Leveling Up by Seducing Milfs-Chapter 281. She Let Go

Rick held on. He could hold on now, but he still couldn’t win.

He had not yet reached the limit of forty years of power and two hundred years of practice. They both knew this. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

Fighting a war of attrition against someone whose power source did not run out was a losing proposition, no matter what the current numbers said.

His HP had dropped slowly to forty-one percent.

He knew he had been looking for Zephyra in the courtyard and that she hadn’t come back.

...

Forty meters past the outer garden wall, on a path that the Shadow Covenant operative had used because it was hidden from the temple’s main buildings, Sophia was sitting on a flat stone surface. Two operatives who had been there before the attack began were watching her.

Sophia was not upset. She had found an interesting piece of lichen on the stone’s surface near her left hand and was looking at it with the same intense interest she gave to everything that was worth looking at.

The operatives were watching her watch the lichen.

Zephyra found the way by following the operational resonance, similar to how the socket operated, but she did it faster and more accurately than any receiver because she had studied the theoretical architecture behind it for fifteen years.

She walked around the outside wall and saw her daughter sitting on the stone with the lichen.

She looked at Sophia for two seconds, like you do when you fear you won’t see something again. Then she looked at the three operatives between her and Sophia.

She let go.

The title of Grand Sorceress was not a title of honor. Her calm professional demeanor and ability to analyze things were not her strong points.

They were how she kept herself in check. She had been holding back her whole adult life because her father had taught her, very early and very deliberately, how much damage she could do if she didn’t.

A vessel that knew its own capacity was easier to calibrate, as it allowed for better self-regulation and understanding of one’s limits in emotional and interpersonal situations.

She had known this even then. She had decided to hold back anyway because she was her person and not just what he had made.

Now she wasn’t holding anything back.

Thirty-six hours spent studying the Golden Temple’s pre-coalition ward architecture had transformed into a fully drawn weapon. Ward harmonics operated at three different frequencies simultaneously: one designed to break magical shields, another to destabilize footing, and a third to disrupt spatial orientation.

These frequencies ran in parallel through the temple’s three-hundred-year-old structural resonance framework. This method had been forgotten after the coalition ended and had not been employed in real combat for two hundred years.

Three operatives were neutralized in forty seconds. Not with finesse, but completely.

She crossed to Sophia and crouched down. Sophia grabbed her collar with both hands in the standard grip, and Zephyra held her steady.

For four seconds, she embraced her daughter in silence, gathering herself and resisting the urge to revert to the usual protocols she followed after resolving a situation. They were in the afternoon light on the outer grounds of the Golden Temple, where lichen still clung to the nearby stone.

For those four seconds, she was no longer the Grand Sorceress, the pre-coalition architectural theorist, or the analytical mind that had endured thirty years of being forged into a mechanism.

Four seconds.

Then she looked up, her face returning to its usual flat, precise professional mask.

But her eyes told a different story. When Rick ran from the courtyard to the outer grounds, having just broken away from Zein during a lull in their conversation, he halted at the sight of the three operatives and the destruction they had caused. He stood there for a moment, taken aback.

"Holy shit!" he exclaimed. "Did you do all of this?"

"Yes."

"In how long?"

"I didn’t keep track of it."

He glanced at the operatives, then at Zephyra, and back at the operatives again, wearing the distinct expression of someone whose perception of another has just shifted dramatically.

"Uhh... Right," he said.

...

They all went back to the inner courtyard together. Zephyra was carrying Sophia on her hip, while Rick’s Draconic Sovereignty remained active, and his HP continued to decline.

Zein was still in the courtyard. He had been waiting.

"I found her," Zephyra said.

"I know." He looked at Sophia with a look that was, no matter what else was true about him, real. "I wouldn’t have hurt her... she’s my granddaughter, after all."

"I know that too," Zephyra said. "That’s not what I’m trying to say."

"What’s the point then?"

She looked at him the same way she looked at everything else: directly and completely. When she spoke, her voice was as flat and clear as it had ever been, which meant she was holding something very, very hard.

"You made my whole life a framework for this plan," she said. "My marriage, my education, my place on the Council, and my daughter."

There was a short pause.

"You turned me into a series of access points, and you convinced yourself that loving me and using me were not the same thing." She looked at him. "They are at odds."

For a long time, Zein was quiet.

"I know," he finally said.

That was the first time he had said it without any kind of explanation or justification. "I’ve known that for a long time, but I kept going anyway."

"Why?"

"Because the other option was to accept that the grief had already taken more than I had agreed to give it." He looked at her. "That it had already cost me you, and I wasn’t ready to accept that."

"Are you ready now?"

He looked at Sophia, who was watching him with the same serious interest she gave to things she thought were worth learning about.

"No... Not yet." He stopped. "There is still a way to do this right."

"If you would let me show you—"

"No!" Zephyra exclaimed.

A silence that meant something came after.

"Then we are going to settle it with a fight," Zein said.

"Yeah, that’s a better way to put it."

She gave Sophia to Rick without looking at him, just like she gave him things to do when he was the right person to do them. Rick took Sophia and changed how he was holding her, and she grabbed his coat with both hands and held on with the strong grip she always used.

Rick looked down at her. "I’m sorry about all this," he said in a low voice.

Sophia held his coat and looked at the unfolding situation with focused attention.

...

What Zephyra did to Zein in the first ninety seconds was something Rick had no framework to understand.

The Grand Sorceress, operating at full capacity without restraint, unleashed three simultaneous ward frequencies that coursed through the structural resonance of the Golden Temple.

She had been studying this temple for thirty-six hours, employing direct pre-coalition ward construction to create attack architectures from the building itself in real time, using the three-hundred-year-old sacred infrastructure as raw material.

Additionally, she was able to disrupt Zein’s grief-resonance field with targeted calculations, having devoted fifteen years to studying its theoretical structure, which was rooted in the same bloodline as her own power.

Zein was pushed back significantly. The frequency attack shattered his suppression field.

He transformed, as he always did, because two hundred years of practice had made such changes second nature. However, it took time, and Zephyra wasn’t providing him any.

For ninety seconds, she had her father losing ground in the courtyard of the Golden Temple. Rick stood off to the side, holding Sophia in his arms, and watching it unfold.

Heinz stood next to him, also observing the event.

"She’s—" Rick said.

"Yes," Heinz said softly, like someone who had always known something was there but had never seen it.

"Yes."