On a weed-choked hillside outside Black Pearl Harbor, an enormous beast-bone skull was propped crookedly atop a wooden pole. A lean young man with several dark-red magical patterns on his cheeks stood beside it, coldly studying Wang Zong's camp and the abruptly heightened walls of Black Pearl Harbor.
"Hisss... crafty, shameless humans!" The young man shook his head and stuck his tongue out toward Black Pearl Harbor. His tongue was long and slightly black, its tip forked—a snake's tongue through and through. He was clearly a snake-man, yet no obvious serpentine traits could be seen from his appearance. He must have carried the bloodline of snake-man royalty.
Beside him, a huge man who stood a fist taller than ordinary people even while sitting cross-legged on the ground was clutching a bloody beast leg and gnawing at it in great mouthfuls. Hearing the snake-man youth, the man, whose face was thickly covered in pale-yellow fuzz, snorted. "With the old walls, a loss of ten or twenty thousand men would have been enough to take them. But this city now? Unless we fill it with over a million corpses, don't even dream of getting within a step of it."
After only a few bites, he had stripped the beast leg clean of flesh. His broad tongue licked every trace of blood from the bone, and he gave a cold laugh. "These humans are reaching too far. But it's strange—why would a powerhouse of this level appear here?"
The snake-man youth hissed out a breath, then curled his lips into a strange smile. "Never mind that. Our purpose is to bring about a war between the Black Spirit Continent and the Western Continent. War is what matters. We needn't concern ourselves with anything else."
The big man grunted, then nodded bluntly. "That's right.