Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons novel Chapter 1058

Chapter 1058: Chapter 1058 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike - 4

The first ten meters were silent as the darkness gave ground when the light from Hikari’s beast was pushing it downward as they went.

The walls of the widened opening carried the marks of the bit that old transit Ren had read from above: not the marks of deliberate excavation but of many bodies passing through the same space, compressing and displacing rather than cutting or digging.

The number of mutants must have been insanely high.

The entrance to the first chamber was below them.

The presences Ren had read from the surface were clearer now. The first ones seemed weak, the kind of mutant left in the rear when the main movement had already passed through, different from the kind that came in an active incursion: they were just there without the urgency of something in motion, with the diffuse presence of something occupying the space simply because the space was available.

The first chamber was more a logistics problem than a combat problem.

The golden sprouts that had made the external descent require carefulness and sustained attention couldn’t penetrate the ruin walls. That was one of the specific properties of the material composing ancient structures: a resistance that didn’t correspond to any mineral in conventional classification, which produced the practical effect that what happened inside the ruins and what happened outside operated as two systems that didn’t communicate through the walls.

Whatever grew and moved and consumed in the surface world stopped at the stone boundary.

The enormous Gold 3 growths didn’t fit through the first door in any case; it was the narrowest opening in the sequence, like designed for something else entirely.

What was inside were the mutants, large but not that large to be unable to pass.

Low Silver, the great majority. In numbers that made the first chamber dense in a way that left almost no empty space in the underground area, the concentration of presences building up from things that had been in the same place for long enough without having any reason to move.

Yet they were active despite this.

The group saw them before the mutants fully processed that the group had arrived.

"Are they hugging each other?" Mayo asked, with the tone of someone who had noticed something strange and was trying to make it entertaining.

They did look strange; more active than the situation required, like they were trying to be on top of each other, and they had damage marks.

Not the marks of combat against human defenders, the kind they normally accumulated at the wall. These were the marks of something that had attacked to eat, with the specific shape of bites that only another member of the same species produced, and with absences of tissue that corresponded to parts that had been consumed rather than simply damaged.

Consumed because they were nowhere to be seen.

"They’re eating each other," Liora said.

"And they appear to be doing it systematically," Ren said. "Not out of desperation; as if something ordered them to eat without fleeing or defending themselves."

The distinction mattered. Animals that ate each other out of desperation did so when the environment left no other option, but they defended themselves and reacted to pain. What he was seeing here had no defensive reaction, and the organization of it suggested something that had occurred with enough frequency for the survivors to carry multiple layers of marks, which meant the process wasn’t recent and wasn’t an event but a state. An ongoing selection, not a crisis response.

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