Chapter 1024: Chapter 1024 - Taming Impossible Puzzles - End
Packing wasn’t complicated.
Ren did it using the Wolverine’s extended space with enough practice behind him that the process ran almost automatically while he thought about other things.
The materials he had accumulated. The documents Julius had insisted on delivering in person, which carried a political weight Ren was still processing in the background. The few personal items he had taken out to work through, process and cultivate in the recovery room, which now returned to their organized places in the beast’s space. All of it went in without needing his full attention, which was convenient because his full attention was occupied with a problem that had no dimensional storage solution.
Min appeared in the doorway with the naturalness of someone who hadn’t knocked because knocking would have been admitting he might not have been welcome.
"So what are you going to do?"
Ren tensed.
Not visibly. But Min had known him long enough to catch the fraction of a second too long before he answered.
"Visit all the known ruins," said Ren, without stopping the sorting. "Get the materials I’ll need to make the runes that aren’t on the market. See how far I can push in the Platinum ring now that my beasts are stronger. Look at how corruption has been affecting different surface and underground zones."
Min laughed.
Ren looked at him confused.
"So you’re running from them," said Min. "I didn’t expect that from you."
"I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have important things to do and..."
"Yes," said Min, nodding with the gravity of someone taking something extremely seriously that they were not taking seriously at all. "Very important things. Like the problem of the three female dragons who are going to tear you apart when they find you."
He laughed again.
Ren closed the Wolverine’s dimensional space, dropped onto the bed face-up, and stared at the ceiling with the expression of someone who had concluded that the ceiling was the only element of the room with no opinions about his life.
Min came over and sat on the edge of the bed with the energy of someone who was going to enjoy this conversation and wasn’t bothering to hide it.
"Why don’t you just face them at once? You could probably defeat all three of them together if it were a combat exam..."
Ren looked at him with narrowed eyes.
"I know you’re not Roran," said Min, before Ren could respond. "But I think you have a genuinely good opportunity here to accomplish something he could only dream of."
"Min..."
"Tell me."
Ren exhaled.
"Honestly," he said, with the voice of someone being more truthful than he had planned to be because the alternative was sustained discomfort indefinitely, "it’s not that I don’t understand Roran. The instinct exists in me too... I have a big curiosity about those things, obviously." A pause. "But I can’t stop feeling embarrassed just thinking about something like this. And even less do I want to imagine the consequences of suggesting it, having them look at me with contempt and never speak to me again."
Min laughed with that laugh of someone constructing a very vivid mental image.
"Yes," he said. "I can picture that clearly."
"That doesn’t help me at all..."
"Look, that would be the result if I asked for something like that." Min waved a hand. "You’re different. If you stand in front of them and tell them honestly that you don’t want to choose, maybe they even offer options, or at least give you time."
A pause.
"Which would mean you don’t have to run and have them hunt you down to kill you and divide your remains equally."
Ren looked at the ceiling again.
"I was also thinking that," he admitted. "The talk about running was just... I’d like to procrastinate a little longer." He muttered something that sounded like curses to several past Rens, in an unfavorable tone. "I don’t want to be the last Ren of the future who inherits the obligation of resolving all these unresolved things from his past selves."
Min nodded with the performative gravity of someone who understood the weight of the situation and also found it very entertaining.
"I’m going back to the academy normally," said Min, standing up. "I’ll ask to join Zhao’s group. Taro and the others will be there." He looked at Ren. "When you come back, I hope you’ll join us... Good luck."
Ren nodded.
Min walked to the door.
Opened it.
"I’ve held him up long enough," he said, toward the corridor.
All three of them took their mantles off and came in.
From the corridor behind them, Mayo gave Min’s hand a high five with the energy of someone completing a successful mission. "Good work," she said.
Min smiled.
’Traitor!,’ thought Ren, loudly enough for the thought to be heard in his face.
He sat up on the bed.
Looked at all three of them and swallowed with some difficulty.
He remembered his mother. ’Stand tall and firm.’
He remembered his father. ’You’ve been warned about the consequences.’
He remembered Min. ’They’ll give you time if you’re honest.’
He breathed deeply.
Got to his feet.
Raised his gaze with the composure of someone who had made a decision and was going to execute it.
