Leveling Up by Seducing Milfs-Chapter 260. The Pages Were Not Important
Heinz had given back the gardening tool he had borrowed. He had seen a good deal on something he didn’t need and bought it without feeling bad about it.
He had gotten a little lost in the market district, but it wasn’t too hard for him to find his way back, which was better than average.
He took a shortcut through the Council district on his way back because the street he usually used was blocked by construction.
He saw the wall by the east wing of the Council building because the stonework didn’t look right. He had a keen eye for construction because he had made a few small mistakes in the past.
"Wait just one second... that’s not right," he uttered to no specific person.
The section of the wall near the archive that had burned appeared to have been repaired recently, but it seemed rushed, featuring mortar that did not match and a small irregularity in the stone seating, which suggested that the work was done to conceal something rather than to properly fix it.
"Whoever did this," he muttered, crouching to inspect the uneven seam, "was in a hurry. Or didn’t care. Or both."
Heinz knocked on the wall because he was interested in it, just like he was interested in most things. He gave the wall a few knocks, the kind you use to check if something is vacant.
Something inside the wall hit back.
He pulled his hand away. He looked at his knuckles, then at the wall.
"Hm," he said.
A person couldn’t make that sound. It was a resonance, the unique vibration of something tuned to a certain frequency that had just received a matching input, like a bell that had been waiting for decades in silence to be struck and had finally heard the right note.
The mortar broke along the uneven seam. A faint purple light came from the crack, first dim and then brighter.
Heinz stepped back two steps and looked at the wall with the look of a man who has caused something to happen and is quickly rethinking his choices.
"Alright," he said carefully. "Alright."
The wall throbbed again.
"Right." He straightened up and brushed the dust from his hands. "I need to find someone whose job this is."
He went to find an official to report this incident. The Council guard he found was busy getting people out of a nearby street because of some kind of structural noise that had just started.
"Excuse me," Heinz said. "There’s a crack in the east wall of the Council building, and it’s glowing."
The guard looked at him the way people look at someone who has said something they don’t have time for. "Sir, I need you to move back! There’s a structural concern in this area."
"Yes, I know. I caused it... partially, and that’s what I’m trying to tell you."
"Sir."
"The wall! On the east wing, it has some weird purple light, and it’s getting bigger."
"I cannot take a report right now." The guard turned back to the crowd. "Everyone, please move to the far side of the fountain—"
Heinz decided to take care of it himself because he thought time was important.
He went back to the wall, and he could see that the crack had gotten bigger. The purple light was slowly leaking out, casting faint color across the cobblestones.
"Alright," he said again, this time in the tone he used when a job had revealed itself to be more complicated than advertised. "A crack in a wall is still a crack in a wall."
He reasoned that the crack was the issue. He also knew that cracks in walls could be temporarily sealed with the right materials until the right repairs could be made.
He was close to a building site, and there were lead pipes there where the building was going up.
He picked one up, tested its weight, and nodded with the quiet confidence of a man who has improvised before and mostly been fine.
"This will do," he said. "Temporarily."
Heinz didn’t know that the piping was conductive because he wasn’t a mage. The pipe had been next to enchanted tools for long enough that some of the magic had infused the metal, a fact that Heinz was unaware of.
He pushed the pipe into the crack.
The resonance he had set off in the wall found the conductive material and used it as a bridge, having waited two hundred years for the right frequency. The outside node fragment, which had been cut off from the main node under the Council building’s foundation, reconnected.
The ground shook.
Heinz stumbled, caught himself against the wall, and then immediately thought better of touching it and letting go.
"Hm," he said, looking at the pipe, at the crack, at the light now pouring steadily from the seam like water finding a gap in a dam.
He clasped his hands behind his back.
"Well," he said. "That’s worse."
...
Inside the ward chamber, the storage crystal blazed.
Not with encryption from before the coalition, but with the corruption. The dormant node and the crystal were connected at their source, and when the node woke up, the crystal did too.
The encryption shell broke apart, and the corruption bloom inside it spread out so quickly that there wasn’t much time to make decisions.
In the time it took most people to notice something was wrong, Zephyra put up a barrier to keep things inside. She was quick and accurate, but the corruption coming out of the crystal was ancient and concentrated, the kind that had been sealed and building pressure for years.
Her first barrier broke when it touched the crystal.
Liora’s Divine Aegis went off. The auto-barrier spread across the room in a wave of golden light. It held, but it used up a lot of energy in the process, which made Liora feel weak.
"Everyone out of the chamber, now," Natasha said as she began to move.
Outside, the Council district was breaking away from the base.
The pre-coalition node under the east wing was a storage container for corruption that had been sealed and sitting there for two hundred years, building up pressure the whole time. Whatever had sealed it in the first place had been getting worse for years.
The archive fire three nights ago destroyed the last of the suppression wards, which prevented the damage from becoming a breach. The fire had nothing to do with the papers.
The papers were not important. The fire was a sign that the last lock on a door that had been getting ready to open for a long time had been taken off.
The node blew up.
BAMMMMMMMMMM!!!
Corruption ripped through the foundation of the east wing and up the street in three different directions at once. It was violent and thick, unlike the slow corruption spread Rick had seen before.
"What the fuck is that...?" Rick was shocked just by looking at it.
Zephyra said. "This was a concentrated release, with everything that had been sealed and pressurized for 200 years coming out at once."
Rick’s sense of danger didn’t just kick in. It went off on every bond channel at once, with six different resonances sending the same warning at the same time.
He was already moving before he had fully made the decision to move.
The area around the Council building became something that needed quick and coordinated action. The corruption bloom was so thick that it was making the stone, wood, and metal around the breach move in a violent, directionless way.
Several huge corruption beasts came together in the sealed chamber, pulling themselves together in a way that seemed like it had been waiting to happen for a very long time.
Rick activated Draconic Sovereignty as he walked out of the main entrance of the Council building. He felt the familiar forty percent boost to all of his stats and used Bond Resonance to get the tactical picture from everyone at once.
"It’s time to save this city again..."
