Orion looked at him and made a decision.

Four purple crystals.

The beam that formed from that combination was qualitatively different from the previous ones, not only in scale but also in density.

Luna jumped first to shield Ren, the fastest of the three in agility and reaction speed.

Larissa immediately after. Liora from the opposite angle at the same moment as Larissa, the three of them placing themselves in front of Ren before the beam reached them, shields already forming, energy already being pushed into elemental barriers...

Julius and Arturo had moved from the flank first.

Fused. Simultaneously, without a word between them they combined their barriers with the coordination of two people who had similar Qilins and had grown up learning to read each other’s timing and no longer needed to announce it.

They drove the combined force of their 4 bonds in front of Ren, interposing themselves between the beam and everything behind them.

They held it.

For a second and a half, they held it.

The kids ended up trusting...

But then Orion added another crystal and the balance broke.

Julius and Arturo absorbed most of it before they were sent flying, but most was not all.

What remained punched through the gap between them and reached the girls and Ren with the residual force of something that had been enormous and that, even diminished, was more than exhausted bodies could receive without damage.

The hall came apart after the explosion.

Julius’s and Arturo’s soldiers along the margins pushed forward enraged. Orion’s moved to intercept them...

The Starweaver brothers, who had held their positions quietly behind Orion through the entire session, slipped beneath their brother’s barrier where its coverage protected them. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

The ceremony hall became something else.

Orion sent several black beams toward specific positions at the margins, tamers of sufficient rank to change the shape of things if they entered active combat, each beam arriving with enough precision and power to occupy its target with the immediate problem of surviving rather than advancing.

"Stop." He said.

Not a shout. Just the volume of someone who knows they don’t need to shout because the weight of what they are is sufficient.

"Julius Dravenholm is on the floor, Arturo Dravenholm is on the floor... Selphira Ashenway and Victor Dravenholm are also incapacitated." A pause to let the inventory reach everyone. "If you want to do this the hard way, you will lose. Not because I’m stronger than any one of you individually, but because I am stronger than all of you simultaneously today, in this room, on this side of this barrier. So today, in this hall, you will listen to me."

The crystals moved in a slow orbit around his hands.

"The only outcome of continuing is more people in this hall getting hurt and me winning at the end anyway, just with a higher body count on your side on the way there."

His people had Julius’s contained now.

"Good." Orion turned toward where Ren should still be on the floor with his niece and the other kids dumbly protecting him just enough. "I only have one more thing to do... Push those girls aside and then, then this is finished."

He walked toward them while the settling dust from the last exchange shifted.

And a figure stepped forward from it.

Not Luna, not Larissa nor Liora

Ren was standing between Orion and the girls.

Nobody had seen him get up.

Or they had seen it and hadn’t been able to process the speed with which he had placed himself there, because the body he had available right now shouldn’t have been capable of that speed, not without something like active fusion, not without some beast that gave him the margin that made the difference between possible and impossible.

"I’m awake," he had said to the girls, very quietly, before taking the powerful step that put him between the beam and them.

A short sentence. Just that.

Now he glanced at Luna from the corner of his eye.

The corrupted energy had been building around him since he absorbed the beam, and it was still growing, but differently from how it would have grown before, differently from how Orion had calculated it would continue to grow.

Not expanding without direction.

Not simply feeding on Ren’s emotional state the way Orion had read it doing, the way the subjects from Yino had always done when the corruption in them found the heat of genuine feeling.

Something in the way it was circulating was alike to what had happened at the very end in his interior space to help him push Selthia away... the final experience of learning to embrace what hurt rather than resist it, the moment when the three girls’ energies had entered the vortex and found a way to coexist that none of them could have found separately.

Those patterns, that learning, that power and that something that had moved through him and left a changed shape in the channels it had used, all of it was still there.

This power was already a little more his than corruption’s.

It was not a perfect counter or a perfect cure... Not 100% controlled the way Lin would have approved in the clean command of a trained martial technique applied with precision and understood from the bottom up.

But ’a little more his’ was the difference between a little and nothing was everything right now.

He still looked at Luna.

"You’re worth more than all the rewards combined," said Ren. The voice was still dulled at the edges but it had better direction now, it arrived where it was aimed. "And you’re worth more than that crystal, I don’t care how much it matters to you."

Not something said because it sounded right. Something said because he had been thinking it for a long time, turning it over in the part of him that worked on problems quietly while the rest of him was occupied elsewhere, and because standing here now, with her pained face in his sight and everything that had just happened still in the room, it felt like the most accurate thing he had ever tried to say.

"You’re alive and free. That matters more to me than anything else." He held her gaze. "You don’t have to sell yourself for anything or anyone. Not ever."

Luna felt something strange move through her.

The white crystal in Orion’s hand pulsed.