Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 692: Malice

The lower tier of screens displayed the basin scene. The intense shelling. Luna's daring escape as bait. Alice's radiant halo streaking through the heavens. And Kaiden, positioned on the hilltop with arms crossed, observing the chaos with the icy calculation of a youth who had turned the tables on his foes and given them a taste of their own tactics.

Vespera observed all the displays simultaneously, her expression remaining unchanging.

The relic positioned on the table next to her sparked into activation.

"Your son is a great man." Eleanora’s voice transmitted through, warm and sincere, laced with the special affection of a woman who had just passed an hour conversing with someone surpassing her anticipations. "I enjoyed my talk with him throughout."

Vespera offered no reply.

Her gaze stayed locked on the screens. She remained seated in her subterranean laboratory, absorbing the praise for her eldest son with the inert reaction of sculpted stone.

Eleanora laughed softly from the connection's far side, her tone hinting that she had foreseen this very reaction. "I really don’t envy you, Vespera. What a dramatic family." She paused briefly. "But if you ever need my help again, you know where to find me."

Silence followed.

Then Eleanora sensed it.

An oppressive force unrelated to audio, stemming entirely from the woman linked on the other side. The atmosphere in Eleanora’s chest constricted. A drop of perspiration slid along her forehead, followed by more, which she brushed off with a trembling hand.

The hostility was immense and directed at another, rendering it far more terrifying. What Eleanora perceived via the artifact was mere overflow. Leakage. The peripheral seepage of a rage so immense that its fringes alone made her breath feel loaned. It emanated relentlessly from a woman poised motionless in her seat, and even transmitted through the relic over vast distances, it triggered Eleanora Voss’s primal survival urges.

"Well then." Eleanora’s voice turned brighter, deliberately light, the inflection of a woman aware of the moment to depart. "Goodbye, Vespera. Take care of yourself."

The connection severed abruptly.

Vespera had uttered not a single word.

Within the laboratory, the screens kept showing footage. Multiple viewpoints. Numerous instances. Her son’s visage appeared on six varied displays, composed, analytical, ingenious, and remarkably akin to her own, causing a constriction in her torso.

Her attention fixed on a particular screen.

Magnus Ashborn positioned himself on the ridge, his mana surging, his anger projecting broadly, facing their son with the futile wrath of a man whose scheme had been unraveled before a million onlookers.

Vespera examined her husband’s features.

The lab's atmosphere chilled noticeably.

It originated from under her, a gloom extending from the foot of her seat like dye permeating cloth, consuming the pristine white flooring panel by panel until no surface remained, only abyss, a blackness so absolute it seemed the chair hovered above a gash in the ground.

The shades behind the screens seeped from their edges and trickled down the surfaces in gradual streams, gathering around her, attracted to her form like metal particles to a lodestone. The atmosphere grew heavy. The illumination from the screen setup wavered, faded, and the space turned increasingly dim until it reached utter darkness, despite no switches being flipped.

Amidst everything, Vespera remained utterly motionless.

Her eyes turned fully black. The pupils had expanded to engulf the sclera completely, creating two abysses embedded in a countenance so immobile it might have been hewn from stone and affixed to a partition. Her complexion had drained of all hue, the fairness yielding to obscurity, as though the murk accumulating below her seat was rising through her veins and overtaking her from within.

The outlines of her figure started to dissolve into the surroundings, the divide between Vespera Ashborn and the enveloping shadows weakening until distinguishing the woman from the obscurity became challenging.

Despite all this, she had not blinked once, inhaled, or altered her demeanor even slightly.

Nevertheless, the animosity emanating from her was so thick that the surrounding air began to warp.

The Shadow Monarch, disguised in human garb, stared at Magnus’s image on the monitor, and every alert in the Ashborn manor blared at once.

The protective spells ignited in red. Security shields dropped over each entrance and opening with the resounding mechanical certainty of a structure initiating full containment.

Armed units rushed from their posts, firearms ready, mana auras ignited, heading to the origin of what all detectors in the structure identified as an enemy breach.

The property’s defense system had long been adjusted to Vespera’s energy profile, configured to identify her shadow essence as allied and exclude it from danger alerts.

It was activating regardless.

The data streaming via the safety web surpassed the set limits, exceeding what the manor’s designers thought one person could generate. The energy matched Vespera’s, and the setup recognized it as hers, but it triggered warnings because the intensity had overrun every predefined maximum.

In the laboratory, following sixty minutes of absolute immobility, Vespera rose.

The screens in her wake fractured. All displays in the arched setup shattered together as the shadow force surged from her frame, fine cracks branching over surfaces designed to endure impacts. The images vanished sequentially, Magnus’s visage disintegrating into lifeless pixels and void.

She advanced toward the exit.

The fortified steel barrier that had locked the lab in containment mode deformed inward as she neared, the alloy twisting in her aura, and she passed through the opening without pausing. The hallway ahead lay in shadow and echoed with siren wails.

Vespera Ashborn traversed her own residence until she stepped out from the manor’s main portal.

She never glanced behind as she departed.