Read Novel Full Chapter 1228 - Taming the Old World - Lead - 7
Chapter 1228: Chapter 1228 - Taming the Old World - Lead - 7
The tactical blueprint for Selthia was identical to the one that had broken the other five guardians: do not attempt to slaughter them in a single, decisive engagement that could erase thousands of weaker units via apocalyptic breath, but relentlessly exhaust their stamina with high resistance big units until they inevitably broke.
A slow, safe strategy that should still take too long, but no one trusted corruption now...
So Liu and Sirius were fundamentally forced to maintain their dual-fusion state to check and simply to prevent the indigenous, Platinum 2 and 3 avian predators naturally inhabiting their surveillance zones from violently driving them out of the airspace. Those huge aerial beasts were practically the only native fauna currently escaping the suffocating, cannibalistic wave of the mutant hordes.
But sustaining their fusions indefinitely would have catastrophically drained their cores. Hence, the strict three-minute operational window per hour. It was a grueling logistical balance. Barely sustainable, but technically manageable.
♢♢♢♢
The strike force abruptly halted...
Ren took a slow, deliberate step forward, aggressively expanding his ethereal perception. He stared at the two motionless, crystalline figures occupying the absolute dead center of the first sanctuary’s final chamber, and a terrifying chill instantly extinguished the measured calm of the exploration.
"Wei," Ren ordered, his voice very quiet, his eyes locked onto the statues. "Expand the network... We analyze this... With extreme caution."
They had fully anticipated one of the figures. Li’s statue, having been dragged beneath the bedrock the moment he extracted the corrupted core, was guaranteed to materialize somewhere within the sanctuary’s depths. It was the known variable; the calculated price of admission they had proactively accepted.
The second statue was not.
Because the existence of a second petrified victim meant the corrupted core wedged in the threshold had absolutely never been a simple, abandoned prototype engineered by Selthia, as they had originally hypothesized. Someone else had crossed this threshold long before them. Someone who had already paid the door’s horrific toll, years, perhaps decades, before their Vanguard or Selthia had ever set foot in these ruins.
Li’s statue was the voluntary sacrifice they had knowingly made.
The second statue was a very weird question that absolutely no one had even thought to ask.
♢♢♢♢
Selphira meticulously reviewed both dispatches, the northern report from Liu and the southern update from Sirius, and a deep frown carved lines into her ancient yet young face.
Julius stood beside her, reviewing the logistical maps.
"Ever since Ren’s strike force breached the perimeter of the Wood ruin," Selphira noted, sliding the second general city and silver ring dispatch across the table toward the prince, "the mutant horde is moving with a highly irregular pattern."
"Irregular in what specific capacity?"
"They are behaving as if they are desperately trying to marshal their forces for a massive, coordinated offensive," Selphira stated, rereading the encrypted lines, desperately hunting for the tactical logic. "But they completely lack a definitive target. Sometimes the army aggressively realigns toward one of the sovereign dragons. Then, abruptly, it pivots back toward the capital. It is entirely erratic... I cannot read the board."
Julius scrutinized the tactical report. "The corruption has absolutely never behaved erratically."
"I concur," Selphira nodded grimly. "Perhaps this localized chaos is a direct consequence of whatever our resident genius just executed inside that star prison or the ruin. But I absolutely do not like unknown variables..."
They stood in heavy silence for a moment, both commanders staring down at the ink strokes summarizing military maneuvers unfolding miles away.
♢♢♢♢
A second, slightly smaller messenger bird arrived several minutes later...
"I have a logistical matter I must attend to," Julius finally announced, straightening his posture. "Keep me continuously updated on the movements... And ensure Arturo is briefed too. He has the defensive grid fully primed, and the absolute fastest messenger birds are locked and loaded on the runway in the event we must urgently recall the external strike forces."
"Is the entire defensive perimeter fully operational?"
"Absolutely everything is locked down. If this erratic movement escalates into a full-scale siege here, we possess the capacity to hold the line for a while. Without the indestructible artifacts or the Diamond-rank dragons looming as punctual threats, surviving the swarm is merely a matter of flawless resource management." Julius turned toward the heavy oak doors. "Signal me the exact microsecond the Northern and Southern avians deliver fresh data."
And with that, the Qilin prince departed, leaving Selphira entirely alone with the ominous reports.
Selphira lingered on the unsettling concept of an erratic Selthia... And then, unbidden, her thoughts drifted toward another notoriously erratic woman.
’No, think of anything else...’
Julius was entirely correct; stripped of the ancient artifacts, the Vanguard could definitively withstand a conventional siege. They had meticulously calculated the defensive arithmetic. And this time around, Selphira noted with a profound, quiet relief, Liora would absolutely not be forced to sprint back to the capital and recklessly risk her life defending the Great Wall. She was far beyond the perimeter, deployed alongside Ren.
And there was mathematically and statistically no safer coordinate in the entire known universe than standing directly beside that miraculous boy.
Even if she was currently deployed deep within the feral, infinitely dangerous, and previously uncharted wilderness that the young Tamer now casually treated as his personal backyard.
That exact same brutal, external world that had violently taken her...
That specific thought forced Selphira to pause again.
’Am I a fundamentally terrible grandmother for permitting my granddaughter to venture out into that slaughterhouse, and actually feeling relaxed about it?’
Because that exact brand of absolute freedom, the unchecked liberty she had so casually granted to her grandchildren, and to many of the children she had birthed or adopted over the centuries, had successfully produced Ashenways of every conceivable caliber. Many were brilliantly exceptional. But a staggering number of them, mostly the freer most pampered ones, possessed severe flaws regarding authority, an absolute inability to accept necessary boundaries, and a fatal refusal to remain stationary even when staying put was the only logical sound option.
Exactly like Leonel.
Exactly like Laura.
Laura...
Selphira carefully placed the encrypted report down on the tactical map and permitted herself, for a fleeting, agonizing moment, to carry the crushing weight she almost always forced away.
Laura had dedicated shamefully little time to her own daughter. She infinitely preferred to "work", which, in her specific vocabulary, meant constantly launching reckless expeditions into the wilderness, blatantly abusing anti-mana pharmaceuticals to push herself further and vastly deeper into hostile territory, inevitably dragging her poor, also enabling husband alongside her into huge dangers they had absolutely no need to seek out.
Until one day, one profoundly sad, stupid day, she simply did not return.
Liora had been far too young to fully comprehend the permanence of the tragedy. She had adapted to Selphira’s care rapidly, with the resilience of a very small child who lacks the cognitive maturity to remember and truly process what was stolen from her.
But Selphira absolutely had not adapted with the same ease.
She still carried the suffocating weight of the guilt. The crushing guilt of failing to discipline Laura with a slightly firmer hand, of being too lenient, too pampering, the regret of not having raised her with a little less casualness, with a little less coddling, simply because coddling her felt so good...
The guilt of failing to severely reprimand her, not even once, not even when it became glaringly obvious how fundamentally wrong it was to abandon her infant daughter ninety-nine percent of the time simply to relentlessly chase the horizon.
A single, harsh word, delivered at the absolute perfect moment.
Perhaps it would have been enough to anchor her... Perhaps not.
She would absolutely never know the truth, and that agonizing uncertainty was the cruelest part of the punishment.