Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1200 - Taming the Old World - Exiguous… Not! Just Enough - 3

Ren had damaged it again…

But the crystal adapted instantly. As Ren charged his second volley, the artifact's massive, bladed tail, which was actually constructed from the two remaining ancient artifact legs, bound together by hyper-dense mutant muscle, whipped backward like a massive flail, seamlessly parrying Ren's next strike.

The artifact was a flawless defensive juggernaut. With its sprawling array of indestructible appendages, it possessed a counter for absolutely everything he could try.

Except Ren had not come down here alone…

Another blinding beam of energy slammed into the artifact's left flank.

It was a perfectly synchronized helix of Light and Darkness. Larissa and Luna had utilized the chaos of Ren's teleportation hit to aggressively flank the beast. Selthia screamed again, ripping her fifth ancient arm away from her core to block the blind-side assault, barely managing to block the girls' contradictory fusion.

But the exact second she committed the fifth arm, the sky on the right flank tore open.

Sirius and Selphira, operating in absolute, unified harmony, unleashed their signature spiral beam directly into the artifact's exposed right side.

Desperate, Selthia deployed the sixth and final ancient arm to intercept that blast too.

The battlefield locked into a flawless geometric stalemate.

Four arms raised to block the massive ray from the Hydra above. Two legs fused into a tail defending against Ren below. The fifth arm locked on the left flank. The sixth arm locked on the right.

Every single indestructible extremity of the mechanical dragon was completely pinned down, actively engaged in resisting a catastrophic, Diamond-tier assault from many a different vector. To the untrained eye, it looked like a perfect deadlock: the Vanguard Tamers lacked the raw output to punch through the ancient metal, and Selthia was entirely paralyzed, completely incapable of launching a counter-offensive without fatally exposing her biological core.

Yet with time, the fusions would dissipate…

But standing in the ground, staring at the trapped god, Ren smiled.

Because he wasn't going to take that long and this exact stalemate was precisely what he had engineered.

All eight ancient appendages were completely, irrevocably committed. There wasn't a single free limb left on the board to defend against what was coming next.

High above the clouds, Liora had already finished charging her second apocalyptic payload, a colossal, hyper-compressed sun of spiritual fire ready to incinerate some artifact controlling meat that no longer possessed a shield.

And directly behind, Zhao had just dropped Julius into position.

The Qilin prince had not come to build walls. He had come to upend the earth beneath the mechanical beast. He was preparing to completely shatter the ground, exposing the soft, unprotected underbelly, the intricate biological joints, and the vulnerable corrupted flesh binding the ancient metal together.

Selthia had arrogantly poured absolutely everything she possessed into perfectly parrying four simultaneous attacks.

And Ren was about to execute her with the fifth and sixth, striking from the heavens and the earth, just when she had absolutely nothing left to protect her.

Julius fully unleashed his dual-earth fusion upon the hyper-compressed bedrock.

The exact same courtyard floor that he and the Vanguard's earth users had aggressively reinforced to seal the subterranean tunnels was now weaponized. With a deafening roar that shook the foundations of Yino Castle, four colossal, jagged pillars of hyper-dense stone erupted from below.

They shot upward in a perfectly straight line... The monolithic stone spikes pierced the softer, unprotected underbelly of the mechanical dragon. But Julius wasn't finished. Utilizing his terrifying mastery over the earth, he commanded the colossal pillars to continue growing, pushing upward with hundreds of tons of kinetic force until they literally lifted the Diamond-rank behemoth off the ground.

Then, with a sickening screech of grinding metal, the pillars bent backward.

The sheer geological momentum physically flipped the colossal artifact completely upside down, exposing its vulnerable, fleshy underside to the sky.

To Ren's Hydra…

And then, Julius restructured the earth one final time.

The massive stone spikes rapidly melted and reformed, mutating into gargantuan, tectonic shackles. They slammed down over the artifact's indestructible appendages, physically pinning the thrashing metal limbs to the bedrock. It was absolutely not a permanent prison; the ancient, indestructible mechanics would inevitably shatter the stone within seconds.

But Julius didn't need the shackles to hold forever. He only needed them to hold for a single second.

And some microseconds was all the Vanguard needed.

From the heavens, the Diamond Hydra's unified, three-headed beam of absolute zero light finally slammed directly into the mechanical dragon's exposed, defenseless belly.

The rest of the strike force did not just stand back and watch. With the artifact's arms shackled to the earth and the beast flipped on its back, every single elite Tamer on the board unloaded their entire arsenals simultaneously, inflicting catastrophic, structural damage upon the corruption's most beloved creation.

Larissa and Luna's interwoven helix of Light and Darkness, Sirius and Selphira's same spiral beam, every single attack bypassed the armor and violently tore into the corrupted flesh that bound the ancient joints together.

And then, Liora delivered the executioner's blow.

