It was too good to be true. Ren knew that. Part of him had always known it, with that sa cold certainty with which he knew two plus two equaled four... The sensation was false. It had to be.
But convincing the rest of him that knowledge mattered was a different problem entirely. The power filling his core didn't hurt. It didn't burn the way that ball of spiritual energy had, that slow but intense heat he'd felt seeping through his mana lines. This was nothing like that. This felt like pulling off a pair of boots he hadn't realized were too tight, like taking a full, deep breath after so long without one that he'd forgotten what breathing right felt like.
Freedom.
The word rose in his mind without invitation. Like sothing that had been waiting for him.
And in that exact instant, another voice crushed it.
"You must fight against the sensation of 'freedom', it's completely false! The complete opposite!"
Liora.
Not a soft or old blurry mory. It was her exact voice with that particular urgency she only showed when sothing truly mattered too much to her and there was no longer any ti to pretend otherwise. Sharp and desperate, but not the desperation of soone afraid, the desperation of soone who knew sothing the others didn't, and couldn't say it fast enough.
Ren held onto that.
It was the only thing he could do. He held those words like a fixed point while everything else kept filling up with sothing that felt glorious and wrong at the sa ti.
The white haired girl noticed before he opened his mouth.
Her hands stopped, just for a mont. Her eyes, too still and calm for soone her age, moved across him with the sa focused attention Ren associated with experienced tars fighting, not with one person looking at another. "Don't do that," she said.
No rise in tone or threat behind it… Just the sa way you'd tell soone their hand was over an open fla, not to scold them, just because it hurts and because the result is predictable and because it makes no sense.
"If you start swimming against the current in here, it's going to hurt quite a bit." She paused briefly, almost considerately. "And not because I want it to hurt you. It's just how this works."
Ren t her eyes. "Thanks for the warning."
She studied him for another second, parsing whether there was sarcasm and whether it was worth responding to.
She decided it wasn't.
"You lost sothing," she said instead. Changing angle with ease Ren found more disturbing than a threat. "Sothing that's been with you since the beginning of all this." Her partially crystallized fingers slowed as she spoke, as though giving the idea room to settle. "I don't know if you actually liked it, or if you just got used to having it."
Ren said nothing.
But she could see the answer. Read it in the silence that spoke louder than words because it was shaped by loss.
She continued. Her voice dropped one register, not to intimidate, but to make it feel closer. More personal.
"I can give you what it gave you. The function, what it did for you before... Except this ti there's nothing holding it back, nothing deciding how fast you can grow and by which path and for what reason." A pause. "Just you."
She was talking about his mushroom... His first beast. About the silence having occupied this space ever since the familiar presence that had been part of his developnt as tar from the beginning had withdrawn behind a wall he himself had built and Ren didn't know how to overco. He wouldn't lie to himself saying he didn't miss it.
He missed it. That was the simple uncomfortable truth.
The mushroom had been there from the start. Had been a ntor, a guide and a partner. Almost a friend in a way that transcended normal tar-beast bonds. And now it was gone. Sealed away… Silent. Leaving a void that nothing else filled no matter how many other friends he had. No matter how strong he beca or how many battles he won.
She saw it in his face before he finished processing it himself. A small smile crossed hers, different from the ones before. Less calculated… Like sothing genuine had surfaced, briefly, beneath everything else.
"There it is," she said quietly. "You don't even have to do much. Just stop resisting completely. I'll handle the rest. We wake it up and you get that back, but without the limits you had before."
The argunt had a serious flaw… It sounded too good.
And Ren knew, with that sa cold, analytical part that never went fully quiet, that things which sound too good often carry a cost they're not showing you yet.
And yet...
The offer was tempting. Dangerously tempting. Because it targeted the exact vulnerability he'd been trying to ignore. The exact loss he'd been having a hard ti pretending didn't matter lately. The exact wound that hadn't healed despite ti passing.
Getting his mushroom back. Having that presence again. That voice. That guidance.
Just had to stop resisting.
Just had to surrender.
Such a small price for sothing so valuable. Such an easy solution to a problem that had been tearing him apart.
Then he saw them.
A fresh vision… Luna, a few ters away, reaching toward him with that particular tension in her expression she normally worked hard to hide. Larissa, shooting so light the artifact's suppression field swallowed before it reached him. Desperation visible even from a distance. Liora looking at him from Lin's arms with that expression she had when deeply worried.
And further back, that had been unable to break from the last defensive formation, his parents, pushing forward now that the mutants left them and being pushed back again by the pulses.
His friends, his allies.
"No," Ren said.
The girl didn't react with frustration. She simply turned her attention back to the crack and resud.
"Fine. I'd rather you'd relaxed and let this be easy, but you don't have a choice either way."
She pressed forward, and she was right... He couldn't stop her.
That had been clear from the first mont he'd tried to move his body in this space and found the paralysis was absolute. His resistance was exactly what she'd said: swimming against a current that didn't notice him.
The crack widened under her pressure
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