Read Novel Full Chapter 1194 - Taming the Old World - Exiguous - 7
Chapter 1194 - Taming the Old World - Exiguous - 7
A single, hijacked counterattack had cost her dozens of elite beasts. Ren had traded up, achieving vastly more destruction than the brief interruption of his team's beams had cost him.
Furious, Selthia immediately shifted the offensive parameters of her annoying magma head.
She replaced the magma with the blackish-purple corrosive liquid that was currently melting the tower. She logically feared that Ren would simply hijack another thermal strike, and the synthetic corrosive sludge was much harder for him to steal and redirect with the same clean efficiency.
Up in the clouds, the girls watched Ren with soaring pride. Even Selphira allowed a grim, razor-sharp smile to touch her lips as she witnessed the devastating return volley. It was exactly the kind of impossible, improvisational genius that only Ren could pull off in the middle of battle.
But their triumphant smiles instantly froze when they looked back down at the castle gates.
Thick, billowing clouds of white smoke were pouring off the adamantium tower. Under the ceaseless, high-pressure assault of the artifact's third head, the impenetrable armor was actively melting away.
♢♢♢♢
Ren charged his lightning again.
This time, the energy pooled faster. He was overclocked, his system humming with the adrenaline of seamlessly weaving the elemental rings and the wind mana to weaponize the plasma. He had entered the absolute zone, that terrifying, hyper-focused flow state where a warrior falls into a perfect rhythm and every single hit is cleaner and vastly more lethal than the last.
He didn't fire a single bolt. He unleashed three simultaneous, interwoven lances of pure lightning.
The thunderclaps cascaded across the sky, completely erasing three Platinum mutants from the dome's perimeter in a synchronized execution. Liora, genuinely startled by his sudden, terrifying rate of fire, scrambled to blanket the smoking craters in spiritual flame.
"The tower is going to hold for a while!" Ren roared, his voice cutting through the thunder, instantly reading the mounting panic on his allies' faces. "Don't let the smoke distract you! It would take a massive amount of that level of degradation to completely melt through my armor forged from hyper-dense mana! Do not panic! Keep slaughtering the mutants, that remains our absolute priority!"
He didn't wait for a response. He immediately fired another catastrophic lightning bolt.
But he didn't aim at the Platinum fodder, this time he aimed directly at Selthia's mechanical dragon.
The artifact instantly raised a metallic arm, easily absorbing the kinetic impact of the strike. But the sheer voltage of Ren's overclocked lightning traveled down the conductive metal, causing the Diamond-tier biological flesh binding the chassis to violently spasm.
The electrical paralysis only lasted for a few precious seconds, but it was enough. All three of the artifact's heads sputtered, their elemental blasts interrupted.
The adamantium tower immediately stopped taking corrosive damage. Selphira and Sirius were granted the critical spatial breathing room they needed to begin charging their spiral beam again. The girls found their footing in the sky.
"I am locking Selthia's offense down!" Ren commanded, already charging his aura for the next volley, effectively turning himself into the undisputed axis of the ranged duel. "You all focus entirely on taking out the trash! Every single Platinum we burn weakens her dome. When she has no fodder left to hide behind, we will execute her main body!"
It was a flawless division of labor.
Ren was going to unilaterally neutralize the offensive output of a Diamond-rank entity, while the rest of the Vanguard systematically bled her army dry.
Deep within the core of her artifact, the corruption's fury reached a boiling point.
The miserable brat wants to do it again. He had taken her offensive strike, improved it, hurled it back in her face, and was now casually hovering in the sky, acting like a tavern bouncer kicking her out. He was systematically canceling the attacks of all three of her heads with the insulting, effortless aura of a man who treated the primordial power of an ancient dragon like a casual game of target practice.
He was containing her…
He was holding a god at bay, dedicating himself solely to being an irritating nuisance, while his friends calmly and methodically dismantled the invincible army she had spent years breeding in the dark.
The absolute, world-ending rage of the corruption, which had already been burning like a star, found an entirely new, terrifying degree of heat.
♢♢♢♢
Selthia did not attempt to strike Ren with a higher concentration of raw output.
It was not because the corruption lacked the desire to permanently erase the annoying brat from the sky...
It was simply because she couldn't.
The catastrophic energy she could currently project was entirely dependent on, and strictly hard-capped by, the physical circumference of her ethereal dome.
Without expanding the dome's runic perimeter, her three-headed mechanical dragon possessed an absolute ceiling for its offensive capabilities. And she had already redlined that ceiling.
Ren had read the tactical board perfectly. By forcefully inserting himself into the crossfire and neutralizing the artifact's rhythm, he had correctly deduced that the adamantium tower could comfortably withstand the current rate of chemical degradation for quite a while.
But there was a second way to exponentially increase the artifact's firepower…
She could simply grow the dome. And to achieve that, she only needed one resource: more mutants to act as biological batteries.
Which was exactly what she was about to pull from the dark.
If the human Vanguard genuinely believed they could halt her conquest just because they were methodically slaughtering the outer edges of her phalanx, or because Ren possessed a temporarily superior rate of fire, they were suffering from a fatal, blinding delusion.
It seemed the pathetic defenders had fundamentally failed to comprehend the truly unfathomable volume of raw biomass and compressed ether hoarded within the Platinum rings of the world's crust and also its subterranean rings.
Selthia had not even siphoned ten percent of the planetary ring's total available biomass. Yet, with that microscopic fraction, her army had successfully evolved to this apocalyptic stage. A mere tenth of her reserves had birthed an ethereal dome capable of sustaining a three-headed Diamond-rank artifact, spawned hundreds of Platinum-tier horrors wielding advanced elemental mana, and generated a subterranean tide so massive it made the tectonic plates groan.
Less than ten percent.
The other ninety percent was still waiting to be eaten.
The earth did not just tremble; it ruptured. From the deep subterranean fissures and the massive, shattered gaps in the Vanguard's outer Great Wall, a completely new tide of Platinum mutants poured onto the battlefield.
It wasn't a slow trickle of reinforcements. It was an entirely fresh, sprawling river of horrors. This was the catastrophic reserve army Selthia had deliberately kept buried beneath the surface, hidden by the Whisper of the Wind and waiting in the shadows just in case the Vanguard had deployed a suicidally overcharged Ren capable of wiping the board with a single, god-like strike.
She hadn't needed to deploy them to replace that supposed massive, sudden losses as she had originally anticipated. But now, they could be perfectly utilized as heavy-duty support to accelerate the siege by leaps and bounds.