Chapter 1298 - Taming the Old World - Light Dragons - 2

Chapter 1298: Chapter 1298 - Taming the Old World - Light Dragons - 2

Ren scanned the cramped notes without slowing his mount.

Far from bothering him, the news came as a welcome relief. Knowing the enemy was backing off meant he did not have to push his Mantis into a frantic sprint anymore, allowing the group to maintain a steady cruising speed and save every bit of their stamina for the fight itself.

A week ago, watching the enemy scatter to deny him a clean multi-kill would have annoyed him. Now, looking at the bigger board, he could not care less about the rank-and-file mutants. He was not flying south to pad a body count; he was here for the dragon, the ring, and the core.

Whether Selthia lost a hundred Platinums today or two hundred made very little difference in the grand scheme of things, not when her mountain incubators and outer-ring hunting packs could replace those losses before tomorrow afternoon. Trying to win this war by burning individual beasts was like trying to empty a beach from its sand with a broom.

The only metric that mattered anymore was denying the corruption of any new capabilities.

Every guardian core Selthia wired into her hive unlocked a fresh branch of magic for the entire swarm. If she got her hands on the Light Core, her beasts would gain access to light-attributed mana and higher-speed cellular mending, no light weakness would mean patching up the single greatest weakness in their biology.

So Ren would gladly let five hundred high level mutants walk away unharmed if it meant keeping that upgrade out of her reach.

The fact that her troops were scattering told him everything he needed to know: Selthia had run the math and realized she could not kill the guardian before he touched down.

So let the fodder run for the hills; the real prize was anchored to the mountain, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

????

Over the next half hour, each fresh wave of scout reports painted the exact same picture in sharper detail.

Selthia was playing scared...

Mile by mile, her siege rings were loosening, the heavy packs pulling back from the slopes as the Witch pulled her hand away from a stove she knew was about to get hot. She had bled too much yesterday across three failed fronts, and she had no stomach for throwing away another army in a lane where Ren was personally taking the field.

When Ren and his five companions finally crested the final ridge and brought the southern peak into view, they found the exact scene the spotters had promised.

The Light Guardian was still in remarkably good shape.

The great white dragon towered over the rocky crags of its mountain sanctuary, its pale scales catching the morning sun with barely a scratch on its hide. A few dozen straggling mutants led by a Diamond one were still loitering along the lower ledges, lobbing occasional, half-hearted attacks up at it, yet there was no real conviction behind the push.

Selthia was smart enough to realize that any damage she poured into the guardian right now was just free labor for the humans, softening up a boss that Ren would inevitably claim the second he arrived.

More telling than what was on the mountain was what was missing. Earlier that morning, the spotters had logged seven massive, Diamond-class signatures moving with the southern column, yet there was now only a single one in sight around the peak.

Ren could also feel two more deep underground and pieced the logic together at a glance. Even a newly forged Diamond mutant, stitched together from ten Platinums, was no match in a straight fight against a true elemental dragon drawing endless power from its home mountain.

Seeing that she could not brute-force the guardian in time, Selthia had pulled her heaviest pieces off the board right away and left only some to test her new units against Ren.

But 4 big ones were missing and Ren had a very good guess where those missing titans were headed.

Rather than leaving her best troops sitting idle in the southern dirt while he claimed the mountain, Selthia was almost certainly rerouting those pulled battalions north toward the capital and Selphira’s front. She was recycling the force she could not use here and shoving it into the lanes where she thought she could still do real damage. It was a sound, pragmatic adjustment, and almost the exact play Ren would have called if their seats were traded.

Before descending toward the peak, Ren pulled out a blank scroll, jotted down a quick warning along with the estimated vectors of the retreating horde, and sent the messenger birds racing back toward Arturo and Selphira so neither front would be caught off guard by the reinforcements.

Once the birds were away, Ren turned in his saddle to look at the five people flying beside him.

Luna, Larissa, Liora, Liu, and Sirius were sitting in a tight half-circle, a small, lethal unit handpicked for speed and concentrated burst damage.

"We are up," Ren called out over the rushing wind. "We cannot afford to drag our feet here. If we want to turn around and reinforce the northern front before Selthia’s rerouted troops overwhelm them, we need to put this dragon on the ground fast."

For once in this war, making it to the second front in time was a realistic goal.

Yesterday, they had been playing from behind, forced to let the capital and the southern army bleed for hours while waiting for the enemy to show its hand. Today, they had seized the initiative from Sethia’s hands, flown straight to the target without wasting a minute on stealth, and arrived well ahead of Selthia’s schedule.

They had bought themselves a cushion on the clock.

Now, looking down at the pristine, untouched Light Guardian coiling atop the white stone of the mountain, they just had to cash it in.

Out of all seven primordial dragons, this one was the undisputed wall. The healer of the old world. A creature that laughed at standard attrition because its scales drank the ambient mana light to knit torn muscle and shattered bone back together almost as quickly as a claw could part them, turning any wanna be siege into a grueling marathon that dragged on for days.

That was the hurdle standing between them and the rest of their army.