Read Novel Full Chapter 1197 - Taming the Old World - Exiguous?
Chapter 1197 - Taming the Old World - Exiguous?
Because if he didn't, the Vanguard simply lacked the raw ethereal energy to sustain the meat grinder for much longer.
He maintained the status quo for a few precious seconds, buying himself the time needed to think.
At the very least, he was still perfectly capable of intercepting and canceling the catastrophic beams the artifact fired into the sky. He 'shielded' his allies that way, providing Liora the uninterrupted airspace she needed to continue permanently incinerating a fraction of the enemy's energy.
And down on the flanks, Liu had seemingly weaponized his Wendigo's special absorption capability, discovering a viable method to cull the horde without the corruption instantly consuming his sanity.
The containment fronts were holding and they were also buying him time to think.
He couldn't afford to stall for long... But just a bit was enough.
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A moment later, the chaotic variables clicked into place. Ren reached a terrifying solution and committed to the gamble.
He instantly sent a message to Selphira and Larissa. He fired a second, secret tactical notification to Julius on the ground. Finally, he whispered for Liora to prepare the most massive spiritual cremation she had ever conjured, explicitly instructing her that absolutely nothing caught in the upcoming blast radius could be left intact enough to be recycled.
He gave everyone exactly fifteen seconds to prepare and brace themselves, and then...
Standing on the broad, jade-scaled back of the colossal Hydra, Ren reached into his shadow. The five elemental crystal hearts materialized, instantly snapping into a rapid, aggressive orbit around his body. They were fully awake and violently vibrating with a resonance that made the air hum.
Then, he reached deeper and extracted the cores of the five Diamond-rank dragons.
He embedded the ancient, pulsating hearts directly into the jade scales of his Hydra's back, silently praying they might trigger some sort of latent activation. They continued to vibrate fiercely, perfectly mirroring their hyper-active state from the underground vault, reacting to an invisible stimulus that Ren still didn't fully comprehend.
He didn't know if he could successfully ignite them. He had no theoretical framework for what would happen if he actually did... But if these primordial batteries were going to react today, he vastly preferred having them locked and loaded on the frontline rather than safely rotting in his shadow space where they were tactically useless.
The very next second, the atmospheric pressure collapsed.
The energy violently cascading around the Hydra and Ren began to exponentially multiply. It grew denser and denser, his blinding white-jade aura becoming heavily saturated with the primordial, golden light of the dragons.
The air didn't just crackle; it screamed… The sheer, unfathomable accumulation of raw ether became physically visible, swirling into a terrifying, concentrated storm anchored to a single coordinate in the sky.
Far below in the courtyard, Selthia registered the atmospheric anomaly a fraction of a second too late.
Figuratively speaking, the ancient entity swallowed hard.
It instantly became apparent that entirely dismissing the possibility of Ren unleashing a nuclear strike had been a catastrophically arrogant assumption.
The miserable brat did have the punch. He had possessed the apocalyptic payload this entire time, patiently hoarding it, waiting for the absolute perfect window. And now, he was aggressively charging it with a sheer, unadulterated magnitude that physically warped the atmosphere around the three headed Hydra.
Selthia reacted with the only logical defensive maneuver available.
She instantly issued a frantic, overriding telepathic command to her sprawling mutant phalanx: Burrow.
If that huge blast scoured the surface, she needed to ensure it incinerated the absolute minimum number of assets. If the hyper-dense biomass of her stronger platinum mutants survived by burying themselves deep in the bedrock, she could pull them out again and rapidly reconstruct the ethereal dome the moment the dust settled.
But the exact second she issued the command, the horrifying reality of the board snapped into place.
Julius... And five other elite Tamers possessing the Earth affinity, including the front liner Larissa.
They were aggressively reinforcing the courtyard floor.
That had been the secret tactical message.
While Ren was floating in the sky, aggressively drawing her undivided attention by raining lightning on her just before charging the 'nuke', Julius and the Vanguard's earth-users had been quietly, systematically sealing the subterranean crust beneath the battlefield. They were hyper-compressing the bedrock, permanently fusing the plates together, and crushing the subterranean tunnels the mutants would have utilized to retreat.
The exact same geological domain Selthia had exploited to secretly funnel her endless army to the surface had been forcefully weaponized against her, transformed into an impenetrable, steel-dense lid that absolutely refused to let them back down.
There was no escape route.
The thousands of Platinum mutants that frantically attempted to claw their way into the dirt met almost impenetrable, solid bedrock where porous tunnels had existed just seconds prior. The absolute entirety of the colossal force Selthia had proudly deployed to the surface was now permanently trapped, utterly exposed within the fatal blast radius of the apocalyptic strike Ren was about to unleash.
In that paralyzing microsecond, Selthia fully understood... He had read her mind yet again.
High above, atop the Diamond-rank Hydra, Ren completed his charge.
The entire sky seemed to hold its breath.
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High above the trapped, corrupted army, the atmosphere completely collapsed.
Ren did not merely gather mana; he forcefully bent the fundamental laws of mana to his absolute breaking point. He pushed his triple-fusion to its absolute limit, preparing to unleash a payload that would permanently scar the city.
He drew his primary inspiration from Min's signature thermal explosions, the chaotic, volatile detonation of fire and water violently crashing into one another to create expanding steam. But Ren was not a crude bricklayer; he was a master architect. He took Min's foundational concept and elevated it to the level of a divine, apocalyptic science.
He wasn't going to settle for just the two elements swirling within the red and blue crystals orbiting his chest.
He aggressively layered the spell... He injected a massive volume of Wind mana to exponentially multiply the kinetic expansion rate. Then, he wove Earth mana into the final phase of the runic matrix, designing a catastrophic fragmentation effect. He wasn't just creating a bomb; he was forging an omnidirectional blender the size of a city block, designed to hurl hyper-compressed rock in every conceivable direction like a hurricane of ballistic shrapnel.
All of this was anchored by the five elemental crystals humming around him.
He leaned into the three of his precious wildcard slots to forcefully modify the spell's parameters. He dumped two of the wildcards directly into the Earth affinity, artificially doubling its density. The resulting shrapnel wouldn't be mere rock; they became aerodynamic, diamond-dense pointy makibishi specifically engineered to effortlessly punch straight through Platinum-tier chitin instead of merely bruising it and pulverizing upon impact.
He dumped the third wildcard into the Wind affinity, drastically amplifying the outward kinetic radius and the force of the shockwave.
And at the absolute dead center of the runic matrix, the Fire and Water cores acted as the nuclear reactor fueling the entire chain reaction. It was Min's crude idea, but executed with a god-like precision on a scale that defied comprehension.
The sky didn't just light up... It became a second, blinding sun.
And then, Ren dropped it.