Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1040 - Taming Resistance

The hall watched.

And it understood, even the section that would have preferred not to, that what Julius had announced was not the beginning of something but the recognition of something that had already existed long enough for the recognition to be arriving late and exactly on time simultaneously.

Outside, in the territory that had just stopped being called Goldcrest and now carried the name of the family that had transformed it, the afternoon was still afternoon. The streets were the streets. The people who lived there were going about the business of living there, mostly unaware that something had just been said about the place where they kept their things and raised their children that gave it a different name and the same character it had always had.

The absences were still absences.

But the four of them were standing together in the right place, with what they had in front of them being enough for this moment.

Enough, and more than enough.

♢♢♢♢

The ceremony closed with the correct protocol, and the master of ceremonies had the quiet satisfaction of someone who had executed the second most complicated program of his career without a single visible error.

What followed was the kind of time that existed between the formal end of an event and the real end of it, the space where people who needed to speak found the right angle and the right distance, where those who had arrived together regrouped with the satisfaction or discomfort of what they had just lived, where the hall stopped being a ceremony hall and returned to being simply a large space with many people in it.

The four of them were together.

Not talking in the sense of exchanging information. Simply present in the same space and who didnʼt need the moment to do anything more than it was already doing.

Fern arrived first, the way she always arrived when she needed to reach her son, with a determination that didnʼt consider the obstacles between her and her destination to be particularly relevant. Reed arrived one step behind, with the face he had when Fern had taken the initiative and he had decided the correct decision was to follow.

The embraces that followed were not the protocol kind.

Fern embraced her son, but she also embraced his new ʼdaughtersʼ, all three of them, with the same energy she would have used for people who were already family, which was exactly what they were even though the paperwork still had a pending date. Luna, Larissa, Liora, each in turn, each received the same way.

Reed embraced Ren with the back-pat that carried everything from the bedroom conversation he hadnʼt said and everything he still wasnʼt going to say because it didnʼt need saying.

Then the friends.

Taro with brevity but also with the considerable strength of someone expressing exactly what they felt without decoration, the kind of hug that communicated its content entirely through force per square centimeter.

Liu with the energy of someone who had been waiting for this moment from far enough back that arriving at it was itself a form of satisfaction that showed on his face and that he didnʼt bother to conceal.

Min with the calm of someone who understood this was not the moment for jokes. But perhaps for a well-placed quiet comment in Renʼs ear that would produce a moment of discomfort, and a small mischievous laugh.

Zhao with the congratulation he offered when something struck him as fundamentally right, short, concrete, worth more than something long for that reason.

Lin with all the pride of a second mother. The specific pride of someone who had spent years watching the process of growth and who had understood from closer than anyone what the process actually was.

Wei and many more approached in their own time to do similar things.

And at the end, Klein, with the quiet approval of someone who had calculated many things for a long time and could now verify that the calculation had been correct.

He hadnʼt expected Ren to invite him to manage part of his former territory.

♢♢♢♢

Victor found them when the hall was beginning to empty.

The red had left his cheeks and he had recovered the composure of someone who had done what needed to be done and made peace with having done it, a version of Victor that Ren didnʼt entirely recognize, which was its own kind of interesting.

”When youʼre ready,” Victor said, in the tone of someone presenting something already decided while looking for the right form to present it, ”the wall is waiting.”

Not as an obligation. As an invitation to something that everyone present had already decided they wanted to do.

Military service was military service, and for people with the kind of capacity this group had, the city was too important and the wall too real for anyone to want to ask for an exception. Poorly viewed from outside... Impossible from inside.

The four of them nodded, in variations that were different in style and arrived at the same place.

Victor opened his mouth to continue and said they at least had some relaxing days ahead first.

But a message arrived before he could.

The kind that reached Victor with that particular urgency, through that specific channel, when the information was the kind that couldnʼt wait for the recipient to finish what they were doing.

Victor read it.

His expression changed the way Victorʼs expression changed when he was processing tactical information, no drama, with the efficiency of someone updating a map in real time.

”The wall is under high pressure,” he said. ”Northeast sector.”

It seemed the wall wasnʼt going to wait for them even a moment longer.

But nobody in the group made the gesture of someone who had just heard something interrupting something more important. The gesture they made was different: the adjustment of a person shifting from one mode to another without the transition requiring deliberation. The same way a hand moved toward a weapon before the mind had consciously named the threat.

Maybe someone wanted to ruin the mood?

But if Selthia wanted to rain on their celebration, she wasnʼt going to find it that easy.