Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1190 - Taming the Old World - Exiguous - 3

That damned engineer had built a vastly more optimized, flawlessly perfect counter-system designed specifically to hunt her down.

He had hidden this superior network within some small adjacent nodes, relying on the incredibly stupid, blind faith that a human would eventually stumble across it by pure, dumb luck.

But there was no point dwelling on a pathetic loser who had already suffered his punishment centuries ago. The traitorous engineer had been dealt with.

That ancient vengeance didn't alter the miserable reality of her present.

What mattered now was that the boy had successfully ambushed her, outmaneuvered her, and stolen her momentum time and time again.

The list of grievances was agonizingly long... She had reviewed the ledger so many times in the dark that she had every single failure memorized. Every single line item was a festering wound to her pride.

Ren had fundamentally crippled her early-stage efficiency by stealing the genetic capabilities of the Shadow Stalkers. If she had secured those specific beasts, she would have possessed the biological tools way earlier to rapidly dissolve the ancient mana barriers in vastly greater quantities, accelerating her entire conquest schedule by a decade.

He had brutally delayed her acquisition of the Hydra… That specific multi-headed beast was the absolute perfect biological base to house the Amalgamation Leech within her human host. It was the crucial key that would have allowed for the flawless future assimilation of up to ten entities. That first Hydra egg, which was rightfully hers by design, was now his. He was actively using her own stolen weapon against her.

Ren had systematically hunted down and executed the deep-cover spy kid she had meticulously groomed to steal the third ring of Yano. A ring she had spent years preparing to reconfigure into a massive power spike, only for the boy to brutally sever that connection before she could even touch the relic.

His interference had forced her to aggressively claim her own ring by brute force today, dragging her schedule through the mud for years.

Ren had also nearly exterminated her secondary network of enhanced mutants... Ironically, his fight had forced that specific strain of corruption to mutate unexpectedly, differentiate, and retreat into absolute invisibility, which had ultimately gifted her the sprawling army currently besieging the walls. However, if it hadn't been violently evicted from her primary incubation zones by his dumb lucky pressure, she could have engineered a vastly more flexible, terrifyingly capable horde with significantly more interesting biological traits.

During the actual war, his interference had forced her into catastrophic, desperate sacrifices...

The crystal had been forced to take agonizing gambles, violently accelerating the biological development of her human subjects after the annoying brat constantly neutralized her biggest advantages. She had forcefully broken the natural limits of their system, permanently sacrificing long-term efficiency and massive biological potential just to forge some Triple-contract Tamers.

When that failed, she burned even more of her network's ether, sacrificing the future potential of more loyal subjects to force the Quadruple fusions.

And in the end, pushed to the absolute brink of desperation by the boy's relentless lucky assault, she had even gambled the fragile sanity of the puppet King himself. She had permanently crippled many of her own subjects, sacrificing priceless cores and irreplaceable potential just to forge the Sextuple fusions of mediocre Silver beasts.

And despite all of that blood, all of that sacrifice…

It had still not been enough!!

The miserable brat had also engineered a biological countermeasure to her mind control right in the middle of a warzone. He had weaponized his disgusting spores to forcefully sever the psychic tethers, stealing back some of the very tamers she believed were permanently locked under her command.

And finally, the single greatest, most agonizing insult that still burned her core today, Ren had actively served as the conduit that allowed that bastard Dragarion to permanently freeze more than half of her true, planetary power, locking away her primary network in a tomb of crystal.

Right there… In that exact moment, the boy had miraculously leveled the playing field.

It was profoundly, cosmically unfair.

The corruption had plummeted from wielding a suffocating, absolute planetary advantage down to being forced into a desperate, grinding war of attrition. And it was all because of the relentless intervention of a human brat who barely even understood the true scope of the cosmic war he was fighting.

And the list of his ridiculous, logic-defying advantages only grew from there.

No matter how aggressively Selthia pushed her pawns to crush him, no matter how much classified intelligence she possessed in advance, no matter how many tactical steps ahead she planned her ambushes, the damned boy always found a microscopic loophole to counter her strategy.

♢♢♢♢

She couldn't even corrupt him…

She had tried. She had attempted to infect him both directly and indirectly on multiple occasions, most notably in the ancient wind and earth ruins, bathing him in her raw, unadulterated energy. And the boy had simply digested it, effortlessly converting her lethal poison into high-octane fuel for his own system.

She couldn't eliminate him.

She had trapped him in the crosshairs so many times. And he always slipped through the cracks. He always discovered an impossible exit.

He always survived!!!

And despite having come so agonizingly close with Orion so close to conquering the entire board through her second chosen proxy, so close to finally erasing Ren from the map, she had lost, yet again, another grueling war.

It was enough.

It was absolutely, finally enough!

They would not stop her today… She would no longer play the board from the shadows.

She was done cautiously measuring risk, meticulously hoarding her strength, and constantly calculating viable retreat paths. That specific brand of hyper-prudent, patient, conservative warfare was exactly the cowardice that had cost her so much ground over the years.

Every single time she had pulled her punches, every time she had prioritized the safety of a tactical retreat over fully committing to the slaughter, Ren had exploited the hesitation to steal another massive advantage.

Not today.

Today, there would be no prudence. There would be no meticulous risk assessment.

There would be no unrevealed trump cards safely hidden away for the next encounter, because there absolutely would not be a next encounter.

Today, the corruption would take everything.

The crystal aggressively expanded its influence over the mechanical artifact, simultaneously forcefully possessing the special beasts writhing within its core, and activating every single contingency card she had brought to the field, alongside every secret she had hoarded for years.

Everything... She shoved every single chip she possessed into the center of the board simultaneously, holding absolutely nothing in reserve, engineering a battlefield with no viable escape route for either side.

And for the very first time in her entire, now miserable existence trapped within the crystal, the corruption threw herself into the absolute center of the bloodbath with absolutely zero intention of surviving.

She only intended to win.