Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1243 - Taming the Old World - Old Perspectives - 2

Ren's ethereal reserves were practically non-existent.

He had emptied his core into the star dome, and during the hour he had spent playfully bickering with the girls, he had barely recovered a negligible percentage of his total output. It was less than 5% and circulating very deep in his core to recover faster...

And that specific reality triggered this consequence, the point that Lutea entirely failed to read outside the normal reality and believed within her immediate context: without active mana circulating outside his core, Ren's ambient aura was practically zero. He wasn't projecting the suffocating pressure that unconsciously forced even elite warriors to lower their voices whenever he entered a room.

At this precise moment, he perfectly matched her arrogant perception: he looked like a thoroughly exhausted, entirely unimpressive commoner.

Lutea grew immediately emboldened by that fatal miscalculation of 'weakness'...

♢♢♢♢

"Kneel," she commanded, taking a sharp and aggressive step toward him. "Apologize immediately before the throne of the true King. And prepare to accept an exemplary punishment for your profound disrespect."

The three girls instantly surged forward from behind Ren, their auras spiking aggressively.

Ren simply raised a single hand and halted them... The ingrained combat rhythm they had forged over years of executing dangerous external sorties, where he consistently dictated the marching flow, granted him an almost absolute authority and a flawless, fluid understanding of non-verbal signals among the four of them.

He shot a side-glance toward Larissa. She held his gaze for a second and offered a small nod. She perfectly understood his intent. Ren wasn't going to surrender an inch of ground, but he also refused to let them fight this battle on his behalf. Allowing them to intervene would only validate Lutea's warped logic, confirming her arrogant belief that he cowardly hid behind Larissa's royal status.

Larissa swallowed her intense desire to retaliate, trusting his decision entirely.

"I committed absolutely zero disrespect," Ren stated with a pristine, unshakable calm. "First of all, Mr. Dragarion possessed minimal interest in actually occupying this room anyway. Furthermore, Larissa also has the absolute right to utilize it... I am even certain that if you formally asked Julius, Arturo, or Victor, absolutely none of them would give a complaint either."

Lutea completely lost her composure.

"His majesty, their highness!! Do not casually drop the names of my husband or my sons, the sovereign princes, with such casualness and insolence!" Her voice spiked in volume, echoing shrilly across the marble. "You are absolutely nobody, completely devoid of the necessary standing to permit yourself such liberties. A wretched plebeian possessing absolutely zero noble bearing and completely ignorant of..."

She abruptly activated her merge, calling upon one of her contracted beasts. It was a Wood-affinity Wolverine. It was an incredibly popular choice among the high nobility, the highly predictable, 'respectable' asset for someone of her high aristocratic caliber.

Luna and Liora simultaneously dragged their hands down their faces in sheer exasperation.

Larissa let out a long, heavy sigh.

Because Lutea had just arrogantly mocked Ren's "noble bearing", and subsequently fused with a standard, utterly mundane Gold 1 Wolverine, the absolute baseline choice for a boring noble. She even ignored the intelligence confirming that Ren commanded the absolute rarest, most terrifying Wolverine variant in existence, and that his specific Wolverine was an integral component of the special fusion that had single-handedly slaughtered sovereign dragon guardians.

But the three girls instantly calculated a unified reality: if they genuinely wanted Lutea to comprehend exactly what caliber of man she was currently insulting, they needed to let her push a little further.

She needed to physically touch the glowing stove to learn exactly how bad it burned.

Behind Lutea, her personal entourage of elite guards and maids cautiously stepped forward, adopting combat stances. But they were visibly terrified... They possessed a vastly superior understanding of exactly who Ren was; they had witnessed the apocalyptic auras that occasionally bled from his body whenever his fusions engaged and didn't delusionally think they were from Victor or any prince.

They advanced here out of strict military obligation, absolutely not out of conviction, desperately praying to any listening god that the situation would not escalate further.

"I explicitly commanded you to kneel," Lutea repeated, her voice dripping with venom.

Ren sighed.

He slowly straightened his posture, standing taller, and took a single, deliberate step forward. He locked his emerald eyes directly onto hers.

"No."

Lutea raged and scrutinized him quickly one last time… She observed zero active merges or fusions, registered the complete absence of ambient mana around him, and those specific variables flawlessly confirmed the intelligence her head maid had previously gathered.

The woman had been actively spying on their logistics, and she definitively knew that Ren completely drained his energetic reserves around this hour maintaining some obscure new construction in Yino.

The timing of this confrontation was absolutely not a coincidence.

Lutea had deliberately arrived to launch her ambush precisely right now, only finding the courage to leave her quarters because she perfectly knew he was running on empty.

If there was ever a perfect tactical window to perfectly put him in his place, to explicitly demonstrate to Larissa exactly how pathetic her little commoner boyfriend truly was, it was this exact moment. Only now, with Ren operating at his absolute lowest capacity, could she force her daughter to open her eyes to the brutal reality of royal authority and finally realize that this foolish, adolescent infatuation was a political dead end.

Lutea aggressively reached out, aiming her hand directly at Ren's shoulder, fully intending to clamp down, violently shove him to his knees, and enforce the subsequent punishment.

But Ren casually blocked the incoming strike with his solid crystal arm.

Lutea clamped down with her absolute maximum output, her Wolverine's reinforced claws desperately attempting to dig into the flesh. Instead, they violently collided with the Diamond-rank crystal, instantly snapping the sharp tips right off. For a fleeting microsecond, a distinct flicker of recognition warped her facial expression.

She intimately recognized this specific hardness... It was horrifyingly similar to the exact affliction that had brutally stolen Dragarion from her, the catastrophic disease that had permanently frozen her husband. But her aristocratic mind failed to process it as a manifestation of being able to use that huge dragon power. She interpreted it entirely as weakness, a terminal disease ravaging Ren's body, an adverse medical condition. That miscalculation only emboldened her further instead of triggering the terror it demanded.