Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1280 - Taming the Old World - Shadow Dragons - Last Front - 5

"Maximum efficiency," Sirius stressed. "Every single drop of mana counts. We move fast, we secure the prize, and we keep enough in the tank to carve our way out. If we run dry in here, it does not matter how far we make it. We will just be trapped in a tomb holding a ring that would still not be ours in the end."

Liu did not offer another verbal confirmation.

But his actions shifted immediately… He tightened his movements, rationing his sonic pulses with extreme prejudice. He only unleashed his power when a barrier absolutely required it, hoarding every possible reserve for the exact nightmare Sirius had just described.

The two men pushed deeper into the dark of the southern ruin. Behind them, the corrupted swarm shrieked and tore itself apart to close the gap. Their internal mana clocks ticked down just as relentlessly as the encroaching tide.

Ahead of them waited the ultimate prize.

Behind them, a sealed door and a hungry army.

And caught between the two, two commanders calculated every breath, every spell, and every fleeting second, determined to pull off the impossible without wasting a single spark of energy.

So Sirius executed the identical strategy repeatedly…

Every time the rushing tide of corruption threatened to swallow them in the dark, he turned. Utilizing his most mana-efficient techniques, short-range shadow jumps and concentrated claws of light, he severed the legs and arms of the leading monsters.

He created grisly, thrashing bottlenecks, meticulously hoarding the vast majority of his core reserves for the true extraction.

The strategy was working flawlessly. Beast after beast, corridor after corridor, the two commanders carved a path toward the final trial chamber protecting the elemental ring.

But just as the finish line came into view, the entire dynamic shattered.

Sirius spun around to deliver another surgical strike, only to find himself staring straight up at a Diamond-tier mutant.

♢♢♢♢

This apex predator had not come into the mountain from the outside. It had been manufactured right here in the tunnel, and Sirius himself was almost entirely responsible for his existence.

The gruesome barricades Sirius had been leaving behind, the crippled, mutilated Platinums thrashing in the dirt, had been consumed by a single monster dragging itself at the very rear of the pack that had realized the feast was free.

Gorging itself on the crippled bodies Sirius generously provided and inside a high mana ambient like the inside of a Diamont rank crystal mountain, this single mutant had forcefully cannibalized its way up the evolutionary ladder. It absorbed the staggering biomass of its fallen kin, inflating its power until it finally breached the Diamond rank.

Sirius's brilliant delaying tactic had essentially spoon-fed a titan.

And right now, that newly birthed Diamond was breathing down Liu's neck.

Sirius launched himself backward, moving with the fluid confidence of a man who had successfully butchered dozens of monsters today.

He discovered, in a fraction of a second, that this creature operated on an entirely different scale.

He couldn't even slow it down. Even with his double fusion beasts kept inside his core and system pushed to its absolute maximum output, Sirius's claws of solid light barely managed to scratch the Diamond's hyper-dense carapace.

And what little damage he did inflict knitted itself back together almost instantaneously.

Sirius was already exhausted... He had been fighting without pause for a while. He had dueled the Shadow Guardian, held the line against the corrupted tide, and navigated this lethal ruin. His core was aching, and his fusion was beginning to flicker under the relentless strain.

Severing the limbs of a peak Platinum 3 had already been a grueling chore. A Diamond was a completely different species of nightmare.

The rhythm of the battle transformed.

It was no longer an elegant, choreographed retreat where Sirius controlled the flow of the corridor. It devolved into a desperate game of survival. Sirius was forced to dodge, scramble, and retreat. He threw wild scratches wherever he found an opening, teleporting away a split second before the beast's massive jaws snapped shut, doing absolutely everything in his power just to buy Liu a few more precious seconds.

The Diamond mutant was terrifyingly fast for its colossal size.

It unleashed a relentless barrage of sweeping claws, elemental blasts, and lunging bites. Sirius barely evaded the onslaught, utilizing his shadow jumps to frantically blink around the cavern. He would appear on the beast's flank, carve a glowing trench through its armor with his light, and vanish into the floor before the creature's spiked tail could crush his skull.

Every successful strike he landed flared with the purifying essence of light, an elemental energy that theoretically inflicted agonizing, lingering damage on the corruption. It was supposed to cripple them.

But the Diamond's regeneration simply ignored the math.

A searing wound of pure light that would have grounded a Platinum for some minutes closed over in seconds. Sirius carved into the flesh, and the muscle instantly rewove itself. He struck again, and the armor hardened. It felt exactly like trying to empty the ocean with a leaking bucket; no matter how frantically he scooped, the water level refused to drop.

Sirius leaped into the air, narrowly dodging a brutal charge that shook the entire mountain. He materialized directly behind the monster, burying his glowing claws deep between its armored segments. The beast roared and thrashed, and before Sirius could even retract his hands, the thick muscle was already hardening around his fingers, trying to trap him.

"Stubborn," Sirius panted, wrenching himself free and diving backward into the shadows. "Very stubborn..."

The Diamond mutant relentlessly pursued them.

Sirius was forced to drag the behemoth in wide, frantic circles through the bigger chamber of the previous trial. He dodged, he cut, he bled the clock. He was entirely incapable of inflicting permanent damage, but he possessed just enough agility to avoid being crushed. It was a suffocating, lethal dance. Sirius knew he could not sustain this tempo indefinitely; every single shadow jump, even if short and cheap, burned precious mana, and his reserves were plummeting with every narrow escape.

A heavy, spiked tail whistled a fraction of an inch past his temple. Sirius ducked, retaliated with a blind slash to the beast's flank, and immediately retreated.

The mutant charged, attempting to pin him against the ancient stone wall. Sirius barely managed to slide through the closing gap, feeling the rotting heat of the corrupted mass radiating against his skin.

He was successfully buying time. But time was all he was buying. And in a war of attrition against this level of regeneration, time did not win battles.

Eventually, the chamber began to flood with the rest of the horde. Running out of physical space to kite the Diamond, Sirius was forced to fall back toward the corridor.

Fortunately, Liu cracked the final lock.

Just before Sirius completely ran out of room to maneuver, Liu's concentrated sonic pulse shattered the final barricade. The heavy stone doors groaned, and the inner sanctum housing the elemental ring finally opened before them.

They finally pushed forward.

But as Liu sprinted across the threshold into the sanctum, he realized the echoing footsteps behind him had stopped... He was alone.

He whipped his head around.

He saw Sirius anchored to the floor, trapped by his ankles.

A thick, viscous tendril of pure, solidified shadow connected Sirius's boots directly to the Diamond mutant, slowly dragging the commander backward toward the beast's waiting jaws.

The Diamond had done something completely unprecedented. It had cast a high-tier darkness spell.

And that horrifying development meant only one thing.

The corrupted network had officially assimilated the elemental core of the guardian the horde was actively devouring outside.

Because outside the mountain, the Vanguard had failed to prevent the swarm from swallowing that Shadow Dragon's core.