Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1179 - Taming the Old World - Adamantium Defense - 3

The volume of the horde was simply too massive. The sheer numbers of the swarm were finally grinding the defenders to dust.

The sprawling barricades of compressed rock and minerals Julius had pulled from the earth to patch the broken perimeter began to fracture. The problem wasn't the structural integrity of the stone... The problem was the fuel.

Julius had been working with less than 10% energy long ago.

Maintaining dominion over a battlefield this large required an astronomical volume of ether. His core felt like a hollow, burning cavity in his chest. His vision blurred at the edges, and a cold sweat plastered his hair to his forehead. He was actively directing the surviving Gold-rank Tamers, shouting coordinates and trying to manage the chaos, but he was constantly forced into an impossible triage.

Every second demanded a choice: did he spend his final drops of mana reinforcing a buckling wall that was already holding back hundreds of beasts, or did he push up some more stone to plug a fresh breach on the flank?

He simply did not have the reserves to do both.

Spiderweb fractures raced across his stone monoliths. At first, they were hairline cracks, barely visible through the smoke. Then, the fissures widened. The corruption relentlessly hammered the exact same stress points over and over again, displaying the cold patience of an ocean slowly eroding a cliff face.

The monsters felt no pain...

They did not tire...

With a deafening crack, an entire section of the right flank shattered.

Julius bit his lip until he tasted iron. He slammed his numb hands against the dirt, forcefully ripping a slab of bedrock from the deep crust to seal the gaping wound in the almost parallel walls.

The exertion finally broke him...

He collapsed to his knees, his lungs heaving, his fingers trembling uncontrollably against the soil.

Thirty seconds later, the left flank caved in.

Julius sealed that breach too, but the new wall was desperately thin, a fragile sheet of sandstone compared to the iron-dense barricades he had built an hour ago. All the color drained from the 3rd Qilin prince's face. He was scraping the absolute bottom of his soul.

Near, in the same parapet, Ren's childhood friends were fighting a losing war.

Taro, Min, Liu, and Li had dragged themselves back to the frontline despite their crushing exhaustion. They were completely incapable of sustaining their fusions anymore. Their towering fused beasts were gone, leaving them fighting as mere mortals armed with standard Golden beasts that pushed to the front with whatever scraps of aura they could scrape together.

Li's fingers hurt as he desperately tried to weave defensive thickets of ironwood across the crumbling gaps. But without even the base multipliers of being a double, and no fusion, his Gold-rank flora was almost useless. The heavy mutated beasts dismantled his barricades the moment they sprouted, snapping the trunks and melting the vines with stolen acid.

Everyone was at their absolute limit. They had been fighting, bleeding, and burning ether for hours without a single second of rest.

The containment finally broke.

They could no longer hold the original perimeter. The sheer weight of the corrupted sea pushed them backward.

So, they did the only thing left to do.

♢♢♢♢

They initiated a retreat…

It was a slow, agonizingly methodical fallback.

It was the kind of grueling, disciplined maneuver that only a battalion of hardened veterans could execute without it instantly devolving into a panicked slaughter.

Yang covered the rear. He took slow, booming steps backward, acting as a moving mountain to shield the retreating soldiers while the rest of the Vanguard ceded ground. They were being pushed directly toward the towering, reinforced doors of Yino Castle.

Victor abandoned his aerial advantage. He plummeted to the earth, touching down beside the exhausted Julius. The boldest commander channeled his remaining ether into the soil, forcefully extending Julius's crumbling rock walls along the sides to elongate the artificial funnel, preventing the swarm from wrapping around their exposed flanks.

Lin and Zhao abandoned their hunting patterns. They anchored the corners of the shrinking pocket, violently intercepting the faster mutants that tried to exploit the retreating formation.

They threw up new, makeshift barricades closer to the castle gates. They were deliberately sacrificing the ruined city center to drastically shorten the width of the line they had to defend.

Every single step backward brought them closer to the castle. Every new barrier they erected was significantly thinner and weaker than the last.

And the minutes Ren had begged for were still ticking away.

The fallback maneuver was brilliant, but it only bought them time. It didn't stop the clock. And that borrowed time was running out.

They retreated until the backs of the rearguard infantry almost bumped into the cold, dark metal of the still off adamantium monolith Ren had planted in the stone.

They were completely cornered against the castle gates. There was absolutely nowhere left to retreat.

They had failed.

The perimeter had collapsed before the tower could wake.

But Yang refused to let the narrative end in any 'heroic sacrifice'.

The Golden Treant let out a deafening, metallic roar. Yang didn't brace for the final impact. Instead, he made them lunge forward. They abandoned the defensive posture that had kept them alive for the past hour and threw their massive weight directly into the teeth of the swarm, violently knocking down his own defensive barriers in a suicidal surge.

"Do it!" Yang's voice boomed through the chaos, directed at the back.

He was ordering Zhao and Lin to execute the final contingency.

The two executioners didn't hesitate. They summoned their birds and moved with blinding speed, grabbing the exhausted commanders and the nearest prince or granny Tamers by their collars. Without a second glance at the crumbling line, they kicked off the broken flagstones and launched themselves away from the shattering parapets, leaping blindly into the castle.

They were not fleeing their posts. They had not abandoned the sister city to save their own skins.

They were simply placing their absolute, irrational faith in Ren.

It didn't matter that only five of the ten minutes he had originally requested were up.

Who cares!?

Ren had specifically asked for that time so he could physically return to the frontline, not to activate the tower.

They knew how he operated. They knew his terrifying, omniscient battlefield awareness. Ren had undoubtedly been tracking their fading auras through the bedrock. He knew exactly how much pressure they were absorbing, and he knew the exact second their physical endurance would snap. He always did. He always calculated the absolute maximum limit of his allies and arrived just before the thread broke.

As they fell backward through the defense, leaving the castle gates entirely exposed to the roaring horde, they braced for the miracle.

And at the absolute last possible millisecond, the dead monolith woke up.

Hundreds of feet beneath the cracked earth, the sprawling Diamond-rank root that Ren had dragged into the dark finally brushed against the ancient, thrumming current of the subterranean mana vein.

The connection snapped shut like a colossal electrical circuit.

An ocean of liquid ether, the hyper-dense, primordial energy that fueled the world's elemental rings, surged violently upward. It raced up the organic umbilical cord, flooding the intricate, Diamond-forged wooden heart hidden inside the adamantium chassis.

A blinding, sapphire light erupted from the seams of the metal.

The tower ignited.