Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1109: Chapter 1109 - Taming the Wall - Acknowledgment - 2

Sirius looked down at Ren.

This was the boy who had dragged him out of the crystal. The one who had willingly thrown himself into the suffocating depths of an ancient ruin, fought back a tide of absolute corruption from within the door’s mechanisms, and purged the rot from his own veins.

This was the boy who had stubbornly clung to consciousness, bleeding from his eyes and ears, until there was absolutely nothing left to fight.

Now, wrapped in the quiet stillness of sleep, the crushing weight of the world had momentarily lifted from his features. With his face finally relaxed, stripped of the agonizing tension of combat, he looked exactly like what he was beneath it all: a very young man. He looked barely older than the infuriating kid Sirius remembered leaving behind in the forest what felt like only hours ago.

Slowly, Sirius shifted his gaze toward Luna.

And his curse, the suffocating, hyper-tuned empathy he had spent his entire life failing to turn off, showed him the truth.

His daughter was standing perfectly still beside Ren’s bed. To the untrained eye, she was a statue of royal composure. But to Sirius, she was a screaming tempest. He could feel the whirlwind churning violently inside her chest.

It wasn’t just the profound, overwhelming gratitude anyone would feel toward the savior of their father. It wasn’t just the breathless relief of seeing a comrade survive. There were other, vastly more complicated layers buried beneath the surface. It was a dense, tangled, agonizing longing. Sirius recognized the exact frequency of that emotion immediately, because he had felt it himself. It was the exact same all-consuming, terrifying gravity he had felt whenever he looked at a woman with hair a color his daughter had not inherited.

Mayo, who possessed a terrifying, preternatural radar for silences that desperately needed to be broken, chose that exact moment to speak.

"The three most beautiful and powerful maidens in the kingdom, absolutely lost staring at a sleeping boy," Mayo drawled, leaning against the wall. She spoke with the breezy, casual tone of someone merely commenting on the afternoon weather. "Ren really does have impossible luck... Though, I suppose karma balances the scales by ensuring he gets brutally beaten to a pulp every now and then."

Sirius frowned, the shift in his expression barely a millimeter.

But the three girls reacted instantly.

Liora flushed first. Liora never bothered to hide what she felt; she wore her heart directly on her sleeve, and her cheeks flooded with a bright, undeniable crimson the second the words left Mayo’s mouth.

Larissa reacted a fraction of a second later. She cleared her throat softly, turning her head away. It was the highly controlled, dignified blush of a woman who felt the heat but absolutely refused to let it govern her expression.

And then there was Luna. She reacted last, precisely because she fought it the hardest. The blush fought its way through her icy, princess-perfect facade in the end too, staining the tips of her ears and dusting her cheeks with a frantic, undeniable warmth she couldn’t suppress.

All three of them.

Triggered by the exact same flippant comment about the exact same sleeping boy.

Sirius registered the entire sequence of events in the single second it took to unfold.

Suddenly, the suspicions that had begun forming the moment his empathy touched Luna’s whirlwind began to solidify into a very concrete, very unsettling shape.

His mind began connecting the dots. He remembered his old conversations with Selphira. He remembered, from the years prior to his petrification, how both Selphira and Julius had casually, yet pointedly, dropped hints about their deep interest in pulling someone like Ren into their respective families. They recognized his monstrous talent, his unmatched utility, his terrifying capacity to do the things absolutely no one else in the world could do.

And now, here was his precious daughter. Looking at this boy with a hurricane of longing in her soul, blushing in perfect unison with two other young women representing highly relevant houses.

Sirius didn’t know the exact details yet... He didn’t have the hard facts.

But Sirius Starweaver knew how to analyze a battlefield.

And the political logic his mind immediately suggested squeezed his chest in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the grief he carried for Lykea. This was a different breed of pain. It was the cold agony of a father waking up from a crystal tomb to discover that while he was frozen, his little girl had grown up.

She had been swept into a massive, sprawling game of political chess.

He hadn’t been there to protect her. He hadn’t been there to ensure that whatever arrangement she had fallen into was built on her actual happiness, rather than her value as a high-house bargaining chip for the people who moved the world from the shadows.

He wanted his daughter to be happy.

Beneath the armor, beneath the stoicism and the military discipline, that was the only thing he truly cared about.

He looked at the battered, sleeping boy. He looked at his fiercely blushing daughter. And a dark, highly specific paternal worry coiled in his gut. He didn’t have all the information yet, but his instincts were screaming.

Was this boy actually going to give Luna the happiness she deserved?

Or had his daughter been boxed into the exact same tragic arrangement so many high-born daughters suffered, a political marriage where personal joy was the very first casualty sacrificed on the altar of the "greater good" they didn’t even know about?

He didn’t say a single word out loud.

It was too soon to make accusations, and he was missing far too many pieces of the puzzle.

But sitting there, right beside the bed of the boy who had pulled him from the abyss, Sirius made a silent, iron-clad vow. He was going to find out the absolute truth. And if the answer wasn’t the right one, his miraculous resurrection from the crystal was going to serve one more profound purpose.

He would dismantle the entire board if he had to.

Beside him, entirely unaware of the calculations running through her father’s head, Luna continued to watch Ren. She still carried that internal whirlwind her father could read so clearly, completely convinced her mask was holding.