Chapter 1313 - Taming the Old World - Ominous Silence

Chapter 1313: Chapter 1313 - Taming the Old World - Ominous Silence

Selthia’s army was caught in a brutal crossfire: blasted from the front by an elusive guardian they could no longer clearly see, and systematically frozen and shattered from behind by a four-hundred-year-old matriarch hunting them for sport.

Without the ancient entity to talk her out of her panic, the girl had walked straight into a tactical trap of her own making again.

????

Down in the capital of Yano, Ren was busy running his own numbers.

Before heading to the command post, he had made a quick detour along the inner wall to check on his parents. Reed and Fern were right where they had been since yesterday morning, their faces lined with dark circles after yesterday’s hours channeling restorative mana into wave after wave of wounded soldiers.

Despite being dead on their feet, the two of them were in one piece, and the instant they spotted Ren, they immediately launched into a dual lecture. They fussed over his pale face and his crystallized forearm, scolding him like he was still a ten-year-old boy tracking mud into the house for wasting his precious free minutes checking on them instead of taking care of himself.

After enduring their scolding with a sheepish grin and making sure they had eaten, Ren walked up to the central war table, where Arturo and Julius were waiting for him over the spread parchment.

"Let’s go over it fast," Ren said, resting his good hand on the edge of the table. "The two hundred Platinums and the six Diamonds retreating from the south are almost at our doorstep. If we add the hundred Platinums and the single Diamond that left here for the north, assuming they pull a U-turn and march back, we are looking at a ceiling of three hundred Platinums and seven Diamonds total. Though they would only converge here if they all committed to the city... say, if I decided to fly north."

"Even if that northern column turned around right this second, it would take them nearly an hour of hard marching to get back," Arturo pointed out, tapping the road markers. "So the seventh Diamond is not an immediate factor."

Ren nodded, keeping his eyes on the terrain lines as he posed the two questions that actually mattered.

"I need two numbers from you, Arturo. First: how many top-tier Tamers do we have to keep behind these walls to guarantee the city holds against that absolute worst-case scenario of three hundred Platinums and seven Diamonds? Second: how many heavy hitters can we safely peel off right now to fly north and back up Selphira?"

Arturo already had the equations half-built in his head; he finished the math out loud without needing to check his notes.

"To hold the walls against seven Diamond titans, my math says we need fourteen Tamers operating at my level," Arturo said, gesturing toward the veteran commander beside him. "Right now, we actually meet that threshold, though only because the curve is skewed at the top. You and Liora alone count for four or five elites on a defensive line, and Luna and Larissa cover at least another three between them; moreover, you can pick Diamonds apart one-on-one fast. If we keep the four of you here alongside Julius, Victor, Taro, and our thousands of Gold Tamers managing the Platinum crowd, the capital can weather that full siege without cracking."

"And how does that change if we want to reinforce the north?" Ren asked.

A dry smile touched the corner of Arturo’s mouth.

"If you personally stay on the ramparts, we can afford to shave our margin and send one or two fast strike pairs up the coast," the strategist replied. "Victor has the airspeed to fly up with Larissa, and Liu could make the trip alongside Sirius or Luna. Perhaps one more, if we stretch the line. It isn’t an army, yet dropping four or five people of that caliber into Selphira’s fight is more than enough to break any stalemate the 100 plus one can make."

Arturo raised his eyes from the parchment, his expression sobering. "The entire equation hinges on those three words, though: if you stay. Selthia pulled her garrison away from our gates to go win the north, yet her whole play right now relies on keeping you glued to this place. To force you to stay home, she has to park those six southern Diamonds right outside our walls as a gun to our head. If you don’t take the bait and fly north to help Selphira, you might spook Selthia into turning those hundred Platinums and that seventh Diamond back around to hit the city while you are gone, leaving us short-handed against seven titans... But the beauty of sending fast flyers like Liu and Victor instead is that if Selthia’s northern column tries to U-turn toward the city, our people can beat them back to the walls by air."

Ren stared down at the map, taking in the three active fronts, the marching columns, and the spacing between them.

Selthia’s game plan was transparent.

It was not a brilliant, multi-layered trap; cut off from the purple dragon, she did not have the head for grand chess matches anymore. Even so, it was a blunt, functional bind. She was using her six southern Diamonds as a heavy anchor to pin him to Yano’s walls, banking on his refusal to gamble with civilian lives so that she could buy herself the time to butcher the Northern Light Guardian without him interfering.

If Ren stayed in the capital, the northern front had to fight without him. If Ren flew north, he left the city exposed to a seven-Diamond hammer.

It was a classic choice between two bad outcomes, the exact sort of fork every commander hated facing because neither lane offered a clean win.

Except Ren had no intention of playing by her rules.

