Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1171 - Taming the Old World - Endurance

High Command hadn't brought a sprawling army.

When the reinforcements finally crashed into the broken Yino perimeter, it was just a handful of the absolute strongest fighters the kingdom possessed. It was the bare minimum required to plug this leak after sending extra people to the boys other 2 places lacking strong double fusers. Bringing anyone else would have fatally compromised the three-dimensional defensive grid protecting the rest of the city.

It was a cruel reality... Every single elite Tamer pulled from the inner perimeter or the Yano borders would have left a gaping hole in humanity's shield. And leaving holes for this seemingly endless tide of corrupted mutants was not just a matter of risking empty territory.

It would be infinitely worse than that.

A breach would mean the corrupted swarm would spill into populated zones. They would reach the residential districts packed with defenseless civilians, terrified academy recruits, and families of old members that hadn't breached the Silver rank. These people possessed absolutely no means to defend themselves against horrors that were currently digesting genuine, Diamond-tier dragons.

And in this new phase of the war, every single civilian that fell wasn't just a tragic casualty. They were high-octane fuel.

Human systems were rich, refined packets of ether for corruption's net. Letting the weak die meant actively feeding Selthia's runic cannibalization cycle. It provided fresh meat for her meat grinder, effortlessly inflating an army that was already scaling completely out of control.

To fail the weak was to literally arm the enemy.

So, the reinforcements were painfully sparse. They had no choice but to be enough.

♢♢♢♢

Julius stepped up to the shattered frontline. He was the absolute anchor of this desperate operation.

His role wasn't to slaughter the vanguard. His first role was to put the wall back together.

The Qilin prince possessed an unparalleled mastery over rock and soil, the exact same terrifying geological control that made him practically untouchable in the subterranean trenches. That precise affinity was exactly what the bleeding Great Wall desperately required.

Julius didn't hesitate. He fused, dropped to one knee and slammed both palms flat against the trembling dirt.

The earth responded immediately. A deep, resonant groan echoed through the bedrock as Julius reached out with his mana, grabbing the severed edges of the broken wall miles apart. He began to forcefully knit the perimeter back together. He pulled massive slabs of stone up from the deep crust, sealing the breaches where the corruption had chewed through the reinforced stone and ironwood.

He didn't try to reclaim the original border. He angled the new walls inward to his place, deliberately shrinking the overall size of the defensive circle and making a funnel.

Ceding ground was a perfectly acceptable tactical trade here to make defending this push for the castle easier.

Taking a step back and handing Selthia a few miles of already abandoned, empty land was not a defeat, provided they didn't surrender the assets that actually mattered.

The military academies and the Royal Castle.

Those specific coordinates were too valuable.

Under Julius's command, the stone funnel sealed shut. For the very first time since the initial wave broke the treeline, the bleeding stopped. The frontline began to stabilize.

Yet, looking down from his newly forged ramparts, Julius noticed something chilling.

Selthia wasn't trying to spread her forces to find weak points in his new wall. She was completely, obsessively focused on pushing straight through the center no matter what.

It wasn't a vague tactical suspicion. The physical pattern of the horde made it glaringly obvious. The rotting sea concentrated all of its kinetic force inward, entirely ignoring the easier flanks. It marched down the exact same central avenue, completely indifferent to how many elite dual-contract Tamers stood at the end of the narrow way, grinding itself to dust just to gain a few feet of ground toward Yino's Castle.

She attacked with the exact same blind, magnetic insistence that had defined her every single siege in the sister cities.

It was a recurring, undeniable pattern. Ren and the Vanguard had noticed it before. Even when Orion, during his own catastrophic rebellion, she had tried to force her way into that specific architecture.

There was something inside the castle's vault she insisted on trying to get despite every attempt having failed. Something tethered to those specific geographical coordinates that the corruption inherently craved. The swarm wasn't throwing millions of lives away because the castle held political value to humans. They were likely doing it because the castle itself contained a prize Selthia was desperate to crack open.

But unraveling that ancient mystery was a problem for tomorrow.

Right now, they had to survive the day.

With Selphira stepping up to the newly forged barricade, bathing the battlefield in an annihilating light, with Julius holding the massive plates together by sheer willpower, and with Zhao securing the airspace from above, the push finally hit a brick wall.

These three were among the absolute elite. They were the rare few who could stare down a swarm of Platinum-tier mutants and hold their ground. Between Julius's flawless architectural traps and Selphira's devastating raw power output, the tide finally met a shore it could not wash away.

But they still couldn't win... Not with these numbers.

The corruption just kept coming. It was an inexhaustible, mindless ocean of teeth and legs. Simply containing the flood consumed every single ounce of stamina the defenders possessed.

But they could hold.

They could grit their teeth, bleed into the stone, and hold the line just long enough.

Because somewhere high above the clouds, tearing across the concentric rings, Ren was coming. The heavy, ancient weight of two new elemental rings rested in his hand and a new core in his shadow space. The cold, burning realization that he was late fueled his flight.

The Glorious General was on his way home.

♢♢♢♢

The battlefield finally stabilized, shifting from a chaotic slaughter into a grueling, grinding tug-of-war.

The veterans of the Vanguard were not enemies that broke easily under pressure. With Selphira's radiant destruction bathing the frontline, Julius manually stitching the broken earth together, and Zhao commanding the skies to ferry the exhausted commanders to safety, the corrupted tide finally slammed into a wall that refused to budge.

For a breathless stretch of time, it actually looked like the containment strategy would hold.

But the cracks quickly began to show elsewhere.

Selthia had adapted… She shifted her composition, deploying only mid-tier Gold mutants specifically engineered to dismantle Ren's remaining autonomous towers. These beasts marched forward infused with fire mana, incinerating the ironwood roots. Behind them came endless, sprawling waves of Silver-tier horrors that didn't just push the surface, but burrowed deep into the subterranean crust across the entire circumference of the sister cities.

This was no longer a single, concentrated front. It was a suffocating, omnidirectional, simultaneous stranglehold applied to every single inch of the perimeter.

It was a cold strategy designed to paralyze High Commanders.

Nobody could move. Not a single commander could abandon their post to reinforce a struggling neighbor without instantly surrendering their own sector to the horde.