She nodded with tremendous satisfaction, settled herself back against his side, and leaned her head against his arm. Basket in her lap. Feet swinging. The morning sun warm on both of them. The fountain at their back making its patient quiet noises, and the market moving around them, and somewhere nearby a woman was calling to her daughter, and the smell of bread drifted across from the baker’s stall.

Lily sighed.

A small contented sigh, full of chocolate and candy and flight.

"Brother."

"Mm?"

"Today is the best day."

"You said that earlier."

"It keeps being true."

Bruce smiled, not at her, just in the general direction of the morning, and put his arm around her small shoulders, and they sat on the rim of the fountain in a small town at the edge of his home continent, and ate frosted berry candies, and did not say anything else for a while, because nothing else needed saying...

At that moment, a voice resounded in his mind.

<I’ll Teleport You Now...>

Bruce went still.

This wasn’t Vaelith’s voice. At his current rank as an SSS-Ranked Being, he could recognize Vaelith not just by sound but through the contractual link that always reverberated when Vaelith spoke, regardless of tone, regardless of disguise. That link was unmistakable.

This voice carried none of it.

It was monotonous like Vaelith’s, but the power behind it was something else entirely. Something that made the hair on the back of his neck rise and stay there.

His alarm sharpened into something colder. Even at full strength, Vaelith was the Guardian of this world, its will, the highest authority within Velmora’s boundaries. For anything to radiate an aura more terrifying than that meant only one thing.

It came from outside.

’An invader probably...’

And the fact that it had reached through the spatial barrier, through the sealed pocket space of Velmora, without so much as disturbing it spoke to a level of power Bruce didn’t want to think about. Didn’t want to name. Naming it made it real in a way he wasn’t ready for.

He steadied himself and spoke inward to test something... ’Who are you.’

’It doesn’t matter who I am.’

The response came instantly.

Bruce’s jaw tightened, but not because of the answer. Because of what the exchange had just confirmed that this being could read his mind, something he wanted to test...

He hadn’t spoken aloud. He hadn’t projected. He had simply thought the words, deep in the privacy of his own mind, in the space he had always assumed was his alone.

’You can read my mind.’

The words felt hollow even as he thought them. Like saying ’You’ve broken in’ to someone already standing in the center of the room. The privacy of his own consciousness, violated without effort. Without resistance. The powerlessness of it didn’t just sting, it burrowed.

Anyways there was something he has always felt ever since he evolved to SSS that he wanted to test out... he didn’t know if it will work, heck in such a situation he felt that the chance of it working or even helping was low, but he couldn’t give hope so easily, after all it was worth the try

He always knew aura had multiple applications, but there was one application he had been thinking of.

He felt that wrapping it directly around his consciousness should, in theory, be enough to block an intrusion like this. His aura wrapped around his consciousness should act against mental invasions and mental attacks...

Without hesitation He did that...

And to his delight it actually worked, he quickly solidified with all the aura he could muster...

But then...

SHATTER!

His aura collapsed. Shattering like brittle glass against what crashed into it...

The backlash tore through his core and he tasted blood before he even realized he’d stumbled. He spat it to the ground, his body trembling slightly from the damage to something as fundamental as his aura’s root. Not from the pain. From the sheer wrongness of it, of something that had taken years to build being folded apart like it was nothing.

He’d expected it. The power radiating from this being made this outcome almost inevitable. But expectation didn’t make it easier to absorb. It just made the helplessness arrive informed.

He pushed heal through himself. It took. But the mana drain was obscene, a million times more than what it had cost to heal the greatest damage he had ever taken, it was consumed so easily, and it was still climbing, still working through the damage at an agonizing crawl. His body was doing what it always did. Surviving. Adapting. He just wasn’t sure surviving was enough this time. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

"Brother?"

A cute voice pulled him back.

He had stopped walking without noticing. Lily stood beside him, face tight with confusion that was quickly dissolving into something worse, her eyes had gone glassy, her lip trembling, the tears already threatening to spill at the sight of the blood on his chin. She looked young, suddenly. Not the girl courageous little girl that was unawakened big stared straight at A-ranked and S-Ranked beasts and still stand strong and courageous.

She was his cute sister. Standing in the path of something she couldn’t see and couldn’t understand. How could he defend her if he couldn’t even defend himself...

Bruce fought off that feeling of helplessness, he had to, he must...

"Don’t worry, Lily." He forced a smile. "I’m fine."

He ran heal over himself again, the surface damage, the internal bruising, and started walking before she could ask anything else. Before she could look at him the way she was looking at him.

But his heart wasn’t steady.

Lily was right here. Sophie was waiting somewhere ahead. His mother Lucy too.

The people he had built everything around protecting, and something had just reached through the wall of the world itself like it wasn’t there, shattered his full-force aura like paper, and was apparently still watching him. Patient. Unhurried. Amused...

The patience of something that had no reason to rush, because it had already seen how this kind of moment ends.

He had never felt this way before. Not once.

It wasn’t a reasoned fear. It came from somewhere deeper, instinct, or whatever passed for it in a body that had survived so much. His aura, at full capacity, could tear through spatial concepts. He could teleport with it the same way he could with heal. He had used it to end things that should have been unendable.

And this being had crushed it effortlessly. Not overpowered it. Crushed it. The distinction mattered to him more than he wanted to admit.

Something capable of that could unmake Velmora entirely. Probably without effort. He had faced strong enemies, many of them, but the gap between the strongest of those and what he was sensing now was not a matter of degree. It was categorical. A million times over, at minimum, and he had the sick feeling that even that estimate was generous.

"Let’s keep moving, Lily."

He started walking. He couldn’t fly yet, without the aura, it was impossible, and he wasn’t sure he trusted his composure at altitude right now anyway. Better to keep his feet on the ground. Better to give Lily something ordinary to follow. Something that looked like her brother, moving forward the way he always did.

The premonition in his chest pressed heavier with every step. Like something settling its weight.

Then the notification came.

[Your Aura has healed.!]

[Your Aura has risen to an unimaginable level.]

Bruce stopped breathing for a moment.

The premonition spiked. A hundredfold. Instantaneously. Not relief, never relief, not yet, just the cold, clarifying certainty that something had shifted, and that whatever came next would demand everything the shift had given him.

’No immunity from the heal?!’

He had cured the damage. He had healed past it, and the aura that had come back was not the same one that had been broken. He could feel the difference in his bones, in the pressure behind his sternum, in the way the world around him seemed to pull back slightly as if making space. Where before his aura could envelope the length of two Earth-sized continents, now it felt like it could stretch across all of Velmora without reaching its limit.

His teeth clenched.

He raised the aura again, tried to wrap it around his mind again, knowing the being watching him had seen every moment of this, was still watching, was probably waiting with something close to amusement for whatever he tried next. Probably had been waiting since before he’d noticed it at all.

The thought made his skin crawl in a way nothing had in a very long time.

Bruce had never felt this helpless in his life. And he had been helpless before, truly, structurally helpless, but always with the knowledge that the ceiling above him was something he could eventually reach. Something finite.

He wasn’t sure this was finite.