Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons novel Chapter 952

Chapter 952: Chapter 952 - Stubborn Tamers - 2

Selphira smiled...

"Victor." The same tone she used with students who kept making the same technical mistake three weeks after she’d corrected it. "We are not the same." A pause. "Besides, they suit me."

Which was also true, in a way she hadn’t expected. The crystals caught on her cheekbone in a way that happened to cover the lines age had carved into that part of her face, a small and absurd side effect that she filed away without comment.

"Do you know why I’m not worried?" she said, keeping the same level of concentration she maintained while she spoke, the shield fed by the steady background of her attention. "I’m not that far gone yet. And when we get out of this and I’ve finished dealing with that idiot Orion, if I find myself in the right part of the city, I might be able to make this a new fashion statement. Crystals are actually quite striking if you look at them from the right angle. They cover a few age lines too."

Silence.

Then, from behind her, where Victor was pushing against her back to help with the weight of the climb, came a sound she needed a moment to place.

A laugh.

Not bitter or polite... A real laugh, surprised out of him, the kind that happens when something strikes a person as genuinely absurd at the worst possible moment to find anything absurd.

"You’re completely insane," said Victor, and there was something in his voice that hadn’t been there before. Something with less weight to it.

"Yes." Selphira drove the shield two more centimeters upward. Fourteen point nine-eight meters. "But I’m not so insane that I’m going to let you sacrifice yourself after all I invested here."

Victor was quiet for a moment.

"If we don’t make it..." he started.

"We’re going to make it."

"I’m only saying, if..."

"Victor."

"Fine. Do whatever you want, you crazy old woman." A beat. "If we die down here at least I’m better off listening to your nonsense than suffering alone down there."

Selphira considered that.

It wasn’t an elegantly constructed compliment. Victor had many qualities, but eloquence had never been the most prominent. He was too direct to be eloquent, too honest to polish things before saying them. What came out was what he actually meant, every time, with no decoration. It was, in that way, more reliable than anything more carefully worded would have been.

It was exactly the sort of thing he would say.

"Shut your mouth and don’t call me ’crazy old woman’ ever again," she said, "or I will actually let you crystallize and use you as part of my shield when you’re a statue. A crystallized idiot weighs less on my nerves than one who talks."

Victor laughed again. Shorter this time, but just as real.

"Is that an insult or a tactical proposal?"

"You never learn..."

The beam pressed.

She felt it in the shield’s weight, in the way the ice cracked with a sound she didn’t like, in the fraction of a second where the backward force outpaced the upward one and she had to compensate without warning, redistributing her footing and the angle in one motion that cost her more than it should have.

Victor perceived it too. She knew without looking.

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