The crystals organized themselves in the air with fluidity, rotating in patterns that exhibited control of extensive practice without requiring further commentary.

The display was calm... Technical.

The opposite of corruption’s common feralness and rage.

"This is not a threat. It is the difference between reacting and preventing."

He let that settle for a moment before continuing.

"And unlike a certain ’small monster’, I do not fuse with these energies... I do not contaminate the bond with my beasts with something I don’t fully understand, I don’t take into my body a power I cannot explain and certainly I don’t take shortcuts that compromise what I am in exchange for a power I can’t control afterward."

Orion raised one hand, and the black crystal steadied above it.

The beam he directed toward the ceiling was powerful, genuinely powerful, the kind of output that shows the power scale without needing to be aimed at anything, and precisely vertical... Technical in its execution again. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

Without even the residual energy at the edges that made people want to step back. It was a demonstration designed to look like an advance in technology.

"What I offer this city is not corruption, as Yino was corrupted by using power in their bodies. This is applied technological understanding. And unlike what this hall witnessed just hours ago in the academy coliseum, the thing that feeds on external energy until it overflows, that requires others to contain it because its bearer can no longer contain it themselves when the dangerous corruption consumes them, I have shown no corrupted reaction of any kind in my own person."

He returned to his seat with the calm of someone who has said what needed to be said and doesn’t need to watch it land to know that it did.

"I am very different from that unnatural child, who is not technology, but an experiment as deranged as Yino’s, one that Julius and the ’old madwoman’ have been conducting in secret." A pause the master of ceremonies recognized immediately as the kind that precedes the central point of an argument, the brief silence that exists so the next sentence has the room it needs.

"That distinction matters when we speak of who can govern a territory with responsibility toward the people living in it. Someone who does not contaminate his bonds with corrupted energies but is capable of domesticating those energies for the good of the people. Someone with the understanding and the discipline to use that power without being consumed by it."

He looked at the hall.

"Someone like me!"

♢♢♢♢

Julius opened his mouth but Orion continued first.

"And before anyone attempts to deny the truth about Patinder, there is a witness to the recent incident at the academy coliseum," he said, shifting angle with the smoothness of another prepared movement, a pivot that doesn’t look like a pivot because it was built into the plan from the start.

Orion’s intelligence network had worked in the end... Someone had gotten close enough during the attack, drawn by the enormous visible pulses of black energy in the coliseum, even when the energy itself was too compressed by the void effect to be felt at distance, and had strayed close enough to understand the scale of what they were looking at.

"Someone who approached when the corrupted energy pulses couldn’t be sensed from far away, but who, upon getting close, sensed them exceed any documented scale." Orion’s tone didn’t shift toward alarm. It didn’t need to since he wasn’t performing surprise.

He was establishing another record.

"What this witness observed does not correspond to any known fusion technique. It does not correspond to any beast-tamer bond documented in the kingdom’s records."

Orion’s eyes moved across the hall with the calm of someone confirming that the expected reactions were occurring in the expected places.

"We are speaking, of course, of tamer Ren Patinder... And there is more! Since this is not the first incident of this kind involving him that has been concealed from the general public."

Luna didn’t change her expression.

But the mana around her, perceptible to anyone with sufficient sensitivity, had a variation that the master of ceremonies could not have described as passive in any sense.

Larissa was also stirred but placed a hand on Luna’s arm with the discretion of something that looked like a gesture of support and had a different purpose entirely.

"That first mutant attack on the city produced similar reports from my intelligence," Orion continued. "Less detailed, because the individual wasn’t as close to the situation, but he had sufficient perception for that mana pattern to be recognizable when it occurred again. An energy that belongs neither to the tamer nor to any known beast. That absorbs corruption instead of expelling it."

He let that land for a moment.

"That grows without control and that could destroy us."

Another pause to let the people make their own conclusions..

"Which is why I find myself compelled to fight for this noble cause through unconventional means. The castle has known this pattern, they has known it since the beginning." He looked at the hall, still not at Julius. "And it has chosen to conceal it."

Julius finally responded as Orion paused to not seem affected and with the voice of someone who has managed enough pressure in enough rooms that one more doesn’t change his register.

"Tamer Ren Patinder is a young man born in Yano with a verifiable five-year record at the academy," he said. "His progression is documented. His techniques are clean and have been supervised and have contributed meaningfully to many people. The presence of corrupted energy during a mutant attack of the kind we recently endured is not unusual in tamers with prolonged exposure, as was demonstrated in Yino, and..."

"There it is! The acknowledgement!" Orion moved on it immediately, with the timing of someone who had been waiting for exactly that opening.

"The prince’s own verifiable statement documents today what I have not been permitted to verify until now."

His voice stayed level but gained a dramatism to it.

"Is being touched by corruption an acceptable excuse for attacking one’s own allies? How many beasts does that boy have, exactly? Is there anyone in this hall who can answer that with certainty based on direct observation... and not on what he himself has chosen to show? Is this transgression of multiple corrupted bonds not precisely what Yino did?"

The silence that followed lasted long enough to matter.