Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons novel Chapter 959

Chapter 959: Chapter 959 - Taming His Core - 4

Selthia was looking at Ren with a face expression that had moved past the point of fun into exasperated.

"That’s a mistake," she said.

The tone was different now, not the dry amusement she had been deploying since the start of this, not the careful observation. Something more direct, stripped of performance and with the particular calm of someone saying what they actually believe but still not especially caring whether the other person accepts it.

"What you’re doing right now... Letting that thing ’help’ you is bad."

Ren didn’t respond.

"The gold wants to play the ’good’ one." Selthia tilted her head slightly. "But it’s deceiving you, so you think we’re the ones doing the deceiving. Because it wants exactly the same thing as what you call corruption." A pause. "What they unfairly call corruption."

Ren closed his fists.

"The difference is that we’re more honest about it," she continued.

Her voice still had that calm... even when everything else around her was in motion. "Your ’false beast’ plants seeds, cultivates them, directs them toward where it wants them to grow. And when they’re large enough..." she opened one hand in a gesture that was almost elegant, the crystallized fingers spreading slowly, "...it will harvest them. The same as us, just with fewer varieties of modification and apparently a better public image."

Her eyes held his.

"Let us give you the power to free yourself from an ending you won’t be able to enjoy... Let us save you."

If it was a lie, it wasn’t a simple one.

That was the most uncomfortable part.

Ren knew it the moment he heard it, and the knowing arrived from two directions at once: he watched for fluctuation in the mana and found none, and underneath that, the part of him that processed logical information at inconvenient moments, the part that had never once agreed to be quiet when he needed it to, turned the words over and found weight in them.

There was something in what she had said that he couldn’t dismiss cleanly, a thread of something real woven into it tightly enough that pulling the lie out would take the truth with it.

But it wasn’t the complete truth either. It was too ambiguous for that... A half truth used as a door left half-open, waiting for him to step through.

"You might be right about some things," said Ren.

Selthia raised one eyebrow. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"But right now the only thing I’m interested in is getting you out of here, and you’re distracting me so..."

He came at her.

♢♢♢♢

Something had changed.

"You’d be better off leaving on your own," he said, slipping from another strike with a rotation that was almost unnecessarily smooth. "Otherwise I’m going to have to make this unpleasant while I push you out."

Selthia stopped.

"You’re getting overconfident." Her tone carried the weight of a reminder, the reminder that less than five minutes ago she had sent him across the room. "A moment ago..."

"A moment ago." Ren shrugged. "Things change."

Selthia came at him with genuine focus this time.

Ren cleared her path with enough margin that the motion looked unhurried, reappeared at her side, and instead of hitting the armor he placed his fingers with perfect accuracy at the thinnest gap between the plates on her abdomen, the exact point where, if you could perceive the mana pattern of a tamer clearly enough, one of the primary flow nodes sat closest to the surface.

It was the same technique he had worked out with Larissa once. Refined again with Luna after that. Find the pattern, find the node, disrupt the flow before the system can compensate for the interruption.

Selthia didn’t have the same flow pattern. The corrupted system was mutated, rerouted in ways that weren’t standard, built around different principles.

She wasn’t Larissa.

She wasn’t Luna.

Who would have thought that a disrupted mana flow in a projected entity from a crystallized body would feel like being tickled?