After training for a while, getting more involved with the other vampires, and getting weapons from Eris's church, Therisa's arsenal had expanded a lot. She learned that as a vampire directly serving Arad, she could also swear herself to Eris service and gain limited access to divine magic.

While she wasn't an official nun or paladin in Eris's church, she still could access holy and divine magic. But that power didn't end there; she was also taught how to store things in her blood, albeit that she could barely fit anything inside.

But the blunderbusses granted to her by one Eris's paladins might be her strongest weapon. Those two weapons were once given to that vampire woman from Vlad's arsenal, and had now made their way to Therisa's hands, since they are too weak compared to other high-class weapons.

As Therisa pointed both guns forward, her blood rushed up her arms and entered the barrel. The iron in her blood condensed into bullets, and the remaining blood burned into flames, exploding and acting like black powder.

BAM! BAM! Two shots were fired, and two zombified monsters exploded into ash. Therisa glared at them with a smile, "I drank the blood of her Divinity Eris, and so the iron in my blood is laced with her holy affinity. No monster or undead would survive a direct shot, as long as they aren't too powerful."

"So, you got a gun that fires holy bullets from your blood, nice." Agnar pointed at the back end of the horde of monsters surrounding them. "If you can use holy magic, then we'll have to rely on you. We'll gather them in one place, and you shoot as many of them as you can."

Everyone moved, and Therisa shouted back at them. "There are too many of them. I can't take them all down with divine magic. We gotta clear a way and run."

"I can burn them all to ash!" Ignis shouted, and Agnar glared at her. "Don't! You'll burn the forest down. We'll have Therisa lower their numbers with her divine magic, and we'll finish the rest manually."

Therisa started shooting the zombified monsters one by one as the others guided and taunted them, and eventually, Yuwaku noticed a strange pattern. "The monsters are taunting us as well; they've been making us run all around the place without them attacking that much. They are probably trying to exhaust us."

While regular monsters almost never worked together, let alone zombified monsters, this situation wasn't normal. Those zombified monsters were created by Poppy's spider, and so… that monster is controlling them from afar.

"So, the moment we get tired, it would jump at us." Agnar growled, "Good, let it come. I've got a nasty surprise for it." He wasn't worried about defeating Poppy's monster, because he had two trump cards that he had never pulled. His beastial, black jaguar form, and his fusion with Yuwaku.

But unlike Agnar, Arad was worried. Watching from his room, he could see that things were getting out of hand quickly. Agnar and his party were strong, but they weren't equipped to face the unknown. Poppy had made this monster of her to help her run away from Arad, and it had made it extremely powerful. It wouldn't be wrong to call it her masterpiece.

Arad could clearly see that Poppy's pet wasn't planning to fight Agnar and his party at all; he was buying time to infect and turn them into his minions. Tiny, unnoticeable spider eggs were already floating in the air around them, and if Arad doesn't act soon, they'll get infected the same way the other monsters did.

Usually, Arad would be quite confident that such tiny spiders wouldn't be able to survive inside the bodies of a devil, a nymph, a red drakaina, and a pure-blooded vampire, but this time, he wasn't so sure. Poppy made this monster, and she had to have thought of that before.

He had sent those kids on the mission; he thought they would be able to just stroll in and slay the monster, but it seems he was wrong.

"They have the raw strength, but not the resistance and tactics to be able to handle exotic situations like this." Zephyr looked at Arad with a smile, "Who are you sending to save them? Or would you let them get controlled first?"

"She is already there." Arad pointed at the crystal ball, and Zephyr still couldn't see anything.

"I can't see anything. Where is she? Who is she?" She squinted her eyes, but still couldn't recognize anything. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

"She is well camouflaged, as expected." It was only then that Zephyr tried to sense all of the wind in that section of the forest and notice that a large amount of it was displaced and getting consumed. Whoever Arad sent, she was massive.

The moment the zombified monsters were almost all wiped out, Agnar could finally see the Poppy's large spider glaring at them from the deep darkness of the forest. It was staying around three hundred meters away, watching in silence.

"There it is!!" Agnar shouted, "Let's kill it in a single go. If we do that, those monsters would lose their coordination and be easier to deal with."

But the moment he was about to move, he froze in place. What his eyes saw made his blood dry out, his back dense in cold sweat, and forced all of the courage out of his bones. He wasn't the only one scared. Poppy's spider was terrified as well. It stood in the same spot, not moving an inch in fear of the titanic horror standing above them all.

Therisa, Ignis, and Yuwaku all looked toward Poppy's spider, and what they saw was a large, semi-transparent silhouette that had a vague draconic shape to it. Just the legs alone were tens of meters long, stupidly thick, and enough to crush Poppy's spider like a tiny spider beneath a human foot.

Ba-dump! Ba-dump! The first thing they heard was the sound of a heart beating like drums, and then, under the moonlight, the drakaina's scale shifted color back to their natural, emerald green. Claug was there, standing above them like a towering titan.

As ruthless as Arad could get in training Agnar and his party, he won't send them on a deadly mission unless he is certain they will survive. Arad had sent Claug there to scout before Agnar, and his party even got the notice of the mission.

Claug had arrived in the forest almost an hour before them, scouted the entire area, found Poppy's spider, and stood there, camouflaged and waiting for Agnar's party to arrive.

This was the most horrifying thing about dragons, and it was that their sneaking abilities were utterly unfair, especially when looking at their size. As much as they hated it, dragons were very similar to lizards in their camouflage. They could change the color of their scales, hide their aura, and blend with the natural area surrounding them like ghosts.

Seeing them sneaking around their prey like this was like seeing a tank sneaking up on someone with a cannon and shooting them out of stealth. Why did AO make them like this? Why make the strongest race an ambush predator? A dragon like Claug could hunt without hiding, without sneaking, without needing to use underhanded tactics.

It was the same question Adam and Yggdrasil asked AO when he made Asgorath, the first dragon. Why create such an overpowered race of beings, yet still give them broken stealth abilities? The world certainly didn't need a kilometre-long doom lizards sneak attacking anything for quadruple damage.

His answer was simple: dragons were created to fight the abominations, and in that case, they need all the advantages they can get. The only reason the abominations can't pull a direct, large-scale invasion, the only reason that the Dracorage mythic meteor was created, is because dragons were a problem.

So, in the case of an abominable invasion of a world.

Why would a dragon need stealth? To hunt the abominations.

Why would a dragon define a domain around its layer? The land that a dragon rules isn't infested with abominations.

Why would a dragon enslave the lesser races to serve it? Because if the dragon dies, they die with it. They have to keep the dragon alive and healthy no matter what.

Why would a dragon require human sacrifices, in the form of maidens, for example? To force a religious cult around its existence. In case of an invasion, it is assumed that the gods can't help the land, so to prevent the lesser mortals from succumbing to the abominations, the dragons take the lead. People worship the dragon; they don't need to worship the abominations.

Why can dragons breed with humanoids? To bestow power upon the next generations in the form of bloodlines and half-dragons.

So faced with such an ancient weapon, Poppy's spider froze in place, unable to move. Like a tiny rabbit that suddenly came face to face with a large tiger, all of its instincts screamed to stay still. If it looked small enough, pathetic enough, and too small, it might be spared.

Claug moved her head down, looked at the spider for a second, and then moved her head toward Agnar's party. "Boy, you were this close to dying." She breathed on them, and all of the tiny spider eggs in the air withered and died from her poison.

"I'll take this spider to Arad; you all can return home. Make sure to visit the castle tomorrow to have Merlin look at you… No, I'll take you with me to her. I'll explain on the way."