Villain's Breeding System: Evolving 999+ Harem into an SSS-Rank Legion-Chapter 211- heading to meet the Priestess

He snapped his fingers.

Gone.

The specific, absolute absence of a person from a room — not the door-closing kind, not the stepped-out kind. The kind where there had been a presence and now there was a room-shaped space where the presence had been.

She sat in the silence.

Her hand pressed flat against her knee.

Her probability calculations were running at a speed that they usually reserved for crisis scenarios.

From the stairs — footsteps.

"’I changed my mind,’" Celia’s voice, already descending, "’I’m not going to fire him, I’ll deal with him personally, I’ll—’"

She came through the door.

The sitting room.

Avriana, on the sofa.

The prosthetic, beside the sofa where he’d set it.

The room, otherwise: empty.

Celia looked at the space.

Looked at her sister.

"’Where—’" she said.

"’He left,’" Avriana said.

Celia was very still for a moment.

The specific, arrested stillness of someone who has received a piece of information and is doing something with it that their face is not fully reporting.

"’He left,’" she said.

"’Yes,’" Avriana said.

Something happened in Celia’s expression.

Just briefly. The specific, brief, involuntary thing — not quite disappointment, not quite relief, the third register that doesn’t have a clean name, the one that people wore when they had been bracing for something and the something had not arrived and the bracing had nowhere to go.

She looked at the space where he’d been.

Then she sat down.

Across from her sister.

The morning light between them.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

’Las Vegas.’

The Stratosphere tower at this hour — the specific, pre-dawn Las Vegas hour when the lights below were still doing what they did and the sky above was beginning to consider doing something different — was cold at the top. The specific, exposed cold of a tower above a desert city at an elevation where the wind came from several directions at once.

He stood at the edge.

Looking at the grid below — the light-grid, the miles of it, the specific, illuminated geometry of a city that had been built in a place cities weren’t supposed to be built and had become something extraordinary through the specific human insistence on building things in wrong places anyway.

His back hurt.

Not seriously. The specific, reasonable ache of a back that had been doing unreasonable things for four hours and was now filing its report in the quiet of a moment where there was nothing else to manage.

He stretched.

Arms up. Shoulder blades together. The vertebrae doing the specific thing they did.

He thought about the island.

The waterfall. The stone. The three women’s specific, distinct voices — Nara’s lower register, Preet’s Delhi-market directness, Gia’s engineering brain breaking down its own experience into measurable units even in the middle of having it.

He thought about the side camp.

Twenty feet away. Celia’s hands.

He had not touched Celia. He had not intended to touch Celia. He had taken the three other women not entirely without calculation — Avriana would need to be approached precisely, and what she valued was restraint, and what she would understand was someone who could demonstrate that the women around him came to him, not the other way, not with her sister as the example.

He thought about Avriana in the back seat of the car.

’I feel that I know you.’ The specific, direct quality of her when she said it — no decoration, no hedging. Just the statement, delivered with the same precision she delivered everything.

She didn’t know why she knew him.

She would never guess why.

In his previous life, in the dimension called Cubis — the system-structured world, the one where abilities were assigned and parties were formed and power was everything, the one where he had been assigned the weakest ability in the most demanding classification — Avriana had been in his party. Not as a friend, exactly. As the specific, other category — the one that preceded friendship, the one that was built from the accumulated weight of surviving things together without having agreed to.

She had the luck ability. Probability manipulation. The ability to tilt outcomes — not control them, not override them, but nudge the probability of favorable things in the specific, quiet way of someone pushing a large stone and finding the slope doing the rest.

He had been saved by her ability more times than he had counted.

Not because she liked him. Not because she had decided to save him. Because she was in his party and she had aimed her ability at the party and he had been included by default.

He had never told her this.

He was not going to tell her this, because the information would complicate the arrangement he had just made, and the arrangement he had made was excellent.

He chuckled.

The Las Vegas lights below.

The sky beginning to develop its pre-dawn intention at the horizon.

He thought about the priestess.

A heroine, if he could recall, was from India and was 5-6 months pregnant when she was transmigrated. She lost her baby and awakened the power of a priestess, beginning to serve at an orphanage and helping children. Healing them with her soul-healing power and her maternal nature, she survived for a long journey.

The healing ability. The specific, irreplaceable kind of healing — not the minor restoration he could manage himself, not the stamina maintenance he’d been running on the island. The real kind. The kind that regrew what was gone.

He knew who had it.

He knew where she was.

He knew the timeline.

He turned from the edge.

The specific, slow turn of someone who has been looking at one thing and is now facing the direction of the next thing.

He looked at the horizon.

The specific calculation ran: location, probable distance from the primary city, current status, and the one additional variable that had been sitting in his awareness since he’d done the math on the timeline six weeks ago.

He exhaled.

"’She’s probably five months pregnant by now.’"