Royal Reboot: Level up, Your Majesty!-Chapter 102: Contingency (2)

Contingency

2

Elias slid down cold steel, a grotesque smear marking gravity’s path. He folded on the tile floor, still.

Dead.

Lust’s cloudy, amethyst-laced tendrils coiled around the stray energy leaking from Elias’s corpse, stroking it, tasting it, teasing it. Her connection to his mind remained intact, half way done.

Time to siphon the rest.

But first, she had to deal with this ugly little pest.

The guard stood stiff in his cheap black suit, skin too pale to pass for any kind of field operative. He glanced at Elias’s broken body, the shock cooling to a precise detachment. Maybe even analytical.

His phone buzzed.

He pulled it from his pocket and casually checked the screen, like the grotesque kill beside him was nothing more than another Tuesday.

“You looped the camera? Clever,” the man said with a half-smile, "and... convenient.”

My loop’s still working? Interesting. Hmm. “You don’t fear me?” Lust crooned. “Even in the presence of death?”

“Fear? Of an inconsequential parasite like you?” the man calmly asked.

For just a second, his brown eyes gleamed gold, molten light blinking behind the iris. His voice lowered, then rose, echoing with a feminine cadence that did not belong in that throat.

Lust snarled and lashed out. A tendril snaked around his throat and squeezed, eager to bruise, to feast, but the skin didn’t bruise; it blistered with heat. The tendril rotted just from touching him.

She hissed and recoiled, a chill snaked down her nonexistent spine.

The guard’s hulking form began to liquefy, a violet shimmer washing over his features. Flesh rippled, hair darkened, limbs slimmed. The body shrank, though not by much.

A woman stepped out, drowning the ill-fitting uniform but she carried it as if the world tailored itself to her. Brunette hair framed a face too symmetrical, too beautiful, something not made for this reality.

But Lust knew that face, not from now, not from here. It drifted in from a memory faded, tied to more than Natalia’s fantasies and secret wants. She wasn’t soft, the way Natalia remembered.

She looked cold, cruel.

“Who are you?” It was Lust’s turn to ask, though she already remembered.

Eydis. The object of Natalia’s unspoken longing. The woman who held no desire nor interest in romance.

But…

There had been someone else. A presence blurred in Natalia’s dreams; repressed, untraceable. A figure with silver hair. Lust hadn’t dug deep enough to see it; it hadn’t been necessary.

Eydis’s golden eyes flicked to the phone in her hand, calculating. She slipped it back into her pocket and turned that gaze on the mist. “Four minutes.”

“Four minutes until what?” Lust lunged for an attack.

Shadowy serpents uncoiled from Eydis’s fingers and consumed Lust’s attacking tendril effortlessly.

Then came the sound: a deep, resonant click from the server’s core. The SD card’s code had finished uploading into Tweeter. A sigil burst into existence, projected high above the server racks, hovering just beneath the ceiling panels like a red moon.

Lust shrieked as a sudden force yanked her upward toward the glowing glyph. But she refused to be chained, by a sigil, by a name, by anyone.

To live tethered to a single will, even one full of desire, was worse than complete erasure.

The vapor erupted, turning the aisle into a furnace. Violet flames seared through. If the server was the anchor, then she’d reduce it to ash, cost be damned.

Eydis walked through the rows of servers as if strolling in dawn fog. Her blazer did not smolder. Her breathing never changed. Her fingers brushed the edge of a whirring console, siphoning the heat.

“You’re smoking out your own secrets. Very efficient of you.” She lifted her chin, smiling softly. “Don’t tell me the great Lust is frightened. I was under the impression you liked it rough.”

She knows my name?

Twin birds burst from Eydis’s shoulders, wrought of darkness, with scythe-long beaks and wings wide enough to brush ceiling tiles. They dived together, gulping mouthfuls of the blistering vapour, then wheeled for more, carving graceful figure eights through the shadowy flame.

Relentless and ravenous.

Lust shrieked as her form began to splinter, siphoned both into the glowing sigil above and the devouring maws of the twin birds.

“Did you really think hoarding desire would save you?” Eydis said.

