Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 958 -  Taming His Core - 3

Ren lay there for a moment taking notes of the damage. Spat blood. Not much, just enough to confirm that the hit had been real in every sense that mattered, that this space translated force the same way the outside world did, and also that his ribs were going to have opinions about this later.

Selthia had gotten to her feet. She watched him from across the empty floor with something that in another person would have read as amusement, but in her carried that particular quality of someone observing an experiment that is producing results worth noting. ”That nice body of yours doesnʼt do much for you in here, so lovely yet useless you know.” Not cruel or mocking tone. Just like a data point she was sharing, mono-tone the way someone mentions the weather before deciding whether to bring a coat. Ren wiped the corner of his mouth and stood up.

He breathed. Not because the oxygen mattered, in this space that was a concept open to debate, but because he needed the two seconds it took to do it correctly. Full breath in, slow breath out. The kind Lin had made him practice until it was reflex, back when he thought it was just a breathing exercise and before he understood it was the reset button she was actually installing.

It wasnʼt useless...

 Linʼs first rule: ʼbuild the foundation.ʼ Her voice had that quality of something you hear and accept before the first real weeks of training convince you it isnʼt what you thought, and then you come out the other side of it and realize it was always exactly what she said. The body is the foundation that everything else sits on. Without a real foundation, the bonuses have a low ceiling. Itʼs not just the bonus that matters. Itʼs what the bonus is multiplying.

Ren looked at his chest.

The mushroomʼs light was still there, faint, slowly reconstructing the casing around the seed. His first beast needed to sleep. He had understood that. Forcing it again would be the kind of mistake that didnʼt get corrected easily, the kind you paid for in a currency that wasnʼt just mana.

But the energy the mushroom had released in that pulse hadnʼt simply vanished. It was still in the space around him, loose and available, carrying the particular signature of something that had been his for long enough that he recognized it the way he recognized his own voice. He breathed it in the way heʼd learned to breathe in, not grabbing for it, just opening the channel and letting it find him.

The first bonus of his first beast opened. Ten percent strength, just grabbing at the edges of his full power, barely enough to notice from the outside.

 Not what he needed… But more than heʼd had thirty seconds ago.

He came at her again.

This time Selthia registered the difference before he arrived. He saw it in the small postural adjustment she made as he closed the distance, worry, a shift in weight, a slight change in how her hands were positioned, the half-second where her expression moved from passive observation to something closer to active attention. She had noticed.

 Same pattern of attack.

But this time he dodged her counter.

”Plenty of strength and speed,” he said. ”But your technique is zero and your movement has huge gaps.”

Ren didnʼt stop moving.

”There are many more important variables,” he said, breathing through the sentence. ”My teacher covers all of them.”

Selthia blinked just once. The single visible sign that the answer had landed somewhere she hadnʼt expected it. ”Youʼre faster than before,” she conceded. ”But only by a margin, you shouldnʼt be able to…”

Another dodge positioned him at the perfect angle for a clean shot to the liver. His fist drove toward it with the full commitment of someone who had set that opening up.

 The punch landed.

 And did nothing.

 The purple-diamond scales absorbed the impact without acknowledgment, without so much as a sound. Like hitting a mountain. Ren felt it before his fist had fully extended, felt the density in the instant of contact and was already pulling the arm back, but that moment of adjustment cost him. Her counter arrived while he was still between positions. He covered, barely, but the blow caught his side and drove him back several meters. He had already turned with the impact instead of bracing against it, converting the force into directional movement, bleeding off momentum through rotation rather than absorption. He landed on his feet, not elegantly, but controlled. Still standing. He stood there, breathing, and let the unpleasant sensation of the spiritual fire build in his chest. The feeling that wasnʼt comfortable. The feeling that worked in his favor.

The bronze bonuses opened. A small golden mushroom bloomed at the top of his head, barely there, and the energy that had been circulating found its natural channels and followed them without needing permission.

Faster. Stronger. Not doubled, nothing so dramatic, but enough that the space between him and Selthia felt different. He could feel the gap in his own reflexes closing slightly at the edges.

He went back at her.

 Selthia laughed while she defended. A genuine sound, not mockery nor the polished amusement she deployed when she wanted to unsettle someone, but the unguarded laugh of a person who is enjoying themselves in a way they hadnʼt anticipated. Ren kept pushing, kept looking for the angle that would make the scales matter less than the body behind them, and every time he found what looked like an opening the diamond absorbed it without complaint.

Ren processed it and changed what he was trying to do.

 He couldnʼt damage her through the scales. That was a fact, at least for now. Accepting facts quickly was one of the things Lin insisted on, because the tamers who argued with facts in the middle of a fight were the ones who got hurt by them twice.

But scales were a static defensive system. They werenʼt a balance system. They werenʼt a reaction system. A tamer covered in armor was well protected against being hit, and significantly less protected against being moved.

 Feints

He had already moved.

Two feints, one setting up the other, each one committed enough that they read as genuine attempts, because Lin had taught him that a feint nobody believes is just a really bad punch, and the only feint worth throwing is one youʼre willing to follow through on if the read is wrong. Selthia took the bait on the first and broke her stance on the second. Her weight shifted to cover the anticipated angle. Ren went low.

The leg sweep caught her before she could redistribute weight. She went down, and Ren was already there before she even finished falling, his hands finding her ankles, back muscles engaging, using the momentum of her own fall and adding to it with a full rotation that carried her in a wide arc over his head.

The sound she made when she hit the floor of the empty library was extremely satisfying.

Ren chose not to say that out loud.

Selthia was down for approximately one second. She lay there with an expression he hadnʼt seen on her face yet, not the cold analysis, not the observation or that dry amusement. This was something more direct. The irritation of someone who has just had something done to them that they hadnʼt calculated for, and who considers that gap in their calculation a personal problem.

 ”Fine,” she said. In a tone that had nothing fine about it.

She didnʼt transform all at once. That would almost have been easier to digest. Instead she did it the way that was somehow worse… gradually, methodically, each layer added with the deliberation of someone who has options and is working through them from the bottom up. The scales extended further. The musculature beneath them shifted, not just the surface but the underlying structure, bones and tendons resettling into something built for a different weight class entirely. Her posture changed. The way she occupied the space she was standing in changed.

When she came at him this time, the speed was different by enough margin that the technique he had been running arrived half a second late.

He didnʼt have the reaction time to close that gap.

The hit caught him with the full weight of what she was now delivering directly into him. Ren didnʼt try to turn it into anything. He went to the floor, bounced once, and lay still for a moment staring at the ceiling again… which was becoming a familiar view.

He breathed again.

Annoyance wasnʼt helping with that uncomfortable feeling.

Two sensations that together didnʼt soften anything.

But he embraced it. And underneath it, something steadier, the part of him that Lin had spent years building past the point where pain could reach it.

 More mushrooms bloomed along the top of his head, small and golden, appearing with the quiet logic of a system that recognized what the situation required and responded to it. The silver rank bonuses of his mushroom opened with a fraction of those of his other beasts, each one settling into place the way something settles when it belongs there. More strength. More speed. Not dramatic yet like a transformation. Just the next rung of the ladder, made available because the foundation underneath it was solid enough to hold it.

 The difference, when he got to his feet, was real.