Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1262 - Taming the Old World - Shadow Dragons - 9

The dark swamp fought back under the Dragon's control, desperately attempting to smother the inferno.

The heavy, viscous water was inherently hostile here, carrying the Shadow dragon's water dragon adjacent resistance to heat, surging upward to drown the flames just as it had drowned countless fiery threats before.

But the three supporting tamers refused to yield.

Ren, Luna, and Larissa kept the inferno alive by actively repelling the dark liquid that masqueraded as water. They controlled the surrounding shadows and moisture, pumping vast quantities of wind into the basin to push back the swamp and feed the roaring blaze, refusing to let a single ember fade until the gruesome work was finished.

Neither the corrupted mutants nor the guardian dragon managed to escape the catastrophic impact.

The beasts that the corruption and now Selthia had dispatched to kill the guardian over time, the towering piles of corpses meant to fuel the living, and several dozen high-tier Platinum predators all burned simultaneously in a purifying blaze that left zero biological material behind for the hive mind to recycle.

In one single strike, the vast majority of the corruption's northern army was reduced to drifting spiritual ash.

And standing directly in the center of that towering pillar of fire and light, Ren's squad finally locked their focus onto Yano's Darkness dragon.

They did not descend. The inferno raging below was far too intense to safely approach the ground. They'd wait until the fire runs out of mana and…

But then, the blaze grew even fiercer than any of their estimates had predicted, forcing even the Platinum-tier mutants that were not on top of the corpses pile into a frantic retreat.

The murky swamp began to burn with an unexpected intensity, releasing thick, choking plumes of jet-black smoke into the air.

♢♢♢♢

The strike force had no way of knowing, but the black dragon's heavy water was not merely a dense liquid.

Due to its long-term exposure to the fungal ecosystem that had merged to grant it life, the substance behaved exactly like a high heat point fuel. It shared properties with something like diesel, a concept entirely alien to their world; it was a sluggish, viscous fluid but forged of pure mana and with an incredibly high flash point near the thousand °C. Under standard conditions, or even against a conventional fire technique, it would never ignite.

This precise threshold was why the swamp had always served as a suffocating, wet kill zone rather than a fiery trap, since nothing had ever generated enough heat to spark a reaction.

Nothing, at least, until Liora's spiritual sun crashed into it, supercharged by the combined output of the other three.

The amplified bombardment spiked the temperature of the heavy water far beyond its natural limits. The dark surface began to evaporate rapidly, and those resulting vapors, finally pushed past their ignition threshold, caught fire.

And once the chain reaction began, there was no turning back…

♢♢♢♢

The entire basin transformed into a roiling sea of flames and dark smoke that severely stung the nose and throat.

However, the sprawling swamp was not their only problem.

The black dragon itself, coated head to tail in that exact same viscous liquid, ignited right alongside it. The shadows made manifest, the heavy water forming the very armor of its physical being, acting as the perfect fuel. Black flames rapidly climbed its massive frame, spreading across its wings and covering every inch of its gelatinous armor, an organic defense composed entirely of raw propellant.

Everything was burning.

The Vanguard could only watch in stunned silence. Whether stationed on the distant ground or hovering in the sky, the entire squad backed away from the towering black inferno erupting below them.

It was a blaze so immense and self-sustaining that they no longer needed to feed it a single drop of mana. It burned independently, hungrily devouring the swamp's fuel alongside the dragon's own body in a runaway chemical reaction that had completely escaped their control.

"...Perhaps that was overkill," Min muttered under his breath.

No one bothered to argue the point.

Yet, from the very heart of the inferno, the black dragon finally rose higher.

It took to the skies with its massive wings fully engulfed in fire, transforming the creature into a terrifying, burning silhouette framed against the dark smoke. The dense ice Selphira had clamped over its jaws had melted away, completely defeated by the intense heat.

Seething with pure fury, the beast unleashed its breath attack once more.

Only this time, the devastating beam was already on fire. It was a lethal mix of raw shadow and the flames currently consuming its own body, supercharged by the crushing internal pressure and agonizing temperature the guardian was enduring.

A torrential blast of black fire shot straight upward, aiming directly at Ren's squad.

The four vanguard fighters scattered through the sky to evade the strike, allowing the beam to crash into the distant mutants who had tried to avoid the burning marsh heat but clearly hadn't retreated far enough to escape the breath splash zone.

Ren and the three girls did not simply fly out of the way, as the blast was far too wide and destructive to casually dodge in time. Instead, they relied on spatial jumps, instantly teleporting to reappear safely outside the beam's trajectory. It was a taxing maneuver on their reserves, but entirely necessary.

The core issue was that the breath attack simply did not stop.

The guardian possessed a vitality and raw power far exceeding their initial estimates, proving exactly why King Dragarion had deliberately saved these beasts for last during his own campaign.

And Ren quickly noticed a highly alarming detail too: releasing that destructive energy actually seemed to provide the creature with relief.

The external flames boiling its flesh generated a suffocating internal heat, and continuously firing its breath acted as a pressure valve. Vomiting its heavy, toxic, burning acid genuinely made the monster feel better. The inferno designed to be its executioner had become excess energy for the fuel the dragon now needed to expel.

It was not going to stop firing, not as long as it kept burning.

Ren realized the entire sky would soon be smothered in a lethal rain of acidic fire and toxic ash if left unchecked, so he fully synchronized his fusion and manifested his massive three-headed Hydra.

He drew his twin elemental power crystals, setting them into a rapid spin, and flooded his two sovereign rings with raw mana, pushing his runic pathways to their utmost limit. He elevated his combat output to the very peak of what his freshly recovered system could handle. The colossal jade Hydra opened all three of its maws and fired a concentrated triple beam directly into the dragon's breath, attempting to win the power struggle and halt the torrent before it blanketed the clouds.

It was the exact same war of attrition he had used to slowly crush the Fire dragon.

But in this clash, he was steadily losing ground.