Incubus Living In A World Of Superpower Users-Chapter 284: Begin Trace Request

Too recent.

Everything around her looked calm—on the surface, at least. The people inside the building walked with straight backs and even smiles, their voices soft, their movements steady.

Still, the longer she watched, the more it felt wrong in that quiet way most people never catch—like a script being followed too well, like a performance that had rehearsed safety until it forgot what safety even meant.

She didn’t step inside.

She didn’t need to.

She kept walking, her presence slipping down the street like a cold breath between shadows, until a strange stillness crept in—the kind that makes you pause, not because you see something, but because something feels like it should be there.

A flicker passed over her skin.

Thin, quick.

Like the wind slipping through a seam in the sky.

She looked up, calm as ever.

There was nothing.

But whatever it was—it had passed.

"Something moved above the atmosphere," she said into the silence.

Deacon’s voice followed a moment later, steady and unreadable. "Traceable?"

"No," she replied. "But it noticed me."

He didn’t answer right away. Then: "Watcher?"

"Possibly."

"Be careful."

She gave a small nod, more out of habit than necessity—he wouldn’t see it, but the motion felt grounding.

Then, near a soot-smeared wall tucked just out of direct view—half-swallowed by grime and old construction—she saw it.

A sigil.

Worn down, almost erased, but not completely.

It wasn’t cult. It wasn’t sanctioned. It wasn’t marked for destruction.

And underneath it, in the faintest strokes of paint that had been scraped but never removed—

Nocturne.

Her eyes didn’t widen. Her posture didn’t change. But something inside her paused.

She stared at the word, not with fear, not even with recognition, but with the kind of quiet tension that grows when a puzzle piece appears in a place no one was supposed to know had a puzzle at all.

"This name," she said softly, almost like she was talking to herself now, "shouldn’t be here. And the fact that it is... and the fact that no one bothered to fully erase it..."

She didn’t finish the sentence.

Didn’t need to.

Because she wasn’t alone.

Not nearby.

Not visible.

But far above—on some unseen ledge that no ordinary human could reach—something perched.

It wasn’t hiding, not exactly. And it wasn’t watching her either.

It was watching what she was watching.

She turned her gaze upward, slow and deliberate.

And for a single, breathless second, she saw it too.

A shimmer—not light, not shadow. Just... attention. Like the air itself had a heartbeat.

And then it was gone.

She didn’t chase.

She never did.

Instead, she turned away, slipped back into motion, and followed the road until the street narrowed into a curved junction where old satellite feeds met the government’s public interface.

The kind of building made to feel accessible, with clean walls and helpful logos, but buried beneath enough bureaucracy and low-level encryption to discourage anyone from ever actually using it.

But she wasn’t anyone.

She didn’t push a door open.

She didn’t set off a single alarm.

She passed through the entrance like mist, unnoticed and unrecorded—not because she was invisible, but because the systems didn’t even register her as a possibility.

Inside, the first level was quiet—rows of outdated terminals flickering with half-loaded menus and error prompts no one had bothered to fix.

This was the face they showed the public: inefficient, sluggish, and unimportant.

She moved past it without hesitation.

There was a wall deeper in—one not listed in the blueprints.

She didn’t touch it. She didn’t force it.

She just stood in front of it, letting her breathing slow and her body fall into rhythm with the low electrical pulse of the structure itself. It was not interference but resonance.

And then the wall simply... thinned.

It didn’t open.

It stopped being solid.

She stepped through.

Inside, the air was cold. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

There were no lights. No cameras. No desks. Just a ring of silver-gray panels—flat, reflective, humming so softly they sounded like they weren’t even sure they existed yet.

"Begin trace request," she said, voice even.

There was no audible reply, but lines lit at her feet, threading outward in neat arcs as the system engaged—not with prompts or passwords, but with questions woven into pulse and posture, into heartbeat and intent.

This wasn’t a network you hacked.

It was a presence you convinced.

Data unfolded around her—quiet screens suspended in midair, each no larger than a page but layered in concentric spirals.

Search: Nocturne.

No direct files.

No registry profiles.

But the web didn’t come up empty.

Lilith Nocturne.

Unlisted in any active battlegrounds but noted in the aftermaths—always just off-frame. Strategic advisor. Crisis negotiator.

Tied into classified cleanup missions, emotional contagion reports, entertainment blacklists, and even the redirection of funding away from high-threat zones.

There was one record of a sealed-class entity being "neutralized"—the signature confirming the report was redacted, but the curvature of the old royal crest still bled through the blank field.

She didn’t frown.

Didn’t react.

But the air around her grew just a touch stiller.

Then, with a flicker of thought and a shift in posture, she changed the query.

Ethan Nocturne.

Nothing.

No school.

No birth records.

No combat logs. No training scores. No bloodline entry.

Not even a ghost file.

She paused, then refined the search.

Cross-reference: genetic proximity, discarded metadata, associated surnames.

Two names surfaced.

Evelyn Moonshade.

Everly Moonshade.

Minimal entries—joint housing approval, baseline medical screenings, one flagged report for "abnormal energy containment." No resolution. No cause.

Each one ended the same way:

Classified by Direct Authority.

No department. No stamp. No trail.

Just that phrase—like a wall carved into light.

She pulled back slowly.

Didn’t cancel the session. Didn’t leave a fingerprint. Just let the data reseal itself.

But beneath her feet, something stirred.

A single code thread deep in the system’s core flickered like a matchhead catching flame.

And elsewhere, far beyond the clouds, an orbital sensor blinked once and sent a single confirmation line down into a secured channel.

Inside a dimly lit observation deck at the upper edge of Earth’s orbital defense perimeter, Velmora Nyx turned her eyes toward the main screen.