Chapter 1091 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Deals - 3
Chapter 1091: Chapter 1091 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Deals - 3
Just a few seconds earlier, in that microscopic window of time when the violet pulse of corruption first struck Ren, before the young man had even begun to fight it back, Sirius had been watching him with worry.
And in that briefest of moments, Sirius finally saw it.
At a thought speed several times faster than a normal person thanks to his tamer’s level, before the shockwave of corrupted energy finally reached him.
The memory washed over him with the crisp clarity of an event that, to his own internal clock, had occurred mere hours ago. He saw the stubborn, fiercely arrogant thirteen-year-old boy on his path to the ruins. He remembered that boy being tainted by this exact same corrupted energy, weaponizing it, riding the surge of his own rage in a way Sirius had deemed recklessly dangerous.
Was it the same boy?
The question paralyzed him before his mind could even fully articulate it. Because if this now more terrifyingly powerful young man standing before him was the same arrogant child... it meant years.
Years... Frozen in solid crystal form.
His conscious mind violently rejected the concept, but the deeper, instinctual part of his brain, the part that had been quietly collecting the puzzle pieces since he woke up, had already assembled the grim picture. The sharp angle of the jaw. The familiar, unyielding defiance in the eyes.
It was Ren.
And if this was the same Ren, the threat he currently posed was on an entirely different scale than the one Sirius had calculated during their brief skirmish in the forest.
If this boy decided to turn on him right now with that seemingly unlimited corrupted energy feeding his rage, could Sirius even hope to stop him?
The answer was a terrifying, absolute no.
But Sirius didn’t have another second to process the existential dread.
Because the shockwave of corruption finally slammed into him.
He felt it intimately, experiencing firsthand the exact same corrupted tide he had watched Ren wield and resist hours prior. But it didn’t strike like a painful hit... It arrived as a sweet, intoxicating whisper.
It was the seductive invitation of boundless, liberating power. It washed through his veins, offering to strip away the heavy, suffocating limits he had spent his entire life respecting. It promised him the freedom to mold reality, to warp his own flesh, to push his beast fusions infinitely past their normal points.
It wasn’t the agonizing burning he had anticipated... It was warm.
It was EUPHORIC!
But Sirius Starweaver was a man defined by his boundaries. He would not bow to a cheap, narcotic temptation.
He violently rejected it. He slammed his mental defenses shut.
And the backlash was catastrophic.
The euphoria instantly shattered, replaced by an agony so intense and unexpected it nearly ripped a scream from his lungs. His nervous system lit up like it was submerged in boiling acid. He didn’t drop immediately; he fought the collapse millimeter by agonizing millimeter, his muscles locking in a desperate war against breaking from the effort.
His knee eventually hit the stone floor. But even as he fell, his eyes remained locked on the only thing in the room that made sense to look at: Ren.
Ren was caught in the exact same necrotic crossfire, yet he was barely flinching.
Through his own blurred, pain-filled vision, Sirius watched the young man simply clench his fists. He watched Ren’s breathing slow, becoming deep and rhythmic. In a matter of seconds, Ren violently reversed the infection. He forced the purple veins to retreat, restoring his internal network to perfect equilibrium with a cold, terrifying level of control.
Sirius, currently drowning in his own failing biology, couldn’t even fathom the astronomical willpower required to execute a purge like that mid-combat, still keeping the wind flow against the enemy.
A bitter taste flooded Sirius’s mouth. He had been instantly, effortlessly humiliated by the one person he least expected. He had defeated and judged this boy so harshly for what he felt not long ago. He had lacked even a shred of empathy for the burden the kid carried while affected by this curse, writing him off as a dangerous liability.
Sirius squeezed his eyes shut. His knee ground into the stone.
A guttural, ragged roar tore its way out of his throat.
It wasn’t a choice...
It was the raw, biological failure of a body being invaded at the mana level, the phantom pain completely overwhelming his ability to suffer in silence.
