Read Novel Full Chapter 1196 - Taming the Old World - Exiguous - 9
Chapter 1196 - Taming the Old World - Exiguous - 9
Liu offered a grim nod. The Wendigo immediately went feral, systematically draining corpse after corpse. With every single carcass it devoured, the beast grew slightly larger, slightly darker, and significantly more terrifying.
But more importantly, with every corrupted meal, it became vastly more capable of holding a frontline that had been minutes away from completely shattering.
Back on the western flank, the princes desperately expanded their architecture.
They forced the crescent wall to grow significantly larger and vastly thicker. The towering barricade of hyper-compressed rock rapidly elevated, desperately trying to cage the fresh, overflowing tide spilling toward the civilian districts.
Julius poured raw bedrock into the foundational structure, while Victor and Arturo aggressively reinforced the outer plates, raising the defensive arc until it became a monolithic fortress, buying the physical space that the swarm's numbers demanded to take.
They held the line.
Across all three containment fronts, and in the skies directly above the ethereal dome, humanity's absolute best held the line.
But simply holding was not winning, and Selthia understood the suffocating math of attrition vastly better than anyone else. As long as her Platinum biomass remained practically infinite, and their borrowed dragon energy possessed a hard limit, this grinding war of attrition only had one mathematically possible conclusion.
Unless Ren found another way…
But if there was a single mind on the battlefield capable of rewriting that fatal equation, it was Ren's. Hovering in the sky, he grasped the exact terrifying truth that Selthia had prayed he would miss.
He needed a vastly more devastating attack.
A methodical execution was no longer tactically viable. He needed an extensive strike, one capable of scouring the entire board in a blinding flash rather than chipping away at the Platinum phalanx one beast at a time. The attritional warfare was fundamentally broken; the clock was mercilessly ticking against the Vanguard. The only logical answer to a parasitic enemy that scaled faster than it could be slaughtered was a singular, catastrophic blow massive enough to instantly flip the table on its head.
And now, with Selthia proudly displaying her full hand, the overarching blueprint of the corruption's strategy became glaringly obvious to everyone.
Selthia had meticulously prepared for the inevitable moment Ren would weaponize an ungodly volume of primordial dragon energy in a single, powerful strike. She had deliberately concealed her true number of mutated heads, the special beasts, the exponentially expanding ethereal dome, waiting patiently in the shadows. Or not so patiently…
She had intended to reveal her true power only after Ren had emptied his core in a massive, blinding flash and removed himself from the board. The dome expansion was, among its many functions, a trump card explicitly designed to aggressively expand and counterattack the moment he was drained.
However, observing that Ren had not arrived overflowing with three hundred percent of his maximum capacity, and seeing that the rest of the Vanguard only carried strictly moderated, safe fractions of the dragon's power...
Selthia had made a fatal assumption. She decided there was no longer any tactical need to hide the true volume of her vanguard.
But it seemed she had grown profoundly overconfident.
Because who in the world had explicitly stated that Ren no longer possessed the capacity to unleash a catastrophic huge strike?
Selthia had arrogantly assumed that by prudently dividing the primordial energy among the fifteen elites, Ren had robbed himself of the hyper-concentrated charge required for a nuclear option. She believed that choosing the cautious path had permanently cost him the devastating one.
She was dead wrong.
Ren himself wasn't entirely certain how effective the ensuing blast would be. He had never unleashed a concentrated strike of this unfathomable scale before. He didn't know exactly how much of the board it would scour, nor could he accurately calculate the physical toll it would exact on his body.
But he knew, with absolute certainty, that rolling the dice on a nuke was infinitely better than continuing to passively execute the exact strategy Selthia wanted him to.
Absolutely anything was better than dancing to the enemy's rhythm.
He harbored one lingering tactical doubt, though. A variable that was mostly resolved, but not guaranteed to a full one hundred percent.
So, to ensure absolute perfection and not be like Selthia, he fully unleashed his fusion.
♢♢♢♢
High above the burning courtyard, the surviving defenders finally witnessed the terrifying majesty of a true Diamond-rank Hydra materializing into the battlefield.
Three colossal, pristine white-jade heads unfolded against the dark clouds. The pure Diamond-tier aura radiating from the sovereign beast burned through the ash like a second, blinding sun. The moment the synergy locked into place, Ren received an astronomical boost in ethereal perception, shattering his mortal limits.
The entire sprawling battlefield abruptly snapped into hyper-focus, revealing microscopic tactical details that had previously been hidden in the dark.
He rapidly analyzed the subterranean reinforcements Selthia would be funneling to the surface shortly. He tracked the relative flow of the beasts. He mapped the currents of corrupted mutants actively slithering beneath the bedrock, pouring through the shattered sections of the Great Wall, and tracing all the way back close to the distant Platinum rings.
And the diagnostic scan confirmed his darkest fear.
The horde was nowhere near its end. Selthia's ranks were replenishing at a sickening, biologically impossible rate simply because her territorial dominion was just that vast, and the sheer volume of Platinum-tier biomass buried in the rings was virtually infinite. The Vanguard could theoretically slaughter Platinums all night long, and Selthia would effortlessly replace every single casualty.
The attritional calculus was definitively, undeniably impossible to win within the strict thirty-minute time limit of his allies' fusions.
There was only one path left to victory.
They had to completely halt the mechanical artifact's advance. And they had to sever Selthia's psychic control over the horde.
A tactical objective that was infinitely easier to declare than to execute.
Ren had absolutely no idea how to physically sever that connection. Selthia's absolute control flowed directly from her crystalline prison, traveling through the subterranean runic network, feeding into the mechanical artifact, and broadcasting to every single mutant on the field. Ren didn't know the exact anatomical or runic net he needed to cut to cause a systemic blackout.