Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1098 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Unfair Advantage

Sirius understood the two new artifacts in a fraction of a second...Two blockades, no anchoring claws. Without the mechanical friction of talons gripping the stone, they couldn't create the immovable bottleneck the four massive arms had formed in the narrow stairwell below.

The kinetic force required to dislodge them wasn't remotely the same as the impossible one down there.

Sirius could push them.

But Selthia's strategy didn't rely solely on a physically weak barricade.

A suffocating shockwave of corruption blasted through the corridor before either man, older or younger, could brace themselves. It was the same hyper-condensed, explosive pulse she had used to violently drop Sirius to his knees in the chamber below.

But this time, Ren's lingering golden energy flared to life again.

It wasn't a conscious choice on Ren's part, he was far beyond the capacity to actively micromanage his mana distribution outside himself. But the massive dose of stabilization energy he had injected into Sirius was now circulating through the commander's veins. Sirius had accepted the pure energy fully and was essentially radiating Ren's pure, powerful signature.

Like a fiercely aggressive autoimmune response, that golden residue instantly reacted to the corrupted threat that had spawned it.

The purple wave crashed into Sirius and shattered. Selthia's pulse failed to drop him again.

Without breaking his stride, Sirius drew upon the absolute maximum output of his Celestial Tiger.

And he didn't swing his fists... He roared.

The blast of wind that erupted from him wasn't the standard, slicing gale of a conventional combat beast.

It was a concussive, kinetic detonation.

It was the devastating, hyper-dense shockwave forged by a tamer who had spent decades mastering the power of air's pressure.

The explosive wall of said pressure slammed directly into the two unanchored artifacts. The impact created a violent gap between the two huge masses.

It was enough... Sirius shot forward like a fired bullet, hauling Ren's almost limp body through the narrow, tearing breach a split second before the corrupted flesh recovered and slammed violently shut behind them.

They were through.

But the edge of the corruption wave had still clipped Ren.

Sickly purple lines immediately bloomed across his collarbone, creeping up the side of his neck.

Ren fought them completely passively. He couldn't aggressively reverse the rot at the blistering speed he normally could. His primary beast, his internal anchor who was normally dormant but present was not helping now, and his core was no longer resonating with the crushing power of the fungus' small and entangled yet robust net.

Operating on a desperate one percent baseline, his conversion process was agonizing. It was the clumsy, inefficient work of a craftsman stripped of his tools, slowly grinding down fractions of fractions of the rot.

It was absorbing agonizingly slow, but it was better than nothing.

Yet he still stubbornly refused to pass out. He forced the meager circulation to continue and the necrotic lines receded, fighting him every single millimeter, moving many times slower than they would have if he possessed the strength to simply incinerate them, but moving.

Sirius burst out of the true ruins, stepping into the sprawling expanse of the ten fake upper chambers.

But the heavy, dead silence they had left behind during their initial descent was completely gone.

From directly above them, vibrating through the thousands of tons of solid bedrock separating the true ruins from the surface layers, came a sound that froze the blood in Sirius's veins.

It was the catastrophic, grinding roar of solid stone being shattered.

And bleeding through that noise was the suffocating, atmospheric pressure of mana so impossibly dense it warped the air itself. It carried the cold signature of entities that did not pause, did not calculate risk, and possessed no instructions other than to obliterate whatever stood between them and their target.

The Platinum beasts from Yino were finally here. They were actively tearing through the ceiling.

Sirius didn't say a word. He didn't need to. He simply tightened his bruised grip on Ren's arm, adjusted the boy's weight against his side, and kept running.

The reality of facing two near-Platinum monstrosities, backed by dozens of High and Mid-Gold beasts, was a nightmare under his best of conditions. But facing that kind of overwhelming force when your muscles are screaming, your mana is scraped down to the marrow, and you are physically dragging an unconscious, bleeding ally?

That isn't just a disadvantage. It is an almost impossible, vertical mountain to climb. Even if you are Sirius Starweaver.

♢♢♢♢

The Great Rift was no longer just a geographical wound, a gaping chasm separating the world's crust, forcefully pushing the two great cities to the East and West.

