noblesse?"

I get it. A "New Game Plus" mode is a crowd-pleasing staple for endgame content. I don’t even hate the trope.

But even so, this is way over the line. What kind of hack writer includes a bullshit episode where four legendary-class Dragons—creatures with Mana reserves that dwarf the sum of all human achievement—show up at the exact same time?

And the single most terrifying thing about the Four Dragons? Their intelligence.

The clearest, most obvious proof of that is...

"It seems you humans never learn your lesson."

The fact that they can speak, just like we do.