Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1165 - Taming the Old World - Retaliation

The moment Ren's mana brushed against the corrupted pulse beneath the Wood ruin, Selthia felt him back.

She did not panic. She did not alter her flow or scramble to issue panicked commands through her network. Instead, she smoothly shifted into the next phase of her deployment, moving in absolute silence without giving off a single signal that might alert her strongest enemy.

Deducing Ren's immediate trajectory required almost zero effort on her part.

The corruption understood him intimately. Over the years, her network had breached his mind, meticulously studying his cognitive patterns, and observed him mapping and cataloging his behavioral ticks. Long before Ren even landed his first strike against the Fire Dragon, Selthia already knew the exact coordinates he was flying toward and precisely what he intended to do when he got there.

If Ren believed he had caught her off guard... well, he had, to a small degree.

Discovering her underground supply node this early had been an unexpected variable. The boy was simply too much of a hyper-fixated perfectionist. Couldn't he take a single afternoon off?

Could he not pause his endless, obsessive hunt for the ancient ruins for even a few days?

Did he lack any semblance of a personal life?

'Stop being such an insufferable workaholic!' her lingering thoughts snorted through the dark ether.

Yet, in her own cold way, Selthia had prepared for this exact contingency. Her grand strategy contained explicit failsafes specifically designed for the moment humanity's most dangerous Tamer inevitably stuck his nose into her workspace.

♢♢♢♢

In the grand hall of the castle, Zhao was already delivering his report, his voice hoarse from the grueling flight…

The intelligence landed instantly. Selphira and Julius immediately gripped the edges of the table, their faces darkening as the implications settled in.

Their first operational decision was swift.

The immediate priority was dispatching high-speed scouts, ideally a specialized dual-contract squad from Victor's aerial division or Victor himself, to verify the status of the two remaining common elemental guardians Zhao hadn't reached, as well as the Light Guardian.

Simultaneously, High Command needed to mobilize an elite strike force, prepared to intervene if any of the remaining dragons were currently under siege to stop it, while urgently bolstering the defensive line along Yino's border.

They executed the mobilization with terrifying speed.

Under Arturo's razor-sharp coordination, the war room transformed into a clockwork engine. In under thirty minutes from the moment Zhao's boots touched the courtyard, the strike team was assembled and marching toward the deployment gates. It was a level of military efficiency only possible because the royal castle was now governed by a single, unified faction holding ninety-five percent of the kingdom's total authority, and a leadership that had spent months quietly preparing for an apocalyptic emergency of this exact scale.

However, the strike force never made it to the wild territories.

They could not be deployed to save the remaining guardians.

The moment they reached the staging ground, the mission was forcefully rewritten into a desperate act of home defense.

Selthia had already launched her offensive.

It was no exploratory strike, nor was it a noisy feint designed to draw their attention. It was a massive, rising tide of biological horror. The newly formed elite team was shattered into fragmented contingents before they could even cross the perimeter, forced to scatter across Yino's border sectors to plug the gaping holes tearing through the frontline.

And then came the true horror.

Selphira, Victor, Julius, and Zhao realized simultaneously, each from their respective command posts on the Wall, that their expectation was still wrong. The volume of Gold and Platinum-tier mutants pouring out of the tree line defied every historical projection. The runic cannibalization cycle, left to run unchecked for months across Yino's vast underground grid, had manufactured an army of high-tier horrors beyond their worst nightmares.

Worst of all, the beasts were no longer restricted to physical combat.

They were casting elemental skills.

The fallen guardians had not simply been lost rings. Every single dragon the corruption swallowed acted as a key, granting the entire network access to that specific elemental tree. The mindless swarm, which for years had been reduced to throwing raw muscle and teeth against stone due to a lack of surplus mana, was now breathing streams of concentrated fire. The flames scorched through the massive roots supporting Ren's autonomous towers, unraveling the green mana that held the wood together.

Yino's Wall was not calibrated for this.

No amount of soldiers in the kingdom was.

Within minutes of the initial impact, multiple sections of Yino's defensive wall collapsed into rubble.

♢♢♢♢

Far to the west, inside the hollow heart of the Fire Mountain, the air was finally growing still.

Ren stood over the smoking remains of the battle, holding the glowing Core of the Fire Guardian in his palm.

Four other Guardian Cores already rested inside the castle's second vault, harvested from previous battlefields. High Command still hadn't cracked their true magical utility, yet the dense, shimmering energy bound within their crystalline structures behaved entirely differently from standard beast cores.

They possessed an ancient energy and stability that made them far too valuable to leave in the dirt, even if their ultimate purpose remained a mystery.

The physical carcasses of the guardians, unfortunately, could not be salvaged.

Preserving the massive bodies was a physical impossibility. Because these creatures were true dragons, even if they were merely infants in the scale of their species, their flesh was intimately bound to the world's ambient ether.

The moment the soul-core was severed, the hyper-dense muscles began to break down, evaporating into shimmering plumes of mana within a matter of days. Attempting to haul a three-hundred-ton corpse back to the city was pointless; by the time the transport arrived, nothing would remain but empty air.

Only the Core endured…

Ren barely felt the fatigue. Clearing the inner trials of the volcano, the minor elemental guardians and the ancient traps protecting the core of the system, had cost him virtually nothing after felling the primary dragon in under half an hour. What would have been maybe longer than a month-long, lethal campaign for an entire division of elite Tamers had become a mere administrative chore for him.

He looked down at his hand. Resting in his finger was the Fire Ring.

Positioned directly beside it was the Earth Ring.