In the shadows, miles away from the heavily fortified city borders, Selthia had been quietly performing surgery on the earth. She had spent months connecting the distant northern and southern extremes of the abyss.

She capitalized on the cities' defensive postures; the human armies simply couldn't mobilize the massive numbers required to patrol and attack every single mile of the endless chasm.

Deep in the dark, massive bridges of jagged rock had been grown and woven together. They reconstructed themselves faster than any scout team could hope to demolish them. Where a human vanguard managed to shatter one section, another stone artery would aggressively calcify and connect corruption to both world's sides before the humans even finished their retreat.

The result between destruction and creation had tilted so drastically in Selthia's favor that sending teams to break the bridges had become a strategically pointless endeavor.

Those secret arteries had given Selthia the terrifying ability to transfer her mutant hordes far away from the cities' watchful eyes. But moving undetected came with a steep logistical cost: the journey from the Yino ruins to this specific location required a big, sprawling detour through the lower-Gold rank zones of the Rift's surface.

That detour had been their absolute saving grace.

The extra hours the Platinum beasts spent navigating the long, hidden route around the city were the exact margin Ren's group had needed to complete their descent, get Sirius, and begin their escape.

Almost escaped fully outside… Almost.

The beasts had finally arrived.

They reached the coordinates just as Sirius hauled Ren's limp body into the fake upper chambers. The final, brutal leg of this escape wasn't going to be a clean sprint to the surface. It was going to be a claustrophobic nightmare, fighting through a subterranean gauntlet against horrors actively digging down to meet them.

The stone ceiling wasn't indestructible, but without a dedicated Earth-aspected tamer to part the rock, the difference was small.

However, there was another saving grace, one that was vastly more important than the detour.

The true, original Guardian of the specific ruin that sent these beasts, the apex predator that had given Selthia her troublesome skill, was already dead.

That meant there was no localized entity there capable of evolving into the Diamond-tier. There was no Dragon-like beast capable of retaining the crystal's vast consciousness or housing Selthia's mind or fundamentally warping space over a massive radius to completely sever their escape.

That specific, apocalyptic threat had been eliminated years ago.

Selthia simply hadn't cultivated that ruin with a proper Guardian at hand to infect, unlike the chamber they had just barely survived.

The other ruin, the cradle of the terrifying, anti-jump earth elemental beast, had been raided and conquered by King Coleoran and his elite vanguard long before Selthia had ever fully integrated her consciousness into the purple crystal.

That ruin had birthed two of the infamous 7 purple crystals that eventually fell into Orion's hands, artifacts that were ultimately disintegrated and scattered back into the world's mana network.

That specific anti-jump earth beast had been one of the very first assets the ancient crystal had desperately tried to secure. It had hoarded the creature's egg long before it had ever found a human medium capable of truly absorbing its power.

Selthia had eventually become that missing puzzle piece. She was the perfect medium.

But merely integrating with the crystal hadn't granted her instantaneous, god-like access to all these abilities. A support-type beast, no matter how profoundly useful for trapping prey, couldn't serve as a primary combat core.

The ancient crystal's multi-beast system was archaic. It possessed rigid requirements and brutal evolutionary bottlenecks that were fundamentally different from Ren's network.

Ren's spore-system was an elegant, biological copy. The architect copied the foundation of the ancient entity, but improved upon it, utilizing the natural inspiration of living things that the base existence lacked.

Where Ren could organically expand his sensory network through symbiotic spores without sacrificing a single human life, the purple crystal demanded a bloody toll. It required living human sacrifices, souls forcibly integrated into its architecture, to advance. It was the stark difference between a vicious, ancient entity and a modernized counter-design.

But despite the archaic flaws, The Crystal/Selthia had finally managed to pay the energy toll.

Armed with her mutant hordes, the eight colossal artifacts, and the final, dark contribution of Orion's fall, the purple crystal entity had finally forged the perfect core through Selthia, mirroring the exact same terrifying ascension Ren had achieved through his fungus.

She had successfully integrated her beast nodes all the way up to the Platinum tier, getting four potentially terrifying slots.