More than a hundred kilometers north of Breyak, the bone-piercing northern wind, mixed with shards of ice, surged southward into the continent between the mountains on either side of the fjord.
The Ice Sea had now entered its polar night. Diyang could not be seen all day long; only the enormous Laya could hang near the horizon for a few hours around noon each day.
At the mouth of the fjord, severed limbs and corpses floated everywhere upon the deep-blue sea. Beneath the waters, several thousand Merfolk and Sea Monsters held their ground within a relatively warm current, ready at any moment to enter the cold waters and fight the Sea Beastmen.
Less than a kilometer into the fjord entrance lay the main battlefield between the Merfolk and the Sea Beastmen:
Along an invisible dividing line, three hundred Merfolk warriors faced roughly three hundred Walrus-folk, Sea Lion, and Seal Clan warriors, forming a battlefield about a thousand meters wide and ten meters deep. Warriors from both sides slaughtered and grappled across that strip.
On such a battlefield, the warriors of both sides fought almost entirely in pairs. The Dragon Beasts in the sky could not dive deep enough to catch the Merfolk underwater, while the supporting Merfolk and water elf Mages on both sides found it difficult to inflict area-wide damage with their spells.
In terms of combat strength alone, low- and mid-rank Merfolk warriors found it difficult to gain any advantage against Sea Beastmen warriors of the same rank. Though the Merfolk warriors were strong and lean, their bodies lacked a layer of fat beneath the skin. Simply beating their tail fins in the near-freezing seawater was already exhausting, let alone fighting the obese sea beasts hand-to-hand with coral razors.
Compared to the Merfolk, every type of Sea Beastman