Villain's Breeding System: Evolving 999+ Harem into an SSS-Rank Legion-Chapter 154 - Doubting the End Game

Priya knew this from the company directory, from the LinkedIn profile, from the three data points the tablet had assembled into a location and schedule.

The woman was currently — she checked her watch — in a meeting that would end in eight minutes, based on the calendar data that Clara had accessed through the corporate network.

At which point she would come down to the ground-floor café for the post-meeting coffee she apparently required without fail.

Priya drank her chai.

She looked at her own hands.

The consulting firm access she’d provided to Raven’s network had not been difficult — she’d been doing similar work for clients for six years, the difference being the purpose and the authorization.

She’d spent forty-eight hours since Las Vegas processing the ethics of what she was doing and had arrived at a position she could live with, which was: the women on this list were being approached for a reason, and the reason was the bloodline, and the bloodline was something they had regardless of her, and her job was simply to be the point of contact.

The door of the tower opened.

The woman who came out was — unexpected, from the profile.

The profile had her as senior financial analyst, late twenties, the kind of career trajectory that looked like a straight line from outside and was something else from inside.

The woman who walked out of the tower was not presenting the straight line.

She was wearing the work clothes but wearing them the way you wear something you’ve put on correctly but that stopped fitting your body some months ago — the jacket pulled slightly at the shoulders, the blouse right at the buttons.

She was pregnant.

Four months, maybe five. The specific visible beginning of it.

The profile hadn’t mentioned this.

Priya looked at her own tablet.

Then at the woman.

The woman went to the café and Priya followed.

She was three feet away when the woman turned.

"’Sorry — did you say something?’"

Priya realized she’d said the woman’s name. Automatically. "’Meera.’"

"’I — yes?’" Meera looked at her. The assessment of a woman used to being assessed and good at doing it back. "’Do I know you?’"

"’No,’" Priya said. "’But I think you should.’"

A beat.

"’That’s a strange way to introduce yourself.’"

"’I know. I’ve been working on the delivery.’" Priya sat at the adjacent table without asking, which was a calculated move. "’I’m a consultant. I do a specific kind of consulting for people who build specific things. The company you work for is on the list of firms I’m assessing for a partnership program.’"

"’I’m not in acquisitions—’"

"’I know. I’m not talking to acquisitions.’" Priya put her tablet on the table, angled so Meera could read it without leaning. "’I’m talking to you specifically.’"

Meera looked at the tablet. At her own name on it, the bloodline annotation below it that Priya had redacted before coming here.

"’Why me?’"

"’Because you have something the program is looking for,’" Priya said. "’And I think you’ve been waiting for someone to tell you that for a while.’"

The specific sentence landed the way sentences land when they’re true.

Meera looked at her coffee. Then at Priya.

"’I’m four months pregnant,’" she said. Like presenting evidence against whatever was being proposed.

"’I can see that,’" Priya said. "’It’s not relevant to the assessment.’"

"’Everything is relevant to—’"

"’Not this,’" Priya said. Simply. "’Not to this particular thing.’"

Meera was quiet.

The Mumbai morning moved around them.

"’What is this particular thing?’"

Priya told her a version of it. Accurate in the parts that could be accurate. Soft around the parts that required context she didn’t have yet.

Internally: bloodline trace. The system highlighted something she read as ’gestation active — bloodline dormant but accelerating.’ Which she’d flagged to Raven the night before and which he’d responded to with: ’I know. That’s why the timing matters.’

She didn’t know what that meant yet.

She ordered two coffees.

The Minjung thread was different.

Minjung was in Las Vegas.

She’d spent the morning in the hotel with the others, processing the previous twenty-four hours in various ways — some women through sleep, some through the aggressive consumption of the room service menu, Sophia through organizing the eleven names into a color-coded contact tracking spreadsheet that she’d shared with everyone whether they’d asked for it or not.

Minjung had been drawing.

Not on the hotel’s provided notepad. On the wall.

A small section. Just — she’d been sitting there and her hand had moved and she’d been pressing her finger against the wallpaper and a dimensional aperture the size of a fist had opened and through it she could see a grey room that didn’t exist on the other side of that wall.

She’d closed it.

Opened it again.

Closed it.

Her target was different from the others. Not a woman to be approached and inserted into someone’s life. A woman to be found.

The name on her file was ’Sung Ji-young.’ Seoul. Twenty-eight. An artist — specifically a graffiti artist, the street-installation kind, the kind whose work appeared on buildings at 3 AM and was documented by someone else’s photographs because the artist herself was already gone. The works were — large. Often dimensional in appearance, creating the visual impression of depth and space on flat surfaces in a way that street art usually didn’t. The impression of doors where there were no doors. Windows opening onto landscapes that couldn’t exist behind the wall they were painted on.

Minjung had looked at the photographs for two hours that morning.

She’d recognized something in them. The specific instinct of her own newly activated bloodline looking at someone else’s work and seeing the same language used by a different hand.

Sung Ji-young was also a Drafter.

Unawakened. Doing it in paint on walls because the ability was looking for an outlet and the outlet it found was visual art. The dimensional apertures in her murals were real — small, unstable, closing within hours, but real. She didn’t know they were real. She thought she was making pictures.

Minjung needed to find her.

She stood at the window of the Las Vegas hotel room.

Opened a canvas in the air — small, the size of a playing card, the dimensional fabric of it shimmering.

And drew a door.

---

’Sigh.’

Raven closed his eyes.

The hotel suite was quiet. The kind of quiet that followed a significant amount of noise — the specific, textured quiet of a room that remembered what it had recently contained.

More than a week.

He thought about the timeline. The calendar he’d carried since the regression, the map of events and catalysts and the specific points where interference was possible versus the points where the current would carry regardless.

Victor was gone. The Phoenix fire ran in him steady and warm, including others of the bloodline that he had derived from all of his nine women.

Elena had her eyes. Yuna had her gold. Minjung had her hands.

Eleven names were being approached by nine women who each had a specific angle, a specific access, a specific reason to be in the right room.

He was ahead.

He was behind.

He was always both simultaneously — the specific mathematics of a regression where you know the timeline but the timeline doesn’t care what you know.

’Will I be able to defeat that succubus with my current power levels?’