Chapter 119: Every Cage Has a Crack
Seeing her gaze drift lower, Evan felt a nerve snap.
Here he was, panicking over the fact that they had just become the target of an Abyss Divinity...
And she was discussing his masculinity?
"As much as I’d love to give you a firsthand demonstration of just how much of a man I can be, I’d rather make sure my life doesn’t end in the next few minutes first. So could we please focus on the more pressing issue?" Evan said, no longer bothering to hold back.
From their recent interactions, he had already realized that, despite being a literal Divinity, this woman behaved nothing like one.
If anything, she acted like an ordinary woman with far too much free time, one who seemed to take particular pleasure in teasing him.
She was straightforward, completely unrestrained, and far more mischievous than he had expected.
Under different circumstances, he might have appreciated that.
His current situation, however, left him with no room to do so.
So he decided to be equally direct, hoping it might steer the conversation somewhere useful for once.
"Oh my? You want to give me a firsthand demonstration?" she asked, feigning surprise before a sly smile slowly spread across her face. "Goodness... I had no idea the big bad wolf had already set his sights on this poor maiden."
Evan was not in the mood to keep playing along, which she seemed to pick up on, because she let it go with a small shake of her head.
"Well, now that our fates are intertwined, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of opportunities to get to know each other better." she said, with a particular emphasis on the final part that did not escape him in the slightest.
"As for the problem with that guy, don’t worry. From what I can see, the restrictions this place imposes on beings like him are still very much in effect. For the time being, there’s no danger of us having to face them directly."
Hearing that, Evan finally let out a sigh of relief.
Mentally, however, he couldn’t help cursing the woman for dancing around the answer and leaving him to stew in fear of dying for no reason.
’Just wait until I become a Divinity. I’ll settle the score with you personally,’ he swore to himself, quietly adding this to the ever-growing list of debts she owed him.
His experience with women, across two lifetimes, had been limited enough that encountering one this bizarre was genuinely capable of making his head spin.
Just as he was beginning to settle, however, a particular detail in what she had said snagged his attention. He looked at her with an uncertain expression.
"You said there’s no danger for the moment," he said. "What exactly do you mean by that?"
The place still had its restrictions in effect, that was what he had understood. They couldn’t make a move against him. At least not yet.
But she had said for the moment. What would change with time?
Seraphine smiled again, that familiar smile she wore whenever she was about to tease him, and said in a perfectly innocent voice:
"I mean exactly what I said. You’re safe for now, but not for long. The restrictions keep those individuals contained, yes, but they are divinities, and let me tell you, we divinities have our own fair share of methods for influencing things without ever needing to act personally."
Her smile grew in a way that Evan found progressively less reassuring.
"Much like myself, even after my death, I managed to preserve my existence and influence the world up to a certain threshold. They can do the same here. They cannot attack you directly, but they don’t need to. They have their methods. Ways to ensure you remain constantly within their reach, until inevitably, inescapably, you end up in their hands."
She said it in the same calm tone one might use to comment on the weather. As though she had not just informed him that the longer he stayed here, the worse his situation would become.
’Damn it... I’ve been here for less than a few hours and I’m already in this much trouble? Bruce! Where the hell are you? Say something! Get me out of here!’ he screamed internally, reaching out to the only other remotely reliable presence he could think of.
The System knew many things.
Enough to point him in the right direction, when it mattered. But just like before, no response came.
He looked at the woman in front of him, who, after everything, remained the single least reliable option available, and decided to ask her anyway, because he had no other options left.
"Is there a way out of here? A door, a gate, anything that could get me away from this place as quickly as possible?" he asked, with a flicker of hope he was desperately trying not to watch get crushed the way it had been every other time.
Seraphine looked at him, eyes narrowing slightly, as though she had detected something faintly offensive in the question but couldn’t quite bring herself to show it.
Then she set that aside and answered.
"As it happens, there is a way. One you can actually use to leave this place," she said, and this time, without any detours, which caught Evan off guard for a full second and made him genuinely wonder whether she was still playing with him.
But he read her expression and concluded that there was no reason for her to do so. At least none that was apparent to him.
"Something I can use?" he said. "What is it?"
He understood too little of this place to even begin searching for a solution on his own, so if she was saying he could get out, all he could do for now was take her at her word.
"Normally, leaving this place is nearly impossible," she said. "It was designed that way deliberately, to ensure that certain individuals could never find a means of escape. But as with all things, there is a flaw, even here."
’A flaw?’ he thought. ’What kind of flaw?’
He still didn’t understand what she was referring to.
She caught his expression, smiled, and said nothing immediately. Instead, she raised her hand, and onto one of her fingers drifted what appeared to be a single snowflake.
It looked like ordinary snow. Evan knew it was more than that. What he couldn’t yet tell was what she was trying to do with it.
Just as he was about to ask where she was going with all of this, she channeled a thread of mana into the snowflake and, without hesitation, moved her finger.
Slightly. Just slightly.
The snowflake shot away from her, covering fifty meters of distance in an instant.
Evan wasn’t sure what she was trying to demonstrate, and just as he was about to ask, he noticed it immediately.
The space around the snowflake had begun to distort.
Before he could make sense of what was happening, the air seemed to shudder for a moment, and then —
Boom.
A powerful detonation tore through the silence. Not a flash, not a light, nothing to see at all. Just a deep, concussive sound, followed by an entire section of ground simply ceasing to exist.