Read Novel Full Chapter 1146 - Taming the Wall - Avowal - 2
Chapter 1146 - Taming the Wall - Avowal - 2
Garret just stood on the parapet, staring at the sheer, god-like devastation.
And suddenly, a tiny, painfully obvious puzzle piece in his brain, a piece that had been glaringly obvious to half the military brass and every single informed aristocrat in the kingdom, but entirely missed by a clueless, grizzled veteran, finally clicked into place.
The prodigy installer... The kid who treated classified castle blueprints like a casual reading assignment. The boy who dismantled a game of dice in two rounds.
'Red Pathfinder.'
Garret blinked slowly. He mouthed the words.
No.
'Ren Patinder.'
A short, rusty bark of laughter suddenly forced its way out of Garret's throat. It was a completely involuntary, breathless sound of absolute disbelief.
He stood on the edge of the Wall, laughing like a madman, watching the towering jade Hydra casually sweep the battlefield with a blinding, purifying light that ordinary men only ever whispered about in drunken stories regarding mythological dragons.
Of course.
'Of course I can't beat him at dice!'
'How in the absolute hell am I supposed to win a simple game against a kid who can casually summon the closest physical thing to the wrath of a god?'
Garret, a scarred veteran of the Great Wall, threw his head back and laughed again. This time, it was a genuine, deep belly laugh. Because out of every single terrifying, legendary thing that quiet boy could have possibly turned out to be, he was the biggest monster of them all. And Garret had spent the last several months sitting on a wooden crate, smugly teaching him, completely, blissfully ignorant of the living god sitting directly across from him.
He shook his head, wiping a tear of mirth from his scarred eye as the Hydra roared.
Good kid, anyway.
Genius prodigy, terrifying legend, or literal walking god of destruction. It didn't matter.
He was still a good kid.
♢♢♢♢
The battle ended, and a heavy silence fell over the parapets.
Liora dissolved her dual-fusion. The towering, ethereal fire serpents evaporated into the wind, leaving behind nothing but the stench of ozone and charred mutant flesh. She looked at Ren, her eyes lingering for a long, heavy second.
She clearly wanted to stay a while longer here with him...
But discipline ultimately outweighed desire. With an attack of this scale having just been smothered, neither of them possessed the tactical luxury to simply stand around where they pleased and leave other zones unprotected.
Mayo, entirely true to her nature, absolutely refused to let the moment pass without weaponizing it. Leaning casually against the massive feathered neck of her avian beast, she delivered a dry, precise quip into the wind about the "utter, agonizing tragedy of the star-crossed-tamers-lovers torn apart by military duty."
But even Mayo's legendary teasing lacked its usual punch. The adrenaline was still humming in everyone's blood, and the entire sector remained on a razor's edge.
A coordinated assault of this magnitude could easily be the opening salvo of a multi-pronged siege. Every veteran on the Wall kept one hand on their bows, eyes glued to the horizon, waiting for the frantic flash-messages warning that another sector was buckling under the pressure.
Luckily no sector buckled…
For the rest of the agonizingly long day, absolutely nothing happened.
Ren repeatedly tapped into his huge expanded perception, aggressively utilizing the sensory windows temporarily forced open by his now public three-way fusion. His mind swept the deeper rings for miles. He scoured the dirt for hidden biological signatures. He hunted for buried formations, maneuvering beasts, or the low, humming frequency of a secondary mutant swarm preparing to breach the surface.
He found nothing. The outside was a graveyard.
After an entire day of relentless, paranoid patrolling, the overarching consensus became undeniable. High Command officially dispatched the all-clear flares to every single sector along the perimeter. The crisis was officially over.
♢♢♢♢
Ren spent the tense daylight hours keeping one eye on the horizon and both hands deep in the mud, meticulously repairing the shattered autonomous tower.
But he absolutely did not rebuild it the same way.
This time, he didn't use Silver-tier wood and stone. He reached deep into his Wolverine's space and pulled out hyper-dense, incredibly strong materials harvested directly from the Gold 3 zone.
He had spent so many weeks flying across those dangerous outer rings, where the ambient ether was thick and the natural resources were vastly richer, that he had stockpiled enough premium lumber and crystal to completely overhaul several of these defensive structures.
He wove the new Gold 3 roots together, crafting a superior internal architecture.
Tactically speaking, even with this massive material upgrade, the monolith still couldn't single-handedly execute a Platinum-tier mutant. That level of automated destruction remained out of reach from the runes absorption input and the ambient's poor mana. Gold was already pushing it, and this needed a battery he would fill with his own power first.
But what it could do was survive the initial, catastrophic impact.
It now possessed the density to withstand the siege, stalling a Platinum beast long enough to grant the Wall the precious minutes required for elite reinforcements to arrive. And against the hyper-lethal, blitzkrieg tactics Selthia had just attempted, those few extra minutes were the difference between a secure border and a total massacre.
And as Ren molded the dense, golden-hued roots into place, a brilliant, terrifying idea snapped into his mind.
Camouflage.
What if he systematically planted these highly upgraded, Gold-tier monoliths across the most vulnerable sectors of the Great Wall, but deliberately disguised them? He could easily utilize his crystal-molding techniques to wrap them in a cheap, superficial exterior layer of Silver-tier wood and stone. From the outside, they would look absolutely identical to the standard, fragile towers.
If Selthia ever attempted to probe the perimeter again to locate humanity's weak points, she would be completely blind. She would have absolutely no easy way of calculating which towers would easily snap under a Gold mutant's weight, and which towers would violently shatter her Platinum beasts' teeth upon impact. The asymmetrical warfare of information would violently swing back in Ren's favor.