Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

He was wrong…

The complexity scaled such that the first phase, mapping, consumed a relatively manageable amount because perception was his strongest point. The second phase, activation, the actual modification of the three-dimensional runes to reverse the process, consumed double what the mapping had cost. In an area the size he had mapped, the total consumption came to triple, not double as he had calculated by treating the mapping as half the total, because the activation cost multiplied at each node, and nodes were where complexity concentrated.

He understood this late. At the moment when the activation began and the system started demanding a quantity he didn’t have available to sustain the complete process. Not gradually, immediately, with the reality of something that didn’t warn you but simply arrived.

And what had been started couldn’t be stopped without completing.

Only redirected…

He regretted it. He had let the subconsciousness and the foggy mind decide. He had factored in, at some level he hadn’t consciously examined, that these statues had come from groups that had done harm to people he knew and cared about.

But Klein had been from Goldcrest and he wasn’t Ren’s enemy now. Han had come from Yino and wasn’t either. The lines between faction and person were more porous than the simplicity of the facts had made them appear. He had been using that blurring as unconscious permission, and it wasn’t permission he had the right to take.

He couldn’t treat people who were unknown to him as acceptable collateral damage. That was the line, and he had been close to crossing it, and he wasn’t going to cross it.

He had to save what he could now.

Ren made the decision in the time it took to draw the first breath after forgetting to breathe for a moment. Less time than it would have needed if he’d had to calculate it from scratch.

The activation he had concentrated in the torso was redirected. Concentrated into the initial mapped area and forced to complete there rather than continuing into the rest of the system.

As a result, the complete left limb of the figure stopped being crystal.

The rest remained crystal.

The junction between the arm and the shoulder, which was now the boundary between living tissue and the unchanged crystallization, couldn’t sustain the discontinuity of tissue that required circulation from a side that was still fundamentally different. The living cells would begin failing at the seam almost immediately without intervention.

Ren saw it before it happened and applied what he could when they separated: a rapid-freeze ice containment field that would cause some small internal damage but would pause the deterioration of the newly freed tissue long enough that it could be healed and reintegrated later.

He took the arm.

He held it for a moment with a feeling that wasn’t only guilt, because he had tried to do something for the person even if the reason hadn’t been entirely the right one, but that wasn’t the absence of guilt either, because the arm he was holding was someone’s arm and that person had not asked him to try.

He stored the arm in the steadily expanding space of the Wolverine.

The figure’s organs remained intact inside the crystallization, which was exactly what he had planned to protect at the end. The preservation was real and it mattered in practical terms.

Wasn’t it?

It didn’t particularly assist with the guilt.

Ren sat on the floor of the chamber with the complete inventory of what he had just learned.

He didn’t have the power for this yet…

If he couldn’t solve this, the other thing he thought of was demonstrating that he could bring down the fire dragon alone. But he couldn’t deceive himself, that was also far off. Not without perhaps two of his beasts at Platinum, which would multiply his capacity to the range the task required. Or not without the three-way fusion that was still theory, which would theoretically take him in one jump to a power level of Diamond scale, but which required having all three beasts at Gold first.

What he had was the mushroom approximately three months from Gold 3.

What he needed was something in two weeks.

He would have to accept it.

He couldn’t give Luna her father back in time for this ceremony.

Sirius’s door was only a step toward another that required three cores. They had two, Orion’s faction had handed over the second as part of the agreements, which until recently had seemed like the only remaining problem.

But it wasn’t the only problem, because the door required another sacrifice. Sirius had been only the first of two.

And beyond that: the artifacts the mutants had assembled at the academy had been eight. Four from each side of the rift. And the crystals Orion had accumulated were seven. If a second sacrifice was added to Sirius’s door, they would have six crystal hearts, not seven. Which perhaps implied that somewhere in Yano, in some ruin not yet found above ground or below it, a seventh door existed. In a fourth ruin that appeared in none of the maps.

Which implied a seventh sacrifice.

Getting two people to volunteer without knowing whether Ren would be able to return them to normal afterward?

Yeah… The promise was going to require more time. When they finished military service, when the moment arrived that now had years ahead of it, he would have it then. Enough time for the mushroom to reach Platinum. For the new bonds that opened at that level to give him the reach that the surgery or the dragon fight required. For the scale of what he could do to become the scale of what these statues needed, and what the ones that were still more complex would need.

Dragarion and Han at Diamond.

Further still. But on the horizon he had reasons to keep looking toward.

He sat there a moment longer, the stone cold beneath him, the chamber lit by the glow of the reinserted crystal hearts.

Then he stood up.