The colossal, hyper-compressed sun of spiritual fire plummeted from the sky. It crashed directly onto the beast's exposed underbelly, instantly melting away a massive chunk of the corrupted biomass. The spiritual flames aggressively devoured the toxic flesh, permanently incinerating the cells before Selthia's runic network could even attempt to trigger a regeneration cycle.

Selthia's scream was deafening.

It was a psychic shockwave of pure, unadulterated agony and world-ending fury. It resonated with such profound, absolute suffering that for a fleeting, irrational microsecond, a few of the Vanguard defenders almost felt a pang of pity for the trapped god.

Almost…

♢♢♢♢

The synchronized strike had inflicted catastrophic structural damage. They had even managed to sever a few of the indestructible ancient artifacts from the central biological chassis.

But there was absolutely no time to celebrate.

Because Selthia's agonizing scream rapidly mutated into something vastly more horrifying. The sound fractured into a sickening, dual-toned screech, one frequency guttural and vibrating the bedrock, the other incredibly high-pitched and threatening to shatter their eardrums. It was a terrifying, profoundly alien resonance that felt like a localized cosmic curse bearing down on everyone who heard it.

A suffocating, oppressive aura began to violently emanate from the scattered, severed pieces of the creation, pooling especially thick around the largest remaining fragment that still possessed three intact appendages.

The corruption was not surrendering because it had been ripped apart. Instead, it was aggressively condensing. It was becoming denser, exponentially more poisonous.

It was her absolute final trump card... The crystal trapped deep within the massive crystal net was aggressively projecting its true, sovereign god-aura across the corrupted flesh, manually exalting the battlefield exactly as it had done in the past to violently reinforce its subjects.

Hovering in the sky, Ren immediately opened his mouth to order a second, merciless volley to suppress the exalted aura and aggressively capitalize on the artifact's shattered defenses.

But before the words could leave his throat, his entire body violently seized.

The corruption aggressively invaded his system. It surged upward through his ethereal pathways utilizing the exact same dirty, parasitic tactics it always did. But this time, fueled by the dragon's power and the exalted aura of the crystal, the attack bypassed his standard defenses and slammed directly into his scar.

The crystal was actively trying to pry open the door that Ren had forcefully welded shut.

And because Ren's system was currently violently amplified by the primordial energy of the ancient dragons, every single microscopic sensation was magnified by a thousand. The pain was astronomical.

It was about to be a catastrophic internal breach.

But Ren refused to fall… Not again.

Absolutely not after so many times.

He ground his teeth together so hard he tasted blood. He slowly, agonizingly forced his spine straight, resisting the invasion with the ironclad willpower of a man who had fought this exact internal war a thousand times before.

But when he finally managed to lift his gaze, the sight that greeted him sent a spike of absolute terror through his chest.

The girls were mildly affected, and…

Liu and Sirius were not enduring the backlash at all.

Both veterans had collapsed into the ground. Their skin was deathly pale, heavily laced with violently glowing, toxic purple veins. They were completely paralyzed, physically pinned to the earth by the sheer weight of the poison. Their mouths were stretched wide in silent, agonizing screams, their vocal cords completely paralyzed by the pain.

They had selflessly absorbed a decent fraction of Ren's corrupted burden wanting to help just minutes ago. And now, that exact same noble sacrifice rendered them catastrophically vulnerable to Selthia's exalted counterattack. Because they lacked Ren's massive, hyper-resilient system… they possessed absolutely zero natural immunity against a direct, exalted invasion that the crystal was burning its fundamental core energy to execute.

Panic gripped Ren's chest. He pushed his body to its absolute breaking point, desperately trying to break free of his own paralysis so he could dive down, take their corruption back and save them.

The five elemental crystals orbiting his chest began to accelerate, spinning into a blinding blur. And deep within the cold void of his shadow space, the ancient dragon cores, the ones that had completely failed to activate on the Hydra's back, suddenly reacted harder.

Ren let out a roar, forcefully throwing caution to the wind. He used some of the corruption as power and dove into a significantly deeper, far more reckless fusion with his Diamond Hydra, Yino style.

The biological transformation was visceral. Jagged, crystalline fangs elongated painfully in his mouth. His pupils violently snapped into reptilian, vertical slits. Thick, impenetrable jade scales ripped through further than only the skin of his arms and neck.

With a booming pulse of energy, he finally shattered the physical paralysis and straightened up completely.

But that strong pulse triggered a secondary resonance. A shockwave of pure energy cascaded through his body, tore through his mana pathways, and even into his shadow space.

The ancient cores flared to life. It wasn't a complete, sovereign activation.

But it was enough to trigger a helpful fifty percent surge in his total ethereal output to push him to 250%, exactly ten percent drawn from each vibrating core, and more importantly, the pulse forcefully awakened a very small, very grumpy ally.

"What is wrong with our core? What ring were we eating...?"

Ren's tiny spore mushroom shifted in the dark, extremely annoyed and still half-asleep, mumbling incoherent complaints through their link.