Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

“You were going to ‘find some water’,” uttered Selphira. Not a question. “Yes…”

“And mostly to think as always.”

 “Also yes…”

Selphira thought that for a moment. Then she did something Larissa hadn’t expected: instead of continuing past her toward Ren’s room, she stopped in the corridor with the posture of someone who had recalculated their destination and decided that here was sufficient. “I was going to find Luna,” she said. “I need to speak with her about something that affects her directly and that she isn’t going to want to hear.” A pause. “But you’re here first.”

Larissa didn’t respond immediately.

“This is not an accident,” she said finally. “The way you said that.”

“No.” Selphira didn’t elaborate where elaboration wasn’t needed, she was the kind of person who let silence do the work when silence was more efficient than words. “Luna is going to need someone who she has opened up to before… Since you girls are lacking some important points I’m almost certain the boy didn’t divulge to you. So when I arrive and say what I have to say. Someone who understands the full situation can share some acknowledgement with her…” she found the right words with the cunning of someone who had the judgment to choose it, “… And help her process the part that isn’t political before we have to talk about the part that is.”

 Larissa looked down the empty corridor toward the room.

Then she looked back at Selphira.

“How bad is that ‘political part’ you have to tell her?”

Direct to the point…

So Selphira answered also with the direct honesty that was probably the only thing Larissa would have accepted at this moment.

“Bad in the sense that there is no version of this situation she is going to like, and no version where she isn’t at the center of something she didn’t choose to be part of.” A very brief pause. “But not bad in the sense that there is no way out of it.” Another pause, shorter. “If we play it well…”

“And if we don’t play it well?”

Selphira didn’t answer that directly.

What she said was: “That’s why I require Luna to have someone with her when I arrive.”

Larissa looked at the woman in front of her. At the wide spread crystalisation damage, especially in her arm. At the posture compensating for what the body no longer did automatically. At the mana signature that was a very small fraction of what it should have been but was still holding itself organized and functional anyway, because several hundred years of practice produced that kind of control, the kind that ran on structure when the fuel was gone.

Larissa stepped to the side to make room in the corridor.

“But tell me first,” she said.

♢♢♢♢

Orion marched slowly.

It wasn’t some timing imprecision… It was the deliberate kind of slowness that communicated something, the pace of someone who knows the other side needs more time to prepare a coherent response, and who therefore has no reason to arrive before that need has been felt at its fullest. Every kilometer he took longer than necessary was a kilometer during which Arturo had to maintain the defense, had to keep dividing his forces, and the tamers who had been active for too many consecutive hours had to stay active for one more. Pressure without the expense of direct combat was the particular advantage that the staggering volume of mutants beneath the ground gave him, and he was using it the way someone uses a hand they’re confident in, without rushing, without showing the cards, letting the weight do the work.

 Julius recognized it from the first response message. The tone was that of someone for whom the urgency lived entirely on the other side of the exchange.

What followed was a negotiation Julius would have found genuinely interesting under different circumstances. Orion bargained with the confidence of someone who believed his crystals resolved any tactical discrepancy that might arise, a confidence Julius understood perfectly, because in terms of raw power it was difficult to argue with. The barrier was real. The crystals storing extraordinary captured abilities were real. The unified army of opportunist factions now marching from the west, consolidated and complete, was real.

But Orion had a need that Julius understood just as clearly: he needed this to be official.

 A coup without ceremony was a usurpation. A usurpation could be maintained by force for as long as the force held, but it demanded an indefinite expenditure of his crystal’s energy to contain the resistance that would inevitably organize itself in the margins, the pockets of opposition that never fully dissolved, the figures who became focal points, the slow erosion of control that came from having to manage resentment rather than consent. It required years of the kind of work that left marks and enemies and no clean way to stop doing it. Orion clearly didn’t want that when a cleaner alternative existed.

 The ceremony gave him legitimacy.

 Legitimacy reduced the long-term cost by an order of magnitude.

 Which meant Julius had something to offer even though the immediate balance of force, after the loss of his two most powerful assets, was not in his favor. He had the one thing Orion couldn’t manufacture on his own: the credibility of the other side agreeing to the terms.

 “He accepted moving the mutant flow to the empty Starweaver sector in the northeast,” Julius told Arturo while dictating the next message. “Further from the castle, from the residential areas, and from the supply storage.”

 Arturo looked at him.

“That splits my formation from yours even further. At least distance-wise, the separate flows were a problem but they were closer to…”

“Yes, but this makes the flow more manageable overall and saves more civilian lives, because the northern sector has fewer critical access points.” Julius sealed the message. “Orion is going to accept because it serves him to have your side and mine further apart, and because in the general accounting he doesn’t care where the mutants are being contained as long as they’re keeping us weaker and more dispersed than him. He isn’t using the flow to win. He’s using it to maintain pressure, because if it actually overruns us it creates problems for him too in the end.”