Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons novel Chapter 972

Chapter 972: Chapter 972 - Taming Harassment - 5

They were still under the same rules...

Arturo processed that. His jaw tightened another fraction, he didn’t like it, but he understood it.

Orion’s response came back in under ten minutes.

He simply accepted.

And he added, with the specific elegance of someone who wants their generosity on the record, that there were undoubtedly many honors to be distributed among many entities, large and small, and that nobility would not be noble if its rules were not applied with equal rigor to all. It was a way of saying that the ceremony was where he intended his new order to be made public, and that delaying it only accumulated losses that Julius could spare himself.

Julius responded in the same register. He expressed appreciation for the consideration. He noted that precisely out of respect for that principle, the ceremony required preparations that honored tradition, and that tradition had its own protocol regarding attendance by lineage.

One lineage, one limited delegation.

Orion accepted that too, without negotiating.

Julius read that acceptance more carefully than all the previous ones, because it was the one that mattered most for what he was building around it.

The ceremony hall operated under a fixed attendance protocol, a small number of soldiers per family established by historical precedent that no faction could alter unilaterally without violating the same rules Orion was invoking to legitimize himself. Which meant that Orion’s army, large as it was, would remain outside, separated from the hall by hundreds of substantial historical buildings that weren’t easy to destroy or move through quickly. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

Inside: only his elite.

Inside also: the elite who answered to Julius, whose numbers were still, despite everything, slightly greater than Orion’s inner circle.

It wasn’t parity when the crystals were factored in. But it was considerably better than open ground against a full army when the defender was dispersed and exhausted.

"You’re giving him the ceremony he wants," said Arturo, who had been reading the exchange in silence.

"I’m giving him the stage where he has the least advantage." Julius folded the final message before sealing it. "If what he wants is to avoid spending his crystals on a prolonged war of attrition, then what he has to do is behave during the ceremony. And I want him to behave, because if he behaves that’s when I can take enough from him that losing today isn’t permanent." A pause. "When I can secure a future for the kids."

Arturo considered that.

"And if he cheats anyway?"

"Then the coup protocols activate." Julius said it with the calm of something already decided, requiring no further deliberation. "Documents, seals, artifacts, old keys... everything Orion needs to run this castle and a functional government instead of a disorganized occupation. All of it disappears into a resistance network that creates problems for him for years. Decades even." A pause. "Time during which other things can grow in places he isn’t watching."

Arturo was quiet for a moment.

"You already have that prepared?" he said at last.

"I’ve been preparing for it since Orion started marching."

Arturo made the sound he made when his jaw was tight and he was compressing approval into its smallest possible form. Not a compliment... Just the acknowledgment that the information was satisfactory.

♢♢♢♢

The corridor where Larissa listened to Selphira had no name on the castle maps, one of those functional passages that connected wings in ways the protocol had never needed to distinguish or label.

But Larissa was going to remember it, because it was where several things became clear to her at once.

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