Chương 42: The Future Approaches

Ninety-nine years had passed. Yes, ninety-nine. I know exactly how that sounds, and I can already imagine the question forming. Helena, why ninety-nine? Why not one hundred? Why not fifty? Why choose such an annoyingly specific number instead of something nice and round that people could carve into a dramatic monument? Because according to Nadia and Rowan, the world had begun falling apart exactly one hundred years after the point they returned to. Ninety-nine years had now passed.

That left us one year away from the day I was supposed to die. Supposedly… I had every intention of proving that particular piece of history wrong, especially since I had become rather fond of being alive. The future Nadia and Rowan remembered had not ended gently. The Demon Lord awakened, its armies swept across the world, and somewhere in the chaos, I died. My blood children followed soon after, their lives ending with mine through the bond we shared. Akane was the one who remained.

Desperate to change what had happened, she shattered her core and used what remained of her power to send Nadia and Rowan back through time with a warning. The warning was meant to ensure that none of it ever happened again. Celeste, naturally, considered the whole thing horribly romantic, while I preferred to think of it as strategically useful. Unfortunately, both descriptions were probably accurate.

So after ninety-nine years of preparation, growth, and waiting, here we were again, standing only one year away from the moment fate had once decided to become exceptionally rude. Two Demon Spires had already been destroyed, leaving only four still feeding whatever slept beneath the Demon Continent. That part, at least, had gone according to plan. The real problem was far more personal. After so long, that damn fox was still nowhere to be found.

A long lifespan did wonders for one's patience, but even mine had limits, and Akane was beginning to find them. The soul shard she had left inside me remained warm, patient, golden, and smugly silent. Every so often, it stirred just enough to make me suspect she was somehow watching me through it, although I had never managed to prove anything. That was the problem with clever fox women.

They left pieces of themselves inside your soul, called it romance, and then apparently decided that providing even the most basic communication schedule was asking far too much. Naturally, I was handling Akane's absence with remarkable dignity, despite Celeste's repeated claims otherwise. She was wrong about many things, and this was obviously one of them. Still, waiting for Akane had never meant sitting around doing nothing.

Four Demon Spires remained on the other side of the sea, and I had no intention of politely leaving them alone for nearly a century. So yes, we went back. We returned to the Demon Continent seven years after destroying the second spire. It went poorly. Not disastrously, since we all survived, but we never reached the core. In fact, we barely made it into the outer valley before it became obvious just how much the continent had changed since our first visit. Destroying one spire had made the demons suspicious.

Losing a second had made them furious. By the time we came back, the third spire was no longer just a tower surrounded by guards. It had become a hive. Demons covered the valley in numbers that made the word "army" feel almost delicate. There were hundreds of thousands at the very least, possibly millions scattered throughout the ridges, tunnels, camps, and black forests surrounding the spire. At times, the ground itself seemed to move beneath them. The sky was no better.

Winged beasts crawled through the air in such numbers that they looked like someone had taught rotting bats how to hate architecture. Patrols circled above the clouds, while invisible warding nets stretched between the ridges and only revealed themselves when Aura came close enough for her scales to start itching. She complained about that for twenty minutes before reluctantly admitting the wards were dangerous. Considering Aura's standards, that meant they were extremely dangerous.

Celeste, Aura, and I could have killed a large number of demons if we had forced the issue. Between Celeste's storms, Aura's dragon fire, and my Primordial Ruin, we probably could have transformed entire sections of that valley into a cautionary painting. Unfortunately, numbers still mattered. Anyone claiming numbers did not matter had never faced an enemy so vast that even victory promised to bury you beneath the bodies it took to earn it. The sky offered no safer route.

Winged beasts moved in flocks dense enough to blot out the moonlight, while several of the enormous ridge-shaking creatures we had encountered during our escape from the second spire waited near the tower. Their massive bodies remained half-buried beneath ash and black stone, red fractures glowing across their backs like banked embers. The creatures were not roaming the valley by chance. They had been stationed around the third spire deliberately, exactly where they needed to be if we returned.

Nadia captured one of their scouts before we committed ourselves to the assault, and a single taste of his blood was enough to tell us what we needed to know. Get out now if you want to live! The demons had constructed false access routes, false cores, blood alarms hidden beneath bone roads, anti-dragon wards, and underground kill chambers designed to collapse if violet magic touched the wrong stone. They did not know my name yet, at least not then, but they had learned enough.

