The Open-Air Arena, normally forever abuzz with heat and bustle like a blazing furnace, was now swept by howling winds, with ice sealing everything.
Even the blood flowing freely across the arena had all frozen into red ice cones, ice pillars, and clusters of ice.
Even the colorful banners that should have been raised high beside the fighting platform to signify victory were covered in frost.
The banners and their decorative feathers hung heavily downward, like broken wind chimes.
The adjudicator, who should have waved the flag and announced, "The gladiatorial match is over. Victory and defeat have been decided," stared in shock, unable to make a sound for a long while.
Like the tens of thousands of spectators, he stood dumbfounded, still unable to believe that the Ice Storm Squad had achieved such a crushing, exhilarating victory.
Ever since their desperate counterattack in the previous thirty-man Team Battle,
more and more spectators had indeed begun to favor Ice Storm, believing she had made up for her greatest weakness.
But even her most diehard supporters had never imagined that a battle between two hundred-man squads would be decided in a single exchange.
After all, Ice Storm's opponent this time, while not a powerhouse from a Powerful Clan on Venom Sting's level,
was a Hippo Warrior, even more difficult to deal with than the Boar People.
With a build no smaller than a young elephant's and a bite stronger than that of lion men or tiger men, Hippo Warriors had long served as amphibious assault troops in the Bloodhoof Army.
Even the hot-tempered Boar People would turn into refined gentlemen whenever a Hippo Warrior opened his bloodbasin of a mouth in a yawn.
When the Ice Storm Squad stepped onto the grand fighting platform, the seventy new servant soldiers were not