Yet just as the pillar of lightning was about to strike those blue figures, they moved in perfect unison without exchanging a word. Eight tentacles thrust forward at once, weaving an impenetrable blue net before them.
The lightning pillar slammed into the net, unleashing a blinding blue-white glare. Violent currents sprayed in every direction, ionizing the surrounding seawater into a mass of boiling foam.
Yet the enormous net woven from tentacles did not budge. Lightning raged and surged across it, but not a single tear appeared.
As the lightning gradually faded, the Eel King's expression turned grim. He had poured almost everything into that strike, yet he had failed to break through even their defenses.
"My turn." All sixty Krakens spoke the same words in unison.
The instant the words left their mouths, all sixty figures vanished.
Alarm flared in the Eel King's heart. His slender body twisted sharply to one side as he tried to evade an attack from an unknown direction.
A full hundred and sixty tentacles wrapped around the Eel King from every direction at once, enclosing him from head to tail in an impenetrable net. Densely packed barbs sank into the gaps between his scales, injecting venom through every wound. An intense numbness spread rapidly from the entangled parts of his body. He struggled desperately to break free, but the tentacles only tightened, squeezing him until blood began seeping beneath his scales.
Meanwhile, the Black Tortoise fared no better. His defenses were indeed astonishing; the hardness of his shell ranked among the best in the East Sea, if not all the seas. But the twenty Kraken clones had no intention of breaking through his defenses head-on. Eighty tentacles belonging to ten of the clones appeared beneath the Black Tortoise's plastron at once—the only area of his