"And the other doubles?" Ren pressed, unwilling to give up completely. "Did they take all the leaders?"
"Arturo is relatively available," Wei admitted, "but he doesn’t have as much direct contact with me. And his role is more... logistical."
Ren felt a wave of frustration wash over him. He had been planning to offer his fusion abilities to the main commanders, but if they were already in active combat, the window of opportunity had closed.
"I wanted to activate everyone I could... the tamers under the royal family, as well as those under Liora and Luna’s families."
He opened his backpack, rummaging through his belongings until he found what he was looking for.
"Besides," he said, carefully removing a small sealed container and his dagger, "I have something that could be useful."
Everyone in the room leaned forward with curiosity when Ren lifted the container, revealing what appeared to be golden mold and spores that glowed. The substance seemed to pulse with its own rhythm, like a tiny heartbeat made of light.
"What are those?" Luna asked, her study in magical material identification failing her again as it always did when faced with anything around Ren.
"Golden spores I found in the forest," Ren explained, his voice taking on the careful tone of someone handling dangerous materials. "They’re dangerous if not handled correctly, so you shouldn’t touch them, but..."
He paused, organizing his thoughts to make it easy to understand.
"I think they could be used offensively against enemy forces. Especially if they can be dispersed in large quantities."
Wei moved closer, his academic mind taking precedence over any other consideration. The prospect of studying something new overrode his usual caution.
"Have you identified their specific properties?"
"They feed on vital energy and mana," Ren responded. "They also cancel each other out with anything with abyssal power... so Yino’s abyssals would be particularly vulnerable to them. And they reproduce quickly when they find the right conditions."
♢♢♢♢
Kharzan observed the wall rising before him, a line of stone and wood that marked the new frontier his army had established during the past weeks.
It was modest by the standards of earth and wood elemental tamers, barely five meters high, but it represented something much more significant: the line of a new and better territory being born from Yano’s land.
The advance of the other half of his elite army toward the city hadn’t yet approached the abyss, though that might seem like a direct way to reach the bridge. Instead, he had chosen the ’hypotenuse’, a diagonal that pointed straight toward the bridge from his wall, initially staying about 20 kilometers below the frontier with the Abyss Wall.
"My Lord," General Valdris approached, pointing toward the horizon with the satisfaction of someone delivering good news, "the upper part of Yano’s Abyss Wall can already be seen..."
Kharzan followed the direction of the gesture and could distinguish in the distance the imposing structure that had been the object of competition between both kingdoms for decades.
The wall was enormous, his own was humiliated in comparison... a barrier that rose toward the sky, designed not only to contain abyssal incursions but also to provide a strategic observation point.
"What’s the current height?" Kharzan asked, though he already knew the approximate answer.
Comments
The readers' comments on the novel: Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons