Chapter 958: Taming His Core - 3 |
Selthia had gotten to her feet.
"That nice body of yours doesn’t do much for you in here, so lovely yet useless you know." Not cruel or mocking tone. Just like a data point she was sharing, mono-tone the way someone mentions the weather before deciding whether to bring a coat.
He breathed. Not because the oxygen mattered, in this space that was a concept open to debate, but because he needed the two seconds it took to do it correctly. Full breath in, slow breath out. The kind Lin had made him practice until it was reflex, back when he thought it was just a breathing exercise and before he understood it was the reset button she was actually installing.
Lin’s first rule: ’build the foundation.’
The body is the foundation that everything else sits on. Without a real foundation, the bonuses have a low ceiling. It’s not just the bonus that matters. It’s what the bonus is multiplying.
The mushroom’s light was still there, faint, slowly reconstructing the casing around the seed. His first beast needed to sleep. He had understood that. Forcing it again would be the kind of mistake that didn’t get corrected easily, the kind you paid for in a currency that wasn’t just mana.
He breathed it in the way he’d learned to breathe in, not grabbing for it, just opening the channel and letting it find him.
The first bonus of his first beast opened.
Not what he needed... But more than he’d had thirty seconds ago.
Same pattern of attack.
"Plenty of strength and speed," he said. "But your technique is zero and your movement has huge gaps."
"There are many more important variables," he said, breathing through the sentence. "My teacher covers all of them."
"You’re faster than before," she conceded. "But only by a margin, you shouldn’t be able to..."
The punch landed.
The purple-diamond scales absorbed the impact without acknowledgment, without so much as a sound. Like hitting a mountain.
Her counter arrived while he was still between positions. He covered, barely, but the blow caught his side and drove him back several meters.
Still standing.
The feeling that worked in his favor.
Faster. Stronger. Not doubled, nothing so dramatic, but enough that the space between him and Selthia felt different. He could feel the gap in his own reflexes closing slightly at the edges.
Selthia laughed while she defended. A genuine sound, not mockery nor the polished amusement she deployed when she wanted to unsettle someone, but the unguarded laugh of a person who is enjoying themselves in a way they hadn’t anticipated.
Ren processed it and changed what he was trying to do.
But scales were a static defensive system. They weren’t a balance system. They weren’t a reaction system. A tamer covered in armor was well protected against being hit, and significantly less protected against being moved.
He had already moved.
Selthia took the bait on the first and broke her stance on the second. Her weight shifted to cover the anticipated angle.
The leg sweep caught her before she could redistribute weight. She went down, and Ren was already there before she even finished falling, his hands finding her ankles, back muscles engaging, using the momentum of her own fall and adding to it with a full rotation that carried her in a wide arc over his head.
Ren chose not to say that out loud.
"Fine," she said. In a tone that had nothing fine about it.
Her posture changed. The way she occupied the space she was standing in changed.
He didn’t have the reaction time to close that gap.
He breathed again.
Two sensations that together didn’t soften anything.
And underneath it, something steadier, the part of him that Lin had spent years building past the point where pain could reach it.
More strength.
Not dramatic yet like a transformation. Just the next rung of the ladder, made available because the foundation underneath it was solid enough to hold it.