With the Sea Dragon Queen dead, it was a simple matter to defeat the two remaining princes, who were both demoralized and stunned by the barrage of lightning. Once they were all dead, I went through and looted the bodies. Counting the one that Diane killed earlier, I received three more Dragon Pearls, as well as a single claw. As for the queen, her loot turned out to be two Dragon Queen Pearls, which looked like just an upgraded version of the ones dropped from the princes.

It was unfortunate that we had to miss out on the loot for the seven princes that went out of bounds, but I wasn't about to fight a mechanic for a set of balls. Instead, we looked around, soon finding their boss chest tucked away behind a distant pillar.

When I opened the chest, I received a chestplate covered in blue dragon scales, as well as two healing potions. Meanwhile, Diane received a greatsword and another Dragon Pearl.

After putting away our loot, I looked up at the boundless water above the pillars. Do you remember where the queen came from exactly?

Diane nodded her head, swimming forward while making sure to stay close to me to stay in my stealth field. Soon, she stopped, pointing at a blank area above herself. Confused, I looked around, activating my Detective Analysis to look for anything out of the ordinary.

My eyes landed on the dragon carvings coiled around each of the pillars, looking for any differences between them. After a moment, I blinked, typing out a message to Diane. Okay, that's just not fair as a clue.

Diane blinked, looking at the pillars herself before responding. Did you find something?

I nodded my head in exasperation. Yeah. The four pillars that form a square around this spot. The eyes of the dragon carving on them are closed, while the others are open.

Diane's shoulders slumped at that, but her disappointment was understandable. Given the size of the pillars, the eyes on the carvings were only as big as a fist. Furthermore, whether they were opened or closed, the only difference was the presence of a vertical slit carved in for the pupil. Such a small detail is supposed to show us where to go?

Before continuing, we returned back to the first region, examining each of the carvings again. Sure enough, there were only two that had their eyes closed. To test it, I sent a water clone between those two pillars. I watched as the translucent clone disappeared beyond an invisible boundary, just like when I saw Diane transfer between regions, and signalled to her that it was safe.

The two of us passed through the invisible wall, finding ourselves in a small chamber lit with torches. The sight of lit torches confused me for a moment, until I realized that this room was not filled with water like the rest of the dungeon was. "Is this meant to be a rest stop?" I mused aloud, finally able to speak.

Diane walked next to me, her draconic tail flicking. "It should be. You can't drink a potion or anything underwater, so they must have made the hidden chest rooms like this to give challengers the chance to recover before going out and continuing to fight."

At the back of the room was another chest, which we both naturally approached. Once again, the loot was… lackluster. We both got another Dragon Pearl, but Diane got some coins in addition, while I received a pair of heavy boots. "Part of me is thinking that we used up all of our loot luck in Ember Flight." I said with an awkward chuckle.

"Doesn't matter. We're here for the quest rewards and the experience. Everything else is secondary." Diane responded, taking a moment to breathe deeply. "You ready? Since the queen charged at us directly, that hidden path should be a shortcut to the boss room."

I hesitated for a moment, before shaking my head. "I think we need to prepare first. In the second region, there were ten minibosses. I think it's safe to assume we won't just be facing a single boss in the last fight."

Diane thought about it for a moment, and agreed with my assumption. "What do you think we should do, then? Are you going to set up another enchantment or something?"

"Yeah… though if I fail, I'll lose my Assassin's Storm." I said with a low groan. "Still, I can try to remake that one later if need be. It's strong, but it's mostly just good for clearing out weaker groups."

With that said, all that was left was to determine what type of enchantment I should create. To my surprise, I didn't receive a skill for modifying Glancing Steps-X to affect items I touched, but there was likely a condition that I was missing for that.

Either way, Diane and I sat down, working together to think of the combination of skills to use in this enchantment. In the end, we settled on a mix of three magic skills. In reality, it was just the same thundercloud that I used previously, but we were adding Poison Bomb into the mix to try to make both the cloud and the lightning poisonous.

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The result… both an immediate failure and painful eruption of poison all over my arm, which took a moment to clear. Again and again, I tried the enchantment, even having Diane draw a rune for poison on my arm to assist me. Still, each attempt ended in failure, with each failure causing me to gasp in pain as my arm was torn open from the inside, needing to heal it again and again.

Finally, on the tenth attempt, I felt the enchantment take hold just as I was bracing myself for another failure. Granted, the pain still came, poisonous arcs of green energy crackling out of my arm, but I simply sat down, enduring the pain with clenched teeth as I let my poison resistance work on clearing the poison out of my system. "Got it…"

Diane let out a sigh of relief when she heard that, nodding her head. "Let's not push our luck trying for another enchantment."

