Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapters 963 – Taming Stress

Luna didn’t punish him. It was a hug…

But her arms were a bit stronger than expected for someone who had no intention of hurting him. He still hadn’t anticipated it and so he didn’t have time to decide how to react before he was already there, his face against her hair, her arms locked around his back with the persistence of someone who has been waiting to do something for long enough that when they finally can, they don’t measure the force. The side of her face pressed into his chest.

 Ren deflated for the second time in under a minute.

Luna was crying.

Not the dramatic kind… The quiet kind, the kind that comes out when someone has been holding something back long enough that when it finally goes, it goes without warning or control.

He felt the dampness against his chest before he fully processed what it was. He stood there for roughly two seconds with no idea what to do with his hands.

Then he put them where they made sense. One against the back of her head, careful, and one flat against her back. A hug he hadn’t planned that, once started, had nowhere better to be.

Larissa cleared her throat.

“She’s right,” she said, with the tone of someone who has reviewed a conclusion and decided to stand by it. “We can’t trust what an enemy says. Her words sounded credible but they were deliberately vague. The most reasonable interpretation is that she was trying to create division so we’d be easier to target afterward. Staying together is the logical response…”

Ren caught movement at the edge of his vision.

Larissa joined the hug from his side with the same composure she brought to everything else, as though embracing Ren while Luna cried into his chest was a tactical decision that happened to coincide with many other considerations, a logical response to the situation that she had evaluated and found sound.

The warmth of the two of them wrapped around him from different angles of his almost bare body.

Ren’s face went red.

He turned his head toward Liora, who was still in her position from before, wearing that complicated expression she got when feelings were stacked on top of each other and hadn’t yet found the right order to be processed in.

“That ‘Selthia’ girl was just causing trouble.” The words came out fast, because if he didn’t say them fast they weren’t going to come out cleanly. “What I was doing wasn’t strange the way she made it sound. It was flow disruption through the secondary nodes, which is a combat technique that actually…”

Liora extended one finger.

She placed it on his lips.

Ren stopped.

“Selthia, I don’t care… What I’m thinking about,” said Liora, her voice quieter than usual, “and what’s been worrying me, isn’t any of that.” A pause. Her eyes had the quality they got when she’d decided to say something that actually mattered and had dropped the wrapping she normally used to make important things easier to hear. “I didn’t need to hear any explanation to know I was relieved you were still you.”

 Ren said nothing more.

 “For the record,” Liora added, pulling in a slow breath the way someone does when they’re consciously setting something aside, “I have things to process… A lot of things about all of this.” A loose gesture that took in the interior space, the spot where Selthia had been, everything that had happened. “But that can wait.” She exhaled. “This can’t.”

 She joined the hug.

Ren ended up surrounded on three sides with enough warmth that the interior space of the empty library, which had spent the last several minutes serving as the setting for too many things that were too intense, stopped feeling like a battlefield.

It was strange.

Strange in a sense that didn’t fit any classification system he had built for the many implausible things that happened to him. Not uncomfortable, not exactly… Not completely comfortable either.

Something that existed between the two, something without a name but that also didn’t urgently need one.

Maybe a happy mistake… he thought. It was the word that came closest.

He wanted to say it was indeed a good thing. He wanted to say something to all three of them, because there was something more important than the strange girl, there was something he’d understood better during his brief contact with his sleeping mushroom, a glimpse into the vast depth of information it now contained at gold rank, things about the crystallization and the problems surrounding them that he hadn’t seen clearly before.

He wanted to put it into words. To tell them he understood more now. To reaffirm, out loud, that he was going to help them, that the warmth they were giving him right now was something he intended to return with positive actions, in the only way he actually knew how to return things.

 He opened his mouth.

 His eyes closed.

 It wasn’t a decision. The body took over when the mind had been running at overcapacity for too long without giving it a say. The exterior battle. The interior battle. Selthia and the mushroom and the roots and the bonuses and the vortex and the pain and the three of them entering the center of everything at the precise moment when he had nothing left to hold himself up with, not alone.

Too much time under too much pressure, the kind of massive load that doesn’t let your body announce when it’s done, it just stops, and you go with it.

 He tried to open them… He genuinely tried.

 If he couldn’t tell them what he wanted to tell them, he at least wanted to know that everything outside was handled. The mutants. The artifact. Lin, his parents, the others. Whether the situation had shifted or whether there was still something he could do from where he was.

But his legs went first.

The girls caught him before he fell, before the fall became disorganized and took him all the way to the floor without any control. They brought him down together with the kind of coordination that doesn’t require anyone to say anything, because it comes from the same concern arriving at the same moment