Chapter 485: Chapter 485- Dead man’s Memories

Nara arrived with her slight, animal-aware asymmetry, her Beast-Touched senses already reading the courtyard’s emotional temperature. She said nothing. She positioned herself and waited.

Marla arrived last, adjusting her glasses, her thick body moving with the deliberate pace of a woman who refused to be seen running even under duress. She stopped at the edge of the group and pressed her thighs together through her skirt.

They looked at him.

All five.

Their eyes carried the same thing in different flavors — fear of abandonment wearing the costume of concern. They had watched nineteen women vanish from a courtyard in the space of two minutes. They had watched the crowd of bodies they had been part of all afternoon simply cease to exist.

They felt the specific smallness of being what remained.

Preet’s hands found her own skirt fabric and gripped it without her permission. Celia pressed closer to Gia. Nara’s nostrils flared. Marla’s jaw tightened.

Fatima waded toward the pool edge, still gasping, her enormous tits floating on the surface ahead of her.

Raven looked at all of them.

"Let me tell you," he said, "all of you. Directly and frankly."

His hands were behind his back.

His voice was not cruel. It was the specific flatness of honesty delivered without decoration.

"The reason you are here with me — unlike the others — is not because I love you more than them."

Preet’s grip on her skirt tightened.

"Or because you are more useful to me."

Celia’s eyes dropped to the flagstone.

"You are burdens."

The word landed in the courtyard like a dropped stone.

All five of them felt their hearts do something specific in their chests — not break, exactly, but contract. A sharp, involuntary pulling inward, the body’s response to something it was not prepared for.

Their eyes went down.

One by one. Preet’s. Celia’s. Gia’s. Nara’s. Marla’s.

Their hands clenched — in skirts, in each other, in nothing.

The silence stretched.

He let it.

Then he breathed.

"So," he said, "do not disappoint me. And do what I say."

He looked at each of their bowed heads in turn.

"Do you understand?"

Five nods. Small, synchronized, miserable.

He smiled.

"Let’s move," he said. "Hold each other’s hand."

He stretched his hand outward — palm up, open, an invitation that was also an instruction.

Five heads came up.

Five pairs of eyes blinked.

Then all five of them moved at once and did the wrong thing.

Preet’s arms found his torso first — her compact muscular body pressing against his left side, her face pushing into his shoulder, her thick thighs against his leg. She was crying before she made contact, small, contained, furious tears that she would be embarrassed about later.

Celia pressed against his right, her small frame finding the space between his arm and his chest, her thin arms going around his back. Gia pressed behind Celia, her arms extending to reach him around Celia’s smaller body, her dark tits pressing into Celia’s shoulder.

Nara pressed against his back with her whole body, her Beast-Touched warmth radiating through her garment, her face against his shoulder blade, breathing him in with the specific intensity of a creature who processes the world through scent.

Marla stood for one moment longer than the others.

She looked at the situation.

She looked at her own hands.

She looked at him.

Then she pressed her thick body against his remaining side and wrapped her arms around what she could reach, her face against his arm, her glasses pressing into his bicep, her thick thighs against his hip.

He looked at the sky.

"I said," he said, "hold my hand."

Nobody moved.

Fatima chose this moment to arrive at the pool’s edge.

She hauled herself out of the water with the specific graceless urgency of a woman whose enormous tits make swimming pool exits a structural challenge — first her arms, then her belly, then the rest of her. Water cascaded from her body in sheets. Her enormous dark tits swung with the effort, slapping together as she straightened.

She saw the situation immediately.

She saw him surrounded by five women clinging to him.

She saw his outstretched hand.

"Wait—" she said. "Wait, wait, wait—"

She stumbled toward him across the wet flagstone, her feet slipping, her enormous tits bouncing with every step, her hairy cunt visible below her soaked dress that was not yet where she’d left it. Her hand stretched forward.

"Don’t leave me—" 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

He reached out and grabbed her hand.

He pulled.

Her body lurched forward, pulled by the hand, her enormous tits swinging inward with the momentum and smashing against his chest with a wet, heavy impact.

"MMPH—!!"

She blinked at him from two inches away.

He looked at her innocent, dripping, wrecked face.

"How," he said, "could I forget my thick, overpowered bitch?"

Fatima’s eyes filled immediately.

Not from the words — or not just from the words. From the tone. From the casual, warm certainty of it. Like she was something he kept track of without needing to think about it.

