Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

The mutants started dying on their own.

It wasn’t a gradual process in the sense of something weakening over time. It was closer to a system losing its power supply, functioning, functioning, and then simply not. The ones ringing the artifact fell first, then the ones farther out along the perimeter, and finally the ones still moving toward the center as though the ritual that had called them was still active, still pulling, even though the core sustaining it had already collapsed from the inside.

Julius observed it from his position near the center of the arena and did not feel immediate relief. He felt the specific caution of someone who has seen enough situations improve in inexplicable ways to know that inexplicable improvements have causes, and that the cause matters as much as the result. Sometimes more.

 He looked at the girls.

 All three were still suspended in the air, eyes open, irises burning with an intensity that had nothing in common with unconsciousness. These weren’t the eyes of someone absent, they were the eyes of someone completely present in a space that wasn’t this one. Julius and Lin observed them blink at irregular intervals and took that as confirmation of what they were both already assuming.

Either they were conscious somewhere deeper in, or it was an illusion produced by the shifting energy flow and their own need to believe things were going to be fine. Neither of them uttered which interpretation they preferred as it was obvious.

The light around the three of them pulsed without uniformity, not a steady glow but the fluctuation of four distinct energy sources attempting to share the same channel without having been designed to do so for long. If Julius concentrated he could separate them: Larissa’s clean light, precise and direct; Luna’s shadow with a density that existed on its own terms, not the absence of light but a presence in its own right; Liora’s fire, bright and purple, pushing at the edges of whatever contained it. And surrounding all three of them, connecting them, threading between them and outward… something else. Something Julius had no reference to classify, but that he recognized as the root network tying everything here to the center of whatever was still unresolved.

The ethereal mana between the girls and the entity was barely visible with the naked eye. A near-translucent web, almost solidified where it was densest, reaching from the three of them outward to the structure of the eight artifacts with a passive nature of something that was not attacking but communicating. They were speaking to it, or through it, in a language that didn’t use words.

Lin tightened her grip on his arm.

 Julius looked at her.

“There,” she said, with the calm voice of someone who had seen things adjacent to this with Ren before, and who for that reason said it without unnecessary drama.

The dark entity that had occupied the peak of the artifact was changing.

Not fighting or resisting… Just changing, the way things change when they lose the purpose that was holding them together. The form that had been a hybrid of shadow and corrupted power expanded outward in every direction at once, losing itself in the process, becoming first a sphere with no defined edges and then something closer to a dissipating cloud than a presence. The density drained out of it gradually and then all at once. What had felt enormous and powerful a short while ago was becoming something the eye could hold. The energy that had composed it began flowing downward.

The eight artifacts received it.

That was the moment Julius found hardest to process, not the entity dissolving, but what the artifacts did with the energy when it arrived. They didn’t respond like structures absorbing power back into themselves. They responded like something that had completed a function and was returning to the state it had occupied before being activated. Then they began to sink… Slowly, methodically, with the same movement with which they had risen from the ground, but inverted, as though something down the earth was calling them back and they were simply answering.

 And as they descended, several of the artifact’s arms came together.

They lowered Ren to the ground.

Julius didn’t have a precise word for what he was watching. “Lowered” was the closest available and still not quite accurate enough. There was something in the way the arms adjusted their angle and pressure as they brought him down, that small, continuous calibration that no structure without intention produces, that belonged to a category Julius associated with people rather than objects. Like someone handling something that matters to them with a care they can’t help showing even when they’re not trying to. The word that came to mind, unbidden, was tenderness. He set it aside because it didn’t make sense in context and he didn’t have time to make sense of it.

Something the watching crowd could not know, but that anyone who had witnessed the interior situation with Selthia might have linked to the strange girl’s parting declaration, that ‘she intended to keep Ren entirely for herself’.

Ren came to rest on the ground near the girls.

Julius held that image for a moment.

Then he looked at the point where the entity had been, which was now just empty space and fading light.

“The girls seemed connected to whatever was happening,” Lin murmured from where he was still holding her, more to herself than to him. “Maybe they’ll have an explanation.”

Julius didn’t answer, because he didn’t have a certainty to offer.

 The three girls descended slowly and opened their eyes almost simultaneously, with that specific transition of people returning from a very long distance who need a moment to locate themselves before they can do anything else. All three of them looked at Ren on the ground before they looked at anything or anyone else. And all three moved toward him with the same urgency, without consulting each other.

Julius walked toward them.

 “I can walk,” said Lin.

“Yes,” said Julius, without putting her down.

“I said, I can walk on my own…”

“Sorry.” He set her down quickly and kept moving, already looking past her toward the center of the arena. “I was… lost in thought.”