Leveling Up by Seducing Milfs-Chapter 263. It Had Only Recently Decided to Reveal Itself

Chapter 263: 263. It Had Only Recently Decided to Reveal Itself

She shut the folio.

Both of them refrained from articulating the apparent conclusion. For the past three decades, whoever had been building the infrastructure inside Valdris—the surveillance network, the archive fire, the dormant node, and the oath-bond with Fredrich—had been doing so under the name of a dead man.

They had been in the city for at least eleven months, and there were full records of their presence. They were operating through institutional channels and were known to be from Valdris.

And they were somewhere in the city right now.

...

The day came to an end slowly, like days do when a lot has happened but nothing has been fixed. Everyone talked about what had happened, thought about it in their own ways, and checked each other’s injuries like people who had learned how to do this in a systematic way.

By late afternoon, Rick’s health had risen to seventy-one percent.

"You should sleep," Liora had said, somewhere around the third hour of her targeted healing.

She didn’t look up from her work. "Your body is doing most of this itself. I’m just pointing it in the right direction."

"I know."

"That wasn’t a suggestion."

He hadn’t answered that one.

Now he lay on his back in his dark, quiet room, staring at the ceiling and letting his mind go through what he knew, putting it in the same order as Natasha would: what was known, what was implied, and what was still completely unknown.

He was more worn out than he was injured. During the surge, he had twenty-three percent health, which didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, but after the adrenaline wore off, his body remembered things differently.

’Twenty-three percent,’ he thought. ’Sebastian would have something to say about that.’

He reached up and fixed his eyepatch out of habit.

It was hot.

It didn’t feel as warm as his body temperature or as if it had been pressed against his skin for hours. The warmth was akin to that of something that has been near a heat source, retaining heat that would otherwise be lost.

Rick put his hand down and looked at the eyepatch that was resting on his fingers. The fabric was warm. The socket below it, the healed-over area where the Eye of the Demon King had burned out during the purification breath, was giving off heat.

Sebastian had confirmed that the eye was completely gone and would never come back

’Sebastian said it was gone,’ he thought. ’Like completely gone... with no residue and no remnant until there’s nothing left to react.’

He took off the patch over his eye, which he didn’t do very often.

When he did, there was nothing to see. The socket was just clean scar tissue with no magical residue, no artifact remnant, and everything Sebastian had already confirmed was present.

He could feel a pulse coming from the empty socket as he held the eyepatch. Faint and clear, and definitely not meant to be there.

"The Eye is gone," Sebastian had said, with the particular flatness he used when he wanted something to be final. "Whatever it was connected to burned out with it."

"The socket is inert, and I would stake my analysis on it."

He applied pressure with two fingers to it.

The pulse got stronger right away.

Then the corruption that had affected him during the surge—specifically, the part he had directly taken on when he stood between Zephyra and the secondary wave—reacted, even though his health had recovered from it but not completely cleared it.

The corruption had spread throughout his body, lying dormant and too dispersed for Liora’s targeted healing to locate and address during the afternoon.

It responded all at once, moving through him like iron filings do when they contact a magnet, coming together from all over his body to form a single point.

The empty socket, the burned-out remains of the Demon King’s artifact, acted like a receiver. The antenna, which had been silent and empty since the Eye burnt out, had only tonight picked up enough corruption to trigger the resonance.

All of it came together at the socket at the same time.

The pain was such that it was out of my control. It went straight to the part of my brain that processes things before they happen.

Rick screamed. "ARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH...!!!"

Not a controlled sound or a managed expression of distress; it was a real reflex that he couldn’t control any more than someone can control blinking when something is too close to their face.

His body froze up. The bond network flared up hard across all six connections.

The sudden spike of pain and wrongness hit his partners through the shared resonance like a signal flare going off in a closed room. He could feel the specific quality of each response through the pieces of his coherent awareness that were breaking apart.

For example, Carmilla’s Unbreakable Bond pulsed alarmingly, signaling that she was already in motion; Natasha’s Frozen Clarity pressed against an obstruction it couldn’t grasp, as there was nothing external to reason with.

Zara’s demon instincts flared with protective aggression, while Sylvia’s ancient power surged with the territorial fury of something that would not tolerate harm to what it claimed.

Nerissa’s oceanic resonance rushed toward him through the bond, like a tide responding to the moon, and Liora’s divine presence attempted to reach him but found the auto-barrier ineffective, as the threat was internal, and the Divine Aegis was designed for external dangers.

The corruption wasn’t spreading through his body, nor was it attacking him. It had found its home and remained there, filling the empty space like water filling a vessel.

Rick could perceive something through the pain that felt like white static, but not through his eyes. He couldn’t derive it from the bond network or from the feelings he had accumulated in Zorathia.

Through the hole where the Eye of the Demon King had burned out was visible. There was something visible in that spot, similar to how distant objects appear when viewed from a location where one shouldn’t be able to see them.

A shape that’s looking straight at him.

This was not the Archon’s corruption signature, which Sebastian claimed was easily distinguished from others. This was not the same.

This was ancient in a different way, like something that has been hiding for a long time on purpose and has learned how to be patient, like things that don’t want to be found.

It wasn’t broken. It was just there, aware, and had just noticed that something new was looking at it.

Rick’s body crumpled to the floor.

His vision split. One side: the room, dark and familiar, the ceiling he had been staring at. The other side was edged in a deep and wrong purple, a layer of Valdris sitting beneath the Valdris he had been walking through, like a reflection that had been waiting under still water for someone to disturb the surface.

In that layer, a huge, careful, and very ancient shape turned its attention toward him with the slow, terrible interest of a being that had been patient for decades and had just encountered something surprising.

The door flew open.

"RICK...!!!" Carmilla came in first, sword drawn.

Thanks to her Unbreakable Bond that led her to the exact spot in the room where Rick had landed without her having to see him. In just a few seconds, the others were behind her, the bond network pulling them all to the same place.

Six Spirit Bond resonances came together on him, each with a different quality of power, presence, and real fear.

The shape in the socket saw them all at once; all six bonds were visible to it in a way that made Rick understand, in the last clear thought he had before his awareness broke apart, that this was not the first time that shape had looked at his bond network.

It had been monitoring all of them for some time, and it had only recently decided to reveal itself.