Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 959 -  Taming His Core - 4

Selthia was looking at Ren with a face expression that had moved past the point of fun into exasperated.

”Thatʼs a mistake,” she said. The tone was different now, not the dry amusement she had been deploying since the start of this, not the careful observation. Something more direct, stripped of performance and with the particular calm of someone saying what they actually believe but still not especially caring whether the other person accepts it. ”What youʼre doing right now… Letting that thing ʼhelpʼ you is bad.”

Ren didnʼt respond.

”The gold wants to play the ʼgoodʼ one.” Selthia tilted her head slightly. ”But itʼs deceiving you, so you think weʼre the ones doing the deceiving. Because it wants exactly the same thing as what you call corruption.” A pause. ”What they unfairly call corruption.”

Ren closed his fists.

”The difference is that weʼre more honest about it,” she continued. Her voice still had that calm… even when everything else around her was in motion. ”Your ʼfalse beastʼ plants seeds, cultivates them, directs them toward where it wants them to grow. And when theyʼre large enough…” she opened one hand in a gesture that was almost elegant, the crystallized fingers spreading slowly, ”...it will harvest them. The same as us, just with fewer varieties of modification and apparently a better public image.” Her eyes held his. ”Let us give you the power to free yourself from an ending you wonʼt be able to enjoy... Let us save you.”

If it was a lie, it wasnʼt a simple one.

 That was the most uncomfortable part.

Ren knew it the moment he heard it, and the knowing arrived from two directions at once: he watched for fluctuation in the mana and found none, and underneath that, the part of him that processed logical information at inconvenient moments, the part that had never once agreed to be quiet when he needed it to, turned the words over and found weight in them. There was something in what she had said that he couldnʼt dismiss cleanly, a thread of something real woven into it tightly enough that pulling the lie out would take the truth with it.

But it wasnʼt the complete truth either. It was too ambiguous for that… A half truth used as a door left half-open, waiting for him to step through.

 ”You might be right about some things,” said Ren.

 Selthia raised one eyebrow.

 ”But right now the only thing Iʼm interested in is getting you out of here, and youʼre distracting me so...”

 He came at her.

 ♢♢♢♢

Something had changed.

Selthia had noticed it before he uttered a word. The way he moved was different, not simply faster in the straightforward sense of velocity increased, but recalibrated, as though Ren had quietly revised his internal map of where he ended and the fight began. She registered the shift not as a single observable thing but as a collection of small things that added up to a conclusion. But he was already close so she attacked.

The strike found only air.

Selthiaʼs expression tightened for a fraction of a second before it smoothed back to neutral. She threw another. Ren didnʼt retreat, he shifted laterally, stepping into the angle that left her committed to the momentum of the swing, and the purple-diamond claw raked across the empty floor of the library and found nothing.

 She tried again. More velocity this time, more mass behind it, increasing the fusion because when a method stopped producing results the obvious answer was to escalate the force driving it. She pressed harder and moved faster and the outcome was the same: Ren had read her movements and was simply no longer where she had aimed.

His three beasts powers had started filtering back in. Not at full strength, nothing close to what they would have been under normal conditions, but enough that each exchange left her in a slightly worse position than the one before it. Small deficits accumulating. The mushroomʼs power kept flowing from the faint pulsing light at the center of the space, steady and unhurried, and Ren absorbed it without forcing it, letting it find its own channels the way water finds the lowest resistance path.

Selthia pushed her fusion further. More bestial, more speed, more strength, the transformation deepening as she committed more to it. The empty architecture of the library began vibrating from the weight of two presences that kept escalating, the space between them shrinking and expanding in rapid sequences as they moved.

But for a good while now, Ren didnʼt take a single hit.

 Somewhere between the fifteenth and twentieth attempt, he started laughing.

 Not the laugh of someone enjoying themselves in a comfortable way. The specific laugh that comes when a person suddenly understands something, and the satisfaction of understanding it is enough that the laugh escapes before any decision is made about whether to let it out.

 ”Youʼd be better off leaving on your own,” he said, slipping from another strike with a rotation that was almost unnecessarily smooth. ”Otherwise Iʼm going to have to make this unpleasant while I push you out.”

 Selthia stopped.

 ”Youʼre getting overconfident.” Her tone carried the weight of a reminder, the reminder that less than five minutes ago she had sent him across the room. ”A moment ago…”

 ”A moment ago.” Ren shrugged. ”Things change.”

 Selthia came at him with genuine focus this time.

 Ren cleared her path with enough margin that the motion looked unhurried, reappeared at her side, and instead of hitting the armor he placed his fingers with perfect accuracy at the thinnest gap between the plates on her abdomen, the exact point where, if you could perceive the mana pattern of a tamer clearly enough, one of the primary flow nodes sat closest to the surface.

 It was the same technique he had worked out with Larissa once. Refined again with Luna after that. Find the pattern, locate the node, disrupt the flow before the system can compensate for the interruption. Selthia didnʼt have the same flow pattern. The corrupted system was mutated, rerouted in ways that werenʼt standard, built around different principles. She wasnʼt Larissa. She wasnʼt Luna.

 Who would have thought that a disrupted mana flow in a projected entity from a crystallized body would feel like being tickled?