Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 692

Chapter 692: Malice

The bottom row of monitors showed the basin. The bombardment. Luna’s bait run. Alice’s halo blazing across the sky. And Kaiden, standing on the ridge with his arms folded, watching it all unfold with the cold precision of a young man who had outplayed his enemies and served them their own medicine.

Vespera watched every screen at once and her face did not move.

The artifact on the desk beside her crackled to life.

"Your son is a great man." Eleanora’s voice came through warm and genuine, carrying the particular fondness of a woman who had just spent an hour with someone who’d exceeded her expectations. "I enjoyed my talk with him throughout."

Vespera said nothing.

Her eyes didn’t move from the screens. She sat in her chair in her underground lab and received the compliment about her firstborn son with the responsiveness of carved marble.

Eleanora chuckled on the other end of the line, and there was a note in the sound that suggested she’d expected exactly this response. "I really don’t envy you, Vespera. What a dramatic family." A pause. "But if you ever need my help again, you know where to find me."

Silence.

Then Eleanora felt it.

A pressure that had nothing to do with sound and everything to do with the woman on the other end of the line. The air in Eleanora’s lungs tightened. A bead of sweat traced down her temple, then another, and she wiped it away with an unsteady hand.

The malice was enormous and aimed at someone who wasn’t her, which made it so much worse. What Eleanora was feeling through the artifact was runoff. Spillover. The ambient bleed of a fury so vast that even its edges were enough to make the air in her lungs feel borrowed. It simply radiated outward from a woman sitting perfectly still in a chair, and even filtered through an artifact across hundreds of kilometers, it made Eleanora Voss’s survival instincts scream.

"Well then." Eleanora’s voice was lighter now, forcibly so, the tone of a woman who knew when to leave. "Goodbye, Vespera. Take care of yourself."

The line went dead.

Vespera hadn’t said a word.

In the lab, the monitors continued playing. Dozens of angles. Dozens of moments. Her son’s face on six different screens, calm and clinical and brilliant and so much like her that it made her chest tighten.

Her gaze settled on one screen.

Magnus Ashborn stood on the ridge, his mana flaring, his fury radiating outward, confronting their son with the impotent rage of a man whose plan had been dismantled in front of a million witnesses.

Vespera looked at her husband’s face.

The temperature in the lab dropped.

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