Read Novel Full Chapter 1184 - Taming the Old World - Amplifying Power - 2
Chapter 1184 - Taming the Old World - Amplifying Power - 2
Ren flew at the absolute vanguard of the formation.
His core was near hollow, scraping the bottom at less than ten percent capacity. Yet, he carried the most dangerous trump card in human history in his mind, racing toward the royal castle where the fate of their half of the globe would finally be decided.
It was a dead sprint.
On one side of the rift, the artifact was systematically emptying the ancient sphere, swallowing centuries of accumulated ether.
On the other side, humanity's greatest defenders were tearing across the clouds.
Whoever reached their prize first would dictate exactly how the world ended.
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The girls already knew…
The classified intelligence reports had reached them long before Ren's exhausted silhouette broke through the clouds into the Yano Castle courtyard. When his boots finally hit the polished stone of the inner sanctum, he found them waiting for him right by the grand entrance, standing alongside Sirius.
And it was immediately obvious that Ren was in deep trouble.
All three of them greeted him with a piercing yet silent reprimand. It was the heavy glare reserved specifically for a man who had not only vanished to fight a Diamond-tier dragon entirely alone, but was now actively preparing to inject a lethal, world-ending amount of power into his own veins. They understood exactly what he was about to do, and they absolutely did not approve.
But it wasn't the glare that twisted the knife in Ren's chest.
It was the just barely contained tears.
But it wasn't the glare that twisted the knife in Ren's chest.
It was the just barely contained tears.
The three women were profoundly, agonizingly, painfully terrified for him, and Ren could see it written in every subtle line of their faces.
Luna's signature aristocratic composure was visibly fracturing at the edges, her small hands trembling slightly where they gripped her dress. Larissa stood slightly behind her, employing her usual quiet stoicism to bottle up the fear, though the sheer effort of suppressing her emotions only made the terror radiating from her more obvious.
And Liora made absolutely no attempt to hide her feelings… She was transparently furious, aggressively trying to channel her crippling terror into anger. She glared at him with puffed cheeks and red eyes, an expression that Ren, despite the urgent circumstances and his own exhaustion, couldn't help but find incredibly cute.
He knew there was no genuine anger behind their faces. There was only the raw dread of losing the one they loved.
Ren didn't raise his hands in defense. He didn't offer a brilliant tactical explanation or try to awkwardly laugh off the tension as he usually did.
He simply walked forward and pulled them in.
He wrapped his arms around all three of them simultaneously, gathering them into a single, desperate embrace all together for the very first time in his life. He closed his eyes, burying his face in their hair, smelling the faint scents cutting through the overpowering stench of ozone and blood clinging to his uniform.
He silently asked for their forgiveness.
He was so incredibly sorry that, in the fleeting window of time they had left, he couldn't find a better, safer equation to save everyone, but mostly them.
The girls didn't complain… They didn't push him away or demand a safer alternative.
They understood the board. Even before Selphira could step forward to intervene and explain the grim reality of the siege, the girls knew. Deep in their hearts, they recognized the cruel necessity of his gamble.
There was simply no margin of time left to argue, to cry, or to search for a miracle.
They hugged him back fiercely. They gripped his ruined uniform, pressing their faces against his chest, committing the warmth of his heartbeat to memory. And then, slowly, they let him go. Releasing him was the absolute hardest thing they had ever done, but it was the only way they could help him.
The situation was impossibly heavy. But as Ren stepped away and turned toward the inner sanctum, a fleeting sliver of gratitude pierced the dread.
He was incredibly thankful that his parents had not been notified.
High Command had granted him that single, selfish request. Reed and Fern were currently stationed miles away, entirely isolated from the capital's command network. They did not have to carry the agonizing, suffocating burden of waiting by a messenger post, wondering if their only son was going to walk out of the battle alive, or if he was going to remain there forever as a frozen statue of crystal.
They didn't need to know. Not yet… Right now, the two old cooks simply needed to focus on defending the Patinder territory in the South, keeping their people safe while their son waged a war against the entity that could mean the end of the world.
There was absolutely no time left for waiting.
The elite strike force moved as one, plunging into the dark heart of Yano Castle. They bypassed the grand halls and the opulent corridors, heading straight for the deepest, normally most heavily guarded sector of the royal compound. They crossed the heavily concealed threshold, a massive door forged from the same logic-defying, ancient engineering that composed the ruins themselves, and began their descent.
The spiral staircase wound endlessly downward, encased within impenetrable, ancient ruin walls that seemed to drink the meager light of their torches.
They bypassed the first subterranean chamber without a second glance. The sprawling, ancient murals etched into those walls, depicting the birth of the system and the celestial mechanics of the world, made significantly more sense to Ren now, especially after the Brain had forcefully downloaded the classified history of the universe into his mind.
But this was not an archeological expedition.
This was the preparation for an execution... There was no time to read the walls when the world above them was burning.
They pushed deeper into the abyss, finally reaching their destination… The second chamber.
It looked vastly different than it had on the day they originally discovered it. The room was significantly cleaner, almost alarmingly empty. The towering, jagged pool of raw crystal that had once choked the cavern, filling it almost to the ceiling, had been meticulously harvested and distributed. Barely a tenth of the original hoard remained.
The vast majority of the ancient fortune was now firmly in the possession of the great Noble Families, some aggressively distributed over the past year to drastically fortify the military infrastructure of the entire city.
With the sprawling crystal thickets cleared away, the raw, underlying architecture of the place was finally exposed. Hidden geometric patterns carved into the floor and subtle runic arrays etched into the ceiling were now clearly visible.
But they weren't here to study the architecture either.
The sole reason for this desperate descent was the massive, monolithic central pillar dominating the room.