Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1189 - Taming the Old World - Exiguous - 2

Selthia processed the implications with lightning speed. There was an astronomical, unforgivable difference between merely wielding that forbidden energy and wielding it correctly.

Dragarion had catastrophically overcharged himself years ago; he had absorbed such an ungodly volume of ether that he became nearly invincible for a terrifying even if small window of time, but he had simultaneously pushed his physical vessel to the absolute edge of catastrophic, crystalline collapse.

These humans were different.

They hadn't overcharged… Ren, who was clearly orchestrating the entire deployment, had meticulously portioned out the energy. Every single one of them carried a strictly controlled, heavily monitored fraction of the power, safely tucked far away from the dangerous threshold of systemic failure.

They were undeniably stronger than normal now, boasting a noticeable combat buff and fully restored stamina reserves, but they were not carrying enough raw divine output to transform into unkillable, god-like anomalies.

Not against her… Not with the heavy-duty arsenal she still had hidden up her sleeve.

♢♢♢♢

Selthia smiled.

It was a genuine expression, a deeply satisfying, almost euphoric manifestation of pure relief. She had genuinely feared, for a fleeting, agonizing second, that they would conjure some incomprehensible, logic-defying miracle that her centuries of calculation had completely failed to anticipate.

But they hadn't. They had played the exact card she expected...

And more importantly, they had played it with pathetic, cowardly prudence.

They had absorbed small parts of the ancient dragons' energy to keep themselves far from turning into glass statues, completely terrified of the crystallization price. By choosing the safe path, they had inadvertently locked themselves firmly within the tactical parameters that Selthia was fully equipped to annihilate.

Fifteen formidable enemies, overflowing with forbidden primordial energy, absolutely desperate to defend the castle gates with just that much.

And standing directly across the blood-soaked courtyard was Selthia. Armed with an immortal Diamond-rank draconic artifact, a monstrous arsenal of unrevealed trump cards, and centuries of meticulous, unyielding preparation.

She smiled and prepared to slaughter them after this.

This would undoubtedly be the final engagement… The absolute end of the road for one side or the other. Because if Selthia claimed victory today, if she successfully breached the castle gates and secured the ultimate prize resting within its depths while all of humanity's greatest champions couldn't stop her, it was over.

Humanity would never recover... There would be no second chance.

They could never amass enough power to match her new caliber, nor would they ever possess the tactical opportunity to arm them with stronger than her dragon energy again because she will have way more capacity than them.

Absolutely everything would be decided right here.

Selthia aggressively expanded her ethereal influence. She synchronized her sprawling consciousness with the mechanical artifact, tightening her grip on the special beasts writhing within its core. She mentally unlocked every single classified contingency she had brought to the field, preparing for the battle that would finally reshape the globe in her image.

The purple crystal origin smiled maliciously in the dark.

♢♢♢♢

The corruption was absolutely, completely sick of Ren.

Today, she would unleash every single ounce of apocalyptic violence she possessed. She absolutely refused to allow that insignificant human pest to ruin her grand design again through sheer, unfathomable luck.

Not ever again... Not when the finish line was finally within her grasp.

She had arrived in this miserable, backwater world with such a staggering chronological advantage that she genuinely believed she wouldn't encounter any meaningful opposition. She had expected a smooth, uncontested conquest before the old, pathetic, ancient idiot God of the Sun could even mobilize a proper defense.

That had been the original calculation.

After everything she had sacrificed just to leave the cosmic void, after being brutally diminished and reduced to a pathetic, small stone upon planetary impact, after surrendering vast oceans of her original power just to survive that battle, the absolute minimum the universe owed her was an unobstructed path to victory.

And yet, she had suffered catastrophe after catastrophe.

It was utterly ridiculous.

She had executed her infiltration in advance and without being noticed by the old hot fart flawlessly. She had successfully ensnared an entire kingdom. She had manipulated the minds of thousands of those weak-willed alien humans, twisting their politics to serve her needs.

She had meticulously bred hundreds of thousands of corrupted horrors in the subterranean manaless dark, forging a biological army that absolutely no natural force on this planet should have possessed the power to defeat.

She had methodically analyzed humanity's magical potential over centuries, meticulously measuring every single rank, every tactical capability, and every biological limitation. She had woven a sprawling, parasitic network of ether that stretched for kilometers beneath the world's crust.

She had done everything perfectly.

And she had done it all just so that, in the final hour, a disgustingly lucky, arrogant brat could stumble onto the stage, continuously derail her schedule, and forcefully hijack massive chunks of her power in ways she still failed to fully comprehend.

Because Ren had somehow stumbled upon one of the three viable contingencies designed to contain the power of the Sun in a way that shouldn't even exist anymore. They were ancient fail-safes that should have been permanently lost to history over a millennium ago. They belonged to a beautiful, distant era when she still had access to her true, terrifying power.

And the brat hadn't just secured any contingency… He had bonded the absolute least orthodox of the three. It was the most obscure, the least expected, and now consequently, the most frustratingly unpredictable.

It was the specific statistically impossible contingency that should have been safely hidden within the roots of the true protagonist Plant… a majestic, towering, perfectly comprehensible World Tree that she could have easily planned for.

Instead, the contingency had manifested as a sprawling, rot network. The exact kind of invisible system that thrived in the dark, feeding off decay, yet here illuminating the cozy abyss darkness with its disgusting, bioluminescent glow.

Those damn glowing mushrooms.

They were an impossible headache. A biological anomaly that refused to be eradicated, constantly sprouting exactly where they shouldn't, and stubbornly refusing to die when she exerted any level of lethal pressure.

And ever since Ren had bonded that wretched spore, his development had been terrifyingly flexible. He adapted with a horrible efficiency.

An efficiency that, she loathed to admit, occasionally surpassed her own.

♢♢♢♢

It was as if that damned, traitorous engineer could read the future.

It was as if the bastard had deliberately sabotaged her. He had intentionally held back when designing the original system, her system, the very framework the corruption relied upon to revive itself following that suicidal cosmic exchange.

And then, the traitor had gone behind her back and engineered something vastly superior that in less than ten years had given her that much trouble.