Selthia was looking at Ren with a face expression that had moved past the point of fun into exasperated.
"That's a mistake," she said. The tone was different now, not the dry amusent she had been deploying since the start of this, not the careful observation. Sothing more direct, stripped of performance and with the particular calm of soone saying what they actually believe but still not especially caring whether the other person accepts it. "What you're doing right now… Letting that thing 'help' you is bad."
Ren didn't respond.
"The gold wants to play the 'good' one." Selthia tilted her head slightly. "But it's deceiving you, so you think we're the ones doing the deceiving. Because it wants exactly the sa thing as what you call corruption." A pause. "What they unfairly call corruption."
Ren closed his fists.
"The difference is that we're more honest about it," she continued. Her voice still had that calm… even when everything else around her was in motion. "Your 'false beast' plants seeds, cultivates them, directs them toward where it wants them to grow. And when they're large enough…" she opened one hand in a gesture that was almost elegant, the crystallized fingers spreading slowly, "...it will harvest them. The sa as us, just with fewer varieties of modification and apparently a better public image." Her eyes held his. "Let us give you the power to free yourself from an ending you won't be able to enjoy... Let us save you."
If it was a lie, it wasn't a simple one.
That was the most uncomfortable part.
Ren knew it the mont he heard it, and the knowing arrived from two directions at once: he watched for fluctuation in the mana and found none, and underneath that, the part of him that processed logical information at inconvenient monts, the part that had never once agreed to be quiet when he needed it to, turned the words over and found weight in them. There was sothing in what she had said that he couldn't dismiss cleanly, a thread of sothing real woven into it tightly enough that pulling the lie out would take the truth with it.
But it wasn't the complete truth either. It was too ambiguous for that… A half truth used as a door left half-open, waiting for him to step through.
"You might be right about so things," said Ren.
Selthia raised one eyebrow.
"But right now the only thing I'm interested in is getting you out of here, and you're distracting so..."
He ca at her.
♢♢♢♢
Sothing had changed.
Selthia had noticed it before he uttered a word. The way he moved was different, not simply faster in the straightforward sense of velocity increased, but recalibrated, as though Ren had quietly revised his internal map of where he ended and the fight began. She registered the shift not as a single observable thing but as a collection of small things that added up to a conclusion. But he was already close so she attacked.
The strike found only air.
Selthia's expression tightened for a fraction of a second before it smoothed back to neutral. She threw another. Ren didn't retreat, he shifted laterally, stepping into the angle that left her committed to the montum of the swing, and the purple-diamond claw raked across the empty floor of the library and found nothing.
She tried again. More velocity this ti, more mass behind it, increasing the fusion because when a thod stopped producing results the obvious answer was to escalate the force driving it. She pressed harder and moved faster and the outco was the sa: Ren had read her movents and was simply no longer where she had aid.
His three beasts powers had started filtering back in. Not at full strength, nothing close to what they would have been under normal conditions, but enough that each exchange left her in a slightly worse position than the one before it. Small deficits accumulating. The mushroom's power kept flowing from the faint pulsing light at the center of the space, steady and unhurried, and Ren absorbed it without forcing it, letting it find its own channels the way water finds the lowest resistance path.
Selthia pushed her fusion further. More bestial, more speed, more strength, the transformation deepening as she committed more to it. The empty architecture of the library began vibrating from the weight of two presences that kept escalating, the space between them shrinking and expanding in rapid sequences as they moved.
But for a good while now, Ren didn't take a single hit.
Sowhere between the fifteenth and twentieth attempt, he started laughing.
Not the laugh of soone enjoying themselves in a comfortable way. The specific laugh that cos when a person suddenly understands sothing, and the satisfaction of understanding it is enough that the laugh escapes before any decision is made about whether to let it out.
"You'd be better off leaving on your own," he said, slipping from another strike with a rotation that was almost unnecessarily smooth. "Otherwise I'm going to have to make this unpleasant while I push you out."
Selthia stopped.
"You're getting overconfident." Her tone carried the weight of a reminder, the reminder that less than five minutes ago she had sent him across the room. "A mont ago…"
"A mont ago." Ren shrugged. "Things change."
Selthia ca at him with genuine focus this ti.
Ren cleared her path with enough margin that the motion looked unhurried, reappeared at her side, and instead of hitting the armor he placed his fingers with perfect accuracy at the thinnest gap between the plates on her abdon, the exact point where, if you could perceive the mana pattern of a tar clearly enough, one of the primary flow nodes sat closest to the surface.
It was the sa technique he had worked out with Larissa once. Refined again with Luna after that. Find the pattern, locate the node, disrupt the flow before the system can compensate for the interruption. Selthia didn't have the sa flow pattern. The corrupted system was mutated, rerouted in ways that weren't standard, built around different principles. She wasn't Larissa. She wasn't Luna.
Who would have thought that a disrupted mana flow in a projected entity from a crystallized body would feel like being tickled?
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