Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

There were still some small problems, with deep roots…

“They’re still saying unpleasant things,” said Larissa. “But don’t focus on that.”

“Larissa.”

“Don’t focus on that.” This time it wasn’t the pedagogical tone. “Liora and Selphira will manage it. We manage it so you focus on this. You don’t need to be wearing the expression you’re currently wearing when we’re in the ceremony and someone slips in a stupid comment.”

Ren looked at Larissa.

Larissa held his gaze with the calm of someone who had decided not to move from there.

“Step seven,” she said.

Ren executed step seven.

Larissa watched him complete the full sequence. Then she set the document on the table and crossed her arms with the gesture of someone arriving at an assessment.

“When you do this perfectly on the day of the ceremony,” she said, “they’re both going to understand why I asked them to let me teach you alone. And no external noise is going to matter to them.”

Ren looked at her.

“That sounds like you have very positive expectations. But it occurs to me that Liu might be able to help in that ‘stupid comments’ regard.” He said while getting closer and grabbing her by the waist.

“Having him there will certainly be useful,” said Larissa. “But I wasn’t only talking about noise.” A pause. “Expectations can fall short… it’s better not to anticipate perfection, because there are things that are inevitable.”

Ren didn’t answer immediately.

He hugged her closer and looked from her back at the seals exchange document for a moment.

“Is your mother going to be at the ceremony?”

Larissa didn’t move.

“Probably.”

Ren made a complicated expression she couldn’t see but likely felt in his mana.

“Didn’t showing her the Diamond Dragon materials help? If King Dragarion had had time to visit her before then maybe my family name wouldn’t…” Ren stopped. Not because he didn’t know how to finish the sentence but because there was no way to finish it that didn’t sound like exactly what it was: the acknowledgment that there were things like an important lineage that he simply didn’t have and that no quantity of territories or ruin rights could replace in the way that woman understood them. Not a character question, not a capability question, a specific kind of old currency that he hadn’t been born holding and that no amount of accumulation in other categories converted into.

“It had to be possible if I do something as significant as your father did,” he said, redirecting. “It’s just that the time is shorter than I expected and…”

“Don’t worry about that either.” Larissa said it but without the firmness of the earlier limit. Something softer. “She doesn’t understand things correctly… She never left that small section of the castle, she hasn’t seen enough in her life to see things from outside it. Even I learned to ignore her most of the time…”

Ren finally nodded.

But the thorn was there regardless, with the specific persistence of things one understood rationally while the emotional system decided that rational understanding was insufficient to ignore them.

If Dragarion could have spoken. If there had been time before this ceremony for someone like him who carried that much relevance and weight to have spoken to that woman about this specific boy.

If…

Liora’s uncles would also keep quiet if there were something large enough that could be demonstrated clearly and with sufficient ease in front of everyone. Even the anti-reform Starweaver faction still searching for a scandal to damage the girls’ day, the noise they could produce was inversely proportional to the scale of what Ren had already done publicly and what he would do next.

There were perhaps other ways of dealing with those things more directly, but…

Sirius was still crystallized.

Ren knew that. He also knew what it implied: that the only way certain doors opened completely wasn’t accumulating more territory, more accesses, more crystals, more victories against elemental dragons. Those were real and they counted, but they were counted in a different currency from the one that mattered there.

What mattered there was a demonstration that he could surpass his own self-imposed walls and bring back legends with older blood that those that were talking couldn’t dismiss.

The crystallization was still pending.

Larissa separated from him slightly to be able to watch his face and looked at him with the attention she had when she was processing something and wanted to know whether the other person had arrived at the same place.

“From step one again,” she said.

Ren released the thoughts for now.

The Mantis helped him relax the body back to its working state.

He ran the sequence again from the beginning, with the exactness of something that no longer required the conscious mind to supervise it, the movements arriving in the correct order at the correct angle while outside the afternoon sun continued advancing across the academy in the direction of the next day.

Barely three weeks left.

♢♢♢♢

Two weeks left…

The day’s schedule was the emptiest it had been in recent memory: a protocol session in the morning that Larissa had canceled for a Dravenholm house meeting, the Goldcrest reports that in all fairness could wait until tomorrow, and an afternoon with nothing written in it.

Ren had been looking for exactly this since he defeated the fourth dragon.

Not with enthusiasm… But with the resignation of someone who understood that the only way to know whether they were ready for something was to attempt it, and that attempting it had a cost that procrastination didn’t eliminate but only deferred to a later date, with interest, because things one avoided had a way of becoming larger in the waiting than they would have been if confronted directly.

He had flown to the north of his still-perceptibly-enormous territory.

The ruins where the water and fire statues rested had the silence of mystery, not only the silence of old but of weight, of things that had happened there and hadn’t fully dispersed. Stone that remembered.

The high-level guards at the entrance recognized him before he reached the distance where the identification protocol would have been relevant, his mana density was recognizable at a very long range that also had grown steadily more pronounced over the past months, the kind of signature that announced itself without requiring confirmation. The captain on duty made the gesture he made every time Ren appeared without prior announcement: a hybrid of a salute and the implicit question of whether he wanted someone to accompany him.

Ren shook his head as always.

The captain nodded and opened the way, signaling his companion to notify the interior. They were about to feel that intense energy from the depths of the ruin again today