Villain's Breeding System: Evolving 999+ Harem into an SSS-Rank Legion-Chapter 163 - Celia’s Personality

Celia’s jaw set.

It was her sister’s jaw. The same bone. The same quality of a decision being made in real time.

The ship groaned.

Not a wave. A deeper sound — structural. The sound of a vessel’s hull in conversation with a sea condition it hadn’t been designed for and was no longer comfortable managing.

One of the young men who’d had the gun — now gunless, still against the corridor wall — turned his head. His expression had changed from aggressive to the expression of a person who has become aware that the context of the last forty minutes is no longer the most pressing context.

"Where’s the captain," he said to the man beside him.

"What?"

"FIND THE CAPTAIN—"

Raven lifted Nara. Princess carry — one arm under her knees, one behind her back, the ease of it familiar. He looked at the young men with the specific, level patience of a person who has arrived at the last available moment for stating the obvious.

"The ship," he said, "is sinking."

Silence.

He looked at them.

"You were thinking with your dicks," he said. "The storm advisory was issued at seventeen hundred hours yesterday. A vessel operating under this hull weight in these conditions needed to be secured by eighteen hundred at the latest. You are now—" he checked nothing, the tectonic sense in his body reporting the specific pressure dynamics of eight thousand tons of water above a hull running on a compromised stabilization system without requiring a watch "—forty-seven minutes past the window where this could have been managed."

The men looked at each other.

Then at Raven.

Then at each other.

"Get the other women," Raven said. "The ones in the saloon. Get them to the upper deck. Do not stop to discuss whether to do this."

He turned to Celia.

She was looking at him.

Not with suspicion anymore — not entirely. The calculation in her eyes had become something more complex, the threat-assessment that had been running since the corridor updating itself with new inputs and arriving at an output that didn’t know what to do with itself.

"Follow me," he said.

She followed him.

The cabin was small.

One of the mid-deck rooms — narrow bed, a porthole showing the darkening chop outside, the kind of space designed to be functional rather than comfortable. There was, inexplicably, a second bed folded into the wall — the ship’s architect having anticipated situations where the fold-out might be needed.

Raven set Nara down.

The mattress received her. She curled slightly, her body finding the position it wanted with the animal efficiency of someone not fully conscious, her hands drawing up near her face, her breathing evening into the slower rhythm of someone who had moved from drugged-alert to drugged-sleep.

Celia stood in the doorway.

She hadn’t come fully in yet. The doorway was its own intermediate position — she was in the cabin but she wasn’t committed to being in the cabin, the threshold doing the work of keeping the question open.

Raven sat on the edge of the bed.

He looked at her.

"You’re going to ask how I stopped the bullet," he said.

"I saw it stop," she said. "I’m not asking. I saw it."

"Good."

"What — what does that mean, good?"

"It means you’re accurate."

Her arms crossed. The specific, self-bracing cross of a person managing their own nervous system. "How."

"Something I have," he said. Simple. Categorically insufficient. The answer of a man who has given this answer before and has calibrated how much it communicates.

"That’s not—"

"I can take you off this ship," he said. "Both of you. Now. Before the hull gives."

"You can—" She stopped. Her jaw did the set thing. "What about everyone else."

"The coast guard was alerted eleven minutes ago. The other passengers will be fine on the upper deck."

"And you know that how."

"I know."

She looked at him.

The face of him. She hadn’t — she’d been in response mode since the corridor, threat-assessing, managing, doing the things she did in situations that required managing. She hadn’t done the thing her brain was now, in a moment of slightly reduced input, doing without her permission.

He was.

She looked at him and her brain produced a thought that was not useful to the current situation which was he looks like someone who would be very famous if he chose to be, the specific quality of a face that operated above the threshold where faces became universally legible as beautiful, the purple eyes that should have been impossible and were simply — present, looking at her.

She closed her eyes.

Opened them.

"You can really get us off," she said. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

"Yes."

"How."

"Like I got on."

She thought about that.

"I don’t want to know," she said.

"That’s fine."

She walked into the cabin properly. The decision made, the threshold crossed, the door swinging shut behind her. She looked at Nara on the bed — her friend’s face slack and young-looking in the dim light, the specific vulnerability of a person who had trusted the wrong context.

Celia’s throat moved.

"She’ll be okay," Raven said.

"You don’t know that."

"The compound they used metabolizes in six to eight hours. Her system is otherwise normal. She’ll wake up with a headache."

"You know what they drugged her with."

"I know what most of them use," he said. No particular inflection on most of them.

Celia looked at him.

"I want to say thank you," she said, with the specific, reluctant energy of someone doing something their chest is requiring and their pride is objecting to. "For getting her out of the bathroom."

"Don’t," he said.

"I’m trying to—"

"I know. Don’t."

She stared at him. Tried to be annoyed by this. Couldn’t fully manage it.

Her head hurt.

She noticed it now that she’d stopped moving — the specific, low throb at her temples that she’d been classifying as stress for the last twenty minutes and was now reclassifying as something else. Something that came from the inside rather than the outside.

"My head," she said. Not to him. Just — out loud.

He looked at her.

"How much did you drink tonight."

"Just water. I don’t drink."

"The water."

She blinked.

"The water bottle," she said. Slowly. Reconstructing. "Seungjae gave me a water bottle when I arrived. He said it was just—"

She stopped.

She looked at Raven.

"I was drugged," she said.

"Yes."

"That—" She said the senior’s name. The specific, flat register of someone locating a face and a fact and putting them together. "He was at the bar all evening. He kept — he kept making sure I wasn’t—" Her voice caught. She looked at Nara. At her friend, asleep, on the small cabin bed.

"He was targeting you specifically," Raven said. "Nara was secondary. You’re — you have access to resources he wanted proximity to."

She looked at him sharply. "You know who I am."

"Yes."

"How."

He said nothing.

The ship groaned again. Deeper. The sound working up through the deck beneath their feet, the vibration of it communicating structural information to anyone who was paying attention.

"We should go," Raven said.

"I—" Celia sat on the edge of the fold-out. Abruptly, like her legs had made the decision before she had. "Give me a second."

He looked at her.

The drug was mild in her system — she’d had less than Nara, her body weight was higher, her blood-chemistry running faster. She wasn’t going to lose consciousness. But the headache was real and the dizziness was a fact and the specific emotional weight of the last forty minutes was a separate thing running parallel to both of those.

"Are you going to be sick."

"No," she said. Then: "Maybe."

"Head down."

"I’m—"

"Head down," he said. Not unkindly.

She put her head between her knees. The fold-out creaked under her weight. The cabin lighting swayed with the ship.

"You should take a nap," Raven said.

"I’m not going to—"

"The drug requires rest to metabolize. If you fight it, the headache gets worse."

"How would you know—"

"I know," he said.

She was going to argue with this.

The argument got as far as the construction phase and then the drug and the headache and the forty minutes of corridors and bullets and a ship that was sinking and a best friend who’d been carried by a stranger and had trusted the stranger more than her — all of it pressed down on the argumentand the argument didn’t happen.

She lay down.

Not on the same bed as Nara — the fold-out. Her back to the wall, her knees drawn up, the jacket she’d been wearing pulled over her shoulders.

"Don’t touch me," she said, to the room.

"I know," he said.

"I mean it."

"I know."