-Crunch.
A crisp, juicy sound echoed through the quiet hallway as Nom-Nom happily munched on a bright red apple she had liberated from the pantry.
She hummed a little tune, skipping every third step as she made her way back to the main hall.
[Peko really is such a worrywart...] Nom-Nom thought, tilting her head as she swallowed. [I don’t understand why she wants to hide who she is... especially when Master said he would handle it.]
Taking another large bite, she chewed thoughtfully.
[Whatever the case... she was angry because she was worried about me... I suppose I should apologize.]
Sighing through her nose, Nom-Nom rounded the corner, ready to ask Nico how to best phrase an apology to a grumpy Phoenix.
"Master, do you th-"
The words died in her throat while the half-eaten apple slipped from her fingers, hitting the floor with a dull thud that she didn’t even hear.
Nico was curled, trembling into a ball on the sofa with his hands clutching his face.
But it was what was leaking between his fingers that stopped her heart.
Tears, thick and profuse, were streaming down his cheeks, mixed with streaks of red blood.
"Master!"
Her scream shattered the silence as her face went pale.
Her frame blurred, crossing the distance in a fraction of a second as she skidded to her knees beside the sofa, her hands hovering frantically over him, terrified to touch him lest she make it worse.
"Master! What happened?" Nom-Nom cried out as she finally gathered the courage to grab his shoulder with trembling hands. "Who did this! Master!"
Nico gasped through his heaving chest as he curled tighter.
Between winces and wheezes, he choked out, "The mean System... is making me cry..."
-Ding!
{Dude...}
Nom-Nom’s violet eyes narrowed into slits of pure, unadulterated draconic rage.
[SYSTEM!!!!]
The mental roar shook the room, promising violence against the metaphysical entity.
-Ding!
{Integration complete.
Host, open your eyes and activate the skill.}
The System said with a side-eye before moving to the furious dragon’s headspace to explain itself.
While gritting his teeth against the stinging burn, Nico forced his muscles to obey.
He peeled his eyelids open, revealing whites that were now more red than white, and activated Eyes of Relevance with the next thought.
-Whoosh.
The world didn’t just change color; it dimmed.
The vibrant hues of the estate, from the lush green of the potted plants to the rich mahogany of the walls, were instantly drained away.
It wasn’t just monochrome; it was like someone had lowered the exposure settings on reality itself, leaving everything in a stark, high-contrast twilight of charcoal and ash.
And surprisingly, the searing agony in his eyes vanished as quickly as the colors.
The burning acid sensation was replaced by a strange, numbing coolness, though every time Nico blinked, his eyelids felt heavy and sticky from blood and tears.
He looked up at this dead, gray world, and the only source of light he found was Nom-Nom.
Her kneeling frame was flaring in a translucent haze of gold, pulsing softly as she continued her silent, furious mental argument with the System.
[She looks... bright.] Nico thought as he stared at her.
But the thought didn’t quite land. It floated away.
Despite nothing else in the room being highlighted with enemies or hidden magic, Nico felt his consciousness wading through molasses.
It wasn’t that the skill was highlighting too much; it was that his brain was now perceiving a spectrum of reality that humans weren’t meant to see.
Just the perception of "Cosmic Entanglement" was eating up enough of his ’processing power’ just to render the empty air to muddle his mind.
He sat there, staring blankly at the gray wall, feeling like he had just been shaken awake from a forty-hour coma.
And not even a full minute later, his throbbing head began to feel uncomfortably warm.
The next beat, a phantom itch crawled across his scalp as his physical brain literally overheated trying to run the new software.
[Right...] Nico thought, the word taking a solid two seconds to form. [Ice... Reinforce...]
He didn’t have the mental bandwidth to be precise. He just grabbed the scraps of mana he had left and shoved them into the activation sequence.
-Whoosh.
Instantly, a wave of cold rushed through his veins.
The magic circulated through his limbs, lowering his body temperature and acting as a physical coolant while the heat in his skull dipped slightly, and the fog in his mind thinned just enough for him to realize how bad it was.
[Damn...] Nico sighed internally, blinking his sticky eyelids. [That cognitive load wasn’t a joke...]
He wasn’t back to normal yet, just... less stupid.
With a deliberate effort, he seized the mana currently circulating through his body and forced it upwards.
[Go to the head.] And the cold surged up his neck, flooding his brain stem, cerebellum, and his frontal cortex.
-Snap.
And with a snap of clarity, the itch on his scalp vanished. So did the heat and the sluggishness, replaced by a crystalline clarity that felt sharper than his baseline state.
It was like upgrading from a dusty hard drive to a solid-state drive in real-time.
Nico let out a long breath, finally able to process the visual data flooding through his eyes as he scanned the room properly this time.
The main hall looked like an old, overdeveloped photograph. Shadows were deep blacks, light sources were pale grays.
He looked at the vase on the mantle. then at the grandfather clock, even at the sofa he was sitting on. And it was all... Grey.
[Nothing?] Nico’s brows furrowed.
Sweeping his gaze across the entire hall, he expected to see the tell-tale shimmer of listening devices or some sort of magical bugs.
[General should have this place wired like a Christmas tree.]
But there was nothing. Just the gray furniture and the golden, angry Nom-Nom.
[So no surveillance here...?] Nico mused, leaning back against the sofa. [Why?]