Ren’s fingers didn’t buckle when hitting the barrier...

He had them locked the way Lin had taught him, maximum structure through the impact, no wasted flex.

And the barrier, to its credit, didn’t feel like a conventional impact. The energy of his punch simply ceased at the point of contact. Absorbed, with the same indifference with which the ocean absorbs a stone dropped from the shore, not even registering it as a disturbance worth acknowledging.

Orion smiled.

Two crystals rose from his hand, one deep black, one a dark corrosive purple, spinning in separate orbits before synchronizing into a single rotation. The beam that emerged from that combination was the darkest possible color of corruption. Not the purple of a standard corrupted technique. Something below purple, something that absorbed the light around it as it moved.

It hit Ren directly in the chest.

The hall held its breath...

But Ren didn’t move back.

He extended his arms toward the incoming beam and let it in, the most counterintuitive thing he could have done and exactly what the interior of his nucleus had learned to do over the last several fights in a way he still didn’t fully understand but that worked.

The corrupted energy he had been carrying near his core since he woke recognized the new arrival and incorporated it with the fluency of something finding its natural channel. The beam didn’t disappear inside him. It circulated... Distributed through the same routes the corruption had already carved through his system and Ren felt it fill him in a way that was simultaneously horrible and functional, a sensation with no clean name because there was nothing clean about it.

Then he sent it back. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Not with elegance... With both hands driving outward from his chest, the blunt motion of someone who has no technique for what they’re doing with pure rage and is compensating with raw will, every ounce of anger still burning behind it because the anger was the only fuel he had left and it was doing the job.

The beam hit Orion’s barrier.

The crystalline surface deformed. Only for a moment, barely perceptible, less than a second, but enough. Enough for Orion to see it and enough for his expression to shift from the smile he had been wearing into something more serious.

The hall made no sound.

So many could hear Ren was breathing hard.

The body had paid the price of receiving that volume of corrupted energy without proper preparation. The black veins along his neck and jaw had spread to his temples now, visible from any point in the hall without needing to look carefully.

The energy around him kept growing, dense, unshaped, without the clean edges of a technique because it wasn’t one.

Orion observed him with the attention of someone filing data.

A rightward spiral to distribute the load. That was what Ren had done...

Visible in the way his body had absorbed the impact and redirected the energy outward, readable to anyone who had spent enough time learning to see how these systems moved.

Years of working with the crystals and paying attention had not been wasted.

It was an intuitive solution for the youngster... Genuinely elegant for someone with no formal study in the area.

But it was a pattern.

Predictable, once you had seen it once.

Orion added a second purple crystal to the next beam.

And sent it with the rotation reversed...

Ren received it. His arms came up, his channels attempted to do what they had done before, but the energy coming this time rotated in the opposite direction from everything his nucleus had organized around the first attempt and he couldn’t shift it fast enough.

Like two puzzle pieces that look identical until you try to fit them together and find they were cut in mirror image... The circulation jammed and pressure built in nodes that weren’t equipped to handle it.

Ren held for two seconds, the two longest seconds since he had woken up, and then the system gave in and the beam sent him backward with all the force he hadn’t managed to absorb.

He landed badly. There was no way to land well from that.

He stayed on the floor for a moment with his chest burning from the inside out and the taste of blood in his mouth, different from before, because this came from the lungs and not the lips.

"Do you see?" Orion said to the hall, at the volume of someone who wants to reach every corner of it, his crystals moving visibly in his hand as a ’demonstration of control’, of the ’contrast’ between what he held and what was lying on the floor.

"Do you see what the castle has been protecting? A corrupted experiment that absorbs foreign energy like a mutant and returns it without control, without technique, without any of the safeguards that characterize a legitimate Yano tamer, but uses it as though it were his own."

The crystals pulsed gently.

"This is what they’ve been sheltering. This is what they wanted to receive today’s recognitions!"

He turned to Luna with a calm that was worse than any direct threat would have been.

"The white crystal won’t wait forever, niece." A pause that had nothing patient in it. "Take it or leave it!"

Seiya, standing relatively close, drew back slightly against his father.

Luna’s fists were closed at her sides. The composure she had carried for the entire session, every controlled expression, every measured word, every managed second of the last several hours... Had left her face entirely.

She pulled free from Larissa and Liora’s hands, already moving forward, not calculating odds because the odds had stopped being relevant, but...

Ren got up.

Not dramatically. He got up the way people get up when they have to regardless of whether they want to, the body registering objections from multiple points simultaneously while the mind overrode most of them without negotiation.

The black veins had climbed further.

The corrupted energy around him was visible now in a way that had moved past perceptible into simply present, something every person in the hall could see without needing mana sensitivity, without trying.