"Liora and I are more than enough to hold the fort here," Ren said, his eyes fixed on the northern peak as the lingering warmth of the castle’s dragon energy hummed quietly through his veins, his mind already piecing together the third option that nobody else in the room had spotted yet. "Don’t just send four people north. Send six of our strongest hitters up right now; you can decide whether to put Taro or someone else in the final slot."

He looked up at Arturo, a calm, knowing glint in his eyes.

"Selthia has no intention of throwing those six Diamonds against our walls; she is terrified of losing them to me, so she is just going to park them on the grass outside to keep me on a leash. Let’s let her believe she has me trapped..."

????

Minutes after the war room adjourned, six silhouettes launched from the castle courtyard and tore northward up the coast.

Liu, Larissa, Victor, Luna, and Sirius led the formation, with Taro claiming the sixth and final slot that Arturo had been left to fill at their own discretion. They were six of the heaviest hitters in the kingdom, flying out to reinforce Selphira’s lines while the refined dragon energy from the castle’s ley line still hummed warm through their veins.

Watching them vanish into the high clouds, Ren had complete faith in the squad. He trusted all of them, and Luna and Larissa in particular, to make sure the Northern Light Guardian’s core did not slip into the Witch’s hands, and to keep each other from pushing their bodies past the breaking point when they went down into the mountain to claim the ring.

With that much concentrated firepower dropping onto the northern ridges, the second mountain was as good as theirs.

Ren, meanwhile, stayed right where he was.

He remained behind the compressed walls of the capital alongside Liora, playing his part in the charade and letting Selthia believe her crude pinning maneuver had worked as intended. As far as the girl was concerned, she had him tied to the city’s perimeter with the looming threat of her 6 marching Diamonds.

There were two distinct layers to Ren’s decision to stay put.

The first was the psychological game he had laid out for Arturo... Selthia was terrified of him, and Ren knew it. She had no intention of ordering her six southern Diamonds to charge a wall while he was standing on the ramparts waiting for them; those titans were too expensive to replace, and she could not stomach the risk of watching him butcher them one by one.

Instead, she was going to park them out on the open grass beyond Ren’s range like a heavy chain, hoping the mere sight of six apex monsters would keep him glued to his post. All Ren had to do to ruin her northern campaign was stand there and pretend the chain was holding him back.

The second reason, the one Ren had kept to himself during the briefing, came down to fuel management.

Even after unleashing that concentrated beam of negative light to pierce the Southern Guardian’s belly, Ren still had well over half of his borrowed dragon energy sitting in his tank.

He wanted to hoard every drop of it.

If his presence on the wall scared Selthia into keeping her army passive on the plains, he would not have to burn a single ounce of mana defending the city. Instead, he could take that entire leftover reserve down into the vault tonight, finish recovering and pour it straight into the containment dome, buying back the hours they had lost on the prison’s clock.

Freezing Selthia’s army in place without lifting a finger was, in practice, the most efficient way to save power for the dome.

????

With the northern strike team well on their way and the capital settling into a tense waiting game of five minutes, Ren decided to use the quiet window to go check on the dome himself.

He was not planning to inject his remaining energy into the stonework just yet; he needed to keep being a deterrent... Still, a nagging restlessness at the back of his mind refused to let him sit still.

Selthia’s six southern Diamonds were less than five minutes away from the city’s outer ditches. Even though Arturo’s spotters had confirmed that the enemy columns had and were steering clear of the sector directly above the star prison, Ren was not in the mood to take anything for granted.

A Diamond titan was a completely different beast from a standard Platinum.

The wide harmonic interference generated by the five-point star array acted as a natural pest repellent against the horde; standard mutants felt their internal connections scramble and their muscles seize up the closer they crept toward the cavern roof. A Diamond, however, was built out of fifty thousand compressed silver cores and wrapped in dense elemental resistance. A monster of that weight class might be sturdy enough to muscle through the disruption, stomaching the sickness just long enough to stomp the ground above the vault or send a shockwave down into the rock.

Now that the city was in a lull between skirmishes, it was the ideal moment to head there and make sure the lock was still holding firm.

Ren glided down, touched down on the floor, and pressed his right palm flat against the warm, humming metal of the dome.

The blood in his veins turned to ice.

The corrupted dragon inside was not digging.

For days, every single trip down to this cavern had been accompanied by the same relentless, mechanical racket: the harsh, rhythmic grinding of ancient excavation artifacts chewing through solid bedrock. That sound had become the background pulse of the Yino capital’s basement.

Now, the cavern was dead silent.

After days of listening to that non-stop scraping behind the steel wall, the sudden absence of noise was a thousand times more terrifying than the grinding had ever been.

Ren’s first instinct was a spike of raw panic.

It broke through! It got out! The thing is loose somewhere in the lower vaults!