Chapter 1279 - Taming the Old World - Shadow Dragons - Last Front - 4

Chapter 1279: Chapter 1279 - Taming the Old World - Shadow Dragons - Last Front - 4

The decision to dive into the mountain might have looked like a desperate, last-second gamble.

It was nothing of the sort... Sirius had run all the options of their situation long before he initiated the shadow jump.

They simply could not use the guardian to weed out the horde any longer. Their spiritual fire reserves were completely dry, and the physical toll of sustaining that three-way crossfire had become unsustainable. If they had pivoted to attack the mutants directly, Selthia would have instantly realized she was fighting a war on two fronts against both the humans and the dragon. She might have ordered a retreat to reassess.

Or perhaps she would have doubled down... But either way, burning their final reserves on a direct clash was a fool’s errand. They would not have thinned the ranks significantly, and the surviving monsters would have simply cannibalized the fallen to undo all their hard work.

The only viable play on the board was patience. Let the Witch do the heavy lifting, conserve their ether, and steal the prize from right under her nose at the last possible second.

The strategy itself was flawless. The execution, however, was about to become a nightmare.

♢♢♢♢

Inside the vault, the southern shadow mountain presented its own unique challenge.

The ancient architecture seemed designed to test intruders, throwing attack mechanisms and dense mana barriers in their path. Liu finally shattered the first major barrier with a concentrated sonic pulse. The destructive wave reduced the heavy crystal obstacle to gravel, clearing the tunnel so they could push forward at a sprint.

But their frontal position came with a fatal flaw. They were not the only ones moving in the tunnels.

A low, guttural chittering echoed from the tunnel behind them. The corruption had finally invaded the entrance too.

This was the biggest problem within their own strategy. Every puzzle Sirius and Liu solved, every physical barrier they obliterated to advance, essentially paved a smooth highway for the monsters chasing them. The two commanders were doing the grueling work of carving a path through the ruin, and the corrupted tide simply flooded into the empty spaces they left behind, exploiting every unlocked door without burning any of their own energy.

Every step forward brought them closer to the elemental ring. It also brought the enemy closer to their backs.

"Do not stop," Sirius ordered, keeping his eyes locked on the darkness behind them. "Do not look back, and do not worry about the rear. I will hold the line. You just focus on moving us forward as fast as the mountain allows."

Liu obeyed without a single word of argument.

He surged ahead, utilizing every ounce of speed the confined space permitted. He systematically dismantled the barriers and elemental shadow golems in their way, leaving his blind spot entirely in his partner’s hands.

They managed to clear half the distance to the core chamber before the horde finally caught up.

Sirius did not panic, nor did he waste unnecessary ether...

As the vanguard of the corrupted tide lunged through the gloom, he activated his shorter and cheaper shadow jumps with perfect precision.

He did not aim for the kill.

Attempting to eradicate the monsters one by one would have drained his core in a matter of minutes.

Instead, he materialized from the darkness just long enough to swing, cheap to keep, claws of concentrated light, cleanly severing the legs and arms of the leading beasts.

He targeted the extremities and nothing else.

This created an immediate, mutant bottleneck. The mutilated predators were not dead, meaning they left no usable corpses for the rear guard to cannibalize, but they were completely stripped of their mobility. They collapsed into the narrow stone corridors, their heavy bodies thrashing and tangling together. It formed a writhing barricade of crippled flesh, physically blocking the tunnel for the hundreds of mutants pushing from behind.

If the horde decided to wait for those limbs to regenerate, Sirius and Liu would gain several precious minutes.

Sirius faded back into the shadows and sprinted to catch up with Liu, leaving his gruesome masterpiece behind. A barricade of living, crippled monsters. It was a remarkably elegant tactic, yielding maximum obstruction for a minimal cost of mana.

But the quiet of the ruin was soon shattered by a sickening crunch.

It was not the wet, shifting sound of an exoskeleton reformed by accelerated healing. It was the brutal, heavy cracking of exoskeletons and muscle being forcibly ripped apart. The beasts trapped in the back possessed zero patience for the roadblock. Rather than waiting for their crippled kin to mend, they simply tore them to pieces. They shoved, bit, and trampled the wounded, carving a path through their own allies without a shred of hesitation.

The corruption did not care for its individual units; it only cared about the collective energy. The swarm used them, and the moment they became a hindrance, they were slaughtered and pushed aside.

Sirius tightened his jaw, but he kept his pace steady.

The tactic still bought them time. It was not as much as he had hoped, but every second mattered... And he could repeat the process.

Every time the vanguard closed the distance, he would sever more limbs, build another wall of thrashing bodies, and buy them another handful of minutes.

It would not hold forever. But it only needed to hold long enough to reach the ring.

♢♢♢♢

Sirius finally caught up to Liu, who was already dismantling the next runic lock in the corridor.

"They caught up to me halfway through," Sirius reported, matching the younger man’s brisk pace. "I crippled the front line and made a bottleneck. It gives us a buffer, but not a big one. They are going to keep coming."

Liu nodded, silently processing the tactical update as he cleared the debris from their path.

"Listen to me carefully." Sirius dropped his voice to a harsh whisper despite the fact that only the enemy was around to hear them. "Conserve your energy for the exit. Do not burn it all just getting us to the center. When we secure that ring, we are going to have to fight our way out of this mountain with four hundred Platinum monsters blocking the door. The entrance is completely sealed. The extraction is going to be infinitely harder than the infiltration."

"I know," Liu replied, his tone flat and focused.