Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

It didn’t matter that Ren recognized the feeling. Recognition and resistance were not the same thing.

 He extended for Liora.

 The memory of her fire, that sensation that burned in the painful but correct way, that pushed back against the wrong kind of feeling and replaced it with the right kind.

 But this time the quantity was different.

A fierce pain arrived before he had time to prepare for it.

 Not the pain of Liora’s spiritual fire, which was clean even when it was intense. This was the pain of an absurd quantity of corruption being resisted without a channel wide enough to expel it, accumulating in the same nodes he had been disrupting so calmly just minutes ago, backing up against the resistance his body was trying to maintain, finding nowhere to go and pressing harder in every direction.

 Ren screamed.

The sound filled the interior space with a volume he had never let go outside, where his physical body was still held inside the veil of darkness in the artifact’s grip, about to be struck by a powerful combined triple beam.

 The energy kept coming.

 Outside, what Julius and the girls saw was the convergence: every mutant that had been scattered across the academy grounds now running in circles around him and funneling their energy toward the center of the eight-artifact structure, a dense black power accumulating in the core of the construct. A power dense enough that the temperature of the surrounding air dropped, not for any conventional thermal reason, but because of what that much concentrated energy did to the senses of the tamer around it.

 Inside, Ren felt that volume as pressure from every angle at once.

He kept resisting. Not because he had a strategy but because it was the only thing he could do, and letting himself be a toy of corruption was not a thing he was willing to consider while his lungs still had air in them.

Yet the pain was insane, maybe he was already don…

Then something happened outside that pulled his attention out of the pain for an instant.

Selthia’s command arrived through the network, slow, like information traveling through a medium that was thicker than it should be. Ren felt it too, the instruction forming and moving outward, past the network, toward the artifact, toward the girls who were still trying to find an opening in the transformation process.

 Attack them.

 Ren disagreed mightily strongly. Fighting the command together with the corruption hurt too much to describe.

 But he kept resisting…

Every second of resistance was a second the command took longer to execute in the external body, delayed past the timing Selthia had wanted it to be.

So the girls got their attack off in time.

But it wasn’t enough to stop the transformation. The beam struck the convergence point and seemed to be absorbed, so Selthia registered it as a victory… the energy spent, she assumed, would simply feed the process further.

Then it entered the vortex.

That weird beam.

Not a single element or a common combination. Something that carried the essence of Liora’s fire, the density of Luna’s shadow, and the clarity of Larissa’s light, except that it wasn’t any of those three things separately. It was a new thing, the thing the three of them shaped when they arrived at the same point at the same moment without a prior plan for what it would become.

 The energy spun in the vortex of corruption for a moment.

 Then it entered the center where Ren was.

 What happened next had no category in the mana theory Ren or Selthia knew. The energies that had been pulling everything toward chaos found a structure to organize around. Corrupted in the way corruption always was, permeating, seeping into every gap, but also purifying now, embracing, spiritual: all of them turning in the same cycle, each one finding its position in a pattern that none of them could have formed alone.

The extraordinary nature of it pulled Ren’s attention away from his resistance. Just for a moment. Just long enough.

So outside, Selthia’s command was finally executed.

 The shadow of the external entity Ren had become raised its hand and struck toward the girls with what should have been concentrated corruption.

Yet what reached them was something else.

It didn’t encroach them as contamination. It recognized them. The impact connected them to the interior space instead of consuming them, the bond traced by something that carried their signatures already mixed with Ren’s in proportions that the corrupted mana network hadn’t calculated, couldn’t have calculated, because those proportions had never existed in a spiritual form, a form it couldn’t have anticipated.

Lin was the exception.

The explosion sent her backward with the clean force of an impact that formed no connection, because Lin had not combined her energy with Ren’s, but Julius caught her before she reached the ground, he had been running to help from the moment the situation started coming apart, calculating trajectories, keeping track of everyone at once.

 Inside, the familiar energies entered the vortex. Their minds came with them.

 Ren recognized them.

They were warm in a known human way, the warmth of things you know so well they no longer feel external, because they aren’t. They had always been at the perimeter of what he was, forming the edge of something that had no precise name but that existed regardless of whether anyone named it. He felt the shape of each one clearly: Liora’s urgency, Luna’s steadiness, Larissa’s directness. All of them present.

 The pain of holding that much energy was still there.

But it was a benign pain now.

 He embraced it.

Liora’s energy scorched with its full intensity. He accepted it. Luna’s shadow cut with a coldness that wasn’t hostile, just honest about what it was. He accepted that too. Larissa’s light didn’t ask permission before it started cleaning what it found. He accepted it the same way.

 The interior space came back to him.

 Not gradually… All at once, the way something returns when it was never entirely gone and was only waiting for someone to take hold of it again.

 Ren’s jade-gold network expanded and took the energy Selthia’s had been built from, so she got fragmented, collapsing back into her human shape, semi-translucent now, her form diminished and unsteady on the floor of the space.

 The empty library transformed into a chamber surrounded by golden roots.

Ren stood at the center, bare as he had been at the start, though at least now covered in his diamond armor. Selthia was on the floor just in front of him, wearing the same expression she’d had the first time the mushroom launched her into the wall, except that this time something that could be called exhaustion had settled into her too-perfect features.

 She was already fading at the edges. She would disappear from his interior soon.

 Ren exhaled and finally relaxed.

But then he observed something else.

The interior space, which had been exclusively his for as long as he had any memory of it, now held three additional presences.

Three very specific presences.

And all three of them were looking at him.

In a very particular situation.

“How could you abuse me like that…” Selthia seemed about to cry.

Anyway, as always…