Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1320 - Taming the Old World - Last Dragon - 4

Sirius had an almost imperceptible, small smile…

"Your wolf struggles when using pure light, but your tiger's affinity easily covers that blind spot," Sirius explained briskly, laying out his observations. "My beasts operate on the same principle... The difference is that when you fuse them, you achieve complete, multi-elemental equilibrium across all seven domains, exactly like our General Ren does. So you have much more potential than I do, Luna, even only within the specific domain of shadows. In your hands, this artifact gives our side a much higher ceiling."

Yet, there was a deeper layer to the exchange, a quiet current of emotion that Sirius did not voice, but which Luna, knowing her father as well as she did, read perfectly between the lines.

Sirius had never been able to give her the primary family ring Dragarion had entrusted for 10 years that never came to fully be. It was the ancestral artifact that had been lost years ago to a now already opened door... The heirloom he, as a father, had desperately wanted to pass down to her on some significant milestone in her life.

This was not that ring.

But it carried the exact same profound weight.

By physically handing over this shadow artifact in the middle of an important battle, Sirius was expressing something he struggled to say aloud: he trusted her... Now more than ever.

He trusted her judgment on the battlefield. He trusted all of her life decisions, including her choice to stand beside someone as extraordinary and complicated as Ren, despite the tangled political nightmare of the harem and everything that situation entailed. Most importantly, he was quietly acknowledging that she was no longer the fragile little girl he had secretly wept over for years. She was a fully grown adult, every bit as capable as he was, if not more so.

Passing the ring was a profound, silent acknowledgment of her strength.

Luna accepted the artifact without a single word.

She took the dense and heavy object, slid it onto her finger, and gave her father a single, firm nod. Her expression remained perfectly controlled, serene, and unyielding, the flawless mask of a commander standing in the middle of a war zone.

Inside her chest, however, something fragile finally broke.

And it broke in the best possible way…

'This is his way of SAYING it, isn't it?' Luna thought, her throat tightening. 'He is... he is REALLY PROUD of me! He completely forbade my mother from stepping onto this battlefield, no matter how much she threw a tantrum or begged, but he let me along WITHOUT A SECOND THOUGHT. That means... IT MEANS HE ACTUALLY TRUSTS ME! HE KNOWS I AM NOT HIS LITTLE GIRL ANYMORE, AND IT DOESN'T MAKE HIM SAD, IT MAKES HIM PROUD!'

'…YOU FOOLISH OLD MAN! COULD YOU REALLY NOT FIND A TIME TO TELL ME THIS WHEN WE WEREN'T IN THE MIDDLE OF AN APOCALYPSE SO I COULD ACTUALLY HUG YOU?! I am going to CRY... No... ABSOLUTELY NOT… I AM NOT GOING TO CRY! I am in the middle of a war, crying is strictly PROHIBITED on the battlefield. ...BUT THANK YOU, DAD!'

She did not voice a single word of the internal monologue. She simply curled her hand into a tight fist, feeling the cold metal of the ring press against her skin, and pivoted sharply back toward the chaos.

With the artifact instantly amplifying her shadow ether, Luna charged a massive strike.

Channeling the power through her Equilibrium Alphyn, now bolstered by an additional fifty percent of pure dark energy, she condensed nearly half of her total shadow reserves into a single, devastating blade. She locked eyes with one of the remaining Diamond titans, jumped across the battlefield, and brought the blade down.

The concentrated shadow half moon strike cleanly bisected the Diamond mutant.

The maneuver cost her a big fifteen percent of her total reserves in a single swing, dropping her internal tank down to a forty-five percent, yet the execution was flawless. The titanic beast crumbled into two severed halves, and the Academy Directors instantly flooded the remains with spiritual fire before the corruption could attempt a repair. A third Diamond erased from the board.

The tactical impact of the strike rippled far beyond the physical death of the beast.

Watching a single, young female Tamer, a girl who had just slipped a new ring onto her finger but not many saw do it, casually cleave a Diamond-tier titan in half with a single strike dealt a crippling blow to the morale of the entire corrupted swarm.

And it dealt an equally devastating psychological blow to Selthia herself.

♢♢♢♢

Isolated inside her crystal chamber, Selthia watched her fourth masterpiece crumble into ash, and something inside her finally snapped.

For the very first time in this entire grueling campaign, the corrupted Witch genuinely considered ordering a full retreat.

She was bleeding Diamonds and Platinums at a catastrophic rate that her mind simply could not sustain. Each of those elite units had cost her an astronomical volume of ether to force-breed, and these Yano bullies were casually slicing them in half one after another across two separate fronts simultaneously.

If this slaughter continued, she would completely exhaust her elite vanguard without securing a single guardian to show for it.

Was this specific Light Core really worth the escalating price? Was the ring worth bankrupting her army?

Perhaps it wasn't… Perhaps the smartest tactical play was to fold her hand right now. Stop feeding her priceless Diamonds into a meat grinder that only served to boost the Vanguard's morale.

She could pull her surviving forces back, retreat into the deep wilds, and maximize her breeding pits. She could drain the beasts from the outer Platinum rings until the very earth was dry and lifeless.

And then, she could launch a final, overwhelming assault on the capital. A true doomsday march. She would attack when there was absolutely no mana beasts left to harvest, throwing a swarm so incomprehensibly massive that not even Ren or Liora could hope to incinerate it fast enough to save the walls.

It was a viable concept… A long-term, survival-oriented strategy, the exact kind of cold, calculated maneuver the ancient purple dragon would have likely endorsed?

But sitting entirely alone in the dark, Selthia hesitated.

Because ordering a retreat right now meant admitting, yet again, that she had lost. It meant swallowing the bitter pill that humanity had utterly outplayed her across all three fronts, that she had burned an ocean of resources for absolutely nothing, and that the arrogant defenders of Yano had humiliated her once more.

And a very vocal, deeply wounded part of her, the angry, isolated girl who no longer had a wise, ancient voice whispering in her ear to cool her temper, flatly refused to accept that humiliation.

She wanted to win something… Anything!

She needed a single victory to prove to herself, more than anyone else in the world, that she was not just an incompetent child losing a war on every conceivable front.

Selthia stared figuratively at her mental map…

She watched her irreplaceable Diamonds fall, watched the morale of her swarm evaporate, watched the Northern Light Dragon castigating her forces without a second of pause.

And, alone in her crystal, she slowly began to weigh the deployment of her ultimate trump card.

The stitched-together, corrupted Shadow Dragon mutant was still buried deep underground, waiting for her command.

Perhaps it was finally time to play it?