Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1026 - Taming Diamond Beasts - II

Facing an entity like this with a Gold 3 beast would have been suicide.

The Hydra at Gold 3 was essentially just 30% of the strength a Platinum 1 beast would be… 0.3 of ʼone Platinumʼ, if the fraction was written plainly.

But the combined bonuses of Renʼs four beasts reached already one thousand percent across several categories.

Strength: 1050%. Defense: 1050%. Regeneration: 1030%. Speed: 1010%. Penetration and lethality: 1010%. Also 950 points of elemental control, and an omni-boost to Vitality, Mana, Perception, etc… of 870%.

Around 10 times stronger than what his beasts would be in their wild states. The arithmetic then: 0.3 multiplied by 10 equaled 3. Equivalent to Platinum 3. Which was thirty percent of a Diamond-rank entityʼs power… In isolation, not enough.

But with the fusion multiplying his effective power by four, the actual number landed at around Diamond 1.2… Or 20% above a common or wild Diamond 1, which was precisely the opponent standing across from him right now.

For as long as the fusion held, they had the advantage.

The fire dragon had felt the Hydraʼs arrival from the moment she fused at the border of the last Platinum ring, that surge of combined energy registering across the mountainʼs territorial awareness the way a shift in tectonic pressure registered, not heard, simply known by the vibration. It had tracked the approach on the way down, watching the trajectory of something that moved directly toward it with the arrogance of a creature that didnʼt fear what it was facing and hadnʼt yet been given reason to reconsider.

The guardian decided that something arriving with that hubris deserved a proper welcome.

It drew a bit more power than usual from the mountain it protected, the absorption visible as a deepening of the heat shimmer in the air around it, not steam, not smoke, but a visible distortion of temperature at a scale where the air itself had to compensate with storms somewhere else. The breath accumulated in the guardianʼs thoracic cavity with a sound that wasnʼt quite a sound, more a variation in pressure and temperature also perceptible kilometers away, the enormous power registered in the inner ear before the eyes confirmed it.

The breath accumulated in the guardianʼs thoracic cavity with a sound that wasnʼt quite a sound, more a variation in pressure and temperature also perceptible kilometers away, the enormous power registered in the inner ear before the eyes confirmed it.

Ren and his Hydra landed.

The size difference between the beasts was visible from any angle without needing to calculate it. The guardian was a mountain that existed at its own scale and the rest of the landscape organized itself around it. The Hydra was a hill that existed on the slope, and that comparison had a concrete physical reality that the bonuses and fusion multipliers compensated for in terms of energy but that the eye continued registering as what it was…

Four times smaller, at minimum, in the dimensions that mattered.

They had arrived in time to see the last moment before the guardian released its power, the throat visibly distended, the heat around it no longer ambient but directional, every one of its three hundred tons of a head oriented toward the two things that had landed in front of it and declared themselves by their presence.

The most feared attack of the superior race... The breath of a Dragon.

It wasnʼt fire in any conventional sense. It was the equivalent of a volcanic eruption of epic proportions compressed and directed, the energy of magma and red crystal released in the time it took a creature of that scale to exhale. A restructuring of the thermodynamic reality of the space it crossed, the air itself becoming something different and temporarily uninhabitable for anything that was not just the concept of heat regulation.

The world between the two combatants became a bright thing.

But the three heads of the Hydra coordinated with the automaticity of a system built to function exactly that way, three simultaneous angles of perception producing an interlaced flow that no single-headed beast could have executed. They fired.

Light with the added properties of elemental ice, the combination that was the natural inversion of the guardianʼs fire-crystal breath, the elemental opposite not simply by category but in the specific geometric relationship between their frequencies. The counter also wasnʼt trying to match the volume of the breath. It was aimed at the central angle where the effectiveness of a counter was highest, where the breathʼs internal pressure was most vulnerable to disruption from within rather than opposition from the outside. The rays hit the incoming breath before it could reach its target, driving into the center of it, splitting the column down its axis.

The sound produced by three synchronized rays compressed into a single point was in the category of sounds that made beasts retreat twice as far as they had retreated when they first sensed the arrival of the mana. Sharp in a frequency that was not purely acoustic but energetic.

The guardianʼs breath was a volcanic mega-eruption.

The Hydraʼs counter was a divine sentence.

The two things met in the space between the two combatants with the violence of incompatible energies arriving at a point where neither could retreat, because retreating meant surrendering the pressure that was the only thing keeping either of them alive in the exchange.

The eruption pushed.

The counter ray answered harder.

From inside the Hydraʼs eyes, the point where Ren existed as architect and engine simultaneously, three angles of perception showed him the same thing: the counter was gaining.

Not comfortably. Not with the ease of something that had been much more superior. The guardian had the mountain behind it, the full deep reservoir of an ecosystem full of fire mana feeding its output in real time, the advantage of something fighting in its own territory with its roots in the ground beneath them. Every second of the exchange, more came.

But the rays had located what they had been cataloguing since the first second of the encounter.

The guardianʼs red crystal structure wasnʼt uniform. It had zones of lower density, visible in the temperature variations that three simultaneous angles of perception had been mapping from the moment they landed, the differential heat signatures that told the story of how the creature had formed and where the formation was thinnest. The three heads had been building toward those coordinates since before the exchange began.

They found them. The rays adjusted fractionally, the angle changing in a small way that no external observer would have noticed but that the guardianʼs structure understood immediately as a different quality of pressure… So they pushed harder and held their ground.

What followed wasnʼt the end of the battle. It was too early for the end.

But it was the point where the guardian understood that what stood in front of it was not an ordinary challenger attempting to seize its mountain.

Ren felt it too.

The difference between a fight you were losing, a fight that was even, and a fight where the margin belonged to you rather than to the opponent.

This was the third.

The wings opened completely, full span, the Mantisʼs gift expressing itself in the architecture of a creature that now needed what those wings had been designed to provide. The Hydra rose onto her rear legs.

The guardian, for the first time in a span that was a question whose answer no longer mattered as much as the simple fact of it being the first time, tilted its three hundred tons of neck toward the target moving upward and recalculated.

Ren thought about how different this was from the situation two years ago. The power he carried now had been worth every one of the three thousand days that had built it, each one contributing something to the sum that was here right now, this moment, this specific exchange with something that deserved everything he had brought.

After getting this elemental ring, only two more would be needed.

The second phase of the exchange began.