Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1063 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike - 10th Chamber

The fire started red. No reason for it to start otherwise; Linʼs fire was always red at the beginning.

The kicks fed it, each impact adding something to the cycle that made the flame consume more energy in less time and release more than it received, and the red shifted toward orange first and then, when the accumulated impacts crossed the threshold, toward blue, the fire that Lin produced when she had the right conditions to produce it.

The two beasts couldnʼt attack because attacking required moving and Linʼs insane kicks didnʼt allow movement.

Their attempts to press together and trap her in the middle only added to the impact because Lin converted their movement into part of her own.

The group was watching from the first step of the descent.

Ren watched both beasts, effectively still except for the constant shuddering from the strikes, and Lin bouncing between them with that blue fire illuminating the entire chamber in a way that made the purple runes on the walls look as if they were dimming by comparison.

Liora was the first to turn around.

Not because she doubted the result, but the opposite; watching was unnecessary when the result was already obvious, and the tenth chamber was waiting.

The sound of Linʼs kicks continued rising from above during the first stretches of the staircase, steady and regular, without the long pauses that would have indicated something had changed direction, just the rhythm of something finishing what it had started.

They descended.

♢♢♢♢

The staircase ended and the chamber opened before them.

No beasts.

That was the first thing their senses registered, the absence where presence should have been, and emptiness in a place that had until this point always been full of something produced a reaction that wasnʼt relief. The opposite kind of attention, the alert that activated when a pattern broke, because broken patterns always had their own reasons for breaking and those reasons were almost never the comfortable kind.

Ren stopped on the last step.

There was something…

Not beasts, not the dense presence they had felt in every chamber before, but something that wouldnʼt fully locate itself, like hearing a sound you canʼt place because itʼs coming from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

His mana perception, fine enough to read the microscopic structure of crystal in the statues he had worked with, found no identifiable source. The signal existed and had no origin he could pin.

”Do you feel it?” he asked quietly.

Liora nodded. The guards and Mayo did too, though their ability for distinguishing where it came from was even less than his.

They advanced slowly, with the economy of movement that groups adopted when the territory hadnʼt given them a reason to run and hadnʼt given them a reason to relax either, the middle pace of sustained alertness.

The chamber was the largest of all of them, the ceiling higher, the walls further apart, and across it, at the far end opposite the staircase, the door was visible from a distance.

That final door of the ruin, old and enormous, built to outlast everything that ordinary construction produced, its surface carrying that quality of things that had been made to still be standing long after the people who made them were gone.

Liora deployed her beasts to cover the flanks.

Ren covered front and rear.

The space between them and the door passed under their feet meter by meter without the something Ren kept sensing taking a shape he could act on, and somewhere between the midpoint of the chamber and the last twenty meters the instinct began yielding to the evidence that if something was going to happen it would have happened by now.

Nothing came to meet them at the end…

They didnʼt fully relax, but enough.

They reached the outer range of the door and stopped.

Ren knew the reach of the crystallizing beam. He had read enough doors of this type, their rune patterns familiar enough to know the configuration that activated the mechanism and the space that was close enough to see without being close enough to be treated as a target.

Where they stood was correct: visible range, outside of response range, the calculation of someone who had learned this thanks to his free access to others similar to this one.

Then they saw him.

Sirius…

♢♢♢♢

Sirius Starweaver had generated a wind crystal for the door.

Not light.

Ren had assumed light, because the celestial tiger carried that element as its primary signature and the assumption had seemed solid, but the statue before them had lost the secondary element at some point, and the core carried the translucency of a wind crystal rather than light: slightly more grey than white, with that quality of something that still had movement frozen inside it, the weird impression of kinetics arrested mid-expression.

Wind and earth…

The Celestial Tiger that was his primary beast had carried wind as well, so the door had recognized him as eligible regardless.

But the posture of the statue was what caught Renʼs attention most.

Not the posture of heroic surrender of the body that Dragarion had, that imposing image of someone who had given everything they had and was facing forward with the arm carrying the full weight of that decision.

Sirius had his arm extended halfway forward, toward the door, with the angle of someone moving with caution and something like urgency at the same time, the hand open, the bodyʼs inclination that of a person about to touch something they very much wanted to touch.

He had known the doorʼs danger and was standing in front of it anyway… As if something in the door or in the space directly before it had shown him something, and he had moved without fully thinking through what he was moving toward, pulled by whatever he had seen before the caution that should have stopped him could.

That was the statue. That was what Sirius had been for years.

But the core in the door was the worst of all of this.

It had not only separated from the statueʼs body and integrated into the doorʼs surface, embedded in the old stone as though the door had always had it, as though it had been part of the original construction and the man it had come from was the detail rather than the other way around.

The worst part was the color.

In the crystalline mass of that core, where there should have been only the translucent green of wind element, nearly half was purple.