Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons novel Chapter 637

Chapter 637: Chapter 637 - Taming the Fifth Year - Broken Seal

The hardness of mana crystals was enormous. They were practically indestructible in normal use.

These weren’t fragile ornaments or decorative pieces. They should have been able to withstand anything Ren could produce, even with his abnormal reserves.

Should have.

The evaluator stood slowly, his expression with dropped jaw and mouth wide open showing genuine confusion. "That’s... How...?"

The words came out strangled, disbelieving. In forty years of administering these exams, he’d never seen anything like this. Students failed to activate seals. Students made mistakes in the pattern. But breaking the crystal itself?

Impossible.

In the upper stands, something changed in the air.

A shift, subtle but unmistakable. The kind of change that came when predators sensed wounded prey.

Jin Strahlfang straightened suddenly, his eyes gleaming at the recognized opportunity.

This was ’The chance’. The opening he’d been waiting for without knowing it.

It had seemed that everything was lost with the genius brat. He was too abnormal. Too talented. Too perfect in his execution of every protocol. Watching him succeed exam after exam had been torture, each perfect score another nail in Jin’s pride.

But that abnormality, that excessive power, now transformed into his downfall.

Ren only had three failures permitted before encountering enormous pushback, dozens of nobles could use those failures as leverage to force him to lose his candidacy for the most significant rewards.

Getting at least one, a failure, in this last exam was without doubt a victory.

And nine of the twelve months of the school year remained. They would have three more opportunities to force more errors. Three more exam periods. Three more chances to chip away at his perfect record.

But they had to seize the moment now.

Aldric, of course, saw the same chance. His mind, trained by decades of political maneuvering, was already calculating angles and approaches. How to frame this. How to guide the narrative. How to ensure this moment of vulnerability became permanent damage.

This was an unorthodox situation. It could go several ways...

It wouldn’t necessarily be automatically qualified as bad. If they took the crystal as "defective" and brought another that Ren didn’t break, they would have lost the best opportunity they might have all year.

They had to act. Fast.

Guide general opinion and especially the evaluator’s toward the ’correct’ conclusion: this was an obvious failure. The abnormal boy’s fault. Obviously.

It had never happened. So, "Only he could be the reason", that had to be the verdict.

"It’s evident," Aldric stood, his voice projecting with authority that cut right through the stunned silence, "that the student doesn’t have the necessary control over his ’enormous and aggressive mana’ to handle costly, no, invaluable and important artifacts."

The words were carefully chosen. Not attacking Ren’s power, which would be foolish. But questioning his control, his refinement, his worthiness to wield that power in a civilized society.

Jin stood immediately after, like following the alpha’s lead. "A noble who cannot seal documents appropriately cannot administer territory. This is precisely the kind of incompetence that..."

"The emblem clearly was defective," Min interrupted Jin, but his shout was immediately drowned out by multiple voices rising in opposition.

"Defective?" An elderly man from the Blackwood faction stood, his face red with indignation at the suggestion. "These emblems are manufactured by an ancient civilization more advanced than ours. What can you know about them?! They’ve never broken even with Dragarion’s enormous energy, the probability that it breaks from the amount of power is..."

"Insignificant," another completed, standing as well. The nobles were rising like dominoes, each one emboldened by the others. "Which means the problem is with the user."

The voices began overlapping, the auditorium transforming into a cauldron of opinions. The nobles who wanted to see Ren fail found their voice, speaking about inadequate mana control, about power without refinement, about the difference between brute force and technical skill.

About the danger of power without control.

It was a narrative that had been waiting for an opportunity to emerge. All the resentment, all the fear of this upstart who threatened their worldview, now had a target.

Min stood in the student stands, his face reddening with anger and frustration. "That’s ridiculous! Ren has the best mana control that..."

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