Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1041 - Taming Forced Contentment

The main group reached the northeast sector before anyone except the guards already stationed there.

The creatures pressing the wall in that section had the numbers the corruption sent when it wasnʼt testing the resistance but attempting to break it, the difference between a serious attack and an evaluation was visible to anyone who had spent enough time watching both. This was the first kind.

Selphira arrived at Arturoʼs side with the confidence of someone who had already calculated the entry angle from the moment they left the hall.

The two of them looked at what they had in front of them.

Everyone joins the defense without struggle, because it costs them nothing to defend and the power the new generations add to eliminating the creatures is enormous, it also isnʼt the first time theyʼve served as extraordinary support when pressure increases.

”Lucky they enjoy this,” said Arturo, with the placidity of someone making observations about the weather.

”If they didnʼt,” Selphira replied, ”Iʼd feel rather bad about the moment being ruined for them.” A pause. ”Though not too bad… Since fighting is part of living.”

The creatures in the northeast sector discovered, over the following twenty minutes, that the pressure they had been executing was not going to produce the results the system that had sent them expected it to produce.

It wasnʼt difficult for Ren and the girls to defend.

And it wasnʼt like they didnʼt want to protect their turf… It was their city.

♢♢♢♢

Deep inside the castle, in the wing that the royal family occupied in different ways depending on which member of it was in question, there was a section that the castleʼs daily traffic avoided instinctively without anyone having given instructions to that effect. The kind of avoidance that emerged organically when a space had an atmosphere that communicated its own awful preferences.

The woman who occupied that space was called Lutea Dravenholm.

She was blonde, with the features that proclaimed her Goldcrest and Starweaver ʼhigh bloodʼ, features that Larissa had inherited in their structural form but that in the mother carried a different quality… the same physical matter organized by a different character. Beautiful in the way individuals were beautiful when they had spent a long time being treated as though beauty were their primary function, which produced a specific kind of beauty that was very good at being looked at and less interesting in being known.

The maids who brought her news of the ceremony did so with the specific fear and attentiveness of people who had learned exactly which version of information their lady preferred to receive, and who delivered it in that form regardless of whether it corresponded to what had actually occurred.

This time they couldnʼt.

What had happened was too concrete, too documented, too present in too many mouths for a different version to exist that Lutea could avoid confronting eventually.

”Is it finished?” Lutea asked, in the tone she had when she wanted information and considered any delay in receiving it a failure of her maids rather than a consequence of the information still being produced.

”Yes, my lady.”

”And?”

The maid who had received the turn to answer this specific question ran the calculation that people in that position ran, and arrived at the conclusion that the honest answer had a more manageable cost than any other version because the honest one at least didnʼt require additional elaboration afterward.

”Miss Larissa was presented to Lord Ren Patinder and the misses Starweaver and Liora too, before the assembly of families.”

Silence.

”Presented as…”

Not a question. The form Lutea used when requesting information she had already guessed was there but needed to hear spoken aloud in order to have something concrete toward which to direct what she was going to feel.

”As part of the betrothal announcement, my lady.”

The silence that followed wasnʼt the silence of someone processing something unexpected. It was the silence of someone whose expectation was confirmed to go in the least convenient direction, someone who now needed a moment to organize a response to that confirmation.

How could they do that to her blood?

Lutea Dravenholm had been a childhood friend of Dragarion in the years when childhood friendships between families of the correct level carried the weight of the agreements those families built around them. The marriage had been as predictable as winter: it arrived when it arrived because it had always been going to arrive, and the way Lutea had received it was that of someone who had expected exactly that and who had integrated it into her self-perception in a way that made it difficult to separate who she was from what he was.

Dragarionʼs great deeds had come afterward.

And with them, in Luteaʼs mind, the delusional certainty that her husbandʼs greatness was in some sense also hers, that the ground she walked on because of him was ground that belonged to her in a different way than it belonged to anyone else. The perception of someone who had grown up in a small space and had never needed to leave it, and who therefore lacked the information that would have produced the natural correction.

Dragarion had seen it.

Not at first, one didnʼt see these things at first, when the peak of affection blurred the angles. He had seen it gradually, and the process of seeing it may have produced in him a distance that Selphira described as that of a man who found it easier to be away than to be close. Selphira, who had known Dragarion before Lutea, described it also as one of the few great mistakes of a man who rarely made them. One of the reasons, the old woman joked, that Dragarion liked to spend most of his time away from home.

A beautiful woman, but with terrible ideas, one who only acted submissive and excessively pleasant and smiling with her husband and sons, never with anyone else… Not even her own daughter. A deep and painful ʼchauvinismʼ, even for Dragarion.

The full understanding had arrived when Larissa was born.

When Dragarion had watched how his wife looked at their daughter.

Lutea didnʼt look at her daughter the way one looked at a person. She looked at her the way one looked at the variables of a problem.

”My daughter,” said Lutea now, with the calm that belonged to the category of things cold on the inside and therefore able to maintain surface tranquility, ”was formally committed to a common-blooded plebeian.”

The maids didnʼt respond because the statement wasnʼt directed at them.

”Without the correct surname… Without the correct lineage. In the main hall of the castle, with her brothers present, with all the high families present.” A pause, each element placed with the care of someone building an argument from components they had been assembling for a long time. ”Staining the sacred surname she carries!”