Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 950 - Taming Longing - 2

”Donʼt let the scammers pull you along. It feels good for a moment and then you regret it.”

”The scammerʼs name is Selthia!”

She shouted, then murmured something about not being able to believe how small her rival was.

Selthia was still laughing, a sharp, duplicated sound. The mushroom seemed annoyed at being called small but despite everything ignored the provocation. Didnʼt defend itself... Just continued with what mattered rather than wasting energy on more meaningless exchanges.

 A pulse of light came from the center of Renʼs core. Different from the detonation, slower... Like a hand pressing something gently back into place. The jade-gold roots moved, re-interlaced and found each other. The crack didnʼt fully seal, but its edges came together enough to change the balance of everything.

Enough to matter.

The power flooding through Ren retreated. Not gone but contained. Like a river that had been about to overflow its banks suddenly redirected into proper channels. Flood diverted before it could destroy everything.

”The rest is on you.”

The voice faded mid-sentence, the way voices fade when someone falls asleep before finishing the thought. Not gone... Just dormant again. There was a difference, and Ren knew it now with a certainty that hadnʼt been there before.

ʼIt wasnʼt gone. It was just sleeping.ʼ

The roots settled.

The empty library was quiet again.

Ren looked toward the edge of the space where Selthia was still not moving. The expression she wore now wasnʼt any of the ones sheʼd shown him before. It was the expression of someone recalculating from the ground up.

 He turned his attention back inward.

The crack was smaller. Not sealed, nor resolved, but different… And the power that had been flooding him with that too-easy sense of freedom had gone from euphoria to friction, to something that pushed against him instead of pulling him with it.

 The crystallization was retreating too. Not gone but less.

Going against the easy way? It hurts…

Outside this space, the artifact still gripped him. Mutants still converged. The girls still couldnʼt approach.

But that would change… Was already changing, because he knew what he had to do now.

Heʼd known since the first time Liora had set him on fire from inside out and heʼd felt something not exactly pleasant but that had pushed corruption backward.

Ren realized he could move now. He closed his hands into fists.

♢♢♢♢

Twenty-five meters.

She could see the top. The end of the stairwell was right there.

But Selphira had spent too many years in this profession to confuse ʼreachableʼ with ʼreachedʼ.

Orionʼs beam came from above with the patience and constancy of someone who had no reason to hurry. A spiral torrent of black and white twisted around each other, coiling over itself as it descended, and Selphira had been holding it back with the best ice she could produce for longer than she would have liked. The first solid plug she had used had held the single black beam for several seconds. But the double spiral was another matter entirely. It chewed through her ice formations faster than she could rebuild them. Trying to stop it that way now was practically a mana donation.

She needed much better resistance. The same focused approach she used forging her spear, a smaller shield, tightly angled, shaped specifically to counter the spiralʼs rotation. And she had to keep it connected directly to her body, feeding it in a continuous stream, squeezing every fraction of efficiency she had.

The reinforced ice held. But barely... Each new one was a bit better but cost more than the one before. Behind them, three of Orionʼs tamers lay solved at the bottom of the stairwell. Three more were thawing out on their own.

Theyʼd been more trouble than they deserved. Not because any of them were particularly talented, but because some were doubles and having two beasts and combos didnʼt care how good you were. It was a logistical headache. Sheʼd burned through more ice than she cared to admit just managing them.

Victor had pushed upward with a grim resolve, his entire right arm was now crystallized past the shoulder. He hadnʼt mentioned it once. That side had stopped hurting some time ago, the one advantage of crystallization nobody talked about, the only clean edge in an otherwise ugly process.

Theyʼd covered forty meters while she helped carry the load by pushing him from behind and giving him her ice barrier that resisted the beamʼs pressure for them. An improvised system, ungraceful and improvised, working roughly the way two people share an aerodynamic umbrella in a gale. Uncomfortable… But sustainable and doable, as long as both of them agreed on the direction.

The last stretch had been exponentially worse than the first.

 The higher they climbed, the harder Orion pressed. The spiral tightened. Somewhere between the fifteen-meter mark and the ten, Selphira, who had measured her mana reserves with the precision of her long experience, quietly accepted that the numbers werenʼt working out the way she needed them to.

They probably wonʼt reach the top.

But ʼprobablyʼ was not a word she used for things that mattered.

Victor had departed quiet a while back. He stood with his good shoulder against the wall, crystallized arm hanging at his side, staring upward with an expression Selphira recognized because sheʼd watched it settle over his face several times in the last few minutes.

”Let me take the beam again,” he said.

Selphira didnʼt look away from the shield.

”No.”

”Selphira.”

”I said no, Victor.”

”If you use me again, you can reach the top without a problem.” His voice was steady. Not the steadiness of someone who didnʼt understand what he was suggesting, but the steadiness of someone who had understood it completely and already made peace with it. ”My body is already useless. Iʼm not helping you, Iʼm weighing you down.”

She pushed the shield another centimeter higher.

”You were helping me not have to listen to you just a moment ago… Do that.”

”This isnʼt the moment for that.”

”Thereʼs always a moment for that.” She shifted the beamʼs pressure toward the shieldʼs left edge, buying her right side a few seconds of rest. ”And Iʼm not sacrificing you.”

Victor exhaled slowly. The sound of someone looking for a different angle.

”My father turned himself into a statue to stop something that couldnʼt be stopped any other way.” He said it without the weight, like the loss didnʼt hurt him anymore. ”If thatʼs the end anticipating for me, it isnʼt a tragedy. Itʼs an honorable family tradition.”