Leveling Up by Seducing Milfs-Chapter 301. Zephyra Was the Last One Standing, and It Didn’t Matter

Chapter 301: 301. Zephyra Was the Last One Standing, and It Didn’t Matter

He viewed the days following Cthulhu, which he had experienced from within, from an external perspective. Rather than perceiving the socket as merely a void where an artifact had once existed, he recognized it as a space molded by corruption over time.

Even after the Severance Rite, it had become more receptive to the Archon’s specific frequency than any other channel he had encountered.

He saw the simulation, which had not started in the mansion but much earlier, at the very beginning, when the Severance Rite got rid of the corruption medium and left the socket more open than it had ever been. The grief construct in the socket wasn’t the weak point.

The grief construct was his anchor. The socket served as a direct, open frequency to the Archon’s network, unfiltered by the corruption medium.

The network was functioning as intended: it was designed to build.

In that moment, he grasped the Archon’s true objective.

It wasn’t merely an idea, a symbol, or a metaphor.

It was him.

Valdris, with its Council building, faith network infrastructure, and the streets he had spent months learning to navigate, lay in the future. He stood there, socket wide open, without an eyepatch, suppression, or a grief construct to stabilize the frequency.

As he remained in that space, the Archon’s corruption coursed through him, just as it did through the figures in the artificial city. The lines were bright, orderly, and all directed in the same way.

He was ruining everything, and it’s already according to his plan.

This does not refer to a confrontation with an enemy, a specific goal, or a tactical objective. When something fundamental within a structure is replaced by something with a different purpose, it inevitably fails from the inside out in a systematic manner.

The bond network had vanished. He couldn’t sense it. He still had connections to Carmilla, Zara, Sylvia, Natasha, and the others. They had been used.

’No... this can’t be true...’

’After all this time...? It was all a fucking simulation that’s been caused by my empty socket?’

The Sovereign Convergence spread out through dead bonds, and when it worked right, it wasn’t built on love, connection, or any of the other real things it was built on.

It was made from the Archon’s frequency and went in all directions without stopping. Wherever it went, things stopped.

And then there was Liora.

He saw Liora, and in that moment, he ceased to be a calm observer of a vision and transformed into something else entirely. She stood in the streets of Valdris while someone rushed toward a distant sound.

The Sovereign Convergence struck her, and she froze. The way she remained still resembled something that had once been alive but was now lifeless.

Carmilla. Zara. Sylvia. Natasha. Heinz with Sophia on his hip, and then without Sophia on his hip because she was on the ground.

Zephyra.

Zephyra was the last one left, fighting as she always did. The Grand Sorceress wielded her magic to manipulate the ward frequencies in the streets of Valdris, turning the city’s architecture into a weapon, just as she had done in every building she had inhabited.

She fought longer than anyone else, but it was futile; the entity controlling Rick’s socket did not respond to resistance as a person or an entity would.

It was doing its job.

Rick screamed.

He screamed in the white void, pressing his hands against the ground, which felt more like a support than solid earth. He struck it, feeling it give slightly, so he struck it again.

Tears streamed down his face without a clear reason, and the sounds escaping him were not words. The sensation in his chest was akin to witnessing something unforgettable.

"Stop," he said. "Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop—"

The vision came to an end.

He was lying on the white ground with his hands flat against it and his forehead against the backs of his hands. His shoulders were shaking in a way that showed he was past the point of being able to handle it all and was just feeling it.

He remained in that position for a while, breathing heavily.

"HAH...! HAH...! HAH...!"

The white-haired girl didn’t say anything. She sat next to him in the white room and waited calmly, like someone who had done this before and understood that it only takes time and presence.

The shaking finally stopped.

Rick sat up, and his face was wet, and his chest hurt in the way that it does when you cry for a long time. He looked down at his hands.

"That’s what... happens," he said.

It wasn’t a question.

The girl looked at him with kind eyes and a face that was almost a smile but not quite a smile. She nodded once.

"The socket." Rick said, "After the Severance Rite, it’s more open than it was..."

"The grief construct is keeping it stable, but the Archon can still access the corruption frequency."

She nodded.

"And if it finishes, if the corruption architecture finishes building inside the socket, then—" He stopped.

He had witnessed it. There was no need for him to articulate it.

She reached into the front pocket of her simple clothes and pulled out a small, flat, round object that resembled old amber.

Then, she handed it to him.

He picked it up and flipped it over in his hand. It felt warm, as if it had been held for a long time.

He asked, "What is this?"

She placed her hand over her heart, then pointed at the object and at Rick.

He understood it. Not as a translation, but as a record of an impression—a fragment of something that had been preserved.

"You were there," he said. "At Cthulhu... The little hand that glows and helps me save Zorathia."

She smiled then, really smiled, and it was the warmest thing he had seen in this empty white space.

"You gave me the last push." Rick said, "I would have failed if you didn’t help me back then..."

She tilted her head slightly, as if to say that she knew the truth and wasn’t being modest about it.

"And the simulation," he said. "You found me in it."

She nodded again.

He examined the object in his hand, his gaze fixed on her.

The white space surrounding them was not a void; instead, it felt like a transition, a liminal area that lay between what had been and what could be.

He remembered what Sebastian had said to him at the Golden Temple’s garden wall, where the girl had disappeared and left him with a hole in his head.

She has witnessed every attempt. This is not the first timeline.

He thought about the simulation, which had been made to keep him in place while the corruption architecture finished. This meant that the Archon knew what it was doing and had a plan, and that this attempt was close enough to working that it needed to be stopped right away.

He remembered what she had told him through the memory vision about the socket, the Eye, and the Archon’s patient architecture.

"What do I need to do?" he asked.

She produced something else from her pocket. She put a smaller object next to the amber disc in his open palm. This one was a folded piece of paper.

When he opened it, he saw that it had writing on it in the Zorathian script, but he didn’t know who wrote it.

She touched the paper, making the words clearer. Although they didn’t translate, they came to him as fully formed thoughts, as if he had always understood them.

"Huh...?"