Chapter 493: Chapter 493- Much Harder than Before

They expanded in a single motion, snapping outward to their full span: enormous, the membrane a deep violet that darkened at the edges to near-black, the internal structure visible where the morning light hit it, translucent in the thinner sections, the individual ribs casting shadows across the street. The span of them, fully extended, covered the width of three huts.

The gust hit everything at once.

Edda’s white hair snapped backward. Her garment pressed against her body from the front—the tight fabric conforming to every line of her, the muscle, the mass, the heavy curve of her chest, the density of her thighs—before the wind released. The great sword at her back rang softly against the scabbard.

Jacob sat down in the dirt.

He did not do this intentionally. His knees simply made the decision.

Rika grabbed the fence post beside her with both hands.

Raven looked at Edda.

His voice, over the subsiding wind:

"Edda."

She straightened her spine. Both hands found her sword hilt. Not in threat—in the absence of anything else to hold.

"Take my women," he said. "Teach them basic swordsmanship." A pause. "I will come after surveying the waterfalls."

He looked at the sky.

Then he rose.

The downbeat of the wings sent a second wave of displaced air across the street—harder this time, directional, carrying a warmth that was not weather but mana, the heat of a power output that the atmosphere did not quite know how to process.

He was above the rooftops in two seconds.

Above the treeline in four.

The violet wings caught the morning light from above, the membrane going briefly luminous before he angled upward and the sky swallowed the color of him.

He was gone.

The street was quiet.

The birds, which had gone silent at some point Edda could not identify, remained silent.

Jacob sat in the dirt. He looked at the space where the man had been. He looked at the sky. He looked at his grandmother.

"Grandma," he said.

She did not respond.

She was looking at the sky.

"Grandma," he said again, quieter, his voice carrying the gentleness of a young man who has just understood that whatever he witnessed has not landed for him the way it has landed for her. "Are you alright?"

Edda’s hand was over her thoracic wound.

She had placed it there without noticing. Her palm pressed against the left side of her chest, over the old damage, over the thing that had not healed properly in three years and had been pulsing warm since the moment this man had arrived at the teleportation grid.

She breathed.

In. Out.

She turned toward the hut.

"Go inside," she said to Jacob, her voice carrying the complete authority of the woman who had told him to go inside for the past twenty-three years. "Stay there."

She stepped toward the hut door.

She stopped.

She turned back.

"And Jacob," she said.

He looked up from the dirt.

Her face was in profile. Her jaw was set. The crimson of earlier had faded to a high, sustained pink at her cheekbones that she would, if asked, attribute entirely to the wind.

"Remember, sometimes the best way to exist," she said, "...is to accept mistakes."

She opened the hut door.

She went inside.

The door closed.

In the dirt, Jacob sat.

He looked at the sky where the violet wings had been.

He looked at the hut where his grandmother had gone.

He looked at the space between them.

His nose was still bleeding.

"Okay," he said, to nobody. "Okay."

The hut door closed.

The six of them stood inside.

The interior was modest — a warrior’s living space, functional and undecorated, the furniture chosen for durability rather than comfort. A long table. A rack of weapons along the wall. A single window letting in the morning light at a low angle.

Six women in maid dresses.

They had been dressed for a master who had just grown violet wings and left through the ceiling of the sky.

Preet was the first to look at the space where the door had been. Her compact Indian frame was straight inside the dark warrior maid dress, her brown hands folded in front of her, her almond eyes tracking upward toward where the sound of the wingbeats had faded. The muscles in her jaw moved. Once. Then she made them stop.

’He left,’ she thought. ’He just — left.’

She did not say it.

Celia pressed her shoulder against Gia’s and neither of them spoke. Celia’s small hands had found the fabric of her dress and were holding it at the sides, a gesture she was not performing consciously. Gia’s dark tits rose and fell with the deep, controlled breath of someone managing an emotion they had not been given permission to name. The clasp at her neckline was still slightly open from before. She did not fix it.

Nara stood slightly apart from the others.

Her Beast-Touched senses were still reading the air — the dissipating mana trail of the wingbeats, the warmth his body had left near the doorframe, the faint residue of power that clung to everything he had been near. She was breathing it in the way animals processed the departure of a dominant presence: with the full, involuntary attention of something that had been organized around that presence and was now recalibrating.

Her eyes were flat. They were not sad. They were doing something more complicated than sad.

Fatima stood at the back.

Her enormous dark tits pressed against the front of her maid dress — the fabric had not been designed with her dimensions as a primary consideration, and the result was honest about her chest in every direction. Her hairy pussy was warm beneath the dress. Her soft belly pressed against the cloth.

She looked at the door.

Her innocent eyes had the expression they always had — that bruised warmth, that quality of a woman who has survived so many departures that she has developed a particular relationship with them. She had watched him leave before. She had survived that before.

She pressed her lips together.

Her hands found the underside of her own breasts and held them — the instinctive, habitual gesture of a woman managing their weight when the world had otherwise stopped being manageable.

She said nothing.

None of them said anything.

Because they all understood, without discussing it, that saying it made it real in a way that silence did not. That voicing ’he left us’ required a response from the universe, and they were not sure they wanted what the universe would offer.

Marla adjusted her glasses. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

The thick professor’s body filled the maid dress with the resigned fullness of a woman who had put on a great many inappropriate outfits in her life and had made peace with the category. Her ink-stained fingers straightened the frames. Her expression was academic — the deliberate, cultivated blankness of a woman processing data she had not yet fully categorized.

The door opened.

Edda stepped inside.

She stopped when she found six pairs of eyes looking at her.

The weight of the collective gaze of six women who had just watched their master fly away was a weight Edda had not been trained for. She had handled dragon hunts. She had survived the annihilation of her team. She had managed a village’s protection for three years with a wound in her chest that never properly healed.

Six women in maid dresses, looking at her with the expression of people who had been abandoned in her keeping.

She breathed.

’Why it seems much harder than before?’