Read Novel Full Chapter 1193 - Taming the Old World - Exiguous - 6
Chapter 1193 - Taming the Old World - Exiguous - 6
Two more Platinum mutants detonated in rapid succession, their armored bodies blown apart by the synchronized artillery of the Vanguard.
Before their shattered remains could even hit the cobblestones, Liora was there…
A roaring torrent of her unique spiritual fire washed over the corpses, instantly incinerating the corrupted flesh and permanently erasing the hyper-dense biomass before the other mutants in the ethereal dome could recycle a single drop of them.
The strategy was good… One Platinum erased forever, then another.
For a few seconds, it genuinely felt as though Ren's methodical, attritional warfare was going to successfully dismantle the enemy piece by piece.
Then, Selthia's mechanical dragon tilted its colossal head toward the sky.
And it fired.
A massive, roaring geyser of superheated magma erupted from the artifact's dragon body jaws, screaming directly toward the towering Celestial Tiger where Selphira and Sirius were currently charging their synchronized attack.
It was blindingly fast, overwhelmingly massive, and above all, completely unexpected. Up until this exact second, the Diamond-rank entity had operated strictly on the defensive, utilizing its six indestructible appendages as an impenetrable shield. The sudden offensive caught the Vanguard off guard. The molten rock crossed the airspace so rapidly that the two veterans barely had time to react.
Sirius engaged in a shadow jump, ripping their tiger through the dimensional fabric just a fraction of a second before the magma incinerated their airspace.
They survived, but the evasive maneuver forcefully aborted the charge of their spiral beam, resetting their output to zero.
A heartbeat later, Larissa and Luna were forced out of their airspace as well.
A second catastrophic blast, this one a concentrated beam of absolute zero ice, tore through the clouds, aimed directly at the girls. The attack also came impossibly fast, completely lacking the necessary biological cooldown a single entity should require to shift from fire to ice.
As the two women plummeted through the air, narrowly evading the freezing beam, they looked down at the courtyard and realized the horrifying truth.
The ice hadn't come from the same mouth…
A second draconic head had grossly ripped its way out of the artifact's biomass chassis, its newborn scales dripping with corrupted ether.
Before the Vanguard could even process the new mutation, both heads reared back. Magma and ice began to aggressively pool in their respective throats again, independently tracking separate targets across the sky.
But the nightmare wasn't finished. With a sickening sound of rending and tearing flesh, a third head burst from the center of the chassis.
Selthia was deliberately emulating the multi-headed anatomy of Ren's stolen Hydra. Or maybe she was announcing her corrupted Hydra had reached 3 heads too…
This third head did not aim at the Tamers scattered across the clouds. It pivoted aggressively toward the castle gates, locking its sights on the adamantium tower. It unhinged its jaws and unleashed a massive, high-pressure torrent of a thick, blackish-purple liquid.
The toxic sludge slammed directly into the monolithic chassis.
Instantly, a sickening hiss echoed across the courtyard. The hyper-corrosive energy began to aggressively degrade the tower's defenses. It was systematically eating through the pseudo-adamantium, the exact same logic-defying alloy that the concentrated, point-blank breath of an ancient Fire Dragon had failed to melt.
The Diamond-rank wooden roots hidden within the shell aggressively lunged forward to absorb the liquid, but they couldn't do much. The moment they touched the sludge, the roots blackened and withered, the corrosion traveling up their vascular systems and breaking them instead of nourishing them.
Hovering in the sky, Ren ran a rapid diagnostic of the attack using his expanded ethereal perception.
It wasn't a pure element. It was a terrifying, synthetic amalgamation. The attack was a weave of pure corruption, Dark mana, Wood, and Water, bonded together to create a paradoxical acid designed specifically to simultaneously devour both inorganic metal and living biological tissue. It was a poison engineered exclusively to dismantle his dual-layered tower.
'Dark mana…'
Ren's eyes narrowed. He rapidly scanned the thousands of mutants anchoring the ethereal dome. But absolutely none of them possessed the Dark affinity within their biological systems.
A fleeting, grim sense of relief washed over him.
Selthia, operating from within her primary beast, was the only entity on the board wielding darkness. That meant the Diamond-rank Dark Dragons, the last guardians of the continent, were still safe in the wild. Selthia had not yet conquered them.
This specific corrosive capability had to be an inherent biological trait belonging to one of her special beasts, not a stolen guardian's ring or core. It was a small silver lining in the middle of a catastrophe, but Ren would take whatever he could get.
♢♢♢♢
The magma head finished its cooldown cycle and fired again. This time, the roaring geyser of molten rock was aimed directly at Ren.
Ren did not shadow jump… He did not dodge.
Because of the sheer distance the magma had to travel, Ren possessed a massive surplus of aerial maneuvering space. But instead of yielding the sky, he reached out with his hands and forcefully seized absolute control of the thermal mass in mid-air.
He didn't just stop the attack.
He hijacked it.
He aggressively tapped into the ancient, thrumming power of his two elemental rings, Fire and Earth. Using their terrifying authority, he pushed his mana into them, hyper-activated their runes and drastically multiplied the raw power of the stolen magma, simultaneously hyper-compressing its density and driving its internal temperature off the thermodynamic charts.
He made the flow dance around him and then pushed it back.
But he didn't stop there...
He added Wind mana around the molten flow.
He commanded the wind to spin the superheated rock and accelerated the rotation to such an impossible velocity that the sheer friction began to generate massive electrostatic charges. The superheated magma transitioned, transforming into a blinding, white-hot sphere of ionized, supercharged plasma.
With a flick of his wrist, Ren hurled the attack back at Selthia's mechanical dragon vastly faster than she had fired it.
Deep within the artifact, Selthia felt a genuine spike of alarm. She was instantly forced onto the defensive, abandoning her offensive posture to raise four of her indestructible, ancient appendages, while simultaneously firing a point-blank ice beam just to cushion the blow.
The plasma detonated.
Despite layering her defenses flawlessly, the sheer kinetic and thermal shockwave managed to inflict genuine damage on the Diamond-tier biological flesh weaving the artifact's chassis together.
Selthia gritted her teeth. She was rudely reminded, yet again, that underestimating Ren was a fatal mistake.
Because the plasma strike didn't end with the artifact. When the white-hot flow shattered against her four indestructible arms, it dispersed. The splash damage, a wave of ionized, electrocuted magma, washed over the courtyard, instantly paralyzing and incinerating an entire row of Platinum mutants she had positioned too closely to her main body.