Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 905 - Taming the Fifth Year - Attrition - Final Battle - 4

Younger students, first and second years, showed more obvious panic. Needing reassurance that this was a manageable emergency rather than a disaster.

Older students, fourth and fifth years, displayed more composure. Still scared but channeling fear into productive action. Helping younger students and following instructor directions. Master Yang struck the arena floor, his Earth Behemoth manifested beneath him in a rumble of displaced sand and stone. The massive creature served as a living platform from which he could observe the complete situation while coordinating defensive response.

Lin was also acting already... She moved between groups of students with her legs already elongated and transformed, spanning ground with speed that normal human physique couldnʼt achieve. Her usual composed demeanor had shifted to urgency focused on Ren.

Who? How? Why now?

Questions Ren didnʼt have answers to. Questions that would have to wait because immediate priorities were survival and protection, not investigation and understanding.

The guilt was immediate and crushing… Felt like heʼd been playing games in a safe controlled environment while outside, people had been fighting and likely dying.

He should have known. Should have recognized the absences and understood their implications. Should have prepared rather than being caught by surprise.

The earth continued trembling as hundreds of beasts approached. Convergence promising violence on scale the academy hadnʼt faced from within its internal installations.

The academy, just like the city, had walls and a patrolled bowl of reinforced earth underneath designed to handle the sporadic invasions. It wasnʼt a simple system of two-dimensional walls, here they dealt with threats operating in complete three dimensions. Beasts that flew and dominated aerial space. Creatures that burrowed and moved through earth with disturbing ease.

Thatʼs why the city and academy had developed complex defensive systems. Though they wouldnʼt need to deploy the anti-air configurations now, they would need to clear the ground because the shield that extended like a giant bowl beneath the school seemed to have failed.

The shield wasnʼt a visible structure. It was rather a layer of earth reinforced with mana from thousands of earth tamers, with some gaps left deliberately to be defended making it easy to create bottlenecks. Controlled entry points where defenders could concentrate more strength.

Its first layer encompassed the entire city. Broad coverage designed to detect major incursions before they penetrated deep.

The second covered the center and schools. Tighter security for critical infrastructure and concentrations of more population.

A slightly curved plate. Coverage that began deep before closing in a perimeter protecting a gigantic volume of three-dimensional space.

Barriers and kill zones… All the infrastructure required to repel attacks from outside.

The most superficial part covering a good portion of territory assigned to educational facilities was still deep enough that ordinary threats wouldnʼt activate it. And mutant incursions should have been detected long before reaching its interior. Should have triggered alarms that allowed proper mobilization of dispersed defenses before threats reached critical proximity.

That 2 layer shield system was designed specifically for that purpose. To block intrusions and provide detailed information about movement and composition of attacks with considerable anticipation.

But the mutants in question had already passed those defenses without activating alarms? Had been noticed only when they were dangerously close?

And they hadnʼt arrived from a depth where the plate-shaped shield would have provided protection.

Theyʼd come from approximately one hundred to one hundred fifty meters below the surface. Considerable depth certainly, but not by the standards of this world where dangerous creatures regularly operated several hundred meters underground. Where truly terrifying things lurked in abysses that went lower down.

It was deep enough that vibrations wouldnʼt be felt easily until the creatures were very close. But again, not so deep as to indicate theyʼd excavated from the abysses where these corrupt life forms normally resided.

And critical for analysis of the external situation: they werenʼt coming directly from below but diagonally.

Trajectories suggesting lateral breach origin rather than vertical ascent.

That implied to Ren almost instantaneously that the breach had occurred from the cityʼs outskirts, not from directly beneath the academy.

The beasts werenʼt coming from great depth and ascending vertically. They were approaching at angles indicating theyʼd penetrated exterior defenses at a distant location. Now they were converging toward the academy and city center from one of the positions surrounding the perimeter.

It was a critical distinction. It meant exterior defenses had been compromised sufficiently to permit penetration of hundreds of mutants. Fortunately, based on trajectories that Renʼs amplified senses could track, the mutants hadnʼt surfaced in areas populated by defenseless low-rank civilians.

They had arrived close to the center of the city, and would be emerging within protected territory where students and non-combatants were concentrated. But at least not in another part of the city… Even if this was creating a situation where defenders had to fight amid the population they were trying to protect rather than at prepared positions away from civilians, it could have been way worse.

The students and guards here were strong.

Thanks to information Ren had shared almost freely during four complete years, the vast majority of youths in the academy were now at least Silver 1. Even the clumsiest students or those with limited resources had reached Bronze 2 minimum.

With just one year of applying refined methods Ren had developed, students could start cultivating to Silver regardless of their luck or natural talent. Progression that was orders of magnitude faster than what previous generations had achieved.

Only first and some second-years, whoʼd had access to their beasts and the information for less time, still werenʼt at Silver. But some second-year students that were almost entering 3rd year and onward had reached at least Silver 1.

The real bottleneck now wasnʼt knowledge of how to cultivate effectively. It was funds. Specifically, crystals containing concentrated mana that could help advancement. Even with the new resources and crystal injections to the economy that Renʼs discoveries had enabled, not everyone had equitable access. A limitation that still created disparity based on family resources rather than individual capability.

On the other hand, most parents and adults from the previous generation already had established beasts before Ren even existed. Theyʼd already ruined their creaturesʼ potentials following inferior methods that had been standard for centuries.

Few had managed to leave Bronze. Some of the poorest in the cityʼs exterior areas hadnʼt even surpassed Iron. Stagnation that was permanent once fundamental errors were committed during early cultivation phases.