Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1005 - Taming Adulthood

In a place with no coordinates on any map, an entity suffered.

The suffering wasnʼt physical, there was no longer a body to contain it. It was simply the only thing available to something that had lost most of its attributes and been left with the most useless of all: awareness of what it had failed to accomplish. Consciousness without agency, without purpose, without any of the instruments it had spent so much time constructing. Just the awareness of the gap between what had been planned and what had resulted, with nothing to do with that knowledge except hold it.

What remained of what had once been a more complete and tangible being drifted through the network without direction, without goal, trailing nothing.

It was like a scream traveling through a data or energy system, a sad, shrill thing that moved through the spaces between everything without reaching anything , without arriving, finding no surface to land on and no echo to confirm that it existed. A pain without an outlet in a space without walls.

Painful not in the way that pain teaches something, but in the false useless kind, the kind built on invented reasons, the kind used to construct the argument that everyone else is responsible and never oneself. The kind a person holds onto too tightly because abandoning it would require acknowledging something their egocentricity canʼt afford to acknowledge, even as holding tears them apart.

A painful immaturity that had nothing to do with age.

But something stopped it.

Not with gentleness, with something that might have been mercy, or might simply have been a positive interest, because the stopping was good, the suffering paused and in that pause what remained of Orion had the only thing still available to him: a moment to think.

”Did you like it?”

The voice arrived from no specific direction. From all of them, or from none, if there was a way things arrived in a space where the rules that made directions relevant didnʼt apply.

”Did you like it at the end? The corruption you despised so much. The power that embraced you back.”

What remained of Orion considered the question with whatever was left of his capacity to form responses, now that something other than constant suffering occupied his attention. The honest answer was what it was… he hadnʼt even known corruption was happening at that moment. But the answer he believed might serve as a last hope of being helped, of being allowed to escape the current state, was a different answer.

He chose that last one.

”Yes,” he said, or did the equivalent of saying in a space where words were only intentions that may not even have direction. ”Yes, I liked it. I didnʼt know what I was missing… I want to be part of it.”

He was wrong about what that would accomplish.

The temporary relief ended.

The anguish returned with the intensity of something that has been held back for a moment and allowed to show its contrast again, letting the person remember what it felt like not to be in it, and then coming back with everything it had accumulated while it waited.

”Lie or truth,” said the voice, without urgency, without the irritation the false flattery in that answer would have carried if it actually mattered, ”it makes no difference… You served your purpose either way.”

Orion tried to respond but couldnʼt form the thoughts into anything with the pain again.

”The time that would have been spent consolidating the new position you gave us… Iʼll use that for something else. The block in our side of the ʼbrainʼ you created by losing the crystals, amusingly ended up being very useful. And the information...”. A pause that wasnʼt consideration but something closer to satisfaction. ”Our big purple ʼbrainʼ you believed was yours for a moment was always mine… with or without the purple crystals as keys, those you thought you were mastering. No one can control it any more since itʼs already a node in my network. The information inside the node is easier to read when the crystals are integrated into its gaps, but the information itself is always mine to manage… A demerit to anyone, without a power like mine or superior, that connects to it.”

Another pause that was preparing to be a conclusion being placed.

”I donʼt particularly care whether you lied. Nor about your time, nor ʼyourʼ crystals, nor the small amount of energy and awareness you have remaining. But the energy that integrated into the network when you were defeated and the crystals fractured at the end, that I do appreciate. Thank you for being useful.”

What remained of Orion processed that for as long as he had to process it, which was less time than his brothers would have needed to understand that their own end would be the same. The minimal control the entity had temporarily returned for the conversation had dissolved back into nothing as completely as if it had never been extended, and what had been able to articulate thoughts became again only the impression of a sensation moving through a current without a name.

He had dissolved into the network but his essence was still there.

Not something easy like death… not the kind with a peaceful ending. Absorbed into something larger if there was a way things were absorbed when they lost the boundary that had made them distinguishable from what surrounded them. The thing that had been Orion Starweaver became part of the current without destination and stayed there.

Somewhere in the network ʼscreamingʼ in pain… Something that might have been a laugh was heard.

Short, genuinely entertained.

”A pleasant tone,” uttered Selthia, with the attention of someone hearing a piece of music. ”Ego and stubborn wrongness that refuses to accept its own errors… that has a nice frequency. Sharp at the edges and without resolution at the center.” She let it continue for a moment, considering it. ”Like a song that never reaches its final chord.”

And she let it play.

Entertainment found in the melodious suffering brought by immaturity, which was its own kind of music if you had been listening long enough.

♢♢♢♢

What came after the battle was, in many ways, more complicated than the battle itself.

Battles ended… What they left behind had no completion date.

Julius and Arturo woke hours after being treated, the marks of the dayʼs effort visible in how bodies took longer than they wanted to to recover energy spent past their limits, and began handling what needed to be handled, because that was exactly who they were. The kind of people who handled what needed to be handled even when the body was asking for another day… And it was not going to get one.

The news of what had happened in the hall had reached Orionʼs external army before Julius sent any official message. Soldiers who had slipped out before the situation fully closed had described what they witnessed to the lines outside, and what they described sounded exaggerated, and was still real enough for the formation to begin coming apart from the margins. The people who had always participated more from interest than conviction found that the interest had changed direction, and they made the adjustment with the particular efficiency of people who had been prepared to make it for a while.

Aldric, who had spent the entire day with the expression of someone working through a calculation that had a splinter in it and who hadnʼt been able to decide whether to act or wait, watched how things developed for exactly the time he needed to confirm that his caution had been correct. Then he moved to contain what remained of the opportunist army like someone who understood that being on the right side at the right moment had a specific value, and who had been working toward being in a position to claim that value since before most people in the room had known the question would be asked.

The casualty count was the kind of count made when something ends that many people bet more on than they should have. Sad the way those counts were always sad, and providing the specific comfort that nobody in their right mind used to comfort anyone but that was still true: it could have been worse. Given the scale of what had been in motion, it could have been considerably worse. The fact that it wasnʼt was partially luck and partially the accumulated decisions of everyone who had spent today making the right small choices in the narrow windows those choices were available.

Selphira and Victor survived. Which defied reasonable calculation given the state in which they were found. They had been disabled but were alive, perhaps by a miracle or because they were so stubborn.

Both incapacitated for an indefinite period, the recovery from the crystallization impossible still, which the people who knew them discovered more noteworthy than the injuries themselves. The school took time to find its rhythm again.

After a brief transition, we’ll move into the time skip and separate what will be the arc that marks the beginning of adulthood and the end of the first half of the story