Something had already destroyed two of their spires, and the demons had learned enough from those attacks to understand what kind of threat they were dealing with. Their enemy could fly, wield violet magic, and arrive alongside vampires, a dragon, blood magic, shadows, gravity, storms, and a crimson bird that should never be allowed anywhere near expensive curtains. In other words, they had correctly concluded that my family was a problem. Flattering, certainly, but also extremely inconvenient.

So I turned us around. Celeste spent the next three days sulking over the retreat, while Aura remained convinced that the warding net would have failed if I had simply given her "one proper chance." Knowing Aura, that translated to… Please let me solve this with an amount of fire everyone else will regret. Adrian was far less dramatic about the retreat, simply calling it the smartest decision I had made that decade.

I briefly considered throwing him into the sea for the comment, but apparently immortality had gifted me with at least a little restraint. More importantly, that failed attempt forced us to rethink our strategy. If Akane's soul shard had told the truth, and nothing about her message had ever felt like a lie, then the future was not going to be saved by grinding through the Demon Continent one fortified tower at a time.

The most important difference was making sure Akane and I remained together when the invasion finally came. Those had been her words, not mine. According to her, if we had never separated in the original timeline, we might have won. This time, the Demon Lord would awaken with two of its six spires already destroyed, cutting away a third of whatever network had been feeding it beneath the continent. We had not stopped the process entirely, but we had wounded it long before the creature ever opened its eyes.

In war, facing a wounded god seemed preferable to facing a healthy one. At least, that was the theory. My experience fighting gods was still too limited to call it proven. For now… After the failed attempt on the third spire, I decided the Adventurer's Guild needed to know what was coming. Not everything, obviously. I was not insane.

If someone told the general public that a Demon Lord slept beneath a distant continent and would one day vomit armies across the world, people tended to respond in deeply unhelpful ways. They panicked, formed cults, started wars, denied obvious facts, or attempted to sell commemorative mugs. The Guild leadership, however, learned enough to understand what was coming.

A demonic invasion was inevitable, the threat extended far beyond a single continent, and although the timeline was long, everyone needed to grow stronger before it arrived. Fortunately, they listened. That was one advantage of being an SSS-rank monster who controlled an unreasonable share of the coastline's economy and had personally helped destroy two Demon Spires. When I warned people that they should expand and prepare before the end of the world arrived wearing horns, nobody dismissed it as eccentric paranoia.

They called it a strategic warning. Over the decades that followed, the Adventurer's Guild expanded far beyond anything I had expected. Humans joined alongside beastkin, ghouls, witches, werewolves, and vampires from lesser houses who spent several years pretending the decision had been entirely their own. Half-demons eventually joined as well, although that resulted in several uncomfortable meetings and one memorable duel in the cafeteria.

Even some of the fae wandered in, complained about the lighting, and then performed frighteningly well during the illusion examinations. The Guild retained its familiar ranking system because mortals loved ladders almost as much as they loved falling off them. Ranks F through S remained simple, understandable, and easy to stamp onto paperwork. SS was reserved for individuals who had moved well beyond the limits of ordinary adventurers. SSS remained reserved for me.

Eventually, that distinction expanded to include my family. There were arguments… of course there were arguments. Several officials disliked the idea of a single House possessing multiple SSS-rank members because, apparently, that created an unacceptable political imbalance. I informed them that the Demon Lord was welcome to file a complaint after I tore out its heart, and somehow, that ended the argument rather quickly. Funny how often that happened.

Over the decades that followed, my family kept training, though not constantly and certainly not in the tedious heroic fashion where everyone wore weighted clothing and screamed beneath waterfalls. We still had lives to live, businesses to manage, territory to protect, and guests to terrify politely. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. Immortality, however, had given us something mortals never seemed to possess enough of: time.

And time had a way of sharpening anything stubborn enough to refuse to rust. Adrian became the quiet spine of House Vaust. He managed our security, intelligence, Guild coordination, family logistics, and the thousand invisible threads that kept the empire from transforming into a jeweled circus fire. Despite technically being my son, he continued behaving like the oldest brother whenever the family gathered, which I found simultaneously useful and slightly enjoyable. He also continued putting up with Celeste.

That alone should have earned him a ranking category of his own. Celeste, meanwhile, remained unmistakably herself. She was a storm in a dress, my brightest annoyance, and perhaps the greatest test of patience immortality had ever inflicted upon me. She remained the family member most likely to redecorate a war room because the enemy's map had "ruined the emotional balance of the space." Somehow, she also became frighteningly good at running the operations inside Vaust Royale.

