Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1070 - Taming the Wall - 10th Chamber - Secrets - 4

Ren looked at the chamber runes a moment longer and seemed to understand something.

”Iʼm going to try,” he said.

”Ren.” Lioraʼs voice had the exact temperature it had when concern had outrun patience.

”If Selthia wanted us to use the sacrifice,” Ren said, eyes still on the runes, ”she wouldnʼt have shown me this...” He indicated the reorganized lines above the door. ”But she also has to tell the truth to force me to try the riskier approach. What she wants is indeed the rematch... For that she needs me to understand certain things correctly and that means the information is accurate, because if it werenʼt she wouldnʼt get what she wants from it. But she deliberately didnʼt mention one thing I just understood.”

He paused to say something to Liora quietly, close enough that it didnʼt carry, then continued at full volume.

”So besides that thing she left out, she gave me correct information against her own interests, or risked not getting her rematch.” He looked at Liora. ”Either way I think she canʼt stop what you can do, and sheʼs redirecting attention away from it.”

He held her eyes.

”I trust you.”

Liora took the time she needed to review that reasoning. Looking for the piece that didnʼt fit, the angle that created a gap in the logic, the assumption that only held if you didnʼt press it.

She found nothing.

Which didnʼt mean there wasnʼt anything to find but...

Ren leaned toward her before closing the distance to the door. His voice dropped to the exact level that reached her and stopped there, the kind of intimacy that was automatic by now.

”What I told you is true, and we have a trump card: the fusion. If the crystallization starts, you can pull me out mid-process.” He kept the delivery level and factual.

”Thereʼs no risk to my primary system if I put the Mantis at the front of the exchange. If Iʼm fused when it happens and the Mantis is the one making contact with the doorʼs system, only the Mantisʼs nucleus takes the full effect. The other three beasts in my system run on a different frequency when the fusion is active; my primary in particular, since itʼs the one managing the fusion itself. The door canʼt reach them the same way until it finishes with the first one in line.”

A pause to let her get that truth.

”And the fusion bonuses give me enough resistance to hold against the beam for a meaningful stretch. Iʼve read more operational detail about how these doors function in the other ruins than what sheʼs showing us highlighted here. That specific part isnʼt in her highlights... Selthia left it out deliberately.”

Liora looked at him for a long moment.

”If it goes wrong,” she said, and the word went down flat, no bend to it, a line rather than a suggestion, ”I pull you out. Whatever is happening with the door at that moment.”

”Yes,” Ren said.

From the walls, Selthia said nothing.

Nothing was also a kind of answer when Selthia was the one choosing it.

Ren moved toward the door, then turned his head back toward Liora one more degree.

”She knows that part is true and didnʼt bring it up because doing so would have cost her the advantage.”

”Exactly!” Selthiaʼs laugh arrived from the walls, quiet and unforced, the kind that came before you could decide whether to let it out.

”Not just handsome,” she said. ”Smart as well... How tiresome.” The pause that followed had a particular quality to it, the pause before something more honest than what had come before.

”Though the part that matters to me was never the crystallization, darling. It was getting you into the system so we can play at pulling opposite ends of the same corruption rope. Thatʼs the game I built this for… Thatʼs what actually benefits me.”

Ren had already known that before she said it, and had already told Liora in the quiet exchange.

The entire chamber had been constructed so that game would favor Selthia and not whoever played against her. The purple runes covering every surface werenʼt repetition for its own sake and werenʼt the product of an obsession that had run past its usefulness; they were an amplification system, the mana in the space filtering through them since the beginning of the descent and changing to that corrupted quality as it moved, conditioning the chamber so that any internal exchange happening here would have the weight of the room behind Selthia and the resistance of it against whoever stood on the other side.

He tilted his head toward Liora one more degree.

”The rune flow enters from above and exits through this door into the crystals. If I redirect it to my Mantis core before it continues the existing process in Sirius, Iʼll have a window to understand how to neutralize or reverse it before the Mantisʼs core crosses the halfway point.”

Not a question... The tone of a plan already assembled, presented for review rather than consideration. ”I already know the order.”

Liora looked at the walls for a moment, reading the pattern with her own sensitivity, whatever her particular range could extract from it. Then she looked back at Ren.

”The only reason youʼre doing this now,” she said, each word placed flat and deliberate, not a question anymore, ”is that if you donʼt, Siriusʼs core keeps corrupting, and when the artifact arrives weʼd have to leave him on the wrong side. A real good fighter in the wrong camp… And Luna would be saddened by it.”

”Yes.”

Silence stretched between them.

”And if you wait until your power is higher, or let the earth sacrifice until itʼs corrupt enough to meet the compatibility conditions she mentioned, that time gets used to push Sirius further anyway and bring in the artifact before you can do anything about the crystal from outside the doorʼs system.”

”Yes.”

Liora exhaled through her nose, quiet and flat, the exhale of a person who had checked every angle and found the one she didnʼt like was the only one that held.

She didnʼt speak after it, just sat with a decision already made and already agreed to, the particular stillness that arrived when both of those things were true at once and there was nothing left to decide.

”Youʼd better be right about this,” she said. ”Because if youʼre not, Luna and Larissa are going to come kill me, not your statue… And thatʼs not fair.”

Ren didnʼt respond to that directly.

Something shifted in his face just enough. Liora read it.

”Go,” she said.

Ren turned toward the door.