Leveling Up by Seducing Milfs-Chapter 271. Absolute Stillness

The body moved toward him by one step.

Heinz put Sophia in the armchair, and he did it carefully, like a man who knows how to do one thing well and gives it his full attention.

He put her against the arm of the chair so she wouldn’t roll, made sure she was comfortable, and then stepped between Rick’s body and Fredrich with the calmness of someone who had already made up his mind about what he was going to do and wasn’t going to change it on the way.

He didn’t have anything. No weapons, no magic, and no training in how to fight. He had a multi-tool in his pocket and was completely still, like a man who had made a choice.

Rick’s body came to a stop.

This was not due to any actions or possessions Heinz possessed. Rick’s instincts were behind the corruption that was running the threat assessment, and they didn’t walk through people who weren’t threats when there was a way around them.

The body’s muscle memory, which came from months of fighting and protecting, stayed even during the possession.

This made a half-second that was enough for Liora.

She had been working on it since the socket opened. The tools she utilized in the field, such as Divine Aegis or targeted purification, were not applicable.

She pressed her hands together and closed her eyes for fifteen seconds.

The light that was gathering behind her closed eyelids felt like something that needed permission to exist, a sacred authority that didn’t belong to Liora alone but was given to her through years of service and would be taken back if she used it carelessly.

The Divine Mother gave High Priestesses two levels of holy power.

The first were what Liora used to fight and heal, the tools that were taught early and used a lot.

The second lesson wasn’t taught until twenty years of service had passed and it had been proven beyond a doubt that the person could handle it without being harmed.

It had a name in the Temple’s records, which were kept because even holy things need to be written down. It was called Absolute Stillness.

Its only goal was to stop something holy from destroying itself.

Liora had used it twice before. Both times were in private, and it took weeks to get better.

She had never used it in public or when her reserves were low.

She looked up.

The light that came from her was white. It wasn’t the warm gold of her normal divine power or the bright gold of her strongest healing.

It was the exact shade of white that something existing to stop possesses. It doesn’t care what it stops, what temperature it is, how heavy it is, or what its agenda is other than stopping the movement it encounters.

"DIVINE MANDATE: ABSOLUTE STILLNESS."

The light spread out from her in a sphere with no clear edge, touching the walls, the window, the floor, the ceiling, and everyone else in the room at the same time.

It didn’t ignite. It didn’t exert force. It didn’t produce sound or apply pressure to anything. It simply halted.

Rick’s body stopped in the middle of a step, with one foot slightly raised. It wasn’t stiff or locked; it was just still, like a clock is when someone gently holds the mechanism without winding it down.

The lines of corruption on his face stopped at his wrist. The red light in the socket faded to a deep, slow pulse, and the flood of signals that had been coming through the weak socket stopped.

It wasn’t cleared, but it was interrupted, like when you put your hand over a speaker and the voice stops for a while.

There was no noise in the room.

Liora was shaking a little bit. Her face showed the effort it took to hold Absolute Stillness in a way that it didn’t usually allow, because all of her control had been focused on the Stillness itself.

Zephyra had been standing still since Rick’s voice stopped in the middle of a sentence. She was staring at Liora with the focused look of someone figuring out how long the tool would last and what needed to be done in that time frame.

Fredrich was looking at Rick’s body, which had stopped moving, with an expression that had stopped being political a few minutes ago and was now just that of a man looking at the results of his actions.

Heinz hadn’t moved from where he was sitting near the armchair where Sophia was watching the white light with wide, calm eyes.

"Fredrich," Liora said, and her voice was steady because she was making it steady. "Tell me everything he said about the socket..."

"NOW!"

"Y-Yes...!"

Fredrich talked without any introduction. "He told me that the socket integration was permanent under normal purification conditions."

"The corruption has taken the cavity’s function, not layered on top of the artifact resonance but replaced it, and the Eye of the Demon King filtered what passed through the socket in both directions."

"What’s there now has no filter..."

"What gets rid of it?" Liora asked.

"Standard purification will get rid of the corruption, but it will also kill the socket tissue..."

"The socket would be permanently closed, and no artifact could ever work there again. It would be clean but dead."

"Is there another choice?"

Zephyra said, at the same time as Liora, "What conditions?"

Fredrich looked back and forth between them and answered both questions at the same time. "He talked about one way."

"It requires a location that has active sacred wards and an established framework for corruption purification, which must be old enough to predate the type of corruption present in the socket."

"A place where divine power and precognitive magical theory can work together in the same ritual infrastructure." He looked at Liora. "He said that the Golden Temple is the only place like that relatively close to Valdris."

Liora’s face changed in a way that wasn’t quite a surprise, since she had read too much Temple history to be surprised by this. It was more like the realization of something she had hoped wouldn’t happen.

"That... that’s it," she said. "The Severance Rite"

"Yes, he did say that word."

"How long can you keep Rick in check?" Zephyra asked as she looked at Rick’s still body. "Before the Stillness comes out."

"No more than three minutes at this reserve level." Liora said, "After that, it lets go."

"The socket opens up to whatever ambient corruption is there." She kept her voice steady. "Valdris’s suppression wards won’t be at full strength until at least tomorrow morning."

"Tonight is what we have," Zephyra said.

"If we move quickly and now, we can get him out of range of the broken wards before the secondary seal I can put on wears off."

"If we’re still in Valdris when that happens, I won’t be able to use the Stillness again until morning."

Fredrich said, "The road to the south gate is faster."

"I can get the council horses ready in less than an hour."