Then he went slightly red thinking about Roran.
But he cleared his throat. Pressed his fist against his mouth for a moment. Then exhaled one last time and asked, in the most neutral voice he could construct with the time available:
"H-how can I help you?"
"We came to put all things on the table," said Larissa, with the ease of someone who had prepared this. "So this doesn’t keep moving forward without order or any kind of rules."
Ren swallowed. "What do you mean by ’this’?"
Liora put a hand on his shoulder.
"You can’t wait until you’ve kissed all of us to make a decision."
Ren went completely rigid.
The room had the specific silence of a space where a significant number of people were watching to see how someone responded to something. From the corridor, where the maids and guards were still clearly present because Mayo didn’t have the physiological capacity to remove herself when something interesting was happening and was transmitting that inability to everyone near her, came the kind of quiet that people produced when they were actively trying not to make noise.
This was the moment.
There was no more time to run from the decisions of past Rens.
So Ren straightened.
"All three of you are... bea... beautiful," he said, and bit the inside of his cheek with discretion. "And all three of you have done a great deal of stuff for me. So right now I’m not comfortable deciding the exact form of our future, we’re young, we have a whole life ahead, so I’m asking you for time to think and to develop as..."
All three of them laughed.
Ren looked at them.
"What?"
"Liora was joking, you don’t need to be so serious," said Larissa.
Ren looked at Liora.
Liora nodded with the face of someone who was not remotely sorry.
Ren exhaled.
"You can take as much time as you need," said Larissa, in the tone of someone closing a negotiation they had already prepared. "But we came to an agreement and we wanted you to know about it."
Ren looked at her, already more relaxed, and nodded.
"You marry all three of us or none of us."
Ren’s brain shut down.
Not metaphorically. It was a physical and specific process in which information arrived at the processing system, the system received it, and the system decided it needed a moment to locate its metaphorical glasses before continuing reading the commands.
He looked at Larissa as if asking for confirmation.
Larissa nodded, with complete seriousness.
He moved his head as if his neck were a machine that needed oil and looked at Luna.
Luna had gone red. She was looking slightly to the side. But she nodded too.
Finally he looked at Liora.
Liora was smiling the large smile of someone who knew that what had just happened was exactly what she had wanted to happen. She also nodded.
"That said," Liora added, "you can’t add anyone else while you’re ’taking your time’ to think about it. Or you lose the three-for-one offer."
Ren sighed...
Then straightened to his full height with the dignity of a dragon his mother had described correctly.
He told them that being the case, with the three of them being the only people who mattered to him among everyone he had ever met, including the girls from social studies, he accepted the offer without hesitation.
He embraced all three of them.
He lifted them.
And there was probably even some dramatic lighting from somewhere.
But that was only in the version of events that Ren’s brain constructed in the second immediately following their announcement...
In the actual version:
Ren went completely rigid.
Produced something unintelligible.
And disappeared.
The shadow step took him to the corridor, which was full of maids and guards and Mayo, so it immediately took him further, and the process of finding a location without witnesses required three additional jumps because the castle turned out to be inconveniently populated in every direction he tried.
’There is no way I’m doing anything like that in front of everyone. Especially not in front of Mayo.’
’Not in front of the guards.’
’Not in front of anyone with eyes!’
He ended up in a section of the garden that was usually empty, back against a wall, his heart operating at a rate that no tamer should be sustaining without an active beast involved.
’Who am I kidding!! I couldn’t even act intimate with one of them in front of the other two!’
Just thinking about having that kind of conversation with all three of them at the same time had done something to the regulation systems that normally functioned well under pressure.
A private conversation with one of them: heart rate elevated.
Two simultaneously: probable system failure.
All three at once: heart explodes, certain death.
He felt three presences.
Each one with their specific mana signature, recognizable because he had spent enough time in proximity to all three of them that his system registered them before his mind had to do the conscious work.
The particular weight of Luna’s shadow energy. The clean precision of Larissa’s light. The warmth of Liora’s fire..
All three of them were approaching.
With fast jumps.
Ren surveyed the garden, calculated escape routes, and cursed every past Ren who had made decisions that had put him in this position again.
End of Transition Arc...
