The Ice-Fire Twin-Headed Earth Dragon lay coiled before a massive stone gate, both heads with eyes shut. With each breath it inhaled and exhaled, the ground transformed into a sea of fire on one side and a frozen hell on the other.
When Ke Le, Ban Jiu, and Ye Wumian drew to within 300 yards of the Ice-Fire Twin-Headed Earth Dragon, its eyes snapped open. Those amber pupils locked straight onto the three of them, and a deafening roar erupted from its throats, echoing through the entire valley. A wave of terrifying pressure slammed into them head-on, and the thousand-strong Zero Wing raid felt their hearts clench, their movements growing sluggish by a fraction.
"Hahaha, they've really got some nerve. They didn't even send a handful of experts in to probe it first — just charged straight in to die." Huang Hai watched the grim-faced Zero Wing members and couldn't help but laugh.
He knew exactly how powerful the Ice-Fire Twin-Headed Earth Dragon was.
He had faced it more than once.
That kind of strength could only be understood by experiencing it firsthand. It was nothing like an ordinary Primordial Species — even he, a second-tier MT, could barely keep up.
Unlike other monsters, the Ice-Fire Twin-Headed Earth Dragon might look like a single creature, but it was really three. The two heads operated independently, while all three tails moved in perfect unison, making it nearly impossible to defend against.
And the sheer power — even under the suppression of the magic array, a single blow would send a second-tier MT like him skidding back several steps even when using damage deflection techniques, dealing over twenty thousand points of damage. Without deflection, a basic attack hit for over thirty thousand. That was how devastating its strength was; one slip, and the Ice-Fire Twin-Headed Earth Dragon would delete you in an instant.
Once the MT was taken out, never mind the terror of the lava rain — even without it, the rest of the raid would be wiped out in short order.
This was precisely why the Ice-Fire Twin-Headed Earth Dragon had become the absolute gatekeeper to the fifth floor.
Before the massive stone gate, as the Ice-Fire Twin-Headed Earth Dragon let out wave after wave of roars, magma surged forth from all directions, immediately sealing Zero Wing inside. No one within could escape, and no one outside could enter.
Both sides were now trapped on this magma-encircled battlefield, and only one would walk out alive. There would be no chance for attrition tactics.
As the magma formed a barrier, both dragon heads opened their enormous jaws, beginning to channel terrifying magical energy. The ice and fire elements drifting in the surrounding air rushed toward the two gaping maws.
"Zero Wing really drew the short straw. The Ice-Fire Twin-Headed Earth Dragon is using Ice-Fire Breath right out of the gate. I'm afraid this will be over before the real fight even starts." Qi Lian, watching from a distance, let out a soft sigh.
Ice-Fire Breath was the Ice-Fire Earth Dragon's party-wipe ultimate — an enormous attack radius combined with an absurdly short charge time. Normally, if all players were within 50 yards of the dragon, dodging it wouldn't be too difficult. But now they were over 100 yards out, and the distance they needed to cover was much greater. There probably wasn't enough time to escape the blast zone at all.
It wasn't just Qi Lian who thought so. Everyone present had already envisioned the image of Zero Wing being wiped before the fight even truly began.
"Seal!"
Just as Ice-Fire Breath was about to be unleashed, Shi Feng's right hand — bearing the Seven Luminaries Ring — shot up, and he activated the Forbidden Domain on the Ice-Fire Twin-Headed Earth Dragon's position.
In an instant, the mana within a 600-by-600-yard area froze solid. The ice and fire elements rushing toward the dragon ground to a halt, and the magic array forming Ice-Fire Breath, starved of its mana flow, collapsed on the spot.
"What an incredible mana-sealing effect!"
"Does Zero Wing really possess a mana-sealing skill this powerful?"
The onlookers in the distance drew sharp breaths, unable to believe that a player had just shut down the Ice-Fire Twin-Headed Earth Dragon's breath attack.
Plenty of players in God's Domain had learned mana-sealing skills, but those skills varied wildly in potency. Most were effective against first-tier players like themselves, but second-tier mana-sealing skills were rare, and the ones that did exist were far too weak to matter — let alone sealing a boss.
Any mana-sealing skill capable of sealing a boss was considered incredibly precious, and every major superpower was willing to pay sky-high prices for one.
Because even a brief mana seal on a boss gave a raid a tremendous advantage, potentially saving them from a full wipe. Its importance was even greater than that of large-scale destructive magic.
And as far as they knew, aside from third-tier magic scrolls that could seal mana, no player had ever possessed a mana-sealing skill effective against a Grand Lord-rank boss — not even against a Great Lord-rank. Yet Zero Wing had one…
In an instant, Zero Wing's value in the eyes of the surrounding superpowers shot up considerably. At the very least, when it came to conquering the Ice-Fire Twin-Headed Earth Dragon, Zero Wing held an advantage that none of the other superpowers could match, lowering the difficulty of the encounter by a meaningful margin.