Chapter 1291 - Taming the Old World - Compulsory Reaction - 2

Chapter 1291: Chapter 1291 - Taming the Old World - Compulsory Reaction - 2

"If I were sitting in her chair, I would have pulled the entire swarm back and let the numbers compound for three to four days straight. I would have waited until five hundred turned into two thousand, no, four thousand, before making a single move toward the capital. Had she done that, she could have marched on the Light Dragons with a force that nothing on this continent could hope to stall."

Ren slowly shook his head... "But instead, she is furious about yesterday. She is reacting out of spite rather than looking at the math, and that impatience is going to cost her the war again."

Even as he said it, Ren added a quiet mental footnote.

Now that he knew she possessed the ability to double her ranks, ,and this time after only sixteen hours, he never would have given her four days of peace anyway.

He would have mobilized the Vanguard to strike the Light Mountains as soon as humanly possible to cut the problem off at the root. In a roundabout way, Selthia’s hotheaded rush to attack today aligned with the exact timeline prudence would have forced upon him.

Still, he could not get over how poorly she had played her hand.

She did not even need four days to tilt the board... If she had simply held her temper for one more cycle, letting her force swell closer to a thousand strong while waiting for the exhausted humans to engage the Light Guardian first, she could have caught them on the back foot with twice the firepower and likely some time to spare.

All she had to do was sit still, let her furnaces burn, and wait for Ren to make the first move.

She had chosen the opposite path...

Frankly, Ren was grateful for the mistake. If humanity’s greatest threat insisted on throwing blind punches out of anger instead of quietly building a checkmate in the dark, he was not going to complain. It handed the Vanguard a workable window to win all, even if they had to march out of the gates at seventy percent capacity.

A patient Selthia, was an extinction-level problem.

An angry Selthia, was just another battle to win...

Ren turned away from the map to face the three mesmerizing women standing beside him.

"We are going to have to tap into the dragon energy from the vault a bit heavier than we planned," Ren told them, keeping his voice level. "I am sorry... I know what I promised you, and I know the risks we are taking with our bodies. Right now, though, we do not have the luxury of choice. If Selthia is marching now, we fight now, and going into a three-front war at only seventy percent is a no go, which means we need the extra fuel to bridge the gap."

He looked from Luna to Larissa, and finally to Liora, gauging their responses.

"There is a silver lining to our current state, at least," Ren continued, unpacking the internal mechanics of what he was proposing.

"Our mana pools are not topped off like they were during the last siege. Because we have empty room in the tank, the draconic energy will flow into our channels much smoother, and we will not risk rupturing our cores from pure over-capacity. The catch is the relative concentration... With less of our own pure human mana sitting in the system to dilute it, the dragon essence is going to run much richer through our veins. It will be easier to take in, but the kick on the mind is going to hit a bit harder."

None of the three women looked pleased by the news.

Luna’s eyes dropped immediately to Ren’s left arm. A thick crust of translucent crystal still encased his forearm, and faint, glass-like veins were visible along the side of his neck and jawline; physical receipts of the toll the vault had already collected from him.

Beside her, Larissa pressed her lips into a thin line, running her own internal calculations on the rate of Ren’s petrification. Liora’s brow furrowed, her jaw tightening as she weighed the cost.

Yet, not a single one of them raised an objection.

As much as they hated watching him trade pieces of his own flesh for combat power, and as much as they dreaded seeing another inch of crystal creep across his skin, they understood the arithmetic of the war just as clearly as he did.

Selthia had denied them the courtesy of a full night’s rest...

And against an enemy that doubled its ranks every time the sun went down, forfeiting an hour of initiative meant handing over miles of ground they could never buy back.

"Alright," Luna said at last, speaking on behalf of all three of them. She met his gaze with firm, unyielding eyes.

"We use the energy. However, you draw only the exact amount required to clear the field, not a drop more. And the very second you feel the crystallization pushing past your threshold, you cut the flow and pull back. No arguments, Ren."

"No arguments," Ren promised, offering her a faint half-smile to ease the tension in the room.

????

With the decision finalized, the war room shifted into immediate mobilization.

The defenders of Yano were sitting at seventy percent of their natural strength, their bodies still aching from yesterday’s bloodbath. Yet, with the ancient, volatile power of the sealed dragons once again coursing through the veins of their top brass, and with Selthia marching her forces straight into a third consecutive blunder out of blind, wounded pride, the human Vanguard geared up to meet the tide.

The final sprint for the Guardians of Light had officially begun.

This time, as Ren walked toward the castle courtyard to rally the troops, his objective went far beyond merely stealing an elemental ring out from under the Witch’s nose.

He intended to strip the board clean, denying Selthia every scrap of light mana and every guardian core she tried to reach, before the compounding avalanche of the corruption grew too heavy for the world to stop.