Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 954 - Stubborn Tamer Rulers - 2

Orion had spent enough years practicing his agility and sensitivity in combat, preparing for this day when he would take down the opposing leaders, for his body to react before his mind had even finished understanding what was happening.

He had spent years drilling the instincts for exactly this kind of moment. Not for this specific situation, but for the general shape of it, the possibility that any engagement might open a second front in a direction he wasnʼt watching. His body half transformed into his Black Tiger and moved before his mind had finished processing what was happening, throwing him sideways on pure reflex.

Several of the feathers passed through the space where his back had been a half-second earlier.

They werenʼt decorative. They were the size of long daggers, each one edged with a density of concentrated mana that drove them into the stone floor up to their shafts when they missed their mark. But several didnʼt miss entirely… He felt impacts across his back and upper legs, sharp and immediate, the kind of pain that processes as fear of death before it registers as pain, and that told him the damage was serious before heʼd even hit the ground.

He activated the barrier from the floor before he even finished falling.

He had made that decision instinctively too, before thinking of standing up, because standing first would have cost him a moment he didnʼt have. The barrier expanded outward around him and caught the second wave of feathers that followed almost immediately after the first. When he finally got himself standing and oriented, he realized two things first in rapid succession.

Not that he was obviously under attack, but…

The beam he had been directing into the tunnel no longer existed.

And the entrance was open.

He moved almost instantly after touching the ground to reposition the barrier over the tunnel mouth. One fast scramble pushing his body with his tiger claws to close the angle, to block what he already knew had to be happening below.

 He didnʼt make it.

Selphira had been ready thanks to her sheer stubbornness. That was the only reason. She also hadnʼt waited for the situation to explain itself to her, sheʼd felt the pressure disappear and moved before the reason had time to matter. She had survived for too many years and knew not to wait for explanations when riding the moment.

She came out of the tunnel at top speed, hauling Victor with her, burning what remained of her fusion into pure velocity because velocity was the only currency that meant anything in those specific seconds.

Orion turned to take in what was behind him.

The wide chamber where he had left the smaller, elite portion of his forces managing the perimeter was no longer the contained situation heʼd set up before going underground. The geometry of it had changed entirely. The people and their positions were wrong in ways that took him a moment to fully map, because the wrongness was spread across too many points at once.

Arturo was at the center of it.

The middle brother, who had never had Victorʼs natural authority or Juliusʼs ease with people, who had always been the one who compensated for those absences by calculating carefully and refusing to stop working. And he had brought people with him who had no business being here.

Zhao came down fast, adjusting his angle mid-descent with the direct, economical movement of someone who had no time to be elegant about it. He caught Selphira and Victor cleanly and pulled into a sharp turn in the air that moved all three of them away from the tunnel mouthʼs vicinity and into the coordinated retreat the rest of the group was already forming.

”Full retreat!” His voice carried the right amount of mana behind it, not a shout, but something with enough structure to reach everyone who needed to hear it through the noise. ”We have who we came for!”

Although she would have liked to give Orion a few good blows… Selphira did not protest. She just canceled her fusion.

Zhao and Victor both registered that in the same moment, and neither of them said anything about it, because there was nothing useful to say. The fact that she let it go without argument communicated her state more precisely than any description of it would have.

Orion launched black beams from the barrier heʼd anchored at the ruins entrance, but the target positions were already abandoned by the time the first ones landed. The groupʼs shields also came up in layers as they pulled back, it wasnʼt a perfect retreat, far from it, but Orionʼs group wasnʼt that large and Renʼs elite with the ability to use fusions balanced the battlefield quite well, especially since they didnʼt need to win and their ground control, thanks to the large number of members of Juliusʼs special unit, was so high.

The unit Julius had built for exactly this kind of job, underground movement, terrain management, the particular skill set that made retreating look like a good decision rather than a failure, was doing what it had been built to do. They were giving ground deliberately, at their own pace, toward tunnels they had already used.

 Slowly, the reinforced stone between them and Orionʼs remaining forces grew.

♢♢♢♢

Pulling those feathers out was the kind of pain that demanded full attention and didnʼt accept negotiations about timing.

He dealt with it. He had spent a long time training himself not to let physical pain restructure his priorities, and he applied that training now with the same systematic approach he applied to everything else. The healer heʼd kept assigned to himself worked quickly, and within a few minutes the damage had moved from urgent to manageable.

Removing those enormous knives from his body hurt, but being left without his hostages hurt even more. He could have used those two to eliminate Arturo, but it was too late now…

Orion left the underground and stepped out through the castle.

The air outside had the particular weight of a battlefield that had been running for hours. Heavy with dust and residual energy, the distinct quality of large amounts of mana burned in a compressed space over a short time. He took it in without commenting on it, because it was a detail and not the detail that mattered.

 His army had changed shape since heʼd gone underground.