The entire group whipped their heads around, staring at him. It was the exact moment he desperately wanted to be invisible.
The shame was suffocating. To be a legendary commander, reduced to a screaming, kneeling liability in front of a squad of kids.
But beneath the crushing shame, a much more useful emotion crystallized: absolute, firsthand understanding of Ren’s purity of mind.
The corruption wasn’t just some cheat enticing energy to be out-muscled or fought with a normal moral standing. It was vastly more insidious and resilient than any noble or military academy had ever prepared him for.
Fighting it required a monstrous, unfathomable level of sheer determination.
But he was Sirius Starweaver.
He clamped his jaw shut. He bit down so hard on his own gums that hot blood flooded his mouth, utilizing every ounce of the iron-clad discipline he had forged over a lifetime to force the dark energy back.
It wasn’t enough to escape.
The door the corruption had found inside him wasn’t the normal, easily guarded threshold of a weak-willed Tamer succumbing to temptation. It was a gaping, physiological breach. It was the twenty-five percent of his core that Ren simply hadn’t had time to purify before slamming it back into the statue to save his life. That unhealed wound was essentially a massive gateway, permanently propped open, allowing Selthia’s power to pour in unopposed.
Sirius simply didn’t possess the power and specific, arcane understanding of the rot needed to rebuild that dam.
It wasn’t entirely his fault the gates were open. But his ability to fight the flood, relying entirely on the raw honor and grit of a soldier, was the only thing preventing total, immediate possession.
He couldn’t be asked to hold out for much longer... Not against this.
This was the resonance of Selthia’s most devastating artifact, the massive, blackened claw currently wedged in the stairwell. It was the exact same ancient weapon that had caught Ren in his most vulnerable state in the past, nearly integrating him into the ’hive mind’ entirely.
It had taken Lin, Luna, Larissa, and Liora risking their very lives to drag him back from the brink that day.
As long as Selthia maintained the pulse, Sirius was trapped in a sinking ship with a shattered hull.
His determination was legendary, but it was not infinite.
And Selthia knew it.
Ren spun toward him the second his own system stabilized a bit.
But the tactical reality was a true nightmare for his mind power. Purging corruption from your own network, where you intimately know every channel, every valve, every point of resistance, was one thing.
Reaching into the soul of another person and trying to surgically extract the rot, while purifying and maintaining a powerful wind, while that person was actively being bombarded by the source? It was nearly impossible.
The external assault was constantly scrambling his attempts to establish a clean circuit to close the huge door.
Selthia was gaining ground by the second, and Ren was rapidly running out of ways to hold her back.
Sirius felt his own pure mana boiling. His thoughts were growing dark, aggressively twisting into violent impulses as the corruption flooded the channels his discipline could no longer seal.
Relying on decades of deeply ingrained training, the most likely soon to be a fallen commander made the only logical, desperate call available.
"Leave me... Leave the dead weight," Sirius ordered. He forced every single syllable through his blood-soaked teeth, desperately trying to maintain the steady cadence of a proud officer. "Leave the less important ones behind. Run now... while I can still hold myself back!"
"No! Hold on to my energy!" Ren roared back, his hands glowing as he refused to break his containment energy.
His eyes darted frantically, calculations firing at lightspeed. The brief clash with the corruption hadn’t just tested him; it had fed him. By perfectly counter-rotating the purple lines, he had absorbed a fraction of Selthia’s projected energy, stacking it on top of his own meager, remaining reserves.
"I’m getting everyone out of here!" Ren shouted. "With what I just absorbed, I have enough! I can make the jump!"
He snapped his head toward Lin.
Her face was a mask of grim, absolute focus. There was no room for panic, no space for doubt. She processed Ren’s words in a fraction of a second and immediately understood the brutal physics of what he needed. To jump them all, he needed to condense their mass.
Lin turned sharply.
"Shizu!" she barked, her voice cutting through the howling wind. "Spit out the prisoners! Do it now!"