Transmigrated as the Villainess Princess - Chapter 253

Chapter 253: This is the Start (3)

Ahcehera sat in silence beside Eros, her gaze resting on his face as he lay in the medical pod, the faint rhythmic hum of the machines a steady reminder that he was still breathing. Every few minutes, the monitors blinked softly with readings of his vitals, stable but weakened.

The bandages around his midsection were slowly beginning to darken again with fresh blood, but the regenerative serum was working, even if not as fast as she wanted. Outside, the city was still recovering.

Emergency alerts had been silenced, but the atmosphere remained tense, an aftershock hanging in the air after the violent rupture of peace. She leaned back in her chair, not to rest, but to focus.

With a blink, her optical brain interface activated, casting a barely visible sheen across her irises. Text and data flowed past her line of sight in augmented layers, allowing her to access the central military network and encrypted defense logs without moving a muscle.

A silent command sequence brought up a direct channel to General Castren’s field console. A moment later, the encryption flickered, and his voice came through, low, gruff, and exhausted.

“Ahcehera,” he said, “I figured you’d reach out sooner or later. How’s Eros?”

“Recovering. The acid wound was deeper than expected. He’ll live, but he needs rest,” she replied quietly, eyes not leaving Eros’s sleeping form.

“Good. We owe him, and you. That battle could’ve turned into a massacre.”

“I need to know what the hell happened. That portal didn’t open randomly. You and I both know void rifts require a tether point.”

Castren sighed. A moment of static buzzed in the channel. “We’re still tracing the breach. Initial scans show the portal wasn’t natural, it was artificially generated using unknown tech. We found residue traces of collapsed spatial runes and some old Dominion-era signal fragments.”

Ahcehera’s brows furrowed. Dominion technology hadn’t been seen in nearly a decade, and even then, most of it was buried deep in forbidden archives after the fall of the Outer Lineages. “You’re saying someone opened the void?”

“It looks that way,” Castren confirmed grimly. “But that’s not all. We found something embedded in the center of the collapsed portal, a black shard. Not Zerg. Not Dominion either. It’s something else. We’re sending it to the Citadel labs now.”

She took a slow breath, her fingers tightening slightly on the armrest of the chair. A shard that resisted classification was never a good sign. “Did any of the Zergs survive the fallback?”

“None. We’ve got all the creatures in the immediate area. But there’s one problem.” Another pause. “Some of the bodies had been… modified. Mechanized implants, neural dampeners, organ extractions. We think someone’s experimenting on them, weaponizing them further.”

Ahcehera closed her eyes for a second, anger simmering just beneath the surface. “That’s beyond standard bio-tampering. Someone’s reviving Dominion black labs.”

“And they’re targeting populated zones,” Castren said, tone grim. “The worst part is, we missed the breach signature until it was too late. Whatever tech they used masked the dimensional rift completely. We only picked it up seconds before the monsters poured in.”

A beat of silence passed. Ahcehera looked at Eros again, watching the slight rise and fall of his chest. “Send me all the data you have, runes, readings, even visual recon. I’ll review it from here. I might be able to trace the signature back to its origin.”

“You’re not cleared for fieldwork,” Castren reminded her with a tired grunt. “You retired. You’re not obligated to dig through this.”

“Obligations don’t matter,” she replied coldly. “They attacked civilians. Eros almost died. I’m already in.”

Another pause.

“…Alright. You’ll have the full package in five minutes.”

She disconnected before he could say anything else, blinking the channel closed. The streams of data flooded in as promised, encrypted packets organizing themselves neatly within her neural interface.

A lesser brain would have taken hours to process it all, but Ahcehera’s mind had been trained for this. Even without her magic, her intellect remained sharp, her strategy-focused cognition unbroken.

She filtered through the battle logs first, watching in accelerated playback the moment the sky had cracked, analyzing the structure of the portal, its angle, its energy signature. Every flicker of motion told a story. Her fingers hovered over invisible keys, tagging points of interest.

Next came the black shard. She paused when it appeared in the stream. It pulsed with something wrong. Not just dark matter, but something… sentient.

A frequency resonated from it, not enough to be heard, but enough to be felt. Her skin crawled, even through the interface. It wasn’t Dominion. It wasn’t Zerg. It was older.

Alien.

Ancient.

And it had chosen now to reappear.

A sick feeling bloomed in her chest.

“Why now?” she whispered to herself.

She flipped to a residual magic scan, barely noticeable, but there. Almost like a trace of something interdimensional, laced with starlight and entropy. Something that shouldn’t exist.

She frowned. A presence. Not a being, but an echo. It didn’t align with any known Zerg hive signature, nor any Void-touched anomaly. Instead, it radiated like a calling card. Like a whisper in the dark. It felt familiar, but distant. As if some part of her had brushed against it long ago.

A faint groan pulled her attention back. Eros stirred, shifting beneath the sterile coverings, his breath catching for a moment before settling again. Ahcehera stood quickly, brushing away the interface view with a blink and kneeling beside the pod. His eyes fluttered open, dazed and unfocused.

“You’re okay,” she murmured, brushing hair away from his face.

“I saw… something,” he whispered hoarsely. “In the portal… before it closed.”

“What did you see?”

His eyes, though clouded with fatigue, met hers with sudden sharpness. “It was looking back at us.”

She swallowed. That confirmed it. Something, or someone, had sent those Zergs. Not just as an experiment, but as a warning. Or worse, a test. Eros tried to push himself up, wincing, but she gently pressed him back down.

“Don’t move. You’re still bleeding.”

“I have to help,” he muttered.

“You already did,” she said firmly. “You fought. You won. Now it’s my turn.”

He closed his eyes again, breath slowing. “They’ll come again.”

“I know.”

She turned her gaze back to the corner of the room, where the interface logs hovered faintly in her vision. The shard’s image remained at the center of her thoughts. This was just the beginning. The skies might have cleared for now, but the storm hadn’t passed. And this time, she wouldn’t be caught off guard.