Leveling Up by Seducing Milfs-Chapter 266. A Predictable Lever

He turned to Zephyra. She had the same blank look on her face as always when she looked at him, but she still had a firm grip on his hand.

He asked, "How did you... know that would work?"

"I didn’t."

"Then why—"

"You said you needed something real and outside the network." She said it like she always did, with the facts in the right order. "I was the only person in the room who didn’t have a magical connection to you or, should I say, a spirit bond."

"So that’s why it was the only logical choice for me to step in and help you."

He looked at her for a moment. "That is the least romantic thing anyone has ever said while saving my life."

"I wasn’t trying to be romantic... I was trying to hold you down."

"Well, uh, y-yeah! I understand that," he said with an embarrassed look. "Ehem! I already know that."

He was still on his knees, and she was still standing. He was still holding her hand, and of course she had still not let go of his.

Neither of them brought up any of this.

Rick could only hear Sebastian’s voice, which was very quiet, like someone who has decided to be quiet for once but isn’t quite making it. "Affection notification coming in."

"I’ll give you five minutes before I say anything."

Rick thought strongly, "Don’t you dare."

Sebastian thought back, "Five minutes."

...

Liora used what little she had left, but she did it with the perfect accuracy of someone who knew exactly where each remaining unit of energy would be most useful. The corruption in the socket was static.

She could lower the activation threshold and make it less likely to respond to an outside signal, but the integration with the scar tissue was too deep for anything short of purification to take the socket with it.

"It’s now part of the tissue," she said, honestly revealing she had learned that softening the truth about the cure was unkind.

"The corruption and the artifact scarring are using each other..."

"You can’t get rid of one without getting rid of the other." She looked at Rick. "There are choices, but..."

"B-But...?"

"They require time and resources we don’t have tonight and probably not this week."

Rick said, "So I have a corrupted eye socket for the rest of my life."

"Yes... for now," Liora then whispered to him. "And I suggest you don’t have sex with anyone until that eye is purified."

Rick’s body shook hearing that. "W-What!? Of course not...! I wouldn’t endanger any of my partners like that!"

Liora giggled. "Good boy."

Natasha had been looking for Rick since he got back. Rick realized that Natasha was being considerate by presenting her results in the order they were found, rather than in the order of their severity.

"During the partial possession, the shape could only see Rick’s memory on the surface," she said. "It’s not deep, but only recent experiences and short-term context."

"Faces, names, and the quality of relationships rather than history." She paused like she always did before saying what she meant instead of just what she found. "It knows what Rick cares about."

"Not in a general way, but in a specific way."

"It had that before," Carmilla said. "It’s been watching the bond network for months."

"What it got tonight was emotional context, and there’s a big difference between watching a bond network from the outside and reading the memories behind it." Natasha put down her crystal. "Before tonight, it knew its form."

"Now it knows the content."

Zara said, "That’s a list of targets."

"Yes, that is one way to look at the data."

Sylvia, who hadn’t moved since the Dragon’s presence left the room, said in a voice that didn’t sound like she was acting, "It looked at my consort’s memories." It was a straightforward assertion of a fact, and that fact was accomplishing all its necessary tasks."

The temperature in the room went down by one or two degrees. No one said anything about this.

Sebastian pulled out what looked like a glass splinter from somewhere. It had a faint purple glow around the edges that was different from the corruption purple Rick had been seeing.

It looked cleaner and more specific.

Sebastian said. "When the shape was pulled back, it moved faster than it wanted to."

"When objects move quickly against their will, they leave traces." He turned the splinter as he held it up. "This was in the socket after the connection broke."

"It’s neither corruption nor the shape’s power directly but some kind of information."

"A piece of the entity’s basic structure that was left behind when it released faster than planned."

"Can you read it?" Rick asked.

"I can try, but it will take time, and I won’t have results until morning at the earliest."

"Well... this is the first direct sample of this entity we have ever been able to get." He looked at the splinter with an expression Rick had never seen on him before, which was a mix of professional interest and real worry. "It knows we have it."

"That’s why it backed off instead of pushing harder. It figured that losing the socket connection would cost less than giving us more of this."

"It made a choice." Natasha said, "This is the first unplanned choice it has made in this whole operation."

"Welp, true," said Sebastian. "This means it can make mistakes when it is surprised."

"That’s useful information about this thing."

Rick saw the splinter throb slowly in Sebastian’s hand once. "Then we have something."

"That’s the first time I’ve been able to say that about this problem."

"Yup," Sebastian said again. "Don’t waste it."

...

The room slowly started working again.

Rick’s partners took up the roles they had given themselves:

Carmilla stood outside the door.

Liora leaned against the far wall to keep things quiet.

Natasha looked over her data, while Sylvia and Zara were in the hallway engaging in their usual helpful activities, which typically involved at least one constructive disagreement and the resolution of one problem.

The last person to leave was Zephyra.

She got up, straightened her coat with the same automatic accuracy she used for everything else, and picked up her folio from the floor where it had been sitting the whole time, apparently put down without ceremony at some point during the twenty-four minutes she had spent sitting next to Rick.

She paused at the door.

Rick, who had been moved to the bed by all his partners, said, "You can say it" while staring at the ceiling.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you’ve been figuring out since the shape pulled back, I can tell you’re working on something because you stop moving."

Then a long pause happened.

Rick even thought she might not answer because she was quiet for so long.

She said, "The shape got to your surface memories."

She didn’t look back. "It saw recent events, like what happened during the Council district’s corruption surge."

There was another pause, but this one was shorter.

"It saw that I was in danger, and it saw the choice you made and why you made it..."

"It knows now that you would make the same choice again if the same thing happened."

Rick said, "Wow... that’s probably the truth."

"That makes me a predictable lever for producing a specific behavior from you."

"If the entity wanted to put you in a particular position, creating a credible threat to me would accomplish it efficiently and reliably." She still avoided looking at him, and her voice remained in the same register.

"I find that inconvenient."

"Wait..." Rick said, "The predictability part, or the part where it means the entity might try to use you against me?"

She looked at him. The flat, analytical look was still there.

"Both," she said.