Finances, entertainment, decor, negotiations, event planning, staff culture, customer psychology, and even magical protections disguised as luxury design gradually fell under her control. More annoyingly, she was probably the person I would miss most if she ever disappeared. I was fully aware of how strange that sounded. Do not tell her. She was already unbearable enough. Adrian and Celeste were still married, naturally.

That had never changed, although Nadia and Rowan's arrival created one particularly memorable misunderstanding when Celeste made the mistake of teasing the two as though they were lovers. They stared at her. Then Nadia calmly informed her, "He's my brother." Celeste froze. I mean completely froze. For one glorious moment, there was no movement, no clever little smile, and not even an immediate response. The universe had finally granted me silence wrapped beautifully in embarrassment.

Then she recovered, unfortunately. For the next two weeks, Celeste became completely fixated on whether she and Adrian technically counted as siblings simply because they both called me Mother. I reminded her, repeatedly, that they had been married long before I ever turned either of them. Celeste, naturally, refused to let that end the discussion.

"That somehow makes it emotionally more complicated."

"It does not."

"It absolutely does."

"Eternity is far too long for this kind of nonsense." She gave me a look of deep offense.

"Nonsense is what keeps a marriage youthful." I stopped listening somewhere around the phrase legal metaphysics of adoption by bite. Adrian, of course, was no help whatsoever. He simply sat beside her reading a report as though debating the legal consequences of vampiric motherhood before breakfast was a perfectly normal family activity. Perhaps, for us, it was. Malcolm and Vera, meanwhile, remained the most openly affectionate members of the family by a humiliating margin.

After nearly a century, they still looked at each other as though the world had personally failed to separate them and they were enjoying its frustration. Malcolm's control over gravity had become more refined over the years. He could crush entire sections of a battlefield when necessary, yet that same power had grown precise enough to catch a falling glass and lower it gently to the floor without spilling a drop. Vera's bond with Vesper had matured just as dramatically.

The crimson crow could now divide into an entire murder, each fragment carrying a sliver of her will, while Vera's own winged form no longer looked like something borrowed or incomplete. It had become entirely hers, elegant and dangerous, like a queen finally remembering she had claws. Whenever their duties allowed it, Malcolm and Vera still preferred to keep to themselves.

They went on dates, wandered through the city together, shared quiet dinners, and occasionally took to the skies with Vesper circling above them. When a mission required overwhelming power without turning the surrounding city into rubble, Malcolm and Vera were usually the pair the Guild called. Nadia and Rowan, meanwhile, adapted to their second chance at life far better than I had expected. Nadia's blood memory eventually became one of the most valuable intelligence abilities on the continent.

A single drink could reveal troop movements, passwords, hidden motives, escape routes, fear, loyalty, lies, and even the emotional weight behind someone's orders. Reaching that level of control had taken years of practice, plenty of pain, and an impressive number of complaints about the taste. Even after mastering it, Nadia still refused to drink from anyone unless it was necessary. I respected that. Rowan's shadows deepened considerably with age.

He could step between them now, not across unlimited distances, but far enough to make locked rooms feel decorative. He became difficult to track, nearly impossible to trap, and thoroughly unpleasant to surprise in dim lighting. Rowan had also developed a habit of appearing behind people in the middle of arguments, which Celeste considered incredibly rude and Rowan defended as "training." I found the ability useful enough, provided he never tried it on me. He did once. He never did it again.

Aura, meanwhile, had grown in her own way, and not merely in size, although she had certainly managed plenty of that. Her full dragon form became enormous, covered in gold-white scales with violet eyes and wings broad enough to shadow an entire courtyard. Her hoard expanded alongside her, partly because Aura remained incapable of seeing treasure without wanting it and partly because visiting dignitaries began sending tribute after discovering there was an actual dragon living on my roof. Yes… my roof.

The upper levels of Vaust Royale belonged entirely to the family, but Aura preferred perching above even those, curling herself around the highest architectural point like an enormous dragon gargoyle judging the city beneath her. She claimed the view helped her think, though I suspected she simply enjoyed being seen perched above the city. Knowing Aura, both explanations were probably true. Over the years, something else changed as well. Somewhere along the way, she stopped calling me Master.

