Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 957 - Stubborn Tamers Crisis - 3

Luckily…

Lin was at the front.

She was the reason Julius sprinted as hard as he could but didnʼt break into a desperate scream immediately. Her posture said something specific to him, not holding position, not waiting for a better moment. Power accumulating.

He recognized the preparation a half-second before he understood what technique she was loading into it, and when he understood, something in his assessment of risk shifted.

 They werenʼt trying to escape, they were attacking.

Power finally exploded and the kick landed against the mass of hundreds of mutants and disintegrated the nearest ones in the immediate impact zone. But the impact wasnʼt the point…

The real function followed a fraction of a second later, a pulse of compressed air that drove outward from the point of contact and displaced everything in a twenty-meter arc that wasnʼt anchored to the ground. It wasnʼt the damage to the mutants who were already dying anyway that mattered. It was the gap it opened between the mutants, that momentary separation between bodies to allow a clear view that lasted exactly long enough for the three girls to all point at the same spot..

 The beam that left them was the closest thing to an adequate answer that Julius had seen since arriving. Light and darkness wound together with spiritual energy, technically covering the widest spectrum available to the three of them, synchronized with a precision that only comes from their fusion augmentations pushing their awareness to their ceiling combined with extended practice and the specific clarity that urgent necessity produces. Everything they had, directed at the figure above, released as a single unified attempt.

Julius held his breath.

The entity didnʼt move. Still locked in whatever process the transformation required, still building toward whatever it was becoming.

The beam made contact with its chest...

And disappeared.

Gone inside of the void.

Absorbed, but not the way a shield absorbs an impact, with resistance and dispersion and residual energy that has to redirect somewhere. It was absorbed the way nothing Julius had ever seen was absorbed. No visible effort, no residue and no indication at all that the impact had registered against a process already in motion.

 The figure above didnʼt move.

The energy point at the center of the structure kept accumulating.

 Julius looked at the girls and saw in their stances what he had hoped not to see. Not surrender, none of the three were people who stood like that. But the recognition that what they had just used was the best they had, and the best they had hadnʼt been enough. The specific exhaustion that follows maximum output with no result is different from any other kind of exhaustion, and he knew what it looked like.

 Suddenly, the energy they had launched, which seemed to have disappeared, reappeared in the entityʼs chest and began to spin.

To transform into something different…

Wrong.

Then the entity extended its hand and directed it toward them.

Julius closed his fists. He wasnʼt going to reach them in time.

He assessed what he had left. Assessed what was around him. Assessed the distance, the angle, the realistic probability that anything he could do from his current position changed what was unfolding in the center of that field.

 The numbers didnʼt work out.

 But Julius Dravenholm was the son of a man who had thrown himself forward without hesitation to save others. One way or another, he was going to reach them.

♢♢♢♢

Moments earlier…

Ren closed his fists.

The faint light the mushroom had left in his chest was still there, quiet and low, like the last ember of a fire that has gone to sleep but hasnʼt quite finished burning. Not gone. Just resting at the bottom of something that still had ʼwarmthʼ.

 The jade-gold roots had returned to their place. The crack was a fraction smaller than it had been. And the words that had come through that thick wall still rang in him with enough clarity that they werenʼt going anywhere, the kind of clarity that comes not from volume but from the dear memory something important is said.

 ʼTo push out these intruders, you already know what you have to do.ʼ

That ʼunconfortableʼ feeling.

He knew what it felt like. He had been subconsciously avoiding pushing to that direction directly since the first time Lioraʼs fire had burned him.

 But it was indeed something that pushed back and spread outward burning something that was inside his mind and felt wrong in a weird way that only intrusive thoughts feel wrong. This feeling was not corrupted-wrong. Not Selthiaʼs version of wrong. The other kind…

 The kind that worked and let him move.

Selthia was on the floor at the far side of what had been the library. Or what remained of the libraryʼs architecture, the walls still stood, the ceiling was still the correct height, the angle of the floor was still what it had always been. The bones of the space were intact… Everything else, the shelves, the books, the accumulated evidence of everything that had once been stored and accessible here, was simply gone. It was the shape of a library with nothing in it, which had been somehow worse than a different kind of emptiness entirely.

She had come to crash against the back wall.

The space was smaller than normal, which meant that when the mushroomʼs pulse had driven her across it, the wall had arrived sooner than it might have. She was examining her shoulder with the careful, slightly detached attention of someone assessing minor damage to something they care about, but not panicked or angry yet. Just evaluating. The expression on her face turned to irritation. The specific, slightly absurd kind of irritation that comes not from pain but from indignity.

”Thereʼs at least one ʼsmallʼ advantage to a space this ʼsmallʼ,” she said, rotating the shoulder once and apparently deciding it was fine. ”When you go flying, the wall is close to hit you again.” A pause, dry as dust. ”Iʼm not sure itʼs worth it, honestly. It hurt my ego more than anything else… Think youʼd win with just that?”

 Ren didnʼt answer.

 He also didnʼt have time to answer, because the moment he started actually listening to her was the moment he was doing exactly what she wanted, which was staying inside his own mental space one minute longer than necessary while she worked out whatever she was working out. He had learned enough about how she operated in the last few minutes to know that her commentary was never just commentary. It was a hand keeping the door open.

 So he came at her instead.

 The first second confirmed what he already knew but what his body needed a moment to accept as operational reality. He could move but… Without his beasts, without any of the bonuses they provided, without anything except fifteen years of physical conditioning and the principles Lin had drilled into every muscle he had. He was not weak, but he was not strong against a tamer of her caliber either. He had a well-trained young body. Against most problems a tamer his age faced, that was enough to matter when everyone would have small buffs still.

In a normal situation 10 years ago, against a girl his age with his level of training, he had a real chance.

 But Ren would do much worse in his city and even more in the academy his spread knowledge had redefined that, what a fifteen years old tamer was supposed to look like.

But at least in Yino it would be a bit less changed. For someone ”frozen in time” even worse. This girl should be far from a gold rank beast… But even so.

 Selthia was not most problems, he didnʼt know how different she was, how anomalous.

 With the corruption using her as main body… She could even be as weird as him.

And maybe it was so since when Ren reached her, she slipped the punch without leaving the wall. A minimal lateral adjustment, precisely calibrated, the margin so exact that his fist passed through the same space her face had occupied a half-second earlier with nothing to show for it. Not a full dodge. Just enough movement to make him miss, applied with the economy of someone who likely saw him in ʼslow motionʼ.

Then she hit him.

The claw arrived before Ren finished processing that the dodge was over. Purple-diamond crystallization, the same technique he carried in his own arsenal, recognizable in structure the moment he felt it, except that Selthiaʼs had that corrupted undertone that changed not just the color but the texture. Bigger and heavier claws. The corrupted variant of the same Hydra he used, wearing a different coat over the same bones.

The impact sent him across the room.

He traveled, hit the floor already rolling, and ended up flat on his back staring at the ceiling of what had been the libraryʼs reference section, a detail his brain supplied with complete uselessness given the circumstances.