Wings of pure shadow burst from her back, unfurling slowly. She rose above the servers, feathers falling like bloom petals in a gale. Wherever they landed, heat vanished, drawn into perfect nothingness, leaving the machines untouched.

“Only shadows end shadows.” Eydis’s golden eyes burned through the purple haze like a goddess surveying ruined worshipers. “Now, Lust, you have three minutes left. Choose: end… or kneel.”

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“What kind of power is this?” Lust gasped, the force pressing down on her like a collapsing star.

Eydis tilted her head toward one of the twin birds, their golden eyes darkening to molten amber as they fed on the vapor. The two circled each other like rivals, locked in a silent competition to see who could outconsume the world faster.

“I’m sure you’ve met Greed before,” she said softly. “And its twins.”

Greed. Twins?

The only name Pride had ever glanced over her shoulder for.

Panic shivered through the Sin.

Run.

Lust collapsed into the nearest port, dissolving into raw data, and raced through the copper lines, hunting escape. She skimmed the code Elias had embedded deep in the firmware, recognising instantly after so long entangled within the grid.

The binding wasn’t localised, not tied to this room, not even these physical servers.

It tethered to Tweeter’s API.

That was her exit.

With rising desperation, Lust began uploading herself into Tweeter’s broader network, threading segments of her consciousness through distant cloud infrastructure, hoping to outrun Eydis’s overwhelming power.

The room began to cool; the fan whirred, while the air conditioner growled loudly as it struggled to recalibrate the temperature.

Eydis landed softly on the floor. She didn’t chase. Instead, she glanced at the clock and sighed.

One minute left.

She knelt beside Elias, pressing her palms to the ragged holes in his chest and skull. Gently, she drew out the last purple threads the Sin had left behind.

It hadn’t fully bound itself to him. And his ever-shifting body, miraculously, was still capable of resisting it. His mana was still there—erratic, frantic, struggling to function without a stable link to his brain.

But it hadn’t vanished. It just needed a restart, a stabiliser, and it had to begin from his core.

She uncorked a viridian vial and dripped liquid onto his cold, purple lips.

“You still have something to do, Elias,” she said soft, almost reverently.

And he heard her.

His power stirred, as if waking from a centuries-long sleep, ripping across his skin in emerald sparks. It flooded through the architecture of his body, channelling from his arcane heart into the branching network of nerves. The current reached his brain and snapped broken links into place with a whip-crack of mana.

Bones reset, muscle wove, flesh sealed. His form began to repair by magic coaxed into remembering what it was meant to be.

A shapeshifter. Never bound by flesh, only by will.

Breath returned. Colour returned to his cheeks.

Her sigh was almost inaudible.

One of the ravens shrank and perched on her shoulder, now no bigger than a finch. “You let Lust take wing to save the traitor. How… nest-wrecking.”

The second followed. “Where is Her Majesty’s fire? Where is the Queen who scorched her enemies wing to wing?”

“Still here.” Her eyes stayed fixed on Elias as she snapped her fingers, dragging the ravens screaming back into the dark behind her mind.

Envy slithered closer. “Clever, following your little traitor. So many contingencies. Humans never deserve that much foresight.”

She stepped closer to the serpent. “He has no reason to trust me.”

Forked tongue flickered, amused. “And you gave up a perfect snare for Lust, all because you assumed this broken thing could survive.”

“Assumption implies doubt.” She plunged a hand into Envy’s gaping jaws. The serpent’s eyes widened, too slow to react, as she withdrew a black tee and blue jeans for Elias.

“Less than five minutes since oxygen was cut. His molecular structures are still sound. He’s not finished.”

Eydis dressed Elias in silence. He wore Ethan’s stolen face, enough to walk him out the front lobby unnoticed. She had studied the mechanics of shapeshifters, learned how their biology adapted, why their fluid nature made them so rare, so coveted.

She understood now why Elias had hidden his Gift, even from himself. Was it just about disguise?

No.

With enough discipline, they could hold themselves just shy of immortality.

That was the prize. And she wondered what kind of experiment it would take to extract such a Gift from his kind.