It happened gradually, beginning with a single accidental slip. The first time Aura called me Mother, she froze in absolute horror, panicked, and then immediately tried to pretend she had meant to say it all along. Eventually, she admitted the truth with all the grudging dignity a dragon could gather. Everyone else called me Mother, and she had started feeling left out. Aura remembered nothing about her mother.

There was no dragon clan waiting somewhere to reclaim her and no family who had ever wanted her without also wanting her hoard, her strength, or her obedience. What exactly was I supposed to do with that? Tell her no? Six blood children already called me "Mother" despite none of them being mine by birth. One dragon hardly seemed like the point where the argument became unreasonable. So Aura became my daughter as well.

She was not blood-bound to me in the same way as the others, but that distinction mattered far less than I once thought. She was family, and as far as I was concerned, that made her mine. Aura was insufferably pleased with the arrangement, while Celeste cried enough for both of them. I graciously pretended not to notice. As for me, I had reached somewhere around three hundred years old by then, which remained an absurd sentence no matter how often I thought about it. Three centuries was a long time to exist.

There were chairs younger than me that had already become antiques. Entire kingdoms had risen during my lifetime, made a spectacle of themselves, and disappeared before I did. Even some of the noble houses I once extorted were gone now, reduced to nothing more than historical footnotes taught poorly in schools. All that time had changed more than the world around me. It had made me considerably more powerful too. That was the absurd luxury of being a primordial vampire.

My strength continued growing as I aged, whether I trained or not. Leisure itself fed me. I could sit in a bath, drink wine, ignore paperwork, and still become more dangerous simply by continuing to exist. Was that unfair? Absolutely… Did I complain? Not once. I still trained, of course, not because I needed to claw for scraps of power, but because overwhelming strength meant very little if I could not control exactly where it went. Over the decades, my Primordial Ruin became far more refined.

I could still erase a battlefield if circumstances demanded it, but destruction was no longer its only expression. I could carve apart a seal thread by thread, slice through a curse without touching the flesh beneath it, or unravel a spell so quietly that its caster might not realize anything had happened until their confidence fell off. My children grew stronger with time as well, although not at the same ridiculous pace.

The bond seemed to nourish them as the decades passed, sharpening their bodies and deepening their individual gifts. Adrian's physical enhancement became terrifyingly efficient. Celeste's elemental magic matured into layered sagecraft, while Malcolm could bend gravity across entire siege lines. Vera and Vesper moved like one creature divided among many wings. Nadia read blood with enough precision to make spies reconsider their profession, and Rowan had effectively become the thing candles feared.

Yet I remained at the center of it all, the anchor holding every thread of the family together and, apparently, the ridiculous vampire queen sitting at the top of the tower. That joke became even more appropriate once Vaust Royale Hotel & Casino reached exactly one hundred floors. I stopped there on purpose. I found the idea far too funny to resist. There was something deeply entertaining about placing a vampire queen on the hundredth floor of a tower and calling it the final level.

No one else was informed of the joke except Celeste, who laughed for nearly ten minutes before deciding the private elevator needed to resemble the entrance to a villain's cathedral. The little fifteen-story hotel by the sea had become something almost unrecognizable. Vaust Royale was no longer merely a casino. It was a kingdom wearing lights. Black marble rose beside violet glass and gold trim, while crimson carpets stretched beneath crystal chandeliers threaded with protective wards.

The elevators were smoother than noble lies. Restaurants from all over occupied entire sections of the building, and one of the bars became famous enough that travelers crossed borders simply to drink beneath its enchanted ceiling of artificial stars. There was also a nightclub filled with music, magic, and exactly enough controlled danger to make immortals remember what being young felt like.

The casino floor alone could have swallowed my original Stonehaven establishment whole and still left enough space for a fountain. Speaking of fountains, I eventually built one in the entrance plaza because modern technology had finally advanced to the point where water could be bullied into entertainment. The result was a massive attraction of music, colored light, and choreographed water dancing beneath the Vaust crest. I had stolen the idea shamelessly and considered that part of its charm.

As one fictional park owner once put it, we spared no expense. Of course, he had dinosaurs. I had a dragon. Mine was better. By then, Vaust Royale had grown into far more than a hotel and casino. Guests could spend days inside without ever needing to leave, moving between luxury suites, restaurants, theaters, magic shows, spa floors, private auctions, dueling arenas, enchanted gardens, secure meeting rooms, and specialized accommodations for nearly every kind of guest.

