Chapter 341: 3.0
"Can I still telepathize with my husbands when you are offline?" Cecilia asked in her mind.
[You can, Cecilia!]
The System answered.
[Just as you can still have your senses shared, the telepathy function will not turn off. It operates independently of our primary connection.]
"I see." Cecilia nodded. That was reassuring, at least. The thought of losing that thread now that she had experienced it, that constant connection to her three ridiculous, infuriating, beloved n, was more unsettling than she wanted to admit.
"By the way." She asked in a casual ntal voice. "When can I unlock the later half of the Bond Rank abilities? Oathran’s Love Affinity level is beyond Level 100 now."
She had been watching those numbers climb for weeks. Oathran’s number had crossed the threshold days ago. And yet—
Nothing.
What would Bond Rank Five to Seven give them?
Rank 1: Bond
Rank 2: Sense Sharing
Rank 3: Telepathy
Rank 4: Summon
Rank 5: Locked
Rank 6: Locked
Rank 7: Locked
[Cecilia, we have determined that you have not yet reached the emotional closeness necessary to unlock these abilities. We are very sorry.]
Cecilia’s brow furrowed.
"That is..." She paused, searching for the right word. "Vague. What do I need to achieve, exactly?"
How did the System even asure such a thing? Emotional closeness was not a quantity. It was not a number on a scale or a milestone on a path.
It was more of a texture. The warmth of Arkai’s arm around her shoulders, the way Eastiel’s laughter caught in his throat when she surprised him, the intensity of Oathran’s gaze when he thought she was not looking. How did one quantify that?
"Do I need to ask the gods again?" Cecilia muttered dryly in her mind.
[P... please don’t summon the All-mory and the All-Oblivion again. It was scary, Cecilia...]
"Huh? Did you get punished?" Cecilia blinked. "Morgen and Caledfwlch are that scary?"
[Of course not! They are very benevole—]
[...]
[You are tricking us to confirm their identity...?]
"Sorry."
[...]
[...anyway, it’s not our fault! If they’re mad, they’re mad at you!]
[We will begin the System Update now!]
Cecilia blinked. "Wait—"
DING!
[System Update Notice: Beast Gacha 3.0!]
[Download and Maintenance Ti: 24 Hours]
[Would you like to update?]
[Yes / No]
Cecilia stared at the options floating in her ntal vision.
"Alright." well, she had tricked it, so she would have to take responsibility, perhaps. "Good luck, System."
[Yes]
[See you tomorrow, Cecilia!]
DI-DING!
[Starting the downloading process...]
[Downloading...]
[23:59:59... 58... 57...]
The countdown began its slow descent, numbers ticking backward in the corner of her awareness. Twenty-four hours without the System.
Cecilia took a slow breath and let it out.
Now, turning her attention from the quieting presence of the System to the considerably less quiet circumstances awaiting her, let’s focus on the matters at hand.
The winter air bit quite ferociously for a season that had not yet decided whether to snow or simply freeze everything solid out of spite.
Cecilia stood beneath the skeletal branches of an oak, its bare limbs clawing at the grey sky like the fingers of a drowning man.
The Presence Concealing Ring on her finger wrapped her in a bubble of magical invisibility that rendered her functionally nonexistent to any observer. A thin layer of mana, carefully controlled and deliberately sparse, suppressed her scent.
Apparently, "by the river" in the ssage Roarke had received ant sothing quite specific. It was a literal river. The nearest one to Roarke’s current location, to be precise.
The Cassian Twins, or whoever had sent the ssage, had followed Roarke’s raven. Tracked its flight across whatever impossible distance it had traveled, watched where it descended, and then identified the closest river to that location.
They had marked a spot along its banks with sothing only Roarke would recognize, and they had given him three days to find it. Hence the "in three days" part.
Cecilia was still confused about one thing, however. How had Roarke’s raven found him at all? The bird had traveled from Cassia, across borders, across distances that should have been impossible for such a normal creature to navigate.
Magical training seed the most likely explanation. Or was it a special training to allow it to rember long-distance routes? How could it even track its master across continents as though tethered by an invisible thread?
If it was simply that well-trained, a creature of mundane but extraordinary skill, honed over years of careful conditioning, then Roarke got himself an incredible partner.
Well, considering it still knew what it had to do once it received a ssage to send while regularly hunting to sustain its own life... Lost was an impressive specin.
How to train it though...? Perhaps assassins had tricks up their sleeves that people like Cecilia had not yet discovered. She made a ntal note to ask Roarke about it later.
Because right now, she saw sothing. From her position beneath the frozen oak, Cecilia watched a figure make its way down the river path.
The wood was dense here, a strip of wild forest just beyond Iondora Capital’s outskirts, outside the city walls but still close enough that the capital’s smoke and noise lingered at the edges of perception.
The trees grew thick along the riverbank, their bare branches intertwining overhead to form a skeletal canopy. The path was narrow, barely more than a deer trail.
The figure walked in a thick winter robe, wrapped around a fra that could have belonged to anyone. A deep hood obscured the face, casting shadows that Cecilia’s eyes could not penetrate.
Roarke, of course, had gone "alone" to attend this appointnt.
He would approach the eting point as though he were obeying the ssage’s instructions to the letter, while Cecilia would follow undetectable.
Even Roarke did not know where she was now, since she wore the Presence Concealing Ring, and she had not told him where she would position herself. If he could not spot her, then whoever had co to et him would not be able to spot her either.
The hooded figure reached the designated spot, a bend in the river where the water ran slow and deep, and an old willow’s trailing branches brushed the surface like fingers testing the cold.
A hand erged from the thick robe, pale and slender, and pushed the hood back.
And as expected—
It was Ivy Cassia.
The princess who was supposed to have left Iondora days ago.
Her blonde hair caught the grey winter light and held it. Her eyes surveyed the riverbank as she smiled.
"Hello, Master Roarke." She said as if greeting an old friend at a social gathering rather than a hired killer in the middle of nowhere. "It has been long since we last t."
Roarke narrowed his eyes. "Princess."
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