Chapter 1293 - Taming the Old World - Compulsory Reaction - 4

Chapter 1293: Chapter 1293 - Taming the Old World - Compulsory Reaction - 4

"Grandma...!"

"It is the truth, making kids is nothing easy like the stories from the old days," Selphira continued, unfazed and visibly enjoying herself.

"Having children somehow gets harder with every passing generation. Even people who live past a hundred and fifty barely manage to have one or two in their entire lives. Look around you; we are the only creatures in this world that do not hatch from eggs... Half the time, I think the world itself finds us so strange that it flatly refuses to let us reproduce too much."

She slid a sideways glance toward Ren, her eyes glinting with genuine curiosity. "I am starting to believe we really did come here from the stars, just like that message in the ruins and that ’engineer’ fellow claimed."

Ren blinked, caught off guard that Selphira would casually bring that up right before a battle.

"Still, none of that matters right now," Selphira said, waving a hand through the air. "What matters is that the four of you need to put some real effort into it, my dears. You are my four favorite people in the world. I want to see you build a huge, stable family that lasts for at least a millennium. I want to walk through the halls and see your faces repeated everywhere I look, in a whole pack of noisy, weird little kids just like you!"

Liora could not stomach the embarrassment for another second.

"GRANDMA, STOP IT ALREADY!"

Blushing all the way to the tips of her ears, Liora marched over, planted both hands against Selphira’s back, and shoved the veteran commander toward the stone stairs. Selphira let herself be pushed out of the chamber with a low, raspy chuckle, thoroughly pleased to have planted the exact chaos she came down here to plant.

Yet, in a twist Ren did not see coming, the moment her grandmother was safely out of sight, Liora turned around and followed the old woman’s supposed "advice" anyway...

????

Instead of walking straight up to the pillar, Liora headed over to Luna and Larissa, who had stayed at the very back of the line to wait for Ren.

Leaning in close, she whispered something directly into their ears...

Both of them stiffened at once. Flushing slightly, the two girls looked at each other, then back to Liora, engaging in one of those silent, rapid-fire conferences the three of them often held that Ren could never quite figure out.

By then, the subterranean chamber had emptied out completely. Up on the surface, the squads were already falling into formation, Tamers climbing onto the backs of the flying beasts as the distant roar of mobilization filled the air.

Down here in the deep cavern of the crystal vein, there was nobody left to watch.

It was just Ren and the three of them.

"Alright," Ren said, stepping forward and extending his right hand toward the nearest of the three with his usual brisk urgency. "No time to waste. Come on, let me pass you the..."

His voice trailed off.

None of the three girls reached out to take his hand.

They stood there in a tight row, fidgeting and trading nervous glances, until Larissa, who was always the most capable of saying things straight to his face even when her voice trembled, spoke up for all three of them.

"We want you to pass us the dragon energy... with a kiss." She swallowed hard, forcing herself to hold his gaze. "Instead of the usual handshake."

Ren stood frozen at the base of the pillar, his hand still hanging in midair and his jaw dropping open.

A full 10 seconds of dead silence settled over the subterranean cavern.

The strongest General in the kingdom, the young man who had wrestled ancient dragons into the dirt, locked a cosmic parasite inside a metal cage, and carried the survival of humanity on his back without blinking, stood completely frozen at the base of the pillar.

His mouth hung slightly open, and for a brief moment, there was not a single coherent thought inside his head.

As he blinked, the translucent crystals creeping along his jawline caught the soft, golden glow of the central column. His mind spun its wheels, trying to process the request, and failing across the board.

"I... well, that is... the energy transfers the same way through... through physical contact, I guess," Ren stammered, the analytical side of his brain scrambling to take the wheel and losing traction by the second.

"Technically speaking, a kiss would work just fine as a conduit, though it is not really..." He swallowed, his fingers twitching where his hand still hung in the air between them. "I mean, looking at the mechanics, there is no real reason why it wouldn’t..."

Across from him, the three girls didn’t budge. Their faces were flushed bright red from ear to ear, yet their eyes remained fixed on him with quiet, stubborn resolve.

Fifty paces away, tucked into the shadowed alcove of the vault’s main stairwell, two invisible figures hidden beneath high-grade concealment artifacts were biting down on their own knuckles to keep from howling with laughter.

"He is dying out there," Mayo whispered, her entire frame shaking with suppressed giggles beneath the illusion veil. "Look at his face, Min. The man butchered a dragon yesterday morning, and three sentences from Larissa just broke his brain."

"Shhh, keep it down," Min hissed back, though he had to wipe actual tears from the corners of his eyes as his shoulders heaved. "If you blow the stealth by talking they are going to hear us. And if they catch us spying down here, Luna is going to murder us both. Slowly with the tiger too, not the quick way with the wolf."

"Honestly, if it meant I could laugh out loud right now, I think I would take the mauling..."

"It really would be worth it... wait, no, shut up, he is still buffering..."

The two eavesdroppers were riding a stroke of pure luck. Under normal circumstances, Ren, Larissa or Luna would have picked up the faint rustle of their breathing from across the room in an instant. Right now, however, all four people standing by the pillar had their blood pressure through the roof and their pulses hammering so loudly against their eardrums that a minor rockslide could have gone unnoticed.

Huddled together in the dark, Min and Mayo kept their eyes glued to the single greatest spectacle they had witnessed in the entire campaign. The end of the world was practically knocking on the city gates, a horde of monsters that doubled its numbers every day was marching across the plains, and humanity’s grand champion was completely falling apart because three girls asked him for a kinky kiss.

Down by the pillar, Ren finally pulled himself together... He did not have the time to stand here stammering all morning.

He decided to go through with it quickly.

If he was being honest with himself, the four of them had barely had a quiet moment alone over the past few weeks, with the constant scramble for survival eating up every waking hour of their days. More than that, he wanted to make the most of the opening. Plenty of people around the castle (some of them trusted advisors, and others far less reliable) had told him that the only real way to get comfortable with his unusual situation was to stop overthinking it and let group affection happen naturally.

And this was natural, Ren told himself, leaning heavily on the brand of mental gymnastics he always used to talk himself into things like ’What if they don’t like it this or that way...’ that still terrified him.