There were vampire-safe lounges, monster-friendly suites, and even moon pools built for aquatic visitors. The lower complex eventually gained an entire family district, an idea Celeste pushed for until I finally gave in. Her argument was simple: children deserved somewhere to enjoy themselves without having to weave between drunken adults, predatory nobles, and rows of blackjack tables. Annoyingly, she was right. Do not tell her. The family district eventually grew into something approaching a theme park.

It had roller coasters, carnival games, illusion mazes, mechanical rides, and plush creatures based on monsters that were considerably less cuddly in reality. There was even a miniature dragon ride that Aura despised until she discovered how much the children loved it. Aura insisted the model's horns be redesigned to look more accurate, and once she was satisfied, the attraction became one of the lower complex's biggest successes. It made an absolute killing financially. Usually only financially.

The city beyond Vaust Royale had changed just as dramatically. What had once been a small coastal settlement became a city and eventually a sprawling metropolis. Adventurers arrived first, merchants followed, monsters settled, humans stayed, and the Guild expanded with all of them. Roads widened, electric transit spread through the city, and neon signs gradually replaced the older glow of gas lamps.

Around Vaust Royale, the skyline climbed higher with every passing decade until the surrounding towers seemed to gather around it like lesser nobles before a throne. Technology eventually reached something close to a twenty-first-century level. Phones, cameras, computers, digital networks, advanced security systems, entertainment screens, and online banking became ordinary parts of everyday life. The world had changed in countless ways, but one of the strangest changes was how people had begun to view monsters.

There had once been a time when the sight of fangs alone was enough to send humans running. Now they purchased drinks from bartenders with horns, took pictures beside werewolf bouncers, watched witches perform on stage, hired ghoul accountants, and argued online over whether vampires should pay luxury taxes on imported blood. Progress was strange, profitable, and occasionally ridiculous, but through every change one rule remained untouched: no blood was spilled beneath Vaust lights without Vaust permission.

Everyone knew it, whether they were human or monster, noble or criminal, adventurer or Guildmaster, king, president, or tourist wearing an unforgivably terrible shirt. Especially the tourists. At the very top of Vaust Royale, the hundredth floor belonged entirely to my family. It was private, heavily protected, and far more beautiful than I would ever admit aloud. Each of my children had a space of their own. Adrian's suite connected directly to the security command level below because of course it did.

Celeste redecorated her rooms so frequently that I suspected the walls had given up forming opinions. Malcolm and Vera shared a wide suite with a private balcony garden and enough layered privacy wards to make even me raise an eyebrow. Nadia preferred quieter surroundings. Her rooms were softly lit and filled with books, music, and sealed blood archives she insisted were not organized according to emotional intensity. They were. Rowan's rooms contained far too many shadows, which he insisted was accidental.

It was not. Aura had rooms of her own as well, although she only seemed to remember them occasionally. Most nights, she preferred sleeping on the roof. My chambers occupied the center of the top floor, hidden behind black doors, violet wards, and enough layers of security to make most assassins reconsider their career choices before they ever reached the elevator. From there, I could see the entire city spread out beneath me. It was beautiful, which was an annoyingly sentimental thought, but unfortunately true.

Beyond that beautiful view, however, the greater threat had never truly gone away. After our failed attempt on the third spire, the Demon Continent fell silent, and no invasion followed. At least, not yet. The date Nadia and Rowan remembered from their ruined future continued creeping closer until only one year remained between us and the point where the original timeline had collapsed.

I stood before the windows of the hundredth floor, looking down at the city I had built around a casino, a single rule, and a stubborn refusal to die. Behind my ribs, six familiar threads rested steady and bright, each one belonging to Adrian, Celeste, Malcolm, Vera, Nadia, or Rowan. Above me, Aura shifted somewhere on the roof, her claws scraping softly across the reinforced stone. Then the shard inside my soul suddenly warmed. Akane… My eyes narrowed.

"Still waiting," I murmured. The golden warmth offered no answer. Damn fox. Below, Vaust Royale shone against the modern night like a crown carved from violet light. Somewhere beyond the sea, four remaining spires continued feeding whatever slept beneath the Demon Continent. And somewhere in this world, assuming she possessed even the faintest appreciation for dramatic timing, a certain nine-tailed woman owed me an appearance. Preferably soon… The end that had already happened once was drawing closer.

This time, I intended to be waiting for it.