Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

The two weeks had passed slowly, in the way weeks passed when someone had made a decision they didn’t like and still needed to keep moving.

Ren had closed the door on the statue problem in his mind after three days of turning over a risky solution… Using the seven dragon cores that formed the energy backbone of the second chamber below the castle. The same mechanism of power Dragarion had used.

The idea had lasted exactly as long as the three conversations in which different people using different ways of saying the same thing had insisted that an overload capable of generating Diamond-rank crystals in his system could end up crystallizing him in ways that had no known solution. Because the only person who might have been able to attempt the extraction of that crystallization was him, and cloning himself was not a viable strategy.

Selphira had been the last to have that same conversation.

With the preserved arm now in her possession, she had said what she needed to say when Ren needed to hear something that wasn’t strategy or tactics but the other kind of thing.

“The girls,” she had said, without preamble because preambles were for people with no good understanding of each other. “That’s what’s bothering you underneath all of this.”

Ren hadn’t denied it.

“Then think about them in a way that lets you make them happy now. Not when you have the power you don’t have yet. Now.”

She had asked whether he knew what might bring them happiness, at least for the moment.

Ren had thought about it for a moment.

And realized that he did know. He had spent enough time with all three of them to know some of their preferred gifts.

Dresses came to mind first. His own design, using special fabrics he had accumulated in the superior rings across years of collecting, with details that corresponded to each of them in ways that only made sense to someone who knew them closely but that he had been putting off working on for different reasons. Luna with the shadows integrated into the weave from the dark beast’s element in a way that was functional as well as aesthetic, actually built to work with her abilities. Larissa with a structure that reflected both her light and the brightness that arrived in her eyes when she released some mana. Liora with the spiritual fire translated into color in a way where the color wasn’t the obvious thing but what appeared when the light turned low.

The earrings came after when Ren realized he still had some time.

Crystals in complex forms with advanced-level runes. Not the basic runes that the ruins had in large quantities with low effectiveness, but runes that delivered the advantages of some larger artifacts in something that fit in an earlobe, designed with the understanding that only the precision levels available to someone with Ren’s enhancements could achieve. He had finished all three pieces two days before the ceremony.

And the sensation of having failed to give them what he had wanted to give them had reduced from something that pressed from every side to something that sat in the background, not fully resolved, but no longer in the way. The feeling of something that was exactly as it needed to be, and that the left additional time to fix small details would only improve his good mood.

♢♢♢♢

The end-of-academic-year ceremony for fifth grade was, under normal conditions, the most important event on Yano’s calendar, the formal recognition of the newest adults that the city had produced. The event where the weight of what someone had become was stated out loud, in front of witnesses, in front of the families that had sent them.

But this year was not a year of normal conditions. The master of ceremonies, who had held the position long enough to have seen the event in many different forms, had understood since the preparation stage that this iteration would be more elaborate than what the program described. This year, the fifth-year students were not going to be the primary focus.

The main hall near the castle was full.

Not with the tension of the last ceremony Ren attended in this space, the one that had involved a fight for the future and the kind of stakes that preceded city level decisions rather than the kind that preceded local applause. This time people had come because they wanted to be here and not because they were soldiers. The energy of an event where nobody was waiting for something to go wrong.

Conversations in low voices filled the space before the official program began, the warmth of rooms where the audience was already present rather than assembled. The hall today was no battlefield and finally was like other buildings being used for the purpose they had been built for, the stone and the acoustics cooperating with the occasion.

The fight years couldn’t shine this time…

Because the eighth-year class of this generation was, by any available metric, the most exceptional the academy had produced in any documented period. The master of ceremonies announced this with the satisfaction of someone who had been given the privilege of reading truths that sounded like exaggerations but weren’t.

The first recognitions covered the year’s academic merits in standard order, giving the would-be protagonist at least some face. The tamers who had reached maturity and were receiving their inheritance rights. Those who had established additional bonds with mushrooms and would soon be true doubles were called too, and those who had completed complex tasks of various kinds. Each name arrived with a brevity that honored the merit without taking time from the program that everyone knew was coming, and the master of ceremonies navigated the balance with the skill of someone who understood the difference between the visible program and the real one and knew how to keep the audience in the second while executing the first.

♢♢♢♢

“The central academy of Yano has the honor of registering this year a joint expedition with the most prominent families, an expedition that has no documented precedent in the history of team expeditions to the upper rings.”

The master of ceremonies held the pause that corresponded to the weight of what he was about to say.

“The elimination of the fourth elemental guardian Dragon of the Diamond ring, and the acquisition of the fourth of the elemental rings, which joins the ones already obtained, leaving in Yano’s custody the rings of Earth, Water, Wind, and Wood, to be held for the improvement of the city’s defense against the ongoing mutant siege.”

The hall processed that with the silence that large things produced when heard out loud and found to be larger than they had seemed in the abstract.

The ten participants of the expedition, led by Ren as the eleventh, were called one by one.

Taro came up first, larger now, a tall, muscular frame that carried an energy suggesting he was ready for a second expedition the moment anyone asked. Broad shoulders and a solid center of gravity that made the walk look deliberate even when it was casual. The energy of someone who had been doing hard things long enough that hard things had stopped changing his expression.

Liu with the face of someone who still hadn’t completely finished believing he was where he was, the look of a person who kept expecting the situation to correct itself and announce that a mistake had been made.

Min with the settled calm of someone who had accepted long ago that the extraordinary was simply the category he operated in, the showoff instinct too genuine to contain.

Zhao moved with the precision that wasn’t only in the feathers he threw, it was in every step, every weight shift, the body of someone who had trained so long to be exactly where he needed to be that being elsewhere had stopped feeling like an option.

Lin with that walk. Lightness and power at the same time, the legs that had kicked things much larger than anyone in this room had any business kicking, carrying her as though gravity was a suggestion she found reasonable rather than a requirement.

When Selphira and Victor’s turn arrived, the master of ceremonies did something that wasn’t in the program.

He stopped.

He looked toward the section where Victor and Selphira were standing, with the expression of someone who had just received an instruction he hadn’t anticipated and was fast calculating the cost of no complying.

“Lady Selphira Ashenway,” he said, in the most formal register he had available, “has requested that it be Prince Victor Dravenholm who presents her to this chamber.”

Victor, from his position, had the face he had.

Not the face of someone who had made a bet and lost it, exactly. The face of someone who had made a bet, lost it, was reconciling himself with the consequences in real time, and was doing all of this while thousands of people watched.

He cleared his throat.

The silence had the quality of silence that formed when something unexpected was about to happen and the room had understood that before it happened, the held breath of an audience that had caught the shape of something coming.

Victor sang.