Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1263 - Taming the Old World - Shadow Dragons - 10

The Hydra's triple beam, the very same technique that had overwhelmed an elemental guardian in less than half an hour, collided head-on with the black dragon's burning breath and failed to push it back.

The point of contact between the two massive energies held firm for a fleeting second, and then it began to retreat.

It was creeping backward, inching steadily toward Ren.

Because the ignited, furious and wounded black dragon was no longer fighting with its standard baseline strength.

With every passing second it spent engulfed in flames, its internal temperature spiked, and it aggressively channeled every single degree of that unbearable pressure straight into its attack. The pain was making the beast exponentially stronger instead of weakening it. The inferno Ren had unleashed to secure a clean kill for the mutants was actively forging the black creature into something vastly more dangerous than it had ever been.

The guardian forced even more raw power into the clash.

The collision point receded another few meters, crawling ominously closer to the Hydra and the rest of the Vanguard elites. Ren ground his teeth together, pouring every last ounce of his output into the light beam, yet he could feel his momentum slipping away.

His masterful tactical strike, his perfectly timed incineration, had inadvertently transformed a wounded, slightly tired guardian into a living torch powered entirely by its own suffering.

And right now, that blazing torch was steadily winning the war of pressure across the sky.

♢♢♢♢

Selthia was furious.

She had known it... She had known they would try to deceive her, that without the core entity running the complex tactical analysis, utilizing the vast, ancient knowledge it had harbored for so long, she would be incapable of guessing the true intentions of Ren's squad.

She had anticipated the trickery, yet it still burned.

They had played her right up until the bitter end. The Ren she had spotted riding on the back of the cloud bird was never the real one.

Of course…

That was exactly why he hadn't looked quite as handsome as she remembered, it wasn't just a different haircut.

Selthia shook her head, quickly pushing the foolish thought aside, and forced herself to analyze her current predicament with whatever fragile composure she had left without her advisor.

The northern front was a lost cause.

Given the catastrophic developments in that sector, the literal inferno now blazing across the black dragon's swamp, her mutants would never be able to get anywhere near the target on time.

It was no longer worth the effort to contest that specific core or its mountain sheltered ring.

The fire was going to burn for an agonizingly long time based on current projections, and without a specialized artifact readily available to trap him inside the mountain, Ren would simply slip through her fingers just like he always did… Like he always did!

Even if the human ended up exhausted, even if the battle cost him dearly, the infuriatingly handsome Tamer would claim the ultimate prize while she was left grasping at empty air like always.

It was a waste of resources to stay.

Instead, she would leave only a handful of scouts in the north to monitor the situation, just in case an opportunity arose. Her military assets, however, had vastly better places to be deployed.

And sitting there alone inside her crystal, Selthia performed the one logistical calculation she could still manage by herself.

The massive influx of northern reinforcements, encompassing half of the remaining forces in that hemisphere that had not yet marched into the fire, did not need to be squandered.

She could simply redirect them…

She would funnel them straight toward the capital to strike the most appetizing target currently available on the board, Yano's royal castle, while Ren's heavy hitters were occupied a fraction of a world away fighting a living torch.

Perhaps, bolstered by those extra numbers, she could finally breach the castle defenses in time.

Even better, now that she held concrete proof that Ren was not stationed in the south, (confirming that the entire operation was merely a highly elaborate decoy manned by a genuine fighting force but not that strong), she could divert a portion of the city's impending swarm southward.

She would reinforce both active battlefields simultaneously using the leftover from the lost and discarded northern front. It was the perfect opportunity to escalate the pressure on both the capital and the southern guardian at the same time, confident that neither location was secretly hiding humanity's greatest threat, that Glorious threat.

It was a solid maneuver... It wasn't exactly brilliant, (since the ancient entity likely would have formulated a far superior plan from the very beginning), but it was reliable. She was effectively transforming a humiliating defeat in the north into a massive tactical injection for her remaining sieges.

Selthia issued the new commands, and her corrupted hordes began to shift.

♢♢♢♢

Back in the capital, the defense was still holding strong.

One hundred and sixty Platinum beasts remained a manageable threat, largely thanks to the tightly condensed perimeter and the star prison silently guarding its own flank. The enemy numbers lingered comfortably below the threshold of two hundred that Arturo had firmly established as their maximum safe limit.

Yet Arturo began to worry.

His concern didn't stem from the immediate visuals on the battlefield; it was born from a subtle feeling. It was a creeping dread that a logistical genius learned never to ignore, since his intuition was often just his brain calculating complex variables much faster than he could consciously articulate them. Something profound in the rhythm of the mutant horde had shifted.

A massive rebalancing act was taking place.

Enemy forces were migrating across the horizon in sweeping patterns that his aerial scouts were only just beginning to report.

"More are coming," he murmured softly, his eyes locked on his tactical map. "I cannot predict exactly when they will reach our walls, but a bigger wave is approaching."

Victor stood right beside him and tightened his jaw.

Whenever Arturo voiced a dark premonition, it paid to listen…

♢♢♢♢

Down in the southern hemisphere, the conflict remained a tense stalemate.

Both sides were operating on relatively even footing, the chaotic skirmish having stabilized into a predictable rhythm with Yang and Ignatius using their massive elemental walls to funnel the little corrupted creatures that dared attacking directly into a slaughterhouse.

However, the beasts abruptly altered their behavior.

They grew more fiercely aggressive once again.