Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1004 - Taming the Last Breath - Treasure

Then the light hugged him. Not from outside the barrier but through it, inward, into Renʼs body, rays moving against the direction of everything that had been attacking him.

More potent than anything Orion had managed to extract from the white crystal across the entire time he had possessed it, even using seven corrupted crystals as the base of the extraction. Not because there was more energy available now. Because the person using it had a relationship with what was inside that crystal that Orion had never had and that no level of technical mastery would have replicated. The essence responded differently to different hands. It had always responded differently to different hands. Orion had possessed it the way a person possesses a door key they found on the ground and never understood belonged to someone specific.

A trait his black crystal never had…

Ren felt both energies turning in the vortex he had been accumulating.

Balancing better now. Completing each other in the way that two things complete each other when they were always meant to be in the same space, the darkness defining the boundaries of the light, the light giving the darkness a shape it could grasp without expanding beyond what it was.

He could accumulate and return it now.

Because of Luna.

Luna who had promised that not one breath more of the remaining essence would be spent. Luna who was now behind him with the white crystal raised between both hands, tears on her face.

Endless tears and the look in her eyes she had when she had made a decision and nothing in the world was going to move her from it, not exhaustion, not the cost, not the warm of her motherʼs presence that was leaving with every second the crystal kept giving.

Ren didnʼt waste it.

The darkness and the light turned around each other, defining each other, in the same spiral that had been at the center of everything since the beginning, since a strange bond formed between a boy and a first beast that nobody could fully explain, since the first time something moved through him that was more than the sum of its parts. What they formed together wasnʼt light and wasnʼt darkness but something that drew from both without being reducible to either, a third thing that could only exist at the point where the two met.

The control of the energy arrived with it. Complete, not partial. Complete in the way that something is complete when it finally finds what it was missing.

Ren returned the beam.

Affecting not only at Orion as a directed strike. But also at the network of purple crystals floating around his body, the source of what had been arriving, the amplifiers through which the corruption had been extending itself beyond what Orion could consciously manage, the infrastructure of everything that had made this afternoon possible for him.

The energy of the impact filled the crystals.

The barrier Orion had generated with them fractured the moment the beam made contact, not absorbed, not dispersed, but reversed. Each crystal returning the energy it had stored directly back into the net system that had charged it. The corruption that had been using the crystals as amplifiers discovered suddenly that the amplifiers had become conductors running in the opposite direction, the current it had been riding turned back on its source with the full force it had built.

Orion had exactly the time to understand what was happening.

The energy from every crystal reached him simultaneously, each one discharging its accumulated contents directly into the person who had been directing them. The crystallization that followed wasnʼt the slow process Selphira had experienced or the gradual deterioration that had come for Victor. It was what happened when energy of that volume met a system that already had corruption as a fracture point and that lacked the specific resistance Ren had developed… The resistance that came from a bond that was also a network spanning a significant portion of the world, from years of negotiation between his body and the thing living in it, from the hard-earned internal architecture that turned what should have been consumption into something closer to coexistence.

So Orion crystallized in under a second.

The position in which the process found him was the one he had been in when he understood what was happening, the eternal posture of someone who has had just enough time to calculate the result and not enough time to do anything except know that his plan had been wrong.

A statue of mournful reckoning.

But it didnʼt end there.

The brightness kept building.

The corrupted crystals that had been orbiting the space where Orion had stood couldnʼt grasp against the resonance. They came apart, the kind of disintegration that happened when the energy holding something together ceased to exist abruptly, not gradually, a collapse not a dissolution. The dust they became fed back into the connected network in the ethereal web of mana like any thing that had served a purpose and was now releasing the energy they had held into the larger current that moved through everything.

The hall went silent.

Not the silence of an empty space. The silence of many people just breathing awe at the same time, not yet sure whether speaking was something they were allowed to do, whether this was over, whether the stillness was real, whether the next moment would hold.

But Ren lowered his arms.

The black veins were still visible but no longer growing, receding, slowly, pulling back from the surface the way water pulled back from a shore after a wave. The blood on him was from multiple exchanges across the afternoon and wasnʼt adding more for the moment. His body was in the state it was in, and that state was an inventory of damage that someone with more energy than he currently had was going to need to evaluate with more calm than existed for most people right now. He noted it the way he noted things that were true and that he wasnʼt in a position to do anything about immediately.

So he turned.

Luna was on her knees with the white crystal held between her hands. The energy remaining inside was barely a breath of light, the kind you needed to half-close your eyes to see, almost nothing of what Luna had sworn would always remain. Her hands were shaking.

She was still holding it like letting go was the one thing she wasnʼt willing to do.

Ren knelt beside her. Or fell… His legs had developed strong independent opinions about how much further they were willing to carry him, but he arrived where he needed to arrive.

He leaned toward her.

ʼThank you...ʼ Barely a sound. The breath behind a word more than the word itself.

Luna raised her eyes to his. She had spent everything, her body had already sent the notice that it was going to collect what was owed very soon, regardless of whether the mind had finished with what it was doing.

ʼThank.. her…ʼ

Both of them with voices equally quiet, equally spent, saying the only things that remained to be said.

They lost consciousness at the same moment.

Around them the hall began the long work of becoming a hall again. Those who could move moving toward those who couldnʼt; the cries of healers searching for those who needed them most; the soldiers who had changed sides at the last moment, not knowing exactly when they had switched, but knowing that they had.

Those who had followed Orion surrendered after feeling the greatest power they had ever felt… Vanish in front of them.