Villain's Breeding System: Evolving 999+ Harem into an SSS-Rank Legion Chapter 211- heading to meet the Priestess

He snapped his fingers.

Gone.

The specific, absolute absence of a person from a room — not the door-closing kind, not the stepped-out kind. The kind where there had been a presence and now there was a room-shaped space where the presence had been.

She sat in the silence.

Her hand pressed flat against her knee.

Her probability calculations were running at a speed that they usually reserved for crisis scenarios.

From the stairs — footsteps.

"’I changed my mind,’" Celia’s voice, already descending, "’I’m not going to fire him, I’ll deal with him personally, I’ll—’"

She ca through the door.

The sitting room.

Avriana, on the sofa.

The prosthetic, beside the sofa where he’d set it.

The room, otherwise: empty.

Celia looked at the space.

Looked at her sister.

"’Where—’" she said.

"’He left,’" Avriana said.

Celia was very still for a mont.

The specific, arrested stillness of soone who has received a piece of information and is doing sothing with it that their face is not fully reporting.

"’He left,’" she said.

"’Yes,’" Avriana said.

Sothing happened in Celia’s expression.

Just briefly. The specific, brief, involuntary thing — not quite disappointnt, not quite relief, the third register that doesn’t have a clean na, the one that people wore when they had been bracing for sothing and the sothing had not arrived and the bracing had nowhere to go.

She looked at the space where he’d been.

Then she sat down.

Across from her sister.

The morning light between them.

Neither of them said anything for a mont.

’Las Vegas.’

The Stratosphere tower at this hour — the specific, pre-dawn Las Vegas hour when the lights below were still doing what they did and the sky above was beginning to consider doing sothing different — was cold at the top. The specific, exposed cold of a tower above a desert city at an elevation where the wind ca from several directions at once.

He stood at the edge.

Looking at the grid below — the light-grid, the miles of it, the specific, illuminated geotry of a city that had been built in a place cities weren’t supposed to be built and had beco sothing extraordinary through the specific human insistence on building things in wrong places anyway.

His back hurt.

Not seriously. The specific, reasonable ache of a back that had been doing unreasonable things for four hours and was now filing its report in the quiet of a mont where there was nothing else to manage.

He stretched.

Arms up. Shoulder blades together. The vertebrae doing the specific thing they did.

He thought about the island.

The waterfall. The stone. The three won’s specific, distinct voices — Nara’s lower register, Preet’s Delhi-market directness, Gia’s engineering brain breaking down its own experience into asurable units even in the middle of having it.

He thought about the side camp.

Twenty feet away. Celia’s hands.

He had not touched Celia. He had not intended to touch Celia. He had taken the three other won not entirely without calculation — Avriana would need to be approached precisely, and what she valued was restraint, and what she would understand was soone who could demonstrate that the won around him ca to him, not the other way, not with her sister as the example.

He thought about Avriana in the back seat of the car.

’I feel that I know you.’ The specific, direct quality of her when she said it — no decoration, no hedging. Just the statent, delivered with the sa precision she delivered everything.

She didn’t know why she knew him.

She would never guess why.

In his previous life, in the dinsion called Cubis — the system-structured world, the one where abilities were assigned and parties were ford and power was everything, the one where he had been assigned the weakest ability in the most demanding classification — Avriana had been in his party. Not as a friend, exactly. As the specific, other category — the one that preceded friendship, the one that was built from the accumulated weight of surviving things together without having agreed to.

She had the luck ability. Probability manipulation. The ability to tilt outcos — not control them, not override them, but nudge the probability of favorable things in the specific, quiet way of soone pushing a large stone and finding the slope doing the rest.

He had been saved by her ability more tis than he had counted.

Not because she liked him. Not because she had decided to save him. Because she was in his party and she had aid her ability at the party and he had been included by default.

He had never told her this.

He was not going to tell her this, because the information would complicate the arrangent he had just made, and the arrangent he had made was excellent.

He chuckled.

The Las Vegas lights below.

The sky beginning to develop its pre-dawn intention at the horizon.

He thought about the priestess.

A heroine, if he could recall, was from India and was 5-6 months pregnant when she was transmigrated. She lost her baby and awakened the power of a priestess, beginning to serve at an orphanage and helping children. Healing them with her soul-healing power and her maternal nature, she survived for a long journey.

The healing ability. The specific, irreplaceable kind of healing — not the minor restoration he could manage himself, not the stamina maintenance he’d been running on the island. The real kind. The kind that regrew what was gone.

He knew who had it.

He knew where she was.

He knew the tiline.

He turned from the edge.

The specific, slow turn of soone who has been looking at one thing and is now facing the direction of the next thing.

He looked at the horizon.

The specific calculation ran: location, probable distance from the primary city, current status, and the one additional variable that had been sitting in his awareness since he’d done the math on the tiline six weeks ago.

He exhaled.

"’She’s probably five months pregnant by now.’"