Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1106: Chapter 1106 - Taming the Wall - Fatherhood

Sirius woke up first.

It wasn’t because he had pushed his body less than Ren, nor was it because his elite biology naturally recovered faster. In the end, during the harrowing escape, Sirius had sustained the most prolonged, brutal physical exertion of the two. He had sprinted, dodged, and bled through ten collapsing chambers, dragging his limits with a body that had only just been returned to flesh.

But Ren’s exhaustion existed on an entirely different way.

Ren hadn’t just run or fight. He had waged a complex, agonizing mind and mana war against corruption. He had fought it within the ancient door’s mechanisms, within Sirius’s chest, and deep inside his own circulatory system, over and over again, until the foundational internal architecture holding his system together had violently collapsed.

Through sheer, terrifying willpower, Ren had remained conscious until the absolute last possible second. He held onto his sanity until his senses confirmed the oppressive, necrotic mana of the horde was finally out of range. Only then, in the ’safety of the open sky’, did his Wolverine violently vomit the nine women and the two surviving prisoners. And only then did Ren’s brain finally allow him to pass out.

Sirius had experienced absolutely none of that.

He hadn’t been awake to see Luna desperately haul the prisoners into her own shadow. He hadn’t seen the women falling from the sky that Luna and Larissa rapidly distributed among the giant felines and the massive shadow wolf, which had finally materialized to help once they confirmed there was no pursuit. The blistering, immediate speed of Luna and Larissa’s initial sky rescue had rendered any attempt by Selthia to chase them utterly pointless; the ancient entity had already fallen back into the abyss at the start as a too big a disadvantage in the race to the city.

Sirius and Ren had missed the entire flight back to the city.

Had missed Mayo’s inappropriate, tension-breaking jokes aimed directly at Luna. Had missed the deeply intense, whispered conversation the eleven women shared about Ren, about Luna’s feelings, and about Sirius’s own lingering, probability of disapproval for the multimarriage. It was a dense, highly intimate exchange that filled the entire journey home, one that none of the women present would forget anytime soon.

When Sirius finally opened his eyes, the roar of the abyss was gone.

He instantly knew he was in the castle.

The immaculate architecture of the royal quarters hadn’t changed a single inch in the years that, to him, had felt like mere seconds. The vaulted ceilings, the elegant proportions of the room, the specific, warm angle of the afternoon light filtering through the towering windows, it was all exactly the same.

A profound, overwhelming wave of relief washed over him. It was deeply comforting to find something else the relentless march of time hadn’t stolen from him while he was frozen in the dark.

Luna was sitting in a chair to his right.

The very first thing he saw was his daughter offering a curt, silent nod to Matilda, who was quietly organizing something on the left side of the bed. The head maid immediately curtsied and practically sprinted out of the room, undoubtedly rushing to alert the high command that the Starweaver had finally awakened.

Sirius turned his head and looked at Luna’s face...

Instinctively, he bit his lower lip.

It was his oldest, most reliable trick. He would bite down hard, gnawing on the flesh until he tasted the hot, metallic tang of his own blood, forcing his brain to focus entirely on the sharp physical pain. It was a deliberate misdirection, a way to aggressively ground himself so that the devastating emotional reaction of looking at his daughter wouldn’t bleed onto his face.

He had done it thousands of times. It had worked flawlessly for years. It worked in front of Luna, in front of the nobles, and in front of his soldiers. They all knew the imposing, immovable Sirius Starweaver; none of them knew the shattered man hiding beneath the armor.

But today, the internal agony was different.

Down in that dark hole, standing before the colossal, mutated jaws, he had finally made his peace with dying.

He had deliberately unearthed the single most painful, beautiful memory he possessed, and he had fully accepted that he was going to die with that image in his head.

But he had unearthed the ghost, and he hadn’t died...

Now he was alive, lying in a soft bed, and Luna was sitting right in front of him. She had grown so much without him there to see it.

She looked even more like her mother than the last time he had seen her. The resemblance was so flawlessly exact that looking at her meant looking at two people at the exact same time. The daughter he had in front of him, and the wife he had lost, perfectly overlapping in the same face, separated only by the shade of her hair and the color of her eyes.

He bit down harder. The blood flooding his mouth was vastly more than normal.

And yet, the trick failed miserably.

For the very first time in years, sitting in front of the one person he desperately needed the facade to work for, the iron wall shattered. The famously stoic, terrifying commander didn’t even feel the tears fall until they were already tracing hot paths down his cheeks.

He didn’t try to wipe them away.

He had no other choice left.

He surrendered... He finally stopped pretending.

Sirius looked his daughter directly in the eyes, truly facing her in a way he had never possessed the courage to do in his entire life.

"I... I regret so much... I am so sorry..." His voice broke on the very first syllable.

"I am sorry for being a practically absent father. For never being capable of keeping you closer... For disappearing into my work." He swallowed hard, the taste of blood and salt mingling heavily in the back of his throat. "I’m sorry for letting myself be tricked and trapped, for losing down there. For risking your mother’s heart and breaking my promise to you. For being a coward who preferred distance over enduring the pain I was supposed to endure." He couldn’t stop crying. The tears flowed freely. "I am so, so sorry, my daughter..."

Luna drew in a long, shaky breath.

She stared at him. With her hyper-tuned perception, she felt the bleeding pulse of her father’s mana. She knew instantly that this wasn’t a polite apology meant to smooth over an uncomfortable silence.

It was a confession... It was the raw, unfiltered truth of a man who had spent years suffocating his own soul, and it finally finding an exit wound.

Luna violently jerked her head to the right, desperately hiding her face so he couldn’t see her own facade crumbling.

"I-I forgive you..."

Her voice trembled on the first word and refused to steady.

"I think... sniff... I think I understand why you did it."

She was crying too.

With trembling fingers, she reached into her shadow space. A soft, brilliant glow illuminated the dimming room as she pulled out the Light crystal, the crystallized heart of her mother. Still keeping her face turned away, she held it out where Sirius could clearly see it.

It was absolutely pristine.

There wasn’t a single microscopic fracture. There wasn’t a hint of wear and tear from use, not even the slight dullness Sirius remembered from his own time carrying it. It had been completely regenerated and preserved with desperate, meticulous devotion.

The flawless state of the crystal spoke volumes; it articulated exactly how fiercely Luna had loved and protected that core in his absence, screaming truths she could never bring herself to say out loud.

"B-but if you ever do something so stupid again..." Her voice cracked entirely, shattering in the quiet room. She violently forced the pieces back together, her tone dropping into a fierce, tear-choked warning. "...like trying to sacrifice yourself and leave us alone... I will never forgive you!"

The last remaining thread holding them together snapped.

They both broke down completely.

The tears came in heavy, unstoppable waves. Father and daughter, sitting just inches apart, fundamentally unraveling in the exact same room after years of forcing themselves to mourn in total isolation.

But even as they wept, they both instinctively clamped their jaws shut.

They gritted their teeth, violently swallowing their sobs, terrified of making a single sound. It was the one tragic, undeniable trait they shared in that exact moment: the deeply ingrained, inherited instinct to suffer in silence. They were terrified that someone in the hallway might hear them.

The stoic, unyielding commander had to remain the stoic, unyielding commander. The flawless, composed princess had to remain the flawless, composed princess.

Even though, on the inside, they were exactly the same. They were just two broken people who had missed each other far more than they knew how to express.