Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1328 - Taming the Old World - 25.5 hours - 2

Selthia's expansion phase, which was projected to double her total forces in less than twenty-four hours, was currently severely bottlenecked.

At this crippled pace, it would take her more than a full day just to achieve a meager forty percent increase. With an almost insulting ease, the humans were actively stripping away more than half of her projected growth velocity.

And they were stealing that growth in the most humiliating manner imaginable.

Several of her Platinums would be locked in brutal combat with high-tier wild beasts, fighting tooth and nail until they were finally on the verge of securing the kill. They would be one step away from feasting on the fresh carcass, ready to recycle the rich energy to spawn a new Platinum clone.

Then, at the exact moment her beasts leaned in to feed, a human strike team would drop out of the clouds, slaughter her exhausted mutants, and casually harvest the premium parts.

Those dense biological materials passed directly into human hands.

They were likely permanently removed from the hive's closed recycling loop.

Instead of serving as vital fuel to multiply Selthia's swarm, the harvested mass was carted back to the capital, repurposed into heavy plating and ammunition for Ren's new 2.0 towers.

Every single piece stolen was a compounding double loss: a unit of growth she failed to secure, directly translated into a unit of hardened defense for her enemy.

It was infuriating…

Beyond infuriating.

But Selthia closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe. She commanded her racing mind to calculate, to detach, and to remain patient.

Because the grand harvest was only just beginning.

More than ninety-five percent of the wild Platinum-tier beasts roaming the outer rings remained completely untouched. It was a vast, sprawling ocean of untapped mana-biological resources that her swarm could still hunt and consume.

Despite the Vanguard's relentless raids, despite the stolen carcasses and the crippled expansion rate, her standing army had already swelled from four hundred to roughly five hundred and fifty elite beasts, and the numbers were still climbing.

It was an agonizingly slow climb, by her original projections, she should have easily eclipsed eight hundred units by now, it was deeply frustrating, and it was humiliating, but the swarm was still growing.

Eventually, the humans would simply be overrun...

It was basic numbers, the cold, unfeeling logic that served as Selthia's final comfort. The Vanguard's efforts, the coordinated raids, the material theft, the support for the local wildlife, had a hard ceiling. The capital possessed a finite number of elite Tamers capable of surviving a hunt in the deep wilderness. Meanwhile, Selthia's army was a self-replicating engine. It was inexhaustible, relentless, and sooner or later, it would eclipse the Vanguard purely through insurmountable numbers.

She only needed to be patient… She just had to wait.

Let the brutal, uncaring machinery of corruption run its course.

She just needed to be patient…

Patient…

PA-TIENT...

BUT IT WAS SO INCREDIBLY ANNOYING… AHHH! The golden fungal beast was neutralizing her packs, the human pests were stealing her hard-earned biomass, and the obnoxiously handsome boy with the most absurd, ridiculous luck in the world was beating her at absolutely everything, over and over and OVER AGAIN!

"DAMN IT, JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!"

Her scream echoed sharply within the cold isolation of her crystal, figuratively bouncing uselessly against the smooth walls of her mental prison. There was no one left in the dark to hear her, Orion's screams were white noise by now and that didn't count.

No ancient entity to calm her fraying nerves either, no wise, rumbling voice to gently remind her to breathe, to wait, and to assure her that everything would go exactly according to plan in the end.

There was only Selthia, her boiling rage, and the brittle, forced patience that her deeply wounded nature barely managed to hold together.

She stood perfectly still in the void, forcing her digital lungs to take slow, shuddering breaths until the blinding fury eventually simmered down to a manageable, bitter boil.

Slowly, she returned to her logistical maps, tracking the agonizingly slow growth of her swarm and embracing her forced patience.

Because in the end, she told herself, clinging desperately to the only comforting logic she had left, raw numbers would win the war.

They had to win.

She just had to swallow the urge to scream her lungs out for real for a little while longer.

♢♢♢♢

Ren was finally back to full strength…

The physical reset had cost him roughly twenty-two hours of intermittent sleep, squeezed between overseeing the new tower grid and painstakingly coaxing his own meridian network back to baseline.

It was a shorter recovery window than he had originally feared, leaving him feeling entirely renewed. His internal systems were operating smoothly, his spiritual channels were swept clean of any lingering strain, and the dense ether flowed freely down his left arm without crashing against the jagged crystalline blockages that had plagued him for days. He had spent so much time compensating for that petrified handicap that having a fully functional arm actually felt bizarre, like a phantom limb returning to life.

He could finally route his magic naturally without having to force the currents through convoluted bypasses.

He was currently soaring high above the capital on the back of Victor's Golden Eagle, running aerial inspections on the ongoing construction below.

Every now and then, he would instruct Victor to dive when his heightened perception caught a twisted knot in the roots mana, signaling a faulty connection where the civilian crews were trying to splice the new defensive towers into the subterranean ley lines.

The engineering project was advancing at a remarkable pace; because the Vanguard had pulled their perimeter back, the defensive ring was tight and manageable, allowing the heavy artillery to go up much faster than Ren had calculated.

Yet, despite the smooth progress on the surface, his focus remained severely divided. A heavy, unshakable anxiety kept dragging his thoughts back down into the dark, fixating on the metallic dome and the impossible task waiting for him in the basement.

♢♢♢♢

Victor pulled him out of his spiraling thoughts with a blunt question over the rushing wind…