Leveling Up by Seducing Milfs-Chapter 270. An Eye That Wasn’t His

Fredrich was quiet for a while. He turned his cup in a small circle on the desk, which is what a man does when he is choosing his words carefully.

"I knew about them," he said. "I didn’t build them..."

"He did, and he explained to me that they served as a precaution, a means to monitor if the corruption crisis was being managed in accordance with the transition framework he had been constructing." He stopped. "I trusted him..."

"But, fuck... I shouldn’t have trusted him as much as I did."

"You knew about the pre-coalition node under the Council building," Zephyra said.

"I knew it was always there... I was told it was dormant and sealed, a piece of pre-coalition infrastructure that had been there before the current building was built on top of it."

"I was told it posed no risk." His jaw tightened a little, the first physical sign Rick had seen from him in any of their conversations. "I wasn’t told that the archive fire was taking away the last wards that were keeping it from waking up."

Rick said, "He didn’t tell you about the node activation."

"No... He didn’t." Fredrich put down his cup with a small, final motion. "And that’s why I wrote the letter."

’I didn’t agree to a corruption node going off in a civilian area thirty-one years ago, and also... I didn’t agree to—" He stopped.

He noticed something’s changed at Rick’s eye patch. "What happened to you the night before last?"

The room was very quiet.

Rick said, "You know what happened."

"He called me yesterday morning on the channel we use... and oh boy, he was upset."

"In thirty-one years of knowing this man, that’s the first time I’ve ever used that word to describe him." Fredrich spoke carefully, weighing each word. "He told me you had seen him through the socket."

"He said the connection had been broken faster than he thought it would be. He was not happy about either of those things." There was a pause. "He also told me that the socket had changed."

"He said that the corruption integrated with the scar tissue had changed the artifact resonance in a way he described as unpredictable."

Liora leaned forward. "Unpredictable... but how?"

Fredrich looked at her, and the worry on his face was real in a way that his political expressions never were. "He said the socket is now a receiver without a sender filter."

"The Eye of the Demon King was designed to channel demonic sight in one direction, with the artifact resonance controlling what passed through and what didn’t."

"What’s occupying the socket now has no such filter, and it can receive from any source that resonates with the corruption medium at sufficient intensity." He paused. "Sources that were previously unable to reach Rick can now do so."

Rick said, "That means the entity isn’t the only one who can use it..."

"That means that anything with a corruption resonance above a certain level can get through the socket if the conditions are right." Fredrich looked at Liora.

"I asked him what the threshold was, and he said it depended on the corruption suppression wards that were covering the area."

Liora’s hands remained motionless in her lap.

"What is the current state of Valdris’s suppression wards?" she asked slowly.

"The Council teams have been striving to restore Valdris’s suppression wards to their full strength since the node activation, but as of tonight, they are not fully functional." He stopped. "They think everything will be back to normal by tomorrow morning."

Rick felt the socket get warm.

Not gradually, not as a slow build. It was as if a switch had been flipped, and the warmth had already surpassed mere warmth, advancing toward a sensation that lacked an adequate term in the vocabulary of temperature.

He put his hand on the eyepatch.

Liora saw the movement, and her divine sense reached for the socket before she consciously told it to. What she found was not the same as what she had seen the night before when everything was still.

The ambient corruption that was echoing through the weakened city wards had worn down the suppression she had used, not all at once but steadily. What was left of the suppression was thin.

"Rick," she said to him.

The heat transformed into a signal. It was neither temperature nor feeling but rather a form of information. It was pure and immense and lacked any means of volume control.

It flooded a receiver that had been made for one carefully filtered source and was now open to all directions at once.

Rick put both of his hands flat on his knees. He found the bond network and held it with all six threads: Carmilla’s steady warmth, Natasha’s winter precision, Liora’s gold, Sylvia’s ancient fire, Zara’s blood-red heat, and Nerissa’s deep ocean blue.

Six anchors. He had them and kept them.

He looked at Fredrich and said, "Keep going...!!! Tell me EVERYTHING he told you!"

"I need to hear it all before—"

The socket burned.

His voice stopped in the middle of a sentence.

The warmth that had been building in the socket broke through the last of Liora’s control and turned into something else: a flood, neither heat nor signal.

Dozens of sources of corruption, not on purpose, not directed, just ambient resonance flooding through the weakened city wards and finding the unfiltered socket and converging on it like water does when it finds every available channel at once.

The bond network pushed back hard. All six threads burned brightly and pushed back, but it wasn’t enough because this wasn’t a single directed force; it was volume, pure unfiltered volume, and the socket couldn’t refuse it.

First, Rick lost his hands.

Next, the arms.

Then the legs became so numb that the sensation was worse than pain.

He stood up, even though he had not intended to do so.

The eyepatch came off.

The socket was open, and what Liora saw inside was not the clean scar tissue she had been watching since the night before. The artifact resonance that was still in the socket’s structure had caused the corruption to gather into the cavity and shape itself into an eye.

The corruption filled the space where the Eye of the Demon King used to be, forming an iris and pupil by a resonance that remembered what it used to hold. It wasn’t a real eye, but it acted like one.

It was red, with the kind of red that was so deep it was almost black in the shadows it cast and so bright in the middle that it threw a faint light on the wall behind Rick.

The corruption lines began at the eye socket and spread outward across Rick’s face, following the channels under his skin that the demon artifact had used to transmit its power, which were now filled with an uncontrollable substance.

They got to his neck, his shoulders, and then both arms down to the wrists. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

Liora shouted. "RICK...! Snap out of it!"

Rick heard it from far away, like he heard something through water.

The head of the body turned toward Fredrich. The corruption instinct that was in charge of the threat assessment didn’t take Rick’s priorities into account.

Fredrich was the unknown factor in the room; he was the one whose connection to the entity made him register as a source.

Rick’s voice came out flat, without any warmth. It wasn’t deep or dramatic; it was just empty.

"You are linked to it..."

Fredrich didn’t move at all. He had been alive for a long time and was both a politician and a mage.

He had the kind of courage that comes from facing the situation early, so he could make the decision without pressure.

"Yes," he said.