Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1312 - Taming the Old World - Last Dragon

That was her desperate gamble, the best strategy her isolated mind could piece together.

Selthia needed to apply just enough pressure to anchor Ren to the city, forcing him to play defense instead of flying north to bail out Selphira. If Ren remained tethered to the capital, the northern front would be stripped of its most terrifying variable, granting Selthia her best, and perhaps her final, opportunity to snatch the Northern Light Guardian before the war concluded.

It was not a brilliant masterstroke… It was the frantic scrambling of a losing player desperately trying not to be swept off the board entirely.

But it was the only card she had left to play.

♢♢♢♢

Up on the northern front, Selphira had caught the latest pair of courier hawks dropping out of the clouds.

The last scroll she unrolled brought the best news she had heard all day: Ren had wrapped up the southern campaign in record time and touched down inside the capital before Selthia's marching columns could even reach the outer ditches.

The southern mountain was officially closed, both the guardian's core and the Light Ring were tucked safely inside Ren's shadow, and humanity's strongest piece was back on the central square of the board, standing guard over the highest concentration of lives in the kingdom.

The earlier dispatch had carried a more complicated update.

Roughly an hour from now, enemy reinforcements would reach the base of the northern peak. Selthia had pulled the hundred Platinum beasts and the single Diamond mutant that had been loitering outside Yano's walls and sent them marching north to join the siege here.

On paper, adding another hundred elites and a seventh titan to the mountain should have been a serious headache. Yet, as Selphira folded the parchment and looked out over the snow-dusted crags, she did not feel pressed for time.

Her northern battalion was in far better shape today than the battered elites that had fought yesterday's war in the south, and she had all those elites here too...

Ren had sent the largest portion of their army up here, and even though the grind against Yino's ethereal Light Dragon had been a slow, methodical affair, her soldiers had barely dipped into their mana reserves. Better yet, the wear and tear on the guardian was starting to show.

The great beast of light looked noticeably frayed around the edges, its translucent hide dulling as each mending cycle took a few seconds longer than the last. Even a dragon level healer had a ceiling on how much sustained punishment it could shrug off, though over the last few minutes, the human lines had actually stopped firing at the dragon altogether, leaving its health bar almost frozen where it stood.

Instead, the Academy Directors stationed along the flanks had turned their attention to the mutant packs. Over the past few minutes, the old scholars had managed to roast ten Platinum beasts using their newly awakened spiritual fire. Because their spiritual flames were still sitting at the base Iron rank and made the fusion unstable, they lacked the heat required to reduce a Platinum carcass to sterile ash in one go the way Liora did.

Even so, scorching the dead meat ruined roughly half the usable energy before the surrounding pack could cannibalize the remains. Ten dead mutants translated to a net loss of five full Platinums energy permanently erased from Selthia's northern ledger.

Bit by bit, the scales on the mountain were tipping toward the Vanguard.

Two specific shifts on the field were driving that momentum.

First, the Light Dragon had not stopped shooting… Its rapid-fire volleys of concentrated radiance kept raking across the rocky slopes, and while that blistering rate of fire had been a major nuisance for the human flyers earlier, it was now doing their work for them. Because Selphira's troops had pulled back and ceased fire against it, the guardian's hostility rested squarely on the mutant formations still crowding its territory.

Second, and far more decisive for the pace of the battle, Selphira had taken the gloves off.

She had overhauled her entire tactical approach… Instead of standing in the rear and using the bare minimum of frost mana to chill the air and scrub away the dragon's mirages, she had pivoted her vanguard to openly hunt Selthia's beasts, pouring her winter domain into the corrupted ranks without holding a single drop back.

The human army had abandoned the boss fight to butcher the rival raiding party.

The logic behind her pivot was simple. The moment Selphira read that Selthia had pulled her siege force away from the capital and sent it north, a cold certainty settled in her mind: once Ren arrived, under no circumstances was the Witch going to turn around and attack the city.

With Ren standing on Yano's ramparts, the capital's perimeter was off the menu. Throwing an army against walls defended by Ren and Liora was not an offensive; it was an energy furnace that would leave Selthia bankrupt in twenty minutes.

That meant this northern peak was Selthia's last remaining casino table. It was the only place left in the world where she still had a realistic shot at walking away with a prize.

For Selphira, that realization was liberating. It meant now she could do whatever she pleased up here.

Earlier, she had been forced to walk on eggshells, worried that if she hit the mutant lines too hard, Selthia would get frustrated, pack up her six northern Diamonds, and send them marching south to overwhelm Arturo's walls. Now that Ren was home to anchor the city, that threat was dead. Selphira no longer had to ration her mana for a worst-case retreat, nor did she have to play nice to keep the enemy seated at the table.

She could cut loose and fight as dirty as four centuries of war had taught her how.

So she waded in.

Selphira stopped playing environmental support on the fringes and dropped straight into the thick of the horde. She cut off the cooling breeze she had been maintaining around the upper peak, leaving the dragon alone, and turned that sub-zero pressure directly onto the Platinum packs. Whole mutants were flash-frozen in mid-stride, their corrupted flesh locking up into brittle ice sculptures that heavy hitters like Lin shattered into pieces a second later.

Her dual fusion, which she had kept on a tight, economical leash all morning, now ran wide open.

Caught off guard by the sudden betrayal of the unspoken truce, Selthia peeled off a small fraction of her swarm to return fire and screen her rear against the humans.

Yet the vast majority of her two hundred Platinums, along with all six of her towering Diamonds, stayed glued to the Light Dragon.

Selthia was racing a clock she could hear ticking in her back.

She was desperate to finish off the guardian before the board shifted again, before Ren got it into his head to fly north or send a fresh wave of heavy hitters up here.

Every extra minute the Light Dragon stayed on its feet was another minute for humanity to steal the kill out from under her nose, so she forced her Diamonds to ignore the bleeding rear guard and keep hammering the boss.

That tunnel vision left her wide open.

With the human battalion blatantly shooting her troops in the back, and with Selphira no longer chilling the air around the summit, Selthia's offensive bogged down in the worst possible way.

As the ambient heat from the neighboring fire territory crept back over the crags, the thermal distortion returned in full force. The Light Dragon slipped right back behind its veil of shimmering mirages, firing blinding lasers from the haze while the mutants swung at empty air.