Villain's Breeding System: Evolving 999+ Harem into an SSS-Rank Legion-Chapter 162 - Nara’s Unconscious Choice

"Celia," she said.

Not answering his question. Just confirming it the way a person confirms something when their brain has decided confirmation is the more manageable response to the current situation than all the other available responses.

"Good," Raven said.

The two men on his wrists made another attempt.

This one more committed than the first — both of them leaning back with their full weight, feet braced against the corridor wall, the physical math of two grown men pulling on a single person’s arm expressing itself at full volume.

He turned his wrists.

Just turned them. The casual rotation of a person adjusting their grip on something. The two men’s arms went with the motion, their elbows taking the angle first, then their shoulders, then their voices.

"AAUGH—"

"STOP — you’re — STOP—"

"Let GO—"

Not broken. He hadn’t broken anything. He’d simply introduced both of their arms to a range of motion they hadn’t expected to occupy and held them there with the easy, terrible patience of something with no particular investment in how long this took.

"STOP—" Celia moved. Toward them, not away — the specific movement of a girl who had a younger sister’s instinct of interposing herself between conflict and its target. "Stop, you’re hurting them—"

"They were trying to rape your friend," Raven said.

"You don’t — you’re — LET THEM GO—"

"Celia."

His voice. Flat. The single word carrying the specific weight of a man who has identified the relevant variable in a room and is addressing it directly.

She stopped.

"Shut up," he said, "and follow me. We need to leave the ship."

"Why would I—"

"Now."

He released the two men’s wrists.

They fell against the corridor wall, clutching their arms, the specific undignified scramble of people who have been demonstrated to be physically irrelevant and have not finished processing it. The one with the gun was still holding it — hadn’t fired yet, the specific hesitation of someone whose calculation about whether to shoot had been running since Raven hadn’t moved when they’d grabbed him and hadn’t resolved.

The ship moved.

Not the gradual roll of an ocean crossing. The specific, violent lurch of a vessel’s hull meeting a wave at the wrong angle in the specific conditions of a storm that had arrived faster than the advisory had indicated. The floor of the corridor tilted fourteen degrees in approximately one second.

Everyone fell except Raven.

The man with the gun fell against the opposite wall, his shoulder hitting the panel, his arm swinging with the impact.

The gun fired.

The specific, contained bang of a handgun in an enclosed space — the sound of it filling the corridor and then the silence after it filling the corridor differently.

The bullet traveled approximately eighteen inches.

Toward Raven’s elbow. The specific, unlucky angle of a gun swinging with the ship’s motion rather than any aimed intention.

Eighteen inches.

Seventeen.

Fourteen.

The bullet slowed.

Not dramatically. Not visibly to anyone who wasn’t watching specifically for it. But the air around Raven’s arm changed — the Phoenix physique running its reflexive thermodynamic process, the kinetic energy of the bullet meeting the thermal architecture of a body that didn’t accept external kinetic input — and the bullet’s velocity dropped from nine hundred feet per second to approximately zero in the space of the final inch.

It stopped.

An inch from his elbow.

Hung there for half a second.

Then dropped.

Hit the corridor floor with the small, anticlimactic clink of a spent projectile.

Silence.

The ship had stabilized. The fourteen-degree roll correcting back toward level.

Everyone in the corridor was looking at the floor.

At the bullet.

At the inch of space between the bullet and Raven’s elbow.

At Raven, who looked at his own arm, looked at the bullet on the floor, looked at the man with the gun with the specific expression of someone taking a final inventory.

"You’re going to put that down," Raven said.

The man put it down.

It clattered against the linoleum with the sound of something that had stopped being relevant.

Celia was staring.

Her face had organized itself around what she’d just seen in the way that faces organize themselves around things they have no existing category for — the jaw slightly loose, the eyes tracking from the bullet on the floor to his arm to his face and back, the loop repeating while her brain tried to construct a file for the event.

"What," she said.

"Follow me," he said.

"What was—"

"Celia."

"That bullet stopped—"

"Yes."

"It literally—"

"Yes."

Her mouth closed.

Behind her, from the bathroom doorway — the one he’d come through, the one with the two men still on the floor — a sound.

Movement. Slow. The specific quality of a body waking from a drugged state, the system coming back online unevenly, the limbs arriving before the consciousness.

Raven turned.

The girl in the corridor — the one he’d carried, the one he’d set against the wall with his jacket under her head — was moving.

Her name, it turned out, was Nara.

Brown hair. Nineteen. The face of someone who’d been smart enough to be almost careful and unlucky enough that almost wasn’t enough. She was pushing herself up from the wall with both hands, the movement taking more coordination than she had available, her body running on approximately forty percent of its normal processing power and doing the best it could.

Her eyes opened.

The corridor. The men against the walls. Celia. The bullet on the floor.

And him.

The eyes found him. She looked at him for three seconds with the specific, non-verbal assessment of a drugged nervous system that was running on older parts of the brain than usual — the parts that read threat and safety before conscious evaluation had a chance to participate.

Her legs moved.

Toward him.

Celia stepped forward. "Nara—"

Nara walked past her.

Not past. Through. Through the space between Celia and the corridor wall, her shoulder brushing Celia’s, her eyes still on Raven, her feet moving with the unsteady purpose of someone going somewhere they’ve decided on.

She reached him.

Both hands found his chest. Her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt and her knees, which had been on the edge of giving, used him as the thing they buckled toward.

She fell into him.

He caught her.

Her face in the fabric of his shoulder. Her voice — barely audible, thick with the chemistry still moving through her system, shaped differently than it would have been with full consciousness — said:

"Sav... Raven."

His name. The first syllable dropped, the second clear, the name landing in the corridor with the specific accuracy of a body that knew things its brain didn’t.

"Please."

Celia stared.

"Nara—" She reached for her friend’s shoulder. "Nara, don’t — you don’t know him, he might have been the one who—"

Nara’s body responded before her voice did. She turned slightly, away from Celia’s hand, the instinctive movement of someone repositioning toward safe and away from threat. Her face stayed in Raven’s shoulder.

"Stay—" Her voice. Low. "Stay away."

"I’m your friend—"

"Stay away from me."

The words were muddled at the edges, the drug blurring the consonants. But the direction of them was clear.

Celia’s outstretched hand stopped in the air.

She looked at it. At Nara’s back. At the man Nara was clinging to.

"What did you do to her," Celia said.

"Nothing."

"She’s never—"

"Her body knows who put her on the floor and who pulled her off it," Raven said. Simple. Without emphasis. "That’s all."

He looked at Celia over Nara’s head.

"I’m going to carry her," he said. "Are you going to follow me."