Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Selphira smiled…

“Victor.” The same tone she used with students who kept making the same technical mistake three weeks after she’d corrected it. “We are not the same.” A pause. “Besides, they suit me.”

Which was also true, in a way she hadn’t expected. The crystals caught on her cheekbone in a way that occurred to cover the lines age had carved into that part of her face, a small and absurd side effect that she filed away without comment.

“Do you know why I’m not worried?” she said, maintaining the same level of concentration she maintained while she spoke, the shield fed by the steady background of her attention. “I’m not that far gone yet. And when we get out of this and I’ve finished dealing with that idiot Orion, if I find myself in the right part of the city, I might be able to make this a new fashion statement. Crystals are actually quite striking if you look at them from the right angle. They cover a few age lines too.”

Silence.

Then, from behind her, where Victor was pressing against her back to help with the weight of the climb, came a sound she needed a moment to place.

A laugh.

Not bitter or polite… A real laugh, surprised out of him, the kind that happens when something strikes a person as genuinely absurd at the worst possible moment to find anything absurd.

“You’re completely insane,” said Victor, and there was something in his voice that hadn’t been there before. Something with less weight to it.

“Yes.” Selphira drove the shield two more centimeters upward. Fourteen point nine-eight meters. “But I’m not so insane that I’m going to let you sacrifice yourself after all I invested here.”

Victor was quiet for a moment.

“If we don’t make it…” he started.

“We’re going to make it.”

“I’m only saying, if…”

“Victor.”

“Fine. Do whatever you want, you crazy old woman.” A beat. “If we die down here at least I’m better off listening to your nonsense than suffering alone down there.”

Selphira thought about that.

It wasn’t an elegantly constructed compliment. Victor had many qualities, but eloquence had never been the most prominent. He was too direct to be eloquent, too honest to polish things before saying them. What came out was what he actually meant, every time, with no decoration. It was, in that way, more reliable than anything more carefully worded would have been.

It was exactly the sort of thing he would say.

“Shut your mouth and don’t call me ‘crazy old woman’ ever again,” she said, “or I will actually let you crystallize and use you as part of my shield when you’re a statue. A crystallized idiot weighs less on my nerves than one who talks.”

Victor laughed again. Shorter this time, but just as real.

“Is that an insult or a tactical proposal?”

“You never learn…”

The beam pressed.

She felt it in the shield’s weight, in the way the ice cracked with a sound she didn’t like, in the fraction of a second where the backward force outpaced the upward one and she had to compensate without warning, redistributing her footing and the angle in one motion that cost her more than it should have.

Victor felt it too. She knew without looking.

“You’re completely…”

“Focused,” she said. “I am completely focused. Which is what you should also be, instead of cataloguing my face.”

Victor said nothing to that.

♢♢♢♢

The problem with honesty was that it normally arrived at the worst moments.

Selphira had spent decades being honest with herself in situations where most people would have chosen the comfort of refusing to look. It was a habit she’d built over a very long time and one that was nearly impossible to suspend, even in circumstances where the comfort would have been considerably easier to carry than the truth.

So when the calculation resolved itself with uncomfortable clarity, she accepted it without argument. They couldn’t make it to the top.

Not as things stood… She had mana for perhaps five more meters, six if she compressed every usage to its theoretical minimum and made no mistakes. But Orion’s beam was not the only problem waiting at the top of those 14 meters. If she reached the threshold by some big miracle, he could reactivate the barrier in seconds. The same barrier that had eaten her best techniques on the way in would seal the entrance before she crossed it. She knew what a lost battle looked like.

She also knew that recognizing a lost battle and stopping were two entirely different decisions.

Victor had said something earlier about Dragarion.

About honoring a family tradition, if becoming a statue was what the moment called for.

He’d said it with the calm he put on when he wanted to appear indifferent to something he actually cared about very much, and Selphira had registered every word without acknowledging them at the time.

She thought about Dragarion now…

The way he looked on the day he gave up everything, forward-facing, not one step back, his posture saying something clear about who he had decided to be at the end. She had known him long enough to be able to copy the exact same bearing.

Selphira was not Dragarion. She was shorter, she had two hundred more years of lines beneath the crystals on her cheekbone, and her beasts were not the stuff of legend the way his had been. She had different advantages, different history, a different way of arriving at the same decisions.

But the posture, at least, could be the same.

So she kept pushing.

♢♢♢♢

Upstairs, Orion had been ignoring the ringing in his ears for the better part of the last hour.

It wasn’t sharp. It was the low, dull kind that settled in after maintaining a technique past the point the body naturally recommended, when concentration began drawing on reserves he hadn’t asked permission to use.

 The sound of sustained effort catching up to him, not dangerous, not yet, but present enough that pretending otherwise required a small continuous effort of its own.