Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1100 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Unfair Advantage, Surface

After the long dance with Selthia's jump jammer artifacts and her beast…The fake walls had been pulverized almost into fine dust; thick stone supports were violently snapped in half. It was the brutal footprint of a desperate odyssey.

Every step of Sirius's ascent had required him to dodge a volume of enemies that defied all dodging possibility logic. Every leap between levels had been a frantic negotiation with gravity. Every evasion was a split-second calculation, made in a razor-thin margin where his muscles had to execute the maneuver the exact millisecond his brain finished the math.

He was a canvas of open wounds.

Shallow, jagged cuts laced his arms, his legs, and his back where the heavily armored, impossibly fast beasts, creatures with far too many legs, had grazed him in passing. A deep, ugly gash tore across his ribs, bleeding slowly in perfect, agonizing rhythm with his heavy breathing. His thighs and calves were not just slashed, but deeply bruised in a dozen places.

Yet, he kept his legs moving. Stopping, even for a single breath, was the one mistake this subterranean hell would not forgive.

Ren, remarkably, was perfectly fine.

That was the only variable that truly mattered for him. It was the sole reason Sirius bore the brunt of the injuries instead of avoiding them entirely.

He had deliberately compromised his own combat efficiency a bit. He had throttled the explosive power of his Celestial Tiger wind, reducing the kinetic force of every push just enough to safely cradle Ren within his shadow and although losing mana input he ended up getting some agility back without the extra mass anchoring him down.

As long as he didn't attempt to rip open a spatial tear, as long as the escape remained strictly physical, the steady mana drain of housing the boy was a burden he could shoulder.

Perhaps, after a long enough sprint, the drain would become lethal.

But once they broke through to the surface and neared the city, when his core was running on absolute fumes, he could release him.

Or reinforcements would find them first.

The city's perimeter defense grids had to detect energy signatures of this catastrophic magnitude barreling toward their walls.

They had to.

It was part of the purpose of the city's existence, defense. Sirius had served those walls long enough to hold a desperate, unshakeable faith that the vanguard would respond.

But first, he had to close that distance.

He hauled himself up into the fifth chamber, capitalizing on a massive cave-in he had orchestrated in the floor of the sixth. He had baited the horde, dodging at the exact right angles to bring the mana reinforced stone crashing down, buying him this fragile lead in the first place.

But as he climbed, he heard it.

Behind him.

Below him.

Closing in.

It was that rhythmic clatter of the two massive, asymmetrical Platinum centipedes that would be in his future nightmares if he ever made it out. They were dragging their colossal bodies up the vertical shafts at a speed that their huge size should have made biologically impossible. He could hear the heavy, almost metallic like screech of their armored plating gouging the stone as they ascended.

They were getting closer… Inch by inch.

Despite his flawless evasion, despite every bit of the tiger's wind accelerating his legs, they were closing the gap. Sirius confirmed the grim reality he had suspected since his very first dodge.

They were faster than him.

Only slightly, but slightly was a death sentence. Because of their sheer mass, Sirius only gained an advantage on the hairpin turns. When the centipedes launched their immense bulk forward, they couldn't brake. Inertia betrayed them; they had to violently scrape against the walls to reorient their momentum after throwing everything into a lunge.

But on a long, unbroken straightaway, their massive leg-span devoured the distance.

And the path back to the city was also a flat, open sprint of hundreds of kilometers.

The nightmare was just beginning…

The fragile lead he had bought with his own blood and sweat would mean absolutely nothing. Sprinting at maximum velocity wouldn't be enough. He would have to run at top speed while continuously, flawlessly dodging lethal strikes.

Every near-miss, every glancing blow he was forced to take, would bleed away his momentum. It would make the next sprint slower, and the next dodge harder, locking him into a fatal, downward spiral that only ended one way if no one intervened.

He considered summoning his tiger completely. The beast could carry him and run. But a Gold-rank beast was fundamentally slower than a Platinum-rank anomaly even with the serpent extra buffs as a double. A massive, four-meter-tall tiger carrying two humans on its back would be an equally massive, unmissable target on an open plain.

One mistake, and it was all over.

Sirius ground his teeth together.

He braced himself for the most agonizing marathon of his life…

Then the stone floor violently erupted beneath his boots.

He threw himself sideways. It was an evasion by a margin so microscopically thin it didn't even deserve to be called a margin. The colossal, mandibled maw of the lead centipede snapped shut on empty air, crushing the exact pocket of space Sirius's torso had occupied half a second prior. As the beast's massive head slammed into the wall, struggling to correct its own massive inertia, Sirius ruthlessly planted his boot on its armored shell, stealing its momentum to launch himself into the mouth of the next stairwell.

♢♢♢♢

Sirius finally dragged himself out of the subterranean hell of the first chamber.

He was bleeding profusely now. He was battered, his clothes shredded, and he was exhausted on a level that made his previous fatigue in the sixth chamber feel like a light warm-up.

The final five chambers had been infinitely worse than he had calculated, for the exact reason he had feared. Every single time the beasts caught up to him, the resulting skirmish had brutally taxed his momentum. Speed lost was speed that could not be reclaimed; it only forced him to burn his remaining energy faster.

With a final, desperate heave, he vaulted out of the massive sinkhole. He cleared the lip of the colossal tree-like corpse, a landmark that was now terrifyingly hollowed out, eaten away more than half, much more compared to when he had first entered years ago.

The blinding light of the midday sun slammed into his eyes in the clearing.

It was the very first touch of natural light, the first breath of true surface air he had felt in this dark, 'futuristic-for-him' world since his descent.

For one fragile, suspended heartbeat, it felt like victory.

It felt like he had actually done it, survived the abyss and breached the surface to begin the flat race to the city.

But right at this achievement's line, he had run out of time.

Directly behind him, exploding out of the pitch-black sinkhole he had just abandoned, a maw opened.

It was huge.

Fully prepared to swallow him whole. It lunged so fast, and was so incredibly close, that the violent displacement of air hit the back of Sirius's neck a fraction of a second before fear even registered in his brain.