Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 888 – Taming the Fifth Year – Attrition – Explosive Pirouette – 2

Min was in trouble…

It wasn’t delicate vegetation that could be easily torn away but now rather robust vines with root systems penetrating deeply into the battle battleground and interweaving in a network that covered the battlefield increasingly completely.

Some roots were now 2-3 meters deep. Others spread horizontally for 5-6 meters before diving down again. The network was becoming three-dimensional, creating a structure that was harder to push back with each passing second because destroying surface growth no longer eliminated the underground infrastructure.

Min responded with the same tricks and explosions that were almost identical but progressively smaller each time.

The pattern was clear. Each explosion consumed reserves that weren’t being replenished as fast as they were being used. The Amphibian was still generating the secretions needed for detonation, but production rate couldn’t match consumption rate when Min was forcing full-body explosions every some seconds.

It was a tug-of-war developing at a good pace that made it easy for spectators to follow the exchange of techniques and counter-techniques that escalated with each passing second.

Mantis planted…

Amphibian cleaned. A cycle consuming resources on both sides at rates that weren’t sustainable indefinitely.

But who would have more mana at the end?

♢♢♢♢

Hundreds of minor adjustments and tactical decisions compressed into sustained high-intensity combat.

After several minutes of intense exchange, the Mantis was operating at approximately 40 percent of its base capacity according to indicators that Ren monitored carefully.

But it had cycled considerably more than 100 percent of its total mana when accounting for energy it had stolen from the Amphibian, with the incoming flow from parasitic plants providing continuous supply that permitted aggressive attack expenditures that would normally have completely exhausted its reserves already.

On Min’s side, the situation was different but equally strained.

There had been multiple explosions, with each one requiring the Amphibian to spend precious secretions to remove those plants threatening to establish permanent dominance over its body. And constant maintenance of techniques to keep them away consumed resources at a rate that accumulated dangerously even for a creature with massive Gold-rank reserves.

The Amphibian had used less than half of its reserves but considerably more mana than the Mantis in absolute terms, with repeated expenditures adding up to a total exceeding what almost any lower-rank creature could have managed.

But base capacity mattered enormously in Min’s sustainability evaluation. In principle, the mana that a Gold-rank beast could contain didn’t compare remotely with what Bronze could store, a disparity that would normally make victory inevitable if battle prolonged sufficiently.

The standard calculation worked like this:

If ordinary Bronze 2 was worth 2 points of mana capacity then Gold 1 was worth 100 points, so under normal circumstances the Gold would simply overwhelm through superior reserves even if usage efficiency wasn’t particularly refined.

Ratio: 50:1 advantage for Gold rank. Insurmountable under equal skill conditions.

But Ren’s Mantis wasn’t an ordinary Bronze 2 by a long margin. The retroactive bonuses from having the Hydra and Wolverine at superior ranks, combined with methods Ren had developed specifically to maximize efficiency, meant that first the Mantis operated with a base mana pool approximately four times better than conventional Bronze 2 in terms of mana capacity.

That elevated it to a value of 8 points instead of 2, a significant reduction in the gap separating ranks.

So instead of facing a 50:1 disparity that would be insurmountable, Ren was operating with a disadvantage of only approximately 12:1.

Still massive certainly, but within range where his high elemental advantage and superior control could compensate for the numerical difference if exploited appropriately.

12:1 meant that if both sides spent mana at equal efficiency, the Amphibian would win. But if the Mantis could operate at 3× efficiency through bigger elemental control and elemental advantages, the effective ratio became 4:1. Still favoring the Amphibian but with energy recovery giving half the used amphibian’s mana back to the mantis… No longer guaranteed victory.

And the Mantis had demonstrated that with that real equivalent of 8 imaginary capacity points of effective power, it had managed to cycle enough plants to absorb the Amphibian’s water thanks to the enormous elemental advantage that wood had over aquatic creatures.

The Amphibian was already below 70% of its reserves according to Ren’s estimation based on the visible strain in its movements and the decreasing power of its explosive responses.

Percentage: 67-69%.

Which meant that if the Mantis could cycle approximately 24 effective points without breaking its internal bond circuits, then the attrition mathematics would favor Ren considerably more than Min.

If it could steal 50% of what the Amphibian spent defending against wood attacks, and if the Amphibian had to spend, then the net flow would drain the Amphibian to critical levels while the Mantis maintained even minimal reserves through recovery.

The Mantis’s resistance being also 4-5 times higher than normal (hypothetical 8) meant it should be able to cycle up to approximately 40 effective points before receiving critical damage from the quantity of mana flowing through its Bronze-rank crystal structures that weren’t normally designed to handle that volume.

40 effective points > 24-30 effective points

Theoretically sufficient to win through attrition at this rate if the parasitic recovery continued functioning. The Amphibian losing its mana to parasitic plants, even if with only half being recoverable because stolen energy conversion was never perfectly efficient… would put it in range where long-term defeat would become genuinely possible.

Especially considering that the arena was already so covered with foliage from which the Mantis received an increasingly greater flow of stolen energy, with accumulation accelerating as the network expanded.

The root network now covered maybe 60-70% of the arena floor. Total mana-wood biomass: perhaps 15000-20000 kilograms of wood-aligned organic matter, all of it acting as conduit for draining the Amphibian’s elemental water energy and channeling it back to the Mantis.

Even the “little tricks” that Min had developed to generate water and distributing it around his beast body through creative techniques were no longer sufficient to counteract the regeneration of plants that fed on every drop he produced.

It was a situation where the initial advantage was inverting, with force changing in ways favoring Ren while the battlefield transformed into territory dominated by the element against which Min had fundamental weakness.

That would have been a correct analysis if the variables didn’t change.

888… 

What a nice number for those like me.

Anyway, as always…