Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 973 -  Taming the Ceremony

Luna heard to all of it.

She didnʼt interrupt. Larissa knew her well enough to understand that Lunaʼs stillness during a difficult conversation wasnʼt passivity, it was active processing, the internal machinery running in parallel with the words arriving from outside, filing and cross-referencing and building toward something while the surface stayed still.

Her father adjusting the truth of the Crystal Heart.

Her uncles being far more responsible for her misfortune than she had ever believed.

What Orion had laid out as though Luna were a trophy with a genetic key rather than a person with her own capacity to decide anything.

The part about Orion was where the texture of the silence changed.

Luna didnʼt cry. Her eyes went still with that particular quality they had when something cold settled in behind them and took charge of the rest… Not shutting down, but reorganizing, the way a room looks different when someone has quietly decided what is going to happen next and has already started rearranging the furniture in their head.

”When is the ceremony?” she asked.

”This afternoon. Julius couldnʼt delay them more than a day,” said Larissa.

Luna looked at Ren and Liora, both still sleeping, for a moment.

”They still havenʼt moved at all?”

”Not while you were sleeping.”

Another moment of silence.

”Good.” The word came out with a sharpness that had nothing resigned in it. It was the voice of someone who has made a decision and is already in the next part. ”Then Iʼll have the freedom to be ugly and aggressive and act as horribly as I want without being seen by them for now.” A very brief pause. ”As those ʼmonstersʼ deserve.”

Larissa opened her mouth.

 ”Iʼm not going against the plan,” Luna cut her off, with something that didnʼt quite reach a smile but occupied the same space. ”Iʼm going to contribute to it.” She stood up. ”Which is different.”

♢♢♢♢

Liora woke two hours later looking like someone whose body had collected the full bill and who had slept exactly enough to be able to pay tomorrowʼs installment. Not recovered… But functional enough to move.

 She sat up, blinked, took in the room, the common unhurried inventory of someone orienting themselves after a sleep that went deeper than usual. Her eyes moved to Ren in the next bed, who was still carrying that non-ordinary quiet, and then to Larissa, sitting in the chair Luna had occupied before.

”How long?” she asked.

”Almost thirty hours.”

Liora processed that. ”And Ren has shown any signals of?” Larissa shaked her head. ”Nothing… Same as the first hour.”

”What did I miss then?”

What followed was the organized version Larissa had prepared while waiting, because Larissa understood things and was capable of producing organized summaries of complex situations with the same easy instinct other people breathed with, not an effort, just a mode she operated in when it was needed.

Selphira and Victor had been treated but the improvement had been minimal. Both were still out of combat, unfortunately. Julius had negotiated the ceremony. Orion was marching almost in front of the castle but slowly, still applying pressure without committing to a direct engagement. The defensive perimeter had contracted but was holding.

Luna was going to the ceremony without Ren.

 Liora listened to that point and her face made the transition Larissa had calculated it was going to make. ”You left her go alone?” The voice had that quality of urgency Liora used when she was working not to raise it and the effort was visible. ”Luna is going to a ceremony where her horrible uncle is trying to claim her as property, Ren is still sleeping, and sheʼs going alone?”

”Sheʼs not going alone,” said Larissa. ”Weʼre going too... I was waiting for you.”

 ”The two of us?”

 ”The three of us.”

Liora glanced at Ren.

”Him like that?”

Larissa didnʼt answer immediately, because the honest answer was complicated and complicated answers deserved the second it took to formulate them correctly.

”Julius is stretching the preparations as far as theyʼll go,” she said finally. ”Every hour he can delay the start is another hour of hope for waking him up.” She looked at Ren too, at the stillness that wasnʼt rest. ”But the ceremony canʼt be postponed any further. It started being prepared twenty minutes ago. If Ren doesnʼt attend he loses his rewards under Orionʼs pressure.”

Liora went quiet.

Then she got up with the speed of someone to whom exhaustion had stopped being a relevant consideration.

”I need clothes.”

”In the wardrobe.”

One instant jump later Liora was at the wardrobe.

She dressed with the concentration of someone who has somewhere to be and no time for anything except getting there. Three movements for her hair, tied back without ceremony. She checked the mirror for exactly the time it took to confirm the result was operational and not a moment longer.

Before fastening the last button, she stopped beside Renʼs bed.

She looked at him for a moment with an expression that had several layers to it, and Larissa didnʼt try to read all of them, since some things deserved the privacy of not being read.

Liora put a hand on Renʼs shoulder, carefully.

”I know youʼre tired,” she said quietly. No drama. Just the direct, honest register she used for the things that actually mattered, the one without any performance in it. ”But we need you.” A beat. ”You know how this works. You never missed the important moments. You always made it to the end of them somehow.”

She took her hand back.

”So itʼs fine if you sleep until the last possible second.” Larissa summoned her Lynx, and together they lifted Ren carefully onto the soft fur of its back, settling him so he wouldnʼt shift. They moved out into the corridor.

The castle hallway had that late-afternoon light coming in at an angle through the high windows, turning the floor into a map of long shadows that stretched and overlapped toward the far end. From somewhere not too distant came the sounds of ceremony preparations, organized voices, the footsteps of people who knew where they were going because the protocol had told them where to go.

The ceremony had begun.

And Ren was still sleeping. ♢♢♢♢

The Starweaver sector was the emptiest front, so the best one for dealing with the mutants, but still the most complicated assignment Zhao had been asked to run alone.

Not because of the density of the flow, that was manageable with what Arturo had left him.

It was complicated because saying that giving orders to an entire army was manageable with maximum effort was not the same as being manageable with margin, and Zhao had spent a small but enough window of time doing this to notice the difference in every decision.

The gap between those two things was exactly the gap where mistakes happened, and he was aware of it without letting the awareness slow him down.

But every wave they contained here was a wave Arturo didnʼt have to direct the main army to handle. And Arturo needed to be at the ceremony.

The reinforced blade feathers, sharpened by the bond with his Raptor, swept across the left flank before the next wave reached the earth tamers holding the center of the line. Clean cuts, precise angles, no feathers wasted on targets the ground formations could handle themselves.

”We hold here,” he said to the nearest person with enough rank to relay it. ”Rotation every twenty minutes. Anyone who cycles out rests outside the perimeter and doesnʼt come back until called.”

He didnʼt wait for confirmation. Zhao rarely waited for confirmations when he could keep shooting and the situation was clear enough that confirmations were a luxury of time that didnʼt exist. Heʼd compensate for whatever he lacked in Arturoʼs kind of leadership with offensive support and positioning, filling the gaps where they appeared rather than trying to manage everything from the center.

Arturo had looked at him once before turning toward the castle.

”Donʼt move from here for at least ten hours,” heʼd said.

It was an unnecessary instruction, Zhao had enough judgment to know exactly that without being told. But it was the kind of thing that got said anyway, because saying it out loud made the instruction exist in the shared space between two people rather than only in one personʼs head. Arturo had turned, jaw still set at its permanent angle for this particular day, and left.

Zhao returned his attention to the line.

♢♢♢♢

The largest ceremony hall near the castle of Yano had the kind of architecture that changed the way sound worked inside it.

Old stone, the kind that had absorbed centuries of use and gave it back as a constant low resonance that had no equivalent in newer construction. The columns rose to a ceiling whose height Julius had once discussed in a conversation about acoustics that had seemed theoretical at the time and turned out now to be practically useful, it meant that conversations happening at the edges of the hall carried to the center with considerably more clarity than the people holding them expected. Sound didnʼt disappear in a room like this. It traveled, reflected, and arrived.

 Julius had chosen the positions with that in mind.