Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1162 - Taming the Old World - Diamond Beasts - IIl

Ren turned back toward the west.

He faced the blazing expanse of the Fire ring. Deep within that scorching territory, a guardian slept on the diamond border, entirely unaware that two separate forces were currently marching to claim its life.

One intended to swallow it in corruption. The other intended to challenge it cleanly.

Without looking back at the city, Ren surged forward.

Alone.

♢♢♢♢ Chapter 1025 - 1026 ♢♢♢♢

The clash of energies above the volcanic crater had been tearing the sky into two for several moments.

On one side, the three-headed Hydra held its ground. On the other, the Fire Dragon roared a torrent of pure, incinerating heat.

A blinding column of cold light ground against a roaring torrent of flames, the impact creating a halo of destructive static in the air. The clash deafened everything for miles, raining freezing magma and boiling frost onto the blackened earth. To anyone watching, the outcome would have defied logic. The fire was pouring from a throat the size of a mountain, yet somehow, the giant was losing.

The exact collision point where heat and cold annihilated each other was creeping upward. Centimeter by centimeter, the Hydra's cold light was eating the flames, pushing the deadlock higher into the ash clouds.

Ren was winning. It was a slow, grueling advance, but it was real.

But the second phase needed to start right now.

Ren hadn't come all this way just to watch his beast win a tug-of-war with a mere twenty percent power advantage. Not in a battle against the clock.

The defender had the ultimate home-field privilege here, drawing endless mana from a literal Diamond-tier mana volcano. A stalemate was perfectly sustainable for the dragon. It was absolutely not sustainable for him. By default, a war of attrition meant Ren's defeat, regardless of who won the initial push, if he ran out of stamina first...

Besides, time was a luxury he couldn't afford. Every passing minute gave Selthia a wider window to notice the disturbance. If the Witch realized what was happening here, she would undoubtedly pull a countermeasure out of the dark to make him suffer.

Ren reached into the cool, silent void of his shadow space.

He emptied his reserves.

One ring and five elemental crystals materialized in the blistering air. Three of those crystals were exact replicas of his own cores, adaptable wildcards pulsing with all available energy combinations, ready to shift into whatever configuration the battlefield demanded. The gems levitated around him, spinning in a tight, glowing orbit.

As they circled him, Ren felt the familiar feedback loop of the fusion rushing into his veins. The recoil from the Hydra's massive output charged his own human body, feeding him raw power.

But looking up at the behemoth, the problem was the sheer disparity in scale…

Compared to the beast looming above him, Ren was just an ant. He was an ant possessing Diamond-rank penetration, sure, but an ant nonetheless. Maybe extremely useful in the exact right scenario at the exact spot. But utterly worthless as a strategy to wear down a creature with prodigious Diamond-level regeneration. Trying to bleed and drop a bull elephant by poking it with needles would take weeks.

Fortunately, Ren had spent years figuring out how to make himself relevant against giants.

He glanced up at the colliding beams. The Hydra's light beam had chewed through two-thirds of the distance.

Ren nodded.

He dropped into a low crouch, channeling a staggering amount of ether down his spine and into his legs.

A split second later, the ground cratered beneath his boots. He launched himself forward in an explosion of wind and displaced rock, aiming straight for the foothills at the dragon's base. He became a blur cutting through the whistling, superheated air, his orbit of crystals trailing behind him like a comet's tail.

Mid-flight, he engaged his mana vision to dissect his enemy. What he saw made him blink in surprise.

The dragon was mostly internal gas. It lacked the dense, solid mass its silhouette suggested.

That explained why it was one of the largest guardians in existence. A creature weighing between three and five hundred tons was undeniably huge, but it shouldn't look this imposing. The beast was literally inflating itself, its internal sacs taking up three to four times the physical volume its actual biomass justified.

It was a biological bluff. An evolutionary trick to appear unconquerable, far more terrifying than it actually was, even though it remained perfectly capable of incinerating a city...

Ren shoved the biological trivia aside and focused.

He landed hard. The impact sent a web of fractures racing through the volcanic stone.

Instantly, he cast his senses downward, attempting to seize control of the earth. The soil here was saturated with compressed minerals and hyper-dense mana-rich crystals. Normally, manipulating ground this heavily mana permeated would be slow and hard even for him. It would be like trying to bend steel girders with his bare fingers. Matter operating at Diamond density simply did not answer to just anyone.

But Ren wasn't operating at his baseline.

He had the three-way fusion pumping through his system. He had five orbiting crystals radiating elemental power. And he had his Earth ring, which he was currently flooding with his own mana to push its carved runes until they glowed white-hot.

Three separate systems stacked on top of one another, all pushing in the exact same direction.

He focused and the foundation of the mountain yielded.

Behind Ren, a deep tremor shook the earth. The bedrock tore open with a deafening crack, tearing a jagged fissure toward the mountain as bright magma bled into the open air like a bleeding wound.

Ren grit his teeth, his eyes burning with focus, and thrust both hands upward.

A colossal spike of Diamond-density rock, packed with compressed minerals and earth mana, erupted from the fault line. It shot skyward at breakneck speed, carrying the combined, explosive force of both earth and fire.

The massive stone pillar stalagmite slammed directly into the dragon's swelling, toad-like gullet.

The impact sounded like a dull explosion.

The torrent of fire stuttered.

Just as the Hydra's cold light was about to claim the final stretch of the sky, the dragon's throat buckled inward. Its breath was cut off completely by an attack it never saw coming. But the internal energy was already accumulating again. The dragon's massive neck swelled as its own unreleased fire trapped itself inside the gas sacs, building catastrophic pressure in a fraction of a second.

And fraction of a second later, the Hydra's beam reached that exact spot and pierced the softer throat scales.

The pressurized, uncontrolled energy trapped inside the beast's throat detonated on impact.