Battlefield Choices

In the Far Northern Seas, beneath a sky shrouded in cold, lead-gray clouds hung low. Dark currents churned along their edges, and the air was full of ice crystals.

Hundreds of small flying boats hovered there, linked by dense runic lines into a vast airborne fortress. The cold was so intense that many hulls were coated in gray-white frost.

Around the fortress, dozens of Monitoring Formations of varying designs moved along preset paths. The Runic Arrays at their tips continuously cast pale blue scanning beams in every direction.

Where the beams passed, they sliced the clouds into alternating bands of light and shadow. Ice crystals at the edges scattered tiny sparks of light before the surging cold swallowed them again.

This airborne camp was the forward position built by the New Continent Slave Army's vanguard!

Some hundred-odd miles south of the camp, Ao Yuan's vanguard fleet had deployed. A large, deep-blue Aquatic Clan flagship held the center, escort warships formed wedges on either side, and every runic line across their hulls glowed.

The entire formation was arranged for an assault, its bows pointed toward the airborne camp to the north. Charged light burned steadily within its energy cannons.

Behind the New Continent's airborne camp, formations of small combat flying boats advanced through the skies for hundreds of kilometers. They flew in from farther north in groups of ten, with more than ten miles between groups, like a long string of gray beads stretched across the leaden sky.

Those formations connected to a much larger fleet behind them. Two flying boats in the fleet's center stood out: several times larger than the combat boats around them, with dark-green hulls covered in coarse, mosslike patterns.

These were the two Poisonous Flying Boats Wu Gu had refined. Their hulls had been soaked in