Chapter 1103 - Taming the Wall - Rescue Components
Chapter 1103: Chapter 1103 - Taming the Wall - Rescue Components
Ren hadn’t been asleep...
The interior of the Wolverine’s spatial stomach was pitch black and suffocatingly silent. Nobody inside had been violently expelled, but that was small comfort; the guards, Mayo, Liora and Lin were completely drained, their mana reserves flatlined. And none of them had any way of seeing the nightmare unfolding outside.
They were completely blind to the fact that Sirius was currently sprinting, dodging, and bleeding his way through ten cavernous, collapsing chambers.
Being trapped inside three distinct layers of mana, operating across three overlapping dimensions folded one inside the other, completely scrambled external mana reading. It was a sensory blackout.
But Sirius had been absolutely right about one thing: Ren was awake inside his shadow.
He was clinging to consciousness through pure, agonizing willpower, meticulously circulating his mana through the intricate rune like pathways of his system. He had promised himself he wouldn’t let his core completely extinguish, and he was honoring that promise.
The pathetic one percent of energy he had left slowly ticked upward.
It became two percent.
Then three.
Then four.
He was forcefully absorbing the purple lines still burning across his chest and neck. He processed the corruption agonizingly slowly, grinding it down into pure energy with the meticulous, teeth-gritting patience of a man who literally had no other option to survive.
He had just scraped his way to five percent when he felt it.
Through only one dimensional barrier for him, he felt the cadence of Sirius’s movements change.
It was no longer the steady, powerful rhythm of a seasoned commander executing a calculated retreat. The kinetic feedback vibrating through the shadow became jagged.
Desperate...
It was the erratic, lung-burning rhythm of a man who could no longer physically afford to keep running, yet continued to force his almost broken legs forward simply because stopping meant being eaten alive.
Ren felt every brutal impact. Every dodge that was executed a fraction of a second later than the last. Every explosive burst from the Celestial Tiger muscles was losing degrees of kinetic force.
Sirius was on his absolute last legs.
The moment Ren realized the mutant horde was finally catching them, he began to prepare a spell. He gathered 4 out of his meager five percent, pooling it into pure wind mana. It was a small reserve, but it was all he had. The plan was to unleash it as a localized kinetic burst, just enough to physically push Sirius forward one final time, should they reach the razor-thin margin where a single push meant the difference between escaping the jaws or being crushed by them.
It was a pathetic, desperate plan for a pathetic, desperate mana reserve. But it was all he had to offer.
What Ren completely failed to calculate was that Sirius was going to fully stop, sacrifice himself and throw him.
And the arm of a fully fused Tamer, who has ruthlessly dumped the absolute final dregs of his nervous system into a single, physical motion, possesses a terrifying amount of kinetic force. It completely defies the logic of a "gentle push toward the exit".
Ren was violently ejected from Sirius’s shadow, grabbed and...
He was launched high into the air at blinding speed. The transition from the suffocating, pitch-black void to the glaring, blinding sunlight and rushing surface air was incredibly jarring. Before his battered brain could even fully process that he had been thrown clear of the ruins, his instincts overrode his disorientation.
His first priority wasn’t to brace for the brutal fall. It was to instantly contort his body mid-air, twisting to look back at what Sirius was facing.
He saw the mouth.
It was too huge and too close. An abyss of jagged teeth and armored plating, actively closing over the exhausted tamer.
And directly above it, Sirius was firing his final, desperate ray of Light and Darkness. Even from a distance, Ren instantly recognized the spell for what it was: a dying, exhausted thread of mana that lacked even the concussive force required to break the beast’s armor.
It was woefully insufficient.
Panic flared in Ren’s chest. His internal system was still highly unstable without the small fungus. The absence of his primary beast was a gaping wound in his mana architecture; the network functioned, but with the violent, grinding irregularity of a complex machine missing its central gear.
But where Ren’s conscious processing failed to be enough, the Mantis stepped in.
It was his most proactive companion, second only to the talking mushroom when awake, and it did exactly what was necessary. Without waiting for a command, the jade insectoid beast forcefully seized control of the clone crystal currently stowed within Ren’s shadow.
It was a flawless bypass. The two systems synced, Ren’s own battered core and the pristine crystal clone that responded to him as a direct extension. Together, they violently magnified the spell. They produced a volume of wind mana that elevated Ren’s desperate intention from a pathetic, dying gesture into a massive, concussive force.
Much, much more than a gesture.
Ren’s explosive burst of wind slammed into the beast’s lower jaw at the exact same millisecond Sirius’s exhausted ray struck from above.
The Platinum mutant suddenly found itself colliding with two opposing sources of kinetic impact, having only calculated its trajectory to crush one.
It didn’t wound the beast...
But the sheer, unexpected upward force of the wind violently stalled the momentum of its colossal jaws and pushed Sirius out.
It bought them the fraction of a second THEY needed.
♢♢♢♢
Miles away, standing in the city’s wall, Luna had felt the mana pressure shift.
She hadn’t asked for permission. She simply jumped and materialized in the castle’s war room and declared she was leaving, her tone leaving absolutely no room for Selphira or Julius to mount a counterargument.
To her, the reality of the situation was glaringly obvious.
These were not normal mana spikes in the rift’s gold ring. The energy signatures bleeding through the earth were too big for that distance. They were on a scale the city’s perimeter defenses hadn’t faced since the invasion of the artifacts. And more importantly, they were barreling directly toward the specific coordinates where her father’s crystal statue rested.