Eydis stood and shifted back into the form of the security guard. Brute force might have breached the door earlier, but Lust would have snapped Elias’s life instantly and leapt to the next host while alarms howled through the building.

Timing was crucial.

Behind her the servers clicked and sang as the binding finished. Lust was chained now to Tweeter’s infrastructure, confined to Alchymia’s slice of the cloud.

Their honeypot.

Where Astra was waiting.

Eydis’s golden eyes narrowed. Lust would know the trap by now. The Sin would already be scheming, rewriting its next move. She could only hope she’d weakened it enough to be contained.

But Lust’s true strength had never been brute force.

And without the distraction of the looming sigil…

Eydis hauled Elias’s arm over her shoulder. He leaned into her, instinctively, sport shoes dragging across the floor.

Then, in a haze of grogginess, he murmured to himself:

“Save… Adam.”

Eydis paused.

Of course, Lust had read his dreams.

She adjusted her grip and all but carried him the rest of the way, out of range of surveillance, toward the waiting electric car. One hand steadied him; the other reached for her phone.

She had to warn Astra.

She pressed the button. The phone rang once.

Twice.

When the line clicked and connected, she let out a sigh of relief.

“Astra, I…”

Adam hovered at the edge of the chair, fingers frozen above the console, pupils locked on the surveillance feeds. Behind him, Astra paced in tight circles, phone pressed to her ear, her expression growing colder as she listened.

But he paid no attention.

For ten relentless minutes Adam had pinged Elias on every channel: static. On-screen, however, Elias drifted between the server racks, head tilting, hand brushing cables. He could hear Adam. He simply chose silence.

“Adam?” Astra’s voice tried to break through, but he stayed wired to the images, filing through explanations.

Maybe Elias’s jammer had failed. Maybe he feared setting off some dormant alert. The maybes kept piling up. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com

But their window for the code update had passed. Astra had mentioned the update would snare the virus the instant it flared, yet the feed remained flat, no alerts. She’d even said, somewhat vaguely, that they’d hear a clicking sound when it triggered. But—

“Adam,” Astra snapped, lunging toward him and yanking him away from the chair. “Stop staring at the screen.”

Only then did Adam realise… he hadn’t been able to look away for a while. Not even as he fell. Not when his head hit Astra’s arm as she cushioned his fall. Even with his spine pressed against the cold concrete, his eyes never broke contact.

The monitors blinked, once. Then a strobing burst of red, white, and violet flashed. The sequence moved too fast for the eye, yet every frame printed itself perfectly in his mind.

A spike of pain knifed through him. He screamed, palms crushing against his temples.

“Adam!” Astra’s hands closed on his shoulders, but his muscles spasmed, then slackened.

Heart sprinting. Eyes glassy, the familiar blue drowned beneath a rising glow.

Within those irises the colours repeated: red, white, violet, tightening into unfamiliar glyphs. Astra met the cyclone and felt her own vision lock, as though something ice-cold had snapped around her face.

All around them the warehouse vibrated with a rolling hiss of static. A voice surfaced inside the noise, not from speakers or vents but from the air itself. It was a voice she knew intimately.

Eydis.

“That was quite a revelation, Astra,” it murmured. “I came for the boy, easy enough, but imagine my surprise when she showed up. In his head.”

“She?” Astra growled, though the edge had vanished. Eydis’s voice always reached some place in her she couldn’t shield.

“Oh, Astra… don’t tell me you didn’t know? Adam’s been practically simmering over your precious girl, Eydis. Is she yours, or just wishful thinking?”

Astra tried to turn; the invisible grip tightened, freezing her in Adam’s glimmering stare.

“Hmm. So you are her weakness, Astra.” A soft laugh shimmered beneath the words. “How delightful. I suppose this is where things begin to get interesting. Wouldn’t you agree?”

The resemblance was uncanny, right down to the inflection, the pauses, the choice of words, the cadence.

The lights overhead tremored. Across the floor, screens that didn’t exist projected in the air, each one repeating that spiralling code.

And Astra couldn’t look away. She couldn’t blink.

Don’t blink, Astra.

Astra.

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