Chapter 1344 - Taming the Old World - Resistance - 2

Chapter 1344: Chapter 1344 - Taming the Old World - Resistance - 2

Ren gritted his teeth and endured the searing pain as the dragon’s continuous blast finally pinned his back hard against the solid stone wall of the ruins.

Yet, as the rings integrated into Mooshito’s network, and Mooshito’s network seamlessly integrated back into Ren’s biology, he felt his innate elemental resistance get stronger.

It did not manifest as an explosive surge of offensive power. Instead, it felt exactly like light armor plating locking securely into place, layered precisely over the areas where the dragon’s breath had been biting the deepest.

The six corrupted elements churning within the purple torrent began to lose a fraction of their lethal edge.

Then, Mooshito executed one final maneuver.

The symbiote actively engaged the three hundred percent base output multiplier derived from the three primary rings it had absorbed long ago into Ren. Compared to the huge power ceiling of his fully realized triple fusion, it was a relatively meager boost, merely a fraction of the raw authority Ren wielded at his absolute peak.

But combined with the newly reinforced biological armor, it was just enough.

It was just enough to stabilize his footing, it was just enough to ensure that, for the very first time since the corrupted beast-machine had breached the vault, Ren stopped being a passive target merely enduring the onslaught and reclaimed his agency as a combatant.

He forcefully shoved his torso forward against the crushing pressure and while screaming for strength threw himself to the side.

For a single, fleeting second, the small window before the dragon could adjust its trajectory, Ren broke free from the suffocating beam of corrupted power. He rolled cleanly out of the blast radius, finally finding the space to draw his first clear breath in what felt like hours but had been just seconds.

And that single extra second was exactly all the time he needed.

He recalled his Hydra.

The draconic summoning responded instantly. It completely dissolved from the surface battlefield where it had been locked out of battle and immediately reconstituted itself down in the vault. It materialized in the open space between Ren and the mutant meat titan, its three massive heads already rearing back.

"Fire!"

Ren barked the command before the Hydra’s physical form even finished fully manifesting.

The three heads instantly chambered their respective light and unleashed a devastating, unified torrent directly into the path of the corrupted creature. The dragon’s sweeping purple breath met the Hydra’s tri-elemental blast head-on in the dead center of the chamber. The two mighty forces collided with a deafening, concussive roar that shook even the indestructible bedrock of the ancient network.

Searing light clashed against deep purple rot; raw draconic energy canceled out corrupted ether. A solid, blinding wall of sheer destructive power erupted in the middle of the room.

And in that exact millisecond, while the two breaths were perfectly deadlocked, while the ancient dragon’s entire cognitive focus was violently anchored to the brutal power struggle...

Ren unleashed his own independent beam of draconic energy.

He did not aim it at the dragon.

He fired it directly at the heavy secondary door.

????

Ren’s independent beam tore across the vault, aimed directly at the heavy secondary door.

For a fleeting second, it actually looked like the desperate maneuver was going to work. It seemed the concentrated torrent of draconic ether would successfully fuse the entrance shut, or at the very least, stall the purple dragon long enough to give him a chance to shift the momentum of the battle.

It did not...

A second beam surged forward to intercept his strike. It was an opposing current, fired at Ren from a different angle that did not originate from the colossal beast and completely separate from the epic clash of breaths currently deadlocking his Hydra.

The two volatile energy streams collided halfway across the room. They canceled each other out in a blinding, concussive flash that illuminated every dark corner of the cavern.

Within that blinding second, Ren heard that voice.

It was playful and unsettlingly cheerful... The voice of a young girl.

The eerie echo traveled across the subterranean space and drifted directly into his ear, carried by a phantom whisper of wind that had no physical right to exist inside a hermetically sealed vault. It slipped effortlessly through the deafening roar of the ongoing combat, specifically tailored to ensure he heard every syllable.

Ren recognized the cadence instantly.

Selthia.

He snapped his head to the right, looking back toward the exact spot he had occupied before the dragon’s initial breath had bulldozed him dozens of meters across the floor. Through the settling dust, he spotted the wall of solid purple crystal where he had amputated Dragarion’s petrified fingers mere seconds ago.

The structure had changed.

Thick, grotesque purple veins were currently throbbing across the smooth crystalline surface. They writhed like living parasites, clinging to the stone and causing the entire wall to pulse with a sickly luminescence. The corrupted tendrils were aggressively seeping into the small fault lines Ren had created when he severed the king’s statue.

He had completely failed to notice their arrival. The corruption had slithered into the chamber while he was busy fighting for his life on the opposite end of the room, distracted by the purple titan’s relentless punishment and the agonizing burden of keeping Mooshito’s network from burning to ash.

And the raw power radiating from the purple beast was still climbing.

Ren felt the terrifying shift through the active crossfire. His summoned Hydra, which had successfully matched the ancient parasite’s output just moments prior, began to lose ground. The three draconic heads pushed back with everything they had, yet the blinding wall of colliding energy steadily drifted toward them, inch by agonizing inch, as the corrupted purple ether overpowered his own.

The power dynamic shifted because the five malformed heads of the original purple dragon were finally stabilizing into their true shapes.

Throughout the entirety of the fight, those heads had remained grotesque and incomplete. One of them had been little more than a mangled lump of flesh that spewed raw magic without any real focus. Now, the chaotic biology was rapidly aligning and defining itself. The beast was actively reclaiming the flawless, ancient symmetry it possessed long before it was ever sealed underground. It had just gained unrestricted access once again.

Access to the complete, unfiltered ether of global corruption.

The throbbing veins on the crystal wall, the sudden, exponential surge in the mechanical titan’s power and the little girl laughing in the dark.

It was all part of the exact same sprawling entity.

"It is far too late," Selthia said. Her tone carried absolutely no trace of the boiling fury Ren had expected after systematically dismantling her armies over the past few days.

Instead, it held something infinitely more disturbing... It possessed the casual, breezy lightness of a predator that had already secured the victory and could afford to act polite.

"You really should regret turning down all my generous invitations. I offered you the exact same evolution as that defective little mushroom of yours, just without all the agonizing pain attached to the process."

Ren offered no response.

"It truly is going to be a shame, you know," she continued, the phantom breeze carrying every syllable perfectly. "I am going to miss seeing your handsome face. I genuinely liked you... You possess a certain spark that I have never seen in anyone else in this world. That is why I was so persistent."

A brief pause followed, allowing the eerie echo to settle into the stone.

"But all of this ends today..."

Then, the second door opened.