Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1180 - Taming the Old World - Adamantium Defense - 4

It was not a soft, ambient hum.

It was not the gentle, pulsing glow that characterized Ren's Silver-tier autonomous defenses out on the plains.

It was an enormous discharge.

The retreating frontline of Tamers, having been pushed until they were only a few feet behind the dormant monolith, had barely crossed into the shadowed 'safety' of the castle gates when the weapon finally answered.

The adamantium chassis did not just light up; it erupted in a blinding, sapphire flare of deep mana. The concealed Diamond-rank roots hidden deep within the metallic shell burst from the subterranean dirt surrounding the structure.

They did not sprout slowly... Dozens of hyper-compressed wooden arms reinforced to mirror the exact terrifying output of Ren's triple-fusion, shot outward like a volley of high-caliber artillery.

They slammed into the vanguard of the Platinum horde with the accumulated, roaring force of a construct that had been greedily drinking from a primordial mana vein.

It was an absolute massacre.

The roots pierced through the hyper-scaled Platinum mutants with the relaxed yet swift ease of steel needles in the hands of an experienced seamstress passing through thin cloth. The tips of the wooden tendrils concentrated their Diamond-tier density into microscopic, razor-sharp points that rendered the beasts' biological armor completely irrelevant.

One Platinum mutant fell. Then two. Then five, ten, a dozen, all impaled, lifted off the blood-soaked cobblestones, and ripped apart in a matter of seconds.

And it began absorbing their blood. Changing the corrupted mana into nourishment.

The immense, unholy energy radiating from the corrupted beasts finally served a purpose that did not involve Selthia's runic cannibalization cycle. The tower was the one feeding now.

As the roots tore the monsters to shreds, the monolithic structure actively absorbed their spilled ether and big parts of their raw biomass. The wooden tendrils visibly thickened and darkened, multiplying and extending further into the horde, fueled by the very enemies they were slaughtering.

Where a standard Silver-tier tower would take grueling minutes of sustained pressure just to whittle down a single Gold-rank beast, this mechanical predator was harvesting Platinums by the half dozen. The boundless energy surging from the subterranean vein replenished the tower's reserves vastly faster than it could expend them.

The massive surplus of absorbed energy was immediately put to defensive use. The tower's umbilical cord, the sprawling root system stretching deep into the earth, which served as its only true structural weak point, was instantly fortified. Hundreds of secondary roots cascaded downward, weaving an impenetrable, root-system-like defense around the vital lifeline.

The endless, rotting tide that had mercilessly shoved the Vanguard defenders to the absolute brink of destruction near the castle gates finally crashed into a wall of thorns that refused to yield.

The roots did not tire... They did just feed, kill and repeat.

For the very first time since the siege began, the horde stopped moving forward.

The entire defensive line watched the slaughter unfold.

And they celebrated…

♢♢♢♢

"HE DID IT!"

Min's voice cracked, ruined by hours of screaming orders through the ash and smoke, but a massive, unrestrained smile stretched across his soot-stained face. "The Glorious General actually did it!"

The infantrymen who had been barely holding themselves upright using their teammates' bodies as support suddenly found a second wind. Watching the impossible Platinum horrors, the exact same nightmares that had been steadily pushing them closer and closer toward the grave all afternoon, get casually skewered by a single architectural masterpiece sent a shockwave of adrenaline through the ranks.

Taro threw his head back and laughed, the deep, booming sound carrying pure, unadulterated relief. Li's legs finally gave out. He dropped to his knees on the stone, utterly exhausted, staring up at the towering metal predator with his jaw unhinged.

Even Selphira, a veteran who rarely allowed her mask of cold authority to slip, closed her eyes and released a long, shaky breath she hadn't realized she was holding. Her shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch. A few minutes ago, she had been silently preparing to order a suicidal last stand, mentally locking in the grim coordinates for where they would all die.

That sacrifice was no longer required. The tower was holding the gate single-handedly.

There was only one tactical objective left on the board: they had to ensure the swarm did not deviate from its current path.

They needed to keep the horde marching blindly into the meat grinder, feeding the tower's exponential growth rather than allowing the beasts to scatter and search for a softer route into the inner city.

As long as the corruption kept pushing directly forward to try invading the castle, the monolith would grind them into dust indefinitely.

Julius immediately recognized the shift in momentum. He began shouting orders, physically pointing and reorganizing the exhausted defenders to form a rigid funnel around this new, impenetrable axis.

For the first time in hours, the suffocating despair lifted.

Morale surged...

But high above the battlefield, Zhao was not celebrating yet.

Hovering in the ash-choked currents, Zhao's enhanced avian eyesight granted him a perspective the ground troops simply did not possess.

He stared past the slaughter at the gates, peering deep into the backlines of the horde. The beasts lingering in the rear, the ones that hadn't yet reached the monolithic tower, were behaving differently now. They were no longer crashing blindly forward in a mindless frenzy. Instead, they were pooling together, shifting their immense weight toward a distant flank.

They were actively changing direction. Someone in the dark was deliberately redirecting them away from Ren's impenetrable chokepoint.

A cold spike of dread pierced Zhao's chest. He banked hard, folding his wings to enter a steep dive, screaming at the top of his lungs to warn the Vanguard to brace the exposed flank before the new trajectory could solidify.

He did not reach them in time.

But it wasn't the shifting tide of beasts that shattered that right side of the perimeter.

♢♢♢♢

The massive aura never telegraphed its arrival.

Logically, a presence of that catastrophic magnitude should have been felt from miles away. It should have suffocated the ambient mana, crushing the air in the defenders' lungs long before it ever reached the wall.

But the battlefield felt entirely normal, solely because the Whisper of the Wind and the Warden of Space had cloaked it in absolute perfection until the very last microsecond.

By the time the frontline actually registered the crushing weight of the entity, it was already standing on top of them.

Victor's heavily reinforced wall, the massive barricade of hardened stone he had literally just built on the flank to channel the horde, shattered as if it were made of wet parchment.

The eight artifacts had arrived on the field.

However, the nightmare that pulverized the stone was no longer the amorphous, clumsy blob of rotting flesh that the city historically remembered. It did not merely flail the ancient mechanical appendages around in a chaotic frenzy.

The artifact had evolved.