Chapter 213: The Will to Act
They were like statues in a museum of failure. Ilsa stood with her useless rifle, her face a mask of furious disbelief. Zara was frantically tapping at her wrist-mounted computer, but the screen just showed a single, mocking error message:
"Action Not Permitted." Scarlett was frozen in her lunge, her muscles trembling with the effort of trying to move, her teeth gritted in a silent snarl.
Every ounce of her strength was being used to push against an invisible wall, and it wasn’t budging.
Ryan felt a cold, creeping helplessness. His own power, the ability to shape reality itself, was gone. It felt like trying to shout in a vacuum. There was nothing for his will to grab onto, no reality to shape.
The Silent Minister watched them, her expression one of gentle pity, like a kind teacher watching her students fail a test they could never hope to pass.
"It is a simple concept," she explained, her voice as soft and calm as falling snow. "Here, in this place, I have severed the link between cause and effect.
The chain of your will is broken. You can have the desire to pull a trigger, but that desire no longer leads to the action of firing a shot. You can intend to stab me, but that intention no longer connects to the result of your blade moving forward. It is the ultimate peace. The peace of knowing that nothing you do matters."
Her words were a poison, more dangerous than any weapon. They slipped into their minds, trying to find a home. Ryan could feel a strange, tired feeling begin to wash over him. Maybe she was right. What was the point of struggling if the universe itself could just decide to say "no"?
He looked at his friends, at the frustration and growing despair on their faces. He knew he had to do something. He couldn’t fight her power with his own. She wasn’t warping reality in a way he could fix. She was doing something much more clever. She was blocking their minds.
He closed his eyes and tried to think, not as a god, but as a person. The Minister’s power was a conceptual block. It was a rule, like a line drawn in the sand.
The rule was: "Any action aimed at me or my goals will fail." The key word, Ryan realized, was aimed. Her power was stopping their intent. To break the rule, they needed an action that had no intent behind it. An action that was pure instinct.
His mind raced, searching for an answer. Who among them was the most instinctive? Who could act without thinking, driven by something deeper and more primal than a plan?
His eyes snapped open and he looked straight at Scarlett.
She was still frozen, her body locked in place, but her eyes were burning with a furious, untamed fire. She was the one. Her loyalty, her protective nature, it wasn’t just a choice she made. It was a part of her soul. It was her deepest instinct.
Ryan couldn’t speak to her out loud. The Minister’s power would probably stop the sound waves if it knew he was trying to form a plan. So he reached out with his mind, not with a complicated message, but with a single, powerful feeling.
He found the thread of their mental link, the special connection that had been forged between them from