Read Novel Full Chapter 1195 - Taming the Old World - Exiguous - 8
Chapter 1195 - Taming the Old World - Exiguous - 8
As the endless columns of fresh Platinum horrors marched forward, the runic flow pulled by their hyper-dense, corrupted auras fed into the central ethereal dome.
The dome drank the raw energy greedily, and it rapidly expanded.
And as the runic perimeter grew, absolutely everything on the battlefield deteriorated for the Vanguard.
The combined elemental beams roaring from the mechanical dragon's three heads instantly doubled in thickness and velocity.
The power spike was terrifying, but it was the third head, the one relentlessly vomiting the synthetic, corrosive sludge onto the adamantium tower, that became an absolute nightmare. The acidic waterfall rained down with such huge volume and pressure that the Diamond-rank roots couldn't even begin to compensate.
High in the clouds, Ren fired another overclocked, hyper-condensed lightning bolt directly at the mechanical dragon.
The thunderclap shook the sky, and the strike connected flawlessly. But the electrical paralysis that had previously bought them 2 precious seconds lasted for barely one.
Fueled by the massively expanded dome, the artifact practically ignored the voltage. It casually shook off the Diamond-tier stun in the blink of an eye, almost completely uninterrupted. Ren gritted his teeth, his eyes widening in horror as he realized he was suddenly almost incapable of halting the corrosive flow melting his tower.
The thick, white smoke boiling off the adamantium chassis rapidly thickened, obscuring the castle gates entirely.
Deep within the artifact, Selthia laughed. The chilling, euphoric sound echoed through the corrupted ether.
The Vanguard was doomed…
If they genuinely wanted to turn this siege into a grinding war of attrition, they would fail catastrophically. They would never manage to slaughter all her Platinum mutants with their limited energy. The beasts were continuously reproducing, continuously scaling, and relentlessly flowing toward the castle from the virtually infinite depths of the elemental rings.
The humans would never clear the board before she melted the adamantium tower into slag, or before they entirely burned through the pathetically small slivers of dragon energy they had dared to steal.
The clock was ticking against humanity.
Time was Selthia's greatest ally, especially now that she had definitively proven her biomass was effectively infinite compared to the finite reserves the Vanguard had brought to the field.
And just to ruthlessly rub salt in the wound, Selthia didn't even use the entirety of the fresh reserve wave to fortify the newly expanded dome.
She peeled half of the new arrivals off and sent them stampeding toward the civilian districts, twisting the knife she had already buried in the Vanguard's flank.
Across the three separate containment fronts, the pressure instantly doubled.
The Qilin princes were holding the line, desperately defending the western flank and slaughtering the beasts trapped within their massive crescent barricade.
But they did not have Liora.
Every single time a prince crushed a Platinum mutant's skull or bisected a horror with Victor's wind cutters from his winged Qilin, the corpse simply collapsed into the ground. And the starving mutants marching directly behind it instantly descended upon the carcass, aggressively devouring their fallen kin to multiply their own strength.
Julius, Victor, and Arturo were bleeding ether, slaughtering wave after wave, yet the physical ground in front of them refused to clear. The horde just kept cannibalizing its way through the meat grinder.
On the southern flank, Lin was a blur of kicks and lethal static.
She abandoned lethal force entirely, realizing the futility of killing beasts only to feed the horde. She moved with blinding speed, delivering hyper-condensed bursts of thunder directly to the mutants' nervous systems, paralyzing them before they could engage their runic cannibalization cycle.
She had quickly deduced the grim math of the battlefield: a paralyzed beast does not devour its fallen kin, nor does it serve as a high-calorie meal for the monsters behind it. But her fast tactical mind also knew this was merely a stalling tactic. It wouldn't work forever. Paralyzing a monster was not the same as permanently removing it from the board, and sooner or later, the sheer, suffocating volume of the swarm would completely overrun her groundspace.
On the northwestern front, Min unleashed another devastating thermal explosion, vaporizing a cluster of beasts.
But a dozen more immediately poured through the steam to replace them.
"This is completely endless!" Min complained loudly. He was laughing hysterically despite the apocalypse unfolding around him, simply because laughing was the only psychological coping mechanism he possessed under this kind of crushing pressure. "We need four Lioras! Four of them! If we don't start burning these corpses right now, these freaks are going to completely overrun us the second they finish absorbing their own dead!"
Hearing the word absorbing, Liu froze.
A terrifying, borderline suicidal idea suddenly bloomed in the quiet tamer's mind.
Liu looked down at his Wendigo. The blood-soaked amalgamation of a Blood Vampire and a Banshee Hyena was already a deeply unsettling, horrifying nightmare to behold. He thought about exactly what Selthia's corrupted beasts were doing: aggressively absorbing the latent energy of the fallen to forcefully evolve.
Without announcing his intentions or asking for permission, Liu issued a silent command. He ordered his Blood Wendigo to sink its fangs into one of the freshly slaughtered mutant corpses.
"Liu, wait!" Taro shouted, his eyes widening in immediate, frantic concern. "What if the corruption backlashes? That energy is highly addictive, it's going to…!"
"We have absolutely no other option," Liu interrupted, his voice as low and quiet as ever, yet carrying an unshakable resolve. "Just one... Just to test the theory."
The Wendigo clamped its jaws around the corpse and violently drained the latent, corrupted ether.
Instantly, Liu's massive beast visibly expanded. Its physical dimensions grew, and its aura mutated, turning a fraction darker. The deep, terrifying shadows clinging to its fur noticeably thickened, laced with sick, pulsating veins of dark purple.
But Liu did not flinch, did not scream, his mind remained perfectly clear, and his ironclad control over his mind remained entirely intact. The localized corruption extracted from a single corpse was manageable. His system could safely process that volume.
Min watched the Wendigo mutate, and a wide, manic grin split his face.
"Then absorb them faster!" Min roared, instantly launching another massive thermal explosion into the encroaching tide. "They are pushing the front! Feed on every single one I blow apart!"