Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1173 - Taming the Old World - Eternal Hope

The blast hit the earth before Ren's boots ever touched the dirt.

When that interwoven beam of lightning and absolute zero struck the vanguard of the horde, several Platinum-tier mutants simply ceased to exist.

They weren't thrown backward by the impact and they also weren't wounded... They were cleanly, instantly bisected.

The residual energy of the strike scorched a massive horizontal plane through the battlefield, leaving behind a smoking mess where an impenetrable wall of horrors had stood just a heartbeat ago.

That single, impossible strike echoed across the entire defensive line.

For the very first time since the siege began, the rotting tide physically recoiled.

The entire defensive line felt the shift in atmospheric pressure. The tamers who were barely holding, the four exhausted commanders, the Vanguard elites bleeding out their final reserves, every single one of them watched that divine light shatter the frontline.

Every single survivor watched that divine light shatter the impossible odds. And in that exact second, something fragile and dangerous ignited in their chests.

Hope.

It was the intoxicating brand of hope that only blooms when someone arrives on a hopeless battlefield and proves, with a single devastating strike, that the board can still be flipped.

Ren was here.

♢♢♢♢

Selphira looked up, her breath catching in her throat as she watched him descend wreathed in an aura of pure, blinding light and glacial cold.

For her, the sheer density of his accumulated power elevated the young man to the realm of almost a nascent demigod, casting a shadow that mirrored the ancient, untouchable majesty of King Dragarion himself.

Yet, in that fleeting microsecond of chaos, surrounded by the stench of ozone and death, the veteran commander's mind drifted to an entirely unexpected place.

She thought of herself…

She thought of her own mortality.

Selphira had walked this earth for four hundred years. For the vast majority of those centuries, nearly three hundred of them, her face had remained a perfect, unchanging mask of youth untouched by time. One hundred years later and only in the last few decades had the subtle, cruel lines of age finally begun to creep more visibly across her skin, etching history into a face that had been perfectly smooth for generations.

But she had recently bought some of that time back.

Her lifespan was nowhere near its limit. Completing the not long at all for her thousand-day method had forcefully reversed some of the biological damage, smoothing a face that was nearing fifty back into the sharp elegance of her early forties.

It was just one more minor miracle gifted by Ren, a casual restoration of stolen time and faded beauty.

And with the theoretical promise of the ten-thousand-day method hovering in the future, her life expectancy had shattered its previous ceiling.

Yet, possessing this newly restored youth had forced Selphira to confront a deeply unsettling truth about her own psychology.

She was terrified of dying.

She feared the end significantly more now than she had in even recent years. Logically, one might expect a seasoned warrior who had seen centuries of bloodshed to grow numb to the abyss. The reality for her was the exact opposite… Perhaps the longer a mind existed, the more accustomed it grew to the rhythm of breathing.

The years seemed to slip through her fingers faster now, making the finality of death heavier.

Did the ancient, primordial entities of the world like that corrupted dragon maybe chase power or immortality for this exact reason? Did living longer simply mean accumulating more things or memories you were terrified to lose?

It wasn't a new cowardice… Selphira still hurled herself into the vanguard without a second thought, risking her neck the exact second her city demanded it. In a strange, twisted way, dancing on that razor's edge was the only thing that made her feel truly alive, the proximity of death sharpening the value of every drawn breath.

But the fear was still undeniable. It loomed large in the back of her mind, especially times like today, magnified by this desperate siege.

And then she looked at Ren.

The boy falling from the sky, crowned in starlight, was fundamentally destined to outlive her. She had absolutely no doubts about that. Whatever biological pinnacle Ren eventually reached at the end of his monstrous cultivation path, he would easily survive two or three times her current lifespan.

If he managed to cross the final threshold and achieve some spiraling cellular regeneration to true immortality, a mere three hundred years would barely serve as a prologue to his reign.

A king possessing that kind of unprecedented potential, a leader capable of guaranteeing centuries of human prosperity, had no business bleeding in the mud of a desperate frontline. Every high-tier monster he traded blows with was a direct threat to a future only he could build.

He shouldn't be here.

But he was here, because humanity simply had no other choice.

Standing in the parapet, Selphira made a silent, ironclad vow. She didn't speak it aloud… She didn't need to.

If it lay within her power, she would do absolutely everything to ensure he walked off this battlefield. She would feed every ounce of her remaining strength to his cause. And if the moment demanded it, she would trade her life for his without a fraction of hesitation.

It was a perfect exchange for her... Her remaining centuries for his eternity.

The fleeting moment of reflection ended.

♢♢♢♢

The lightning strike, no matter how powerful its execution, had not broken the swarm's spirit.

The mutants did not comprehend fear. They possessed no concept of a tactical retreat. Where the Platinum vanguard had been erased, the high-tier Golds marching directly behind them surged forward. They threw themselves upon the bisected corpses of their superiors, their jaws snapping with the insatiable voracity of the runic cycle.

The sound of teeth scraping against bone and tearing through thick muscle echoed.

They aggressively absorbed the hyper-dense energy pooling in the spilled blood.

Every single death merely fed the row behind it. The swarm had lost a single volley of its strongest pieces, but the tide kept coming, mindlessly cannibalizing its own losses to patch the holes in the line.

Ren touched down in the center of the shattered perimeter, anchoring the line beside Selphira and Julius.

Up close, the two veterans instantly read the reality of the situation.

Ren could fight… He still possessed the raw output to sustain his fusion. But this was not the fresh, well-rested prodigy who had marched out of the city gates that morning.

His breathing was shallow and his aura flickered at the edges.