Read Novel Full Chapter 1144 - Taming the Wall - Unease
Chapter 1144 - Taming the Wall - Unease
Ren crashed into the Southwest sector like a falling meteor.
By the time his boots hit the ground, Liora had already wrestled the chaotic situation into a stalemate. It was a spectacular display of control.
Her dual-contract fusion was great at this kind of entanglement. She was currently commanding two distinct, towering serpent avatars, each projecting a phantom purplish searing aura hovering near the Platinum 2 rank power.
In a sheer contest of brute force, she possessed more than enough raw power to completely, physically dismantle Selthia's Platinum horror, even with the mutant's grotesque, hyper-accelerated regeneration.
But the massive Platinum beast wasn't the actual problem. It was the swarm.
Dozens of Gold-rank mutants flooded the perimeter, acting as a frenzied, suicidal meat shield. They bit, clawed, and threw their heavy bodies into the fray, deliberately saturating the battlefield with minor, lethal threats. They were actively preventing Liora from concentrating her overwhelming firepower on the primary target.
In a prolonged, grinding battle of attrition, Liora would have eventually won regardless.
But "eventually" was the exact tactical nightmare Ren was trying to avoid…
Given enough time and enough localized pressure from the Gold swarm, the Platinum beast would inevitably find a momentary window to retreat. Selthia would seamlessly pull her most valuable asset back into the shadows. It was infinitely better for Ren to arrive and violently annihilate the entire board at once, stripping the Witch of any opportunity to salvage her center piece.
And that was exactly what he did.
♢♢♢♢
Ren's fusion did not operate on the same mathematical principles as Liora's.
He didn't divide his power into two separate multipliers. He forcefully crammed a four-times multiplier into a single, localized entity.
The three-way beast fusion, three distinct, multi-elemental titans violently returning their combined, swirling ether into his human system, pushed his biological output slightly beyond the mythical Diamond rank. With that sheer firepower, a level of destructive energy absolutely no other tamer in the present world possessed, exterminating the mutant swarm was very simple.
It didn't matter how robust their compartmentalized biology was. It didn't matter that the mutants possessed a terrifying, plague-like vitality explicitly designed to survive even dismemberment.
The colossal, white-jade Hydra reared its three massive heads. The air around it warped, superheated by the sheer density of its aura. It unleashed its signature, devastating beams of blinding light.
But this time, the concentrated light was fused with incinerating fire mana.
The dual-elemental beams completely ignored the dense, mutated armor of the Gold beasts. The lasers sliced cleanly through the monsters, executing flawless sagittal bisections.
The beasts were violently split in half straight down the middle, but they didn't even have the chance to bleed. The exact millisecond the light parted their flesh, the purifying fire violently ignited. The flames consumed the bifurcated halves from the inside out, instantly incinerating the half structures before their grotesque regeneration could even attempt to stitch any meat back together.
The Hydra's three heads didn't fire blindly. They operated with the precision of independent targeting turrets. Each head seamlessly tracked its own unique targets, firing in completely different trajectories simultaneously. The extermination that a single head would have been forced to execute in a linear sequence, the three heads executed in a devastatingly fast parallel.
After a blistering, rapid-fire volley of around fifteen synchronized discharges from each head, the battlefield fell eerily silent.
Not a single Gold-rank enemy remained standing.
Only one target was left.
The Platinum beast, which Liora was still fiercely restraining with her burning Bashes coiled thickly around its massive body, suddenly found itself entirely alone. Before it could even register that its vanguard was gone, the three heads of the Hydra swiveled, locked onto its center of mass, and fired simultaneously.
Three blinding beams converged directly on its head.
The colossal monster was consumed exactly like the lesser beasts, managing to unleash one final, agonizing shriek before the purifying fire entirely hollowed it out, leaving nothing but drifting ash.
♢♢♢♢
Ren landed softly next to Liora, the residual heat of the battlefield washing over him.
The situation hadn't spiraled out of control. As far as he was concerned, the immediate danger had entirely passed. The other eight sectors of the Great Wall all had dual-contract Tamers assigned to them.
Every single one of their elite squads was more than capable of holding the line against Platinum beasts without suffering losses. Selthia's strategy, despite being a decently executed, 'unexpected' feint, hadn't actually managed to break the wall. Unless she was willing to blindly throw significantly more meat into the grinder, the Wall remained absolute.
But something deep in the back of Ren's mind aggressively refused to click into place.
He had fully expected his specific sector to face a vastly bigger threat. He hadn't expected only one standard, run-of-the-mill Platinum beast. He had anticipated something more, at least two, or something specifically calibrated to rival his own monstrous power, especially considering the massive amount of meticulous planning Selthia had invested in this operation.
Ren knew for a fact that Selthia possessed significantly more powerful horrors hidden in her deep vaults. The very first ruin they had raided together had housed two massive guardians hovering near the Platinum rank, alongside something even darker and stronger beneath them.
And if the Yino ruins were the first she had gotten, as her free time and the downloaded map heavily implied, then she mathematically should harbor even older, significantly more creatures.
With all that world-ending potential sitting at her fingertips... why send only one 'common' Platinum?
It was glaringly obvious. Selthia was still testing the waters with him.
Despite losing the war of information today, despite being the one flawlessly lured into a trap of her own making, in the grand, global scheme of the board, she actually hadn't risked that much. And that was precisely the realization that left a bitter, metallic taste in Ren's mouth. She had managed to avoid committing anything she actually cared much about losing.
'Though,' Ren thought, forcing a pragmatic consolation, 'burning over forty Gold mutants and a Platinum definitely had to sting at least a little…'
Somewhere far away in the suffocating dark, the Witch of the Wastes was undoubtedly cursing through her teeth, calculating exactly how much biological fuel and how many thousands of Silver mutants it would cost her network to eventually replenish the elite strike force she had just lost in a single afternoon.
Ren permitted himself a dark, fleeting half-smile at the thought.
But the smile didn't reach his eyes, and it didn't last.
Because simmering just beneath the satisfaction was a heavy, sinking dread. The unshakable sensation that there was a massive, invisible gear turning just beneath the surface of this attack.
Selthia was deliberately withholding the vast majority of her true military power. So... where was it?
Was she hoarding her absolute strongest assets, desperately cannibalizing them in the dark to synthetically forge Diamond-tier horrors?
Or was she actively deploying that catastrophic power on an entirely different, hidden front, utilizing this noisy assault purely to drag humanity's attention exactly where she wanted it?
Ren stared out at the jagged, bleeding horizon, looking past the stone of the Wall, deep into the sprawling, concentric rings of the wasteland where Selthia was quietly moving her pieces in the shadows. He felt a profound, chilling certainty that today's victory, as flawless and clean as it had been, was merely a microscopic skirmish on a vastly larger chessboard, a board whose true, terrifying borders he still couldn't even see.
The adrenaline began to recede. Ren severed the three-way fusion.
The physical exhaustion immediately crashed into him, but it was noticeably lighter than his previous attempts. His system was adapting.
Beside him, Liora dissolved her fiery avatars too. She turned to look at him, her sharp eyes instantly reading the deep, distracted tension carved into his face. She knew the battle was over, but she could clearly see his mind was already miles away.
"What is it?" she asked softly.
"I don't know yet," Ren replied, his eyes never leaving the dark horizon. "But I am going to find out."
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