Orion filed it and kept his expression easy.

The energy around Ren had not moved in the way he expected from a lie, even a skilled one. It hadn’t jumped or pulsed or done any of the things energy did when someone was working to keep their face ahead of their intentions.

It was still, dense, sitting exactly where it had been when Ren started speaking. Quiet in the way that true things were quiet, without the slight defensive pressure of something being managed.

Orion laughed.

Not with cruelty. With the genuine amusement of someone who has just been surprised by something they hadn’t predicted and finds the surprise itself worth appreciating.

The walking experiment that Julius and the old woman had been protecting for years was in love with his niece. Had said "it wasn’t even a decision" in that dulled, barely-functional voice as though it were the most straightforward thing in the world, the kind of fact that didn’t require inflection because it had never been a question.

And all that ’youngster’s crush’ was doing was making something dangerous grow.

Orion felt it as a subtle, directional pressure, growing slowly, with that chaotic energy that answered to emotion rather than to craft.

It was perfect...

Orion had arrived at this session with a negotiation plan. Luna married to Seiya served multiple purposes, kept her occupied, layered obligation onto obligation, spread her attention across a hundred protocols that would consume her days.

But he was not a person who ignored better options when they materialized in front of him.

What Ren was offering wasn’t a small thing, and it came without the political friction the Seiya arrangement would have generated. He could work with this.

But he needed to take advantage of that energy first.

He studied it with more attention while he thought it through.

Dense... Close to something he recognized from extended study of sources most people found too uncomfortable to approach. And growing, not rapidly, not dramatically, but with that gradual growth that had no ceiling until whatever was feeding it stopped feeding it.

He needed to understand its range before he closed anything. Before he signed anything or surrendered anything.

The easiest way to expose original corruption was well known to anyone who had spent enough time watching it operate.

Feeding it...

"I’m sorry," said Orion, with a cordiality that wasn’t false exactly but was assembled from components, chosen, placed, delivered at the right temperature, "but my niece is extremely important to this family. I won’t have her mixing her regal blood with that of a nameless commoner who obtained what he has through experiments of questionable outcome."

A ’gentle’ pause, almost thoughtful.

"She deserves someone of appropriate lineage. I’ll ’make’ her understand that one way or another for her sake as much as anything."

Luna, furious, opened her mouth. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

But the energy around Ren jumped instantly, so high it was palpable without the need of big sensitivity to mana, taking everyone’s attention.

Orion had felt it, that fraction of a second where something contained stops being contained, where a threshold is crossed not through decision but through the limit simply arriving.

This was perfect...

The veins along Ren’s neck darkened, very slightly still. Not a transformation yet... Just the body’s honest report on the state of what was running through it.

"You won’t decide for her!"

The voice was still dulled but it wasn’t the same anymore. Something had moved underneath it, not volume, not projection, just a quality that hadn’t been there before, the difference between a still surface and a still surface with a current running beneath it.

Orion felt the heat of that energy from across the room.

And he understood.

This was not a performance... Not something arranged with Julius or Selphira beforehand.

It would actually work way better for him to manufacture an incident he could use as a pretext.

The boy was genuinely furious, and the energy he was carrying, the energy that had no clean tamer signature, that sat dense and directionless near his core, was growing with that fury the same way the mutants intensified when Orion added his energy in the crystal flow.

Obedient to emotions states.

’Love’, Orion noted to himself, with a genuine amusement he hadn’t expected to feel today, was a tremendously predictable variable.

The marriage of her niece could wait. There were other ways to manage that particular problem once the more immediate one was resolved.

But this...

Was it better to get the rewards or get rid of this?

He looked at the energy with the eyes he had spent years refining for exactly this kind of reading. The density of it, its proximity to what he recognized from the crystals, from the patterns underground, from the specific texture that corruption carried when it had found a host and settled in close to something important.

And above all: the potential.

No visible ceiling... Something that hadn’t yet reached what it was capable of reaching, that was still early in its growth curve, that was right now responding to the anger of a fifth-year student who had barely recovered from a battle that should have finished him.

What it would look like in three years, in five, in ten, if it was allowed to grow.

Negotiating with the ’castle’s experiment’ would have been profitable, yes.

The offer on the scroll was real and the territories Ren was willing to surrender represented genuine strategic value. Orion had run the calculation and found it favorable more than once in the last two minutes.

But potential without a visible ceiling was a huge risk... And risks without visible ceilings were exactly the kind of thing you eliminated before they reached the size at which elimination became impossible.

If the hall saw the boy covered in that energy here, if Orion gave it the right provocation and let it do what it was already trying to do, no one in this room could complain when Orion acted... It would be self-defense.

In front of witnesses. With the precedent of the coliseum still fresh in every mind present.