She pressed her face into his chest.

Her enormous tits smooshed against his abs.

She said nothing.

He said nothing.

And then they vanished.

All of them simultaneously.

No wave. No warning. No soft pressure of displacement magic.

One moment: a wet courtyard on an island, six women clinging to one man, the pool still churning, the portal sky above still rotating in its slow crimson gate.

Next moment: above the clouds.

The sun hit them all at once — full and white and enormous, completely different from the red-sky island below. The clouds were beneath their feet, stretching in every direction, white and solid-looking as stone but not stone. The wind at this altitude was cold and smelled of altitude itself: thin, clean, slightly electric.

All six women gasped simultaneously.

Preet’s grip on his arm went white-knuckled. Celia made a sound that was not a word. Gia’s mouth opened fully. Nara went completely still with her eyes wide and her Beast-Touched senses attempting to process an environment they had no prior data for. Marla’s glasses nearly flew off her face and she caught them with one hand while the other grabbed his wrist.

Fatima looked down at the clouds below her feet.

Then up at the sun.

Then at him.

"Husband," she said carefully. "We are very high."

"Yes," he said.

The world system was trying to locate him.

He could feel it — the invisible hand of the transit protocol reaching toward his position, attempting to sort him into the appropriate destination. Main world or Labyrinth. Hero-class or commoner tunnel. VVIP direct entry or standard deployment.

The system touched his status.

The system said: ’ANOMALY. Unable to classify.’

The system said: ’Entry cap calculation: INCOMPLETE.’

The system said, essentially: ’I don’t know what to do with you.’

He suppressed his power.

Not all of it. Specifically the parts the system used to calculate his destination — the incubus classification, the bloodline markers, the rank indicators. He folded them inward and held them still.

The system recalculated.

It found a man above the clouds with six women.

It found power levels that made no coherent sense.

It found an anomaly classification that meant it could not apply standard law.

And it did what world systems do when they cannot classify something.

[ Transmigration of Host to labyrinth of Gaia Initiated. ]

"Don’t disappoint me."

They looked at him.

He looked at them.

His hand rested on Preet’s ass — his palm had found it during the transit, the compact muscular firmness of it filling his grip. His other hand was on Gia’s hip. Both women made small sounds at the contact.

He breathed.

"I want women," he said.

There was no hesitation in his voice, as he knew that to grow his powers, he needed to accumulate more IP, for the moment he entered another world he wanted so much absolute power, where he could stand in front of that succubus who killed him by milking his cock dry and fuck her like the bitch she was.

"Manipulate them. Get the strongest ones. Spread their legs for me."

He looked at them.

"Do you understand?"

His hands gripped Preet’s ass and Gia’s hip simultaneously and squeezed. Both women cried out, the sounds bouncing off the air as all of them just vanished.

"AANGHH~!!"

"MNH~!!"

----

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Another World’s First Floor, Base Village.

The morning mist clung low over the thatched rooftops of Edenveil, curling like pale fingers around the wooden fence posts and the mud-patched walls of the base village.

Chickens clucked somewhere beyond the hay piles. The distant lowing of cattle rolled across the open field where the dirt roads met in a crooked T near the well. Smoke rose lazy and thin from the communal cookfire near the center square. Women moved between homes with clay pots balanced on their hips, their voices low and warm in the early hour.

It was ordinary.

Disgustingly, painfully ordinary.

And then — a pair of eyes snapped open.

Jacob lurched upright on his straw mat like a man yanked from the bottom of a lake, his chest heaving, fingers clawing at his shirt as his lungs burned for a breath that didn’t want to come easy.

’Haah—!’

The sound that left him wasn’t quite a gasp and wasn’t quite a scream. It sat somewhere broken in between, raw at the edges, the kind of noise a man makes when his soul realizes it’s been shoved back into a body it already said goodbye to.

His eyes — red-rimmed, heavily shadowed, as though sleep had done nothing but drag him deeper into exhaustion rather than out of it — darted around the room. The low ceiling of cracked timber. The crumbling plaster wall. The single warped window with its rice-paper screen, half-torn where the draft always came through.

He knew this room.

He knew this ’smell’ — hay and woodsmoke and the faint sour note of fermented mash from the barrel Grandma kept near the door that she absolutely denied was liquor.

His jaw worked. His fingers went slack on the front of his shirt.

’What...?’