I couldn't have agreed more. This new enchantment, labeled Necrotic Storm, had taken too much to set up. If not for my healing skill, I'd have likely been waiting days to get it attached to my arm.

Once I was able to move without feeling like my arm was about to fall off, the two of us returned to the second region, swimming up the same passage that the Sea Dragon Queen had emerged from. This time, we were not led into a dry area, but rather through a vertical hallway with dragon carvings along a jade wall. Additionally, there was no chest in this passage that we could see.

However, I was not in the mood to go back and search the other pillars. Instead, I pushed forward, making sure that we were both appropriately hidden before emerging into a grand room, spanning several kilometers in every direction. At one end of the room was a giant, blue dragon, nearly twice as long as the Sea Dragon Queen, and with three other queens surrounding it.

Seeing the boss, which registered as level one hundred and thirty-five, I knew we made the right choice to prepare a new enchantment. Even just a queen was fast enough and strong enough to kill me in a single bite. If we did anything to expose our location in front of the king, there was only one way that it could end.

As I was looking around, planning where to position ourselves for the coming battle, Diane blinked, messaging me. My Swimming skill just evolved.

You have a Swimming skill? I asked in confusion, having not received such a skill myself. Diane looked at me strangely, typing back.

Don't you? I got mine back in Falconlot when you had me take the quest for Water Shaping. That's why I've been swimming around so much, to quickly level it up. It just evolved into Diving, which increases the amount of time I can hold my breath underwater.

I shook my head at her question, before realizing something. I hadn't actually been 'swimming' this entire time. I had just been walking underwater, using the extra weight of my Dragon Form as an anchor. So, the normal solution should be to train the Diving skill long enough to swim through the dungeon, resting to breathe in the safe zones. Diving itself might even evolve into a skill that lets you passively breathe underwater.

Although this was good to know, I wasn't going to go out of my way to train a skill like Swimming to the master level. There were too few cases where we would properly need it for me to invest the time necessary to evolve it.

As for Diane? She was already demonstrating that she was a naturally good swimmer, so her skill evolving like that made sense. I nodded my head, congratulating her on the skill evolution, before returning my attention to the matter at hand.

In the end, I settled on a position not too far from the boss monsters themselves. I needed to be close enough to accurately target them for the attack, after all. And if the poison wasn't enough to kill them, Diane would be able to finish the job with her pistol.

Thus, I walked over behind the nearest pillar with Diane swimming alongside me. Once in position, I projected a barrier around us and summoned the necrotic cloud. Unlike the black, rolling cloud that appeared in the previous region, this one was a sickly green and spread out like a poisonous fog.

Immediately, the Sea Dragon King lifted its head, looking at the cloud before it. Once the cloud was fully formed, a green lightning bolt shot out of it, directly at the boss monster. I was surprised that I was actually able to control the target this time, perhaps because I was no longer dealing with actual electricity.

Either way, the Sea Dragon King let out a furious roar as he was struck, a green patch appearing on his skin in place of a burn mark. He fired a beam of blue energy to disperse the cloud, but it immediately reformed and continued the assault.

His roars awoke the three queens lounging around it, who looked at the intruding cloud with a scornful expression. Like the king, they used their breath weapons, but that only delayed the cloud for a moment. Once it had reformed, I used it to attack all four boss monsters at the same time.

Seeing that attacking the cloud hadn't worked, the boss let out a rumbling growl. The water within the large room started to shift, moving in a rapid current. This didn't affect the queens, but it made the poisonous cloud disperse through the moving rapids. As for Diane and I, I anchored our projected barrier to the pillar we were next to in order to keep us in place.

The boss monster watched the green cloud dissipate again, its eyes scanning over the room as the waters began to calm. However, once they were still, the cloud immediately reformed, striking another bolt of poisonous energy at the dragon, this time striking it squarely on its snout.

Enraged, the dragon boss swam up, circling the room. My cloud wasn't huge, and it couldn't easily track moving targets. However, I could still target the three queens, repeatedly striking them with the poisonous energy while the boss avoided it.

My goal here was simple. All I had to do was put as much poison onto all four bosses as I could, and let that slowly kill them. As long as they weren't resistant to poison, it was only a matter of time. I just had to try to keep applying more poison whenever I could, that way they would die sooner. Preferably before I ran out of water breathing scrolls.

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