Orion let the last trace of ’cordiality’ go...

"How touching," he said. The tone was new, something designed to find the specific place where it would cut cleanest. "The plebeian monster is in love with my niece."

The crystals in his hand pulsed.

"And what exactly do you offer her if you want to ruin that good marriage chance? Unknown origins? A family of provincial tamers carrying a name that nobody recognizes? This power you can neither explain nor control?"

"She is a Starweaver! She carries the blood of one of the oldest families in this kingdom. And what you’re offering her is..." he touched his hair, then tapped his temple with the air of someone thinking very hard about nothing, "...Nothing once you bestow me that scroll of paper, you have nothing left."

The veins along Ren’s neck darkened another degree.

"My family is...!"

Orion didn’t let him finish. He pressed faster, because momentum was the point.

"Your family?" The cadence of someone who knows they’re pressing exactly where they want to press. "What are they? A pair of useless nobodies from a province nobody names... What does your family even do? Sure to do with licking the crown boots, but not something that justifies their son believing himself worthy of..."

The energy around Ren broke.

Not outward... But the air in the space around the boy changed, perceptible to every person in the hall at the same moment, those with sensibility and those without, those with mana vision and those without, because this kind of change didn’t require special sensitivity to register.

The kind of thing that made the back of the neck aware of itself.

The black veins climbed his neck and reached his jaw.

Orion looked at him and saw exactly what he had spent the last two minutes constructing conditions to see.

♢♢♢♢

What Orion saw looking back at him was a beast.

The thing near Ren’s nucleus that had been sitting quiet and contained since he woke had responded to the only reliable trigger corruption had always responded to: the emotional state of its host, rising with his anger, taking advantage of the gap in the nucleus that the mushroom had run out of energy to close before it passed out from the effort of waking him at all.

Orion needed to eliminate him. That was the calculation completed, not in this moment, not as a reaction to the anger or the energy, but as the conclusion of a longer analysis that had been running since the recognition list was read.

The fifth-year student who had restructured the beast cultivation landscape of the entire kingdom by sharing knowledge he should have guarded jealously with both hands.

Who had taken techniques developed through his own growth and handed them freely to the people around him, not as strategy, not as alliance-building, but with the dumb generosity of someone who didn’t understand scarcity as a tool or strategy.

Who had changed what the next generation of tamers was capable of not through competition or exclusion but through the opposite, through making everyone stronger, more capable, harder to rule by conventional means.

The threat was not only what he had now. The threat was the trajectory, the growth curve of something without a visible ceiling that was also, somehow, raising the ceiling for everything around it.

A power like that, given a decade to mature, would not be an obstacle. It would be an impossibility.

But if everything went according to plan, that problem would be solved today. Eliminating the young prodigy after he showed his true colors would remove a piece from the board before he could become a decisive factor in the larger conflict.

And with Selphira and Victor out of the picture... everything was aligning perfectly for the moment when he would finally achieve all the goals he had pursued for years of patient planning.

Ascension. Not merely to a higher rank of power, but to a position where he could reshape the kingdom according to a vision that others in power would have dismissed as too radical.

It was an ambition that transcended a simple desire for personal control and entered the territory of a genuine belief that he knew a better path to the future than the obsolete structures that currently governed. That was why all of this had been necessary.

All of it leading here.

’Self-defense, in front of witnesses. The coliseum should still be fresh in everyone’s mind.’ 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

His crystals continued their orbits around him, each one representing a specific accumulated advantage, deployed now with the understanding of how their systems interacted, how power flowed.

The game was reaching its peak. He had every intention of being the only one still standing when the dust settled and the new order emerged from the wreckage of the old.

♢♢♢♢

That was why he had brought it to this point.

"...not something that justifies their son believing himself worthy of..."

Ren didn’t think about the fusion.

Didn’t think about the mantis, which was the only one of his beasts with anything left to give.

Didn’t think about the state of his bonds or the percentages or any of the things he had learned to calculate before committing to a fight.

The framework that Lin had built into him over years, the mental checklist that ran automatically before his body engaged... none of it activated.

He thought about Luna’s face with her lip bleeding.

And he moved.

The corrupted energy he had been carrying near his core since he woke latched onto his legs and catapulted him forward with a speed that wasn’t his, speed that was borrowed, that hurt in the tendons because the body hadn’t been prepared to absorb the force of it, hadn’t been braced, hadn’t asked permission from the joints and the muscle and the bones that were going to pay for it afterward.

He felt it immediately and completely and still didn’t care.

He crossed the distance in under a second and drove his fist with everything he had.

The white barrier stopped him like a wall of compressed stone.

Orion smiled.

His beam hit Ren directly.