Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1172 - Taming the Old World - Endurance - 2

Standing behind the barricades, Selphira and Julius intercepted the messenger birds dropping from the smoke-filled sky.

One after another, the tiny, hastily scrawled notes reported deep-ground perimeters on the verge of collapse. Sectors crying out for extra aid that simply did not exist.

The elites had their hands full just keeping their soldiers alive.

The sheer pressure of the frontline demanded they invest all their fusion's time right here and now. They weren't using their apocalyptic auras to sweep the field in a glorious display of power; they were using them just to keep from being trampled by the ever-growing vanguard of Platinum mutants spearheading the charge.

Without the exponential stat multipliers their fusions provided, even they would have been ground to dust under the sheer numbers of the swarm.

Selphira raised her hands, countering a beast that spat a roaring cyclone of wind and fire. She instantly summoned a torrential wave of water mana to smother the flames. A second mutant charged through the steam, retaliating with a barrage of hardened wood roots to absorb her attack and push its own. She didn't flinch, seamlessly shifting her elemental output back to razor-sharp wind on the fly to shred the incoming stakes.

A few yards away, Julius was fighting a very different, far more disturbing battle.

He was sweating heavily. His control over the earth, a domain where he was usually an absolute, undisputed king, felt sluggish. It wasn't clean… There was a strange, swarm of invisible small frictions grinding against his spells, a deliberate resistance in the bedrock that defied his power.

Just as the frustration began to mount, Taro and the retreating squad finally reached the safety of their line. They were panting, their uniforms torn and coated in ash, but they were alive.

Leaning heavily against a stone pillar, Taro confirmed exactly what the Qilin prince had begun to suspect.

"The earth," Taro gasped, struggling to catch his breath. "The mutants are controlling it too, right? They weaponized the dirt against my defenses. I poured my mana into reinforcing the stone, and they... they dismantled it from the inside. They worked together in massive clusters, operating like one mind. It was like fighting a dozen master architects at once."

Julius tightened his jaw, his eyes narrowing at the shifting mud below. That perfectly explained the interference.

But that wasn't the only piece of terrifying intelligence the survivors brought back.

"Grandma Selphira! Stop using water!" Min yelled. He jogged up behind Taro, looking completely drained but still possessing just enough energy to complain loudly. "Switch to ice! Those overgrown pests started using wood mana to absorb the water strikes. At the beginning of the siege, they didn't even try to block it. Then, out of nowhere... snap! Every drop of water I threw at them got instantly slurped up by those freaky legs like they were giant tree roots!"

Selphira froze.

She was a veteran who had spent centuries reading the subtle, shifting currents of a battlefield.

'You don't take big free losses just to save a plain hidden card like wood element…'

Her mind raced, snatching the scattered pieces of data provided by Julius, Taro, Min, and the bloodstained notes delivered by the birds.

Fire. Wind. Earth. Water. Wood… All of them.

The complete picture snapped together in her head and turned her blood to ice.

The mutants were wielding all five base elements just now.

Relying on the razor-sharp instincts honed over a lifetime of war, Selphira made the deductive leap that no one else on the field had managed to grasp yet.

If the swarm was successfully utilizing wood mana JUST NOW, but had failed to do so at the very start of Min's skirmish, it meant only one thing… They had just acquired the element.

Right now.

Right in the middle of this siege.

Which meant that somewhere in the deep wastes of Yino, Selthia's hunting party had JUST butchered the Wood Dragon. The fifth and final strike on her common elemental hit list.

Only Light and Darkness remained.

What Selphira couldn't possibly know, what absolutely no one breathing the ash of this battlefield knew, was that at this exact second, on the opposite end of the world, Ren had just shattered the Fire Dragon in record time. He was currently flying home with its core resting in his shadow space.

The board was perfectly tied. The ten common elemental dragons governing the world, five on each side of the Fissure, were all dead.

Only the four sovereign guardians of Light and Darkness still stood.

But Selphira lacked that omniscient comfort… Standing in the mud, she felt utterly overwhelmed. She only knew what she could see, and the reality unfolding before her eyes was nothing short of a cataclysm.

"If that is truly the case," Selphira murmured. Her voice dropped into the low, unforgiving register she reserved for absolute disasters. "We are going to lose..."

Julius shot her a sharp look.

"If Selthia was actively attacking the Wood Dragon while besieging us," the veteran commander continued, her eyes scanning the endless sea of teeth, "then she has at least a second supply line currently running. A completely fresh source of mutated beasts. And those reinforcements are going to march straight here the second they finish gorging themselves on the dragon's corpse."

She tipped her chin toward the roaring frontline.

"They are already pushing us to the brink using their new chance at five elements. When that second army arrives... I don't think calculating our survival time even matters anymore. Our fusions will burn out long before then."

She had voiced the grim, unspoken truth of their predicament without sugarcoating a single syllable.

To survive this, their mana reserves needed to sustain a high-tier fusion for far longer than thirty minutes. Even if they managed that miracle, they still needed enough surplus energy in the tank to fight the second wave. Operating in a state that devoured stamina by the second, neither of those requirements was mathematically possible.

They were running dry. And the enemy hadn't even played its full hand.

As if the battlefield had politely waited for her to finish her grim deduction, the air pressure shifted. The encroaching horde grew denser.

Falling back wasn't an option anymore... They were defending their own doorstep now. The shrunken perimeter rested with the military academies and the royal castle directly at their backs. There was not a single inch of ground left to trade.

♢♢♢♢

Forty grueling minutes later, Selphira's nightmare officially materialized.

The flow of mutants thickened. A fresh, suffocating density washed over the ranks, carrying a kinetic momentum that threatened to snap their defensive line in half. Selthia's second supply line had arrived, fresh from the slaughter of the Wood Mountain.

The tactical situation instantly degraded from precarious to fatal. Calling for backup was a joke; every other sector was screaming for their own salvation. There were no reserves... Every man, woman, and prodigy in the Vanguard was currently bleeding for their own specific patch of stone.

And Ren's gifted Tamer fusion was not infinite.

Selphira felt the familiar, hollow ache spreading through her core. Julius's hands trembled as the earth slowly stopped answering his calls. High above the chaos, Zhao was hovering on fumes, desperately hoarding the last two minutes of his maximum output for the inevitable final stand.

All three of the kingdom's greatest defenders were running empty. And the tide showed absolutely no signs of stopping.

Another minute bled away. Then another.

Their cores sputtered.

The frontline bowed inward, the stone cracking under the sheer, accumulated weight of corruption.

And then, the sky tore open.

A blinding pillar of interwoven lightning and absolute zero ice crashed directly into the heart of the vanguard.

It wasn't a localized strike designed to hold a perimeter. It was a sprawling, apocalyptic detonation that physically launched the hyper-scaled Platinum beasts backward, tearing a massive, frozen crater through the center of the horde despite their overwhelming numbers.

Ren had arrived.