As Layla stepped away from the looming shadows of the Knight Headquarters, the echo of her conversation with Mistress Calra Vynn still curled around her like smoke — sweet, suffocating, persistent.
"A high seat in the Children of Ecstasy," Calra had offered, her smile too perfect to be sincere. "You bear the blood now. You belong."
The invitation might have flattered someone else. But Layla saw it for what it was: a velvet trap. The cult promised purpose, but offered only indulgence. It was a haven not for the awakened, but the lost — a house of silks and firelight where people drowned in sensation and called it freedom.
She had answered plainly.
"We are not the same. I chose this path to fight, not to forget."
They were shapeshifters of spirit, chasing pleasure to silence pain. She was a scientist. She mutated her own body not to escape, but to adapt. To understand. To survive.
And yet… Calra's words stuck with her — not because of the offer, but because it had been made at all.
Calra didn't invite out of generosity. She invited what she recognized.
That alone unsettled Layla more than she cared to admit.
She passed a shattered window and caught her reflection — eyes faintly luminous, skin too smooth, too flawless to belong to the woman she used to be. Her body absorbed mana like breath now, drank it down into every cell.
A gift.A curse.A choice she could never take back.
"I'll never forget who I was," she whispered. "Even if the world does."
But even as she said it, something stirred beneath her calm — an unease that never left. One she had never spoken aloud, not even to Liam.
Her transformation gave her resilience. She could walk through zones where ordinary mages screamed and died. Her body healed faster than ever, her reflexes sharpened to unnatural speed.
But in the quiet moments, she felt it.
Something shifting.
Not a voice. Not a presence. But an instinct rising like heat from deep water. The succubus strain loved mana — too much. It fed on it. Called to it. And the more Layla used, the more it awakened.
Her dreams had grown vivid. Red-lit corridors. Endless eyes. A hunger she didn't recognize as hers.
Sometimes she woke with her hands trembling, her skin flushed, her mind unsure if she'd dreamed… or conjured.
She feared, truly feared, that one day the difference between Layla the researcher and Layla the evolved would blur—and when it did, the clarity of her mission might dissolve into craving.
That was why she had said no. Not out of pride. Not out of disdain.
But because Calra's offer had been dangerously close to prophecy.
"I didn't become this to fall into temptation."
"I became this to hold on to who I am."
She pressed her palm flat against her chest. Her heartbeat was steady. It was still hers.
For now.