Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Selphira turned her head and looked at him. Only one moment before focusing in the front again. “Your father sacrificed himself because it was the only option available, and because he was the only person who could do it.” She looked back at the shield. “Your situation is neither of those.”

“But the outcome would still be better than the alternatives, we need you that can still use beasts and skills more.”

“Outcome isn’t the only thing that matters in a decision, Victor. If it were, I’d have been taking shortcuts for three hundred years that I have never taken after the last one.” Another centimeter… 24.98 meters left. “And I have no intention of carrying you home as a statue.” “You wouldn’t have to spend so much mana. If you use me here, you…”

“I can do what? Watch you slowly expire in my arms?” Something that in another person’s voice would have been a scold came out of hers as something drier, a short exhale that acknowledged the absurdity without committing to finding it as an option. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not being ridiculous. I’m being realistic.”

“At your age, you don’t know the difference yet.”

Victor opened his mouth… Closed it.

Selphira used the silence. She checked him sideways, careful enough that he wouldn’t notice. The crystallization had moved past the shoulder and edged slightly toward his neck. It hadn’t progressed in the last hour, not since the initial exposure… which was, within the narrow range of available good news, the best she had.

The rest of him looked better than it had any right to, all things considered. But under no circumstances should he tank it anymore.

 She turned her attention back to herself.

 Three small crystal formations had appeared on her left forearm in the last twenty minutes. None of them had been there before. Small enough that they didn’t restrict movement yet. But they were growing despite the shield.

That was the part worth noting. Despite the shield she’d been reinforcing and maintaining and feeding mana into without pause. The shield that was supposed to be protecting her.

Selphira filed it away, adjusted her grip, and kept pushing.

The crystallization didn’t hurt… That was almost beside the point. What mattered was what it meant: Orion’s beam was bleeding through the shield with a consistency she didn’t want to dwell on. She could feel each new formation on her forearm the way you feel a splinter you can’t reach.

She had less mana than she needed. Not dramatically less, but just enough less to matter.

“We’re going to make it to the top,” she told Victor, and her voice carried no cracks, no hesitation, nothing he could use to build a counter-argument.

Victor didn’t respond immediately. When he did, his tone had the measured quality of someone deciding whether a fight was worth starting.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” She shifted the shield’s concentration toward the right edge, where the spiral was biting hardest. The adjustment bought her roughly two seconds of easier pressure. “Stop asking me questions and save what you have left for when we reach the entrance. You’re going to need it for running.” Victor obeyed.

That, more than anything, told her everything she needed to know about his condition. When Victor obeyed without advancing back, without one more angle, without at least a pointed look to register his disagreement… things were genuinely bad. He’d pushed them thirty meters with a fully crystallized arm, thirty meters that would have cost her twice the mana to cover at the same pace without him. That was more than anyone should have managed in his state, more than she would have expected. But that contribution was done. If she forced more out of him now, she wouldn’t be carrying Victor out of here, but a big useless souvenir.

So she let him push from behind and took the beam alone.

♢♢♢♢

Ten more meters gone.

She’d covered them, but not the way she would have liked. The ice shield trembled with an irregularity she’d been working to mask for several minutes now, the kind of subtle wobble that an untrained eye might miss but that Selphira felt in her palms. The shield was arguing with her. The fusion she’d kept in reserve as a last measure had started costing more energy just to maintain than it should have, the upkeep bleeding into the same reserves she needed for the push itself. Fifteen meters left.

“I knew it.” Victor’s voice came from just behind her. “Let me go to the front. You look too tired.”

He had waited, with precise and irritating accuracy, for the exact moment when the shield was most compromised to say it. “No,” said Selphira.

“I can assume more impact than you right now and…”

“I said no, Victor.”

“My arm doesn’t feel anything, I swear to you it’s not…”

“Exactly.” She didn’t raise her voice. She never raised her voice when she was right, because being right didn’t require volume to prove. “If you put that side forward, the one that’s already stopped feeling, you won’t notice when it’s too late. And your stubborn skull will become crystal before you realize you’ve crossed the line.” A sigh. “Although I suppose that might be an improvement.”

Victor opened his mouth, then he stopped moving it. Then he shifted it again with that particular expression he made when he knew he’d lost the argument but wasn’t ready to finish losing it.

“What about you, then?”

Selphira considered how long to take answering that. She used the time to reposition the shield half an inch higher.

“What about me what.”

“You have crystals on your face.”

Selphira didn’t blink.

It was true. The first formations had appeared on her forearm some time ago, but somewhere in the last few minutes, while she was redistributing what remained of her mana as efficiently as the situation allowed, compressing her technique down to its smallest workable shape, new ones had appeared. Two on her left cheekbone, catching the chaotic lights on the stairwell. One at the side of her neck, small but positioned poorly, stiffening the rotation when she turned her head. She felt them… They didn’t hurt. But they were there the way unwelcome things are always there.

“They don’t bother me,” she said.

“That’s exactly what I just told you about mine.”