Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 966 -  Taming Public Image - 2

After Julius and Lin, those who had been holding the inner arena reached Ren first… His parents, Taro and Liu, whose beasts had specific capabilities that had kept them functional through the sustained defense when others had been forced back, still relatively fresh despite the hours, still clear-eyed in the way that tamers were when they had pushed hard but not past their limits. Other fighters who had held the inner perimeter and stayed when the outer lines gave ground made their way in from the edges.

 The dead mutants covered the ground in every direction.

 Moving toward the center required attention to where you placed each foot, which meant the walk itself became a kind of accounting, each body on the ground a reminder that what had happened here in the last several hours was too large to process in a single pass. The mind touched the edges of it and moved on to the next step, and the next, because that was what the situation required.

At least the involuntary pause the mutants had created while converging on the artifact had given the healers a window to work without the pressure of active combat, and the condition of the wounded was considerably better than anyone would have estimated an hour ago. Injuries that should have required painful and dangerous days were closed. People who had been down were sitting up. It was a fortunate result that didnʼt square with the ominous reason it had been made possible, and Julius noted the dissonance without resolving it.

He noticed it in the faces too, as they moved toward the circle the girls had formed around Ren.

Not in the ones who arrived first. Not in the people who knew Ren closely, who had fought beside him, who had the context to read the scene without filling in the blanks with the first available negative interpretation. In those faces there was no ambiguity, only the focused concern of people who already understood the boy they were looking at well enough not to need a story around this ʼhostage situationʼ.

But further back, in the tamers who didnʼt share that history, the ones who had been on the outer perimeter and were now moving inward because the immediate danger had passed, he saw it clearly. The question that nobody was putting into words, because this wasnʼt the moment for that, but that was forming anyway the way things form before they become words. In that manner a crowdʼs posture changes before anyone in it decides to say anything.

 Why had the corruption embraced him?

Why had it given him power, and then released him, and then lowered him to the ground with that careful, almost reverent quality that had nothing corrupted in it, nothing aggressive, nothing consuming… but something that looked uncomfortably close to devotion?

The boy who had broken the two-beast standard. The boy who knew things no one his age should know, who had neutralized threats that tamers with decades of experience over him hadnʼt been able to neutralize… And now this. The boy standing at the center of something that none of the outer witnesses had a complete picture of, surrounded by the aftermath of something they couldnʼt fully explain, set down gently by something that should not have been gentle.

It was too easy to think about Yino…

About how that had started, and what it had become, and how little anyone had understood it until it was already decided. The boy who broke the two-beast standard, just as Yino had done before ending up crystallized as part of the evil crystal they didnʼt fully understand...

Julius watched that question taking shape in the distant faces.

His people and Renʼs had formed a ring around the scene first. There were no hostile eyes close in, not yet. The inner circle held.

 But this was not going to stay contained inside the inner circle for long. The distance between what the people who knew Ren understood and what the people who didnʼt were currently constructing was already visible, and distances like that had a way of growing faster than anyone planned for.

 Julius filed it alongside everything else that was going to need handling.

♢♢♢♢

Reed reached the center first.

He knelt beside Ren and the girls and put his hands on Renʼs chest with the practiced moves of a healer who starts assessing before the patient has confirmed anything, even before anyone around him had finished deciding what to feel about what they were looking at. His expression was focused and unreadable in the way healers went when they were working.

Fern arrived one step behind him and made no effort to maintain a composure she didnʼt have available. She knelt on the other side and took her sonʼs hand in both of hers without saying anything, which said everything.

 Julius watched the girls shift slightly apart from Ren to look around, taking in the arena, the mutant bodies covering the ground, the people converging from the edges. The transition back into the external world happening in real time in their faces.

 ”The beam,” Julius said, pulling his attention away from the surrounding crowd and back to them. ”Are you all right?”

 The three of them had that particular look that fusion left on a body when it hadnʼt yet finished calculating the real cost. Present and functional, eyes clear, responses intact, but with the kind of exhaustion behind them that a short rest wasnʼt going to resolve. The kind you carried for days.

 Larissa was the first to answer with something organized.

 She laid out the interior situation with the precision she used when she wanted information to arrive useful rather than merely complete, the entity ʼgirlʼ with white hair, the nucleus, what they had been able to observe of the roots and the crack and the vortex before their three energies entered the cycle and the picture changed. No unnecessary detail, no gaps either. The version that gave the listener what they needed to work with.

Liora and Luna added the pieces that remained.