Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 962 -  Fractionated Tamer

Selthia was not going to take long to fade.

But it was a gradual process. Like ink dissolving in water, the edges of her figure were losing definition while Renʼs interior space slowly reclaimed its golden quality, patient and inexorable. Her features were still visible. Still readable…

The expression on them was something Ren didnʼt manage to catalogue in time.

 ”You were very rough with me,” said Selthia, with that tone of hers that skipped dramatic inflection entirely and landed somewhere in the register of calm observation, someone stating a fact they find mildly interesting. ”Touching me all over like that was cruel.” A deliberate pause cleaning an unexisting tear. ”Though honestly…” her lips curved into something that wasnʼt quite a smile but occupied the same neighborhood, ”...it didnʼt feel that bad. A new sensory experience.”

Ren unlocked his mouth.

He closed it.

Not because he had no answer. He had an answer... Several, in fact. The problem was that every version of that answer he could formulate in the next two seconds was going to sound exactly like the thing it wasnʼt, and two seconds was precisely how much time he had before the three girls reached his back.

 He felt them before he turned.

 When he did, Larissa was already just three steps away. She moved with that efficiency she had when she had finished evaluating a situation and settled on her next step, no additional processing time required. Even when the context made composure a genuine effort. Her eyes scanned the space once, the floor, where the traces of the corrupted network had left their marks on the golden surface. From the floor to Selthia, from Selthia to Ren and from Ren back out to the general situation. The full picture assembled and filed under a category Ren recognized immediately as ʼLarissa Arriving At Uncomfortable Conclusionsʼ.

She stopped in front of him and put a hand on his shoulder.

Ren drew breath to explain that it wasnʼt what it looked like, but she got there first.

”If you want a fourth,” said Larissa, with a calm that was somehow more unsettling than outrage would have been, ”youʼll need to discuss it with us first.”

The air left Ren without permission.

He deflated completely. He hadnʼt prepared a response for that, because preparing a response for that would have required anticipating it, and anticipating it would have required a level of imagination that he refused to credit himself with. The response he had ready was for indignation, or for questions, or for any reasonable variation of what the situation looked like from the outside. Not for that specific calm, the kind that meant Larissa had processed the complete picture and arrived at a conclusion that didnʼt make sense for him.

 He looked for Liora.

 She was two steps further back. Her face had the look of someone whose body had finally sent in the bill for everything theyʼd spent over the last few hours, very tired but arriving while there were still important things left to deal with. She exhaled slowly, the breath of someone preparing to say something they already know isnʼt going to be enough.

”I donʼt agree,” she said. ”For the record. Three is already a problem for me.”

”Liora, this isnʼt…”

 ”Iʼm not saying I wonʼt accept it in some fair agreement.” She cut him off with the same tired energy. ”Iʼm saying itʼs a problem. Those are different things.”

 Ren opened his mouth to explain that nothing they were constructing had any basis in what had actually occurred. That there was a technical explanation for every element of the scene. That disrupting mana flow through secondary nodes was a perfectly documented combat technique, one that the sounds a projected entity made when its corrupted flow was interrupted were a natural physiological response to…

A laugh didnʼt let him start.

 Not from the girls.

Selthia, still dissolving at the edges, had clearly decided to make full use of her remaining time. She was watching the scene with the first expression of genuine amusement Ren had seen from her since sheʼd entered his interior space, relaxed, open, like someone settling in to enjoy something they hadnʼt expected to find entertaining.

 ”After everything he made me feel,” she said, addressing all three girls with a comfort level that Ren found profoundly unfair given the timing, ”he canʼt escape responsibility now.” Her eyes moved to him with something that in a different context might have been called flirtatious and in this one was specifically engineered to make his life difficult. ”Iʼm keeping him for myself. So he can make me feel things like that every day. Iʼm not sharing.” A brief pause. ”I donʼt understand how any of you could…”

”That is completely…” Ren started.

 Selthiaʼs body finished dissolving.

Mid-sentence.

Without letting him even finish.

He stood there with his mouth open, looking at the spot where she had been a moment ago, which was now just an empty section of the golden library. He closed his mouth. Opened it again. Closed it again.

 He turned slowly toward the girls.

All three of them were looking at him.

Larissa with that composure of hers that had depth behind it, which made it harder to read than simple indignation, because you couldnʼt be sure what the depth contained. Liora with the face of someone adding new data to an already complicated social calculation and watching the results update in real time. And Luna.

 Luna, who had taken a step forward.

Who had put both hands on his shoulders.

Who was holding him with a firm grip that maybe wasnʼt aggressive, not exactly, but that still didnʼt factor in the possibility of him going anywhere. Her grip was unyielding in the way that meant the person doing the gripping had been thinking about not letting go for a while before something happened…

Ren registered her mana in the first second of contact because it was impossible not to. The surface was quiet, controlled, carrying that particular serenity Luna used as insulation between what was happening outside and whatever was happening underneath. But beneath that surface the mana was a full vortex. Complex and enormous, the complete storm of someone who had spent a period of time not knowing whether the person in front of them was going to still be that person when it was over.

He gazed at her.

She looked back at him.

He thought that the most reasonable course of action was to explain everything, calmly and in order. That maybe after the shouting and the scolding, once he could show them the actual state of the mana in his core, they would see that there was nothing to understand in the wrong way. That the truth was simple even if it sounded complicated. That Selthia had said exactly what sheʼd said to produce exactly this situation, and that the three of them were too intelligent not to see through that if he gave them thirty seconds.

 He unlocked his mouth.

Luna pulled him in.