The hall made no sound after a collective intake of a strong breath.
Luna made no sound either.
Orion looked at the boy standing in the center of the room, hand still raised, head down, scroll in his grip, and for the first ti in the entire session his expression did sothing it had not done before.
It beca uncertain.
Not visibly in any way the hall could have told just by looking… But the assessnt behind his eyes had changed texture, the way a man's face sharpens when he sits down to a ga he thought he understood and finds a piece on the board he hadn't accounted for.
He took a instant to study Ren properly.
The hand wasn't trembling, the scroll was the real one with the seal and the offer was what it was. Ren's recognitions, all of them added to Luna's, placed on the table in exchange for the crystal and Luna's freedom. Orion had sat through the entire reading of that list and he knew precisely what all of it wasn't. The territories, the rights, the jurisdictional access that had taken Julius and Arturo an hour to defend... It wasn't a small thing.
But what caught his attention, was not the offer.
It was the energy coming from the boy.
Faint still, barely perceptible to anyone who didn't know exactly what to look for. Orion knew what to look for. He had spent years learning to read it in the mutants, in the crystals, in the movent patterns underground that almost no one else had been willing to study up close. And what he was feeling around Ren Patinder wasn't the clean residual mana of a tar.
It was sothing else.
Sothing that told him, with a quiet and specific certainty, that the situation had made this particular tar very angry.
'Interesting.'
Orion let the curiosity lead him before he spoke.
"What a strange situation," he said, directing it at the air more than at Ren directly. "And yet obvious, in so ways... Why didn't you speak before? Why now? Why at this precise mont and not when your own rewards were being disputed?" He tilted his head with the expression of soone working through a simple puzzle, the first answer presenting itself almost as a joke. "Could it be that you have 'feelings' for my niece and simply couldn't bear watching her bound to another man, even at the cost of everything you own?"
He said it the way soone says the most absurd answer first before getting to the ones that actually interest them, as a tease, as a throwaway. His real calculations were running underneath: the genetic key, the third vault, whether giving him the scroll was a feint designed to get him to release the crystal and the barrier with it before all the tars on the room collapsed on him.
Ren didn't answer imdiately.
The silence stretched a second longer than it should have. Then:
"Before, I just couldn't speak."
Said simply. Without explanation or apology, the way soone states a physical fact. And it was exactly that… Ren had woken abruptly, pulled upward by sothing between the last reserves of his mushroom's effort and the mantis bond still functioning at the edge of its capacity, a final push that had gotten him to control his own feet and into this hall with just enough left in him to stand. He was still very tired and far from his peak; in fact, like many others, he was still severely worn down by the continuous battle with the mutants, and his bonds weren't fully repaired, only his bond with his mantis was active. For most of the others on his side, it was the sa: severed, weak, or barely stable bonds due to the recent battle.
But even so, Ren was still emitting so scary amounts of power, and that was because the corruption that remained connected near his core was returning due to his ntal state.
He had finally woke up abruptly upon hearing about Luna being forced into marriage, the fungus had played a part in it, struggling to control him through the mantis's ability and giving him the final push... Although in the end, the poor 'little one' fainted.
The good thing about that was that he managed to wake Ren up just in ti.
The bad thing is that he didn't manage to finish his other task before running out of energy and completely sealing the core and the seed, which again left a small opening for the corruption in Ren's core.
Sothing seed to be changing in his beast, since before he wouldn't have shown any interest in the "mundane things" of Ren's life or his friends, much less in having to help him move to collect his rewards on ti. Rewards that Ren was now willing to hand over…
So the mushroom had spent itself helping him… The sealing of the last gap in their nucleus had been left incomplete, and the small opening that remained was doing again exactly what small openings in a nucleus did when the tar's emotional state stopped being calm.
The corruption that had stayed connected near his core was responding to him. Not to a technique, nor to a decision. To the state of mind of soone who had heard sothing he was not going to accept.
Finally, Orion had almost hit the nail on the head with his first question, which turned out not to be a joke or teasing; it was the exact right thing.
Ren finally raised his eyes.
It was the first ti since the door had opened that his face was visible to the hall.
"But I can speak now," Ren said. "And whether an important friend like her matters to the way you're suggesting or not, that doesn't change what I said. I would have given all of these rewards without hesitating. It wasn't even a decision."
The hall processed that.
Orion processed sothing different.
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