This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange

Chapter 736: Chapter 736: Cracks in the Armour

It began with a flicker.

A moment too small to notice—unless you were Kain.

One of the Starfire suits pulsed out of sync.

Barely. Just for a heartbeat. A lag in the energy transmission between the armoured tamer and their contract, as the contract launched a flame-based spiritual skill toward Queen’s swarm. Three Vespid guards dove from different angles.

The first took the brunt of the hit.

The second slashed through the flame trail.

The third aimed for the caster—not the contract, but the tamer in armor.

The armoured student twisted to avoid it but was still slightly grazed, although much of the harm was redistributed, but Queen’s guard had never intended to land a critical blow.

She was testing something.

And Kain saw it.

“That’s it…” he muttered under his breath, eyes narrowing. “It’s not flawless.”

“What?” Serena said, half-focused while her Elemental Guardian shifted between forms—coating the field in a sudden burst of mist and wind.

“The suits,” Kain said. “They aren’t fully responsive when the spiritual creature’s output spikes past a threshold and some of the energy needs to be redistributed for defence at the same time. Simply put, there is a lag at the same time a large amount of energy needs to be drawn to power a strong move as well as defend against a strong attack.”

Soren listening nearby tilted his head. “So what?”

“So if we can force them to both receive and divert energy at the same time—there’s a delay. Barely a second. But it’s enough.”

‘Unfortunately, this only applies when they are trying to increase the power of their skills using the equipment. If they just used the suits for defense and not offense, it’d be more difficult to find a crack in their armour… I’m surprised they aren’t just playing it safe’

He looked up at the field.

“Time to hammer the weak spot.”

———————————–

Aegis raised both arms as if understanding the command without words. Then he plunged them into the earth.

A shockwave of earth energy rippled outward.

The stage cracked—small fractures spidering beneath the feet of enemy contracts and their tamers. Some of the spiritual creatures flinched; the tamers stayed upright, but only just.

Then came the second wave.

From above.

Queen’s guards’ stingers descended like missiles, glowing a faint green powered by an extra burst of wind elemental power.

And Queen herself hovered high above, generating a spiritual pressure that seemed to thrum with resonance, though not like the armour. This was hive resonance. Organic, but not much less dangerous.

After emitting a green glow to provide a boost to her children, she screeched once—at a high-pitched nearly inaudible frequency—and the guards split apart, each diving for a different target.

The Starfire team reacted fast. The armour suits flared, distributing energy as expected. Plus to get rid of the rest of the impact not offset by the armour, they each activated various skills. However, none of the skills were either powerful enough, or drew on the shared network because there was no delay.

‘No worries…keep testing.’ Kain encouraged the Vespids, while Bea was simultaneously beginning to test out how the suits performed against mental-attribute attacks.

And if worse came to worse, he might have to test the effects of other types of energy against these suits as well…

————————–

Pheneos, meanwhile, never took his eyes off the field.

“They figured it out,” he muttered.

The engineering grad student beside him blinked. “Figured what out?”

Pheneos didn’t reply. Just went back to working, tightening a thread of spiritual wire and quietly twisting the casing shut on the repaired chestplate. But in his mind, the wheels were turning.

His teacher had known. Of course he had.

The shared resonance delay wasn’t some fluke in the design that Kain discovered. It was a calculated compromise in order to not miss the debut opportunity on this national stage—something they’d chosen not to fix.

‘A weakness is only a weakness if someone discovers it,’ his teacher had said. ‘If not, it’s just a variable. Let’s see how long it takes for them to notice.’

Pheneos had doubted it at first. Not the logic—his teacher’s logic was always impeccable—but the necessity. This was a tournament. Letting teammates risk loss just to test a theory?

But then again… Starfire had mot made it past fourth place in decades. A fifth-place finish again wouldn’t change their reputation. And the data gained would be invaluable.

It wasn’t a betrayal. It was a contribution to the nation.

Or at least that’s how Pheneos assuaged his pricked conscience.

Besides—he wasn’t just here to test the suits.

His fingers slid into his pocket and pressed lightly against the object hidden within.

A dense cube of alloy, about the size of a matchbox. The patterns on its surface resembled a spiritual Rubik’s Cube, constantly shifting. His teacher called it an ‘Energy Imprint Matrix.’ It could capture ambient fluctuations and categorize them into strain type, signature type, and origin affinity.

Naturally, such an advanced object was not being used to test basic elemental attributes used by the contracts in this tournament. He’d been told to watch Kain.

More specifically—what surrounded Kain.

‘He has mental attribute contracts. That’s unusual but reproducible,’ his teacher had said. ‘But there’s more around him than that. I sensed Abyssal traces. Weak, faint. But unmistakable.’

Pheneos had nearly dropped his hammer while working due to that statement.

Abyssal energy? From a human? How can a non-abyssal creature tame abyssal energy?

He hadn’t believed it—still didn’t, not entirely. But when his teacher had added: ‘He might have access to something beyond even that. An energy of a higher grade. Something I can’t replicate here in the lab.’

Well. That had been enough to convince him.

The Matrix in his pocket thrummed. Faintly. Weak pulses of incompatible spiritual frequencies trying to sort themselves.

He smiled.

They were getting closer to the answers they wanted. What they would do with those answers though was unknown.

One thing was for certain though, his former brief acquaintance with Kain wouldn’t prevent him from turning any compromising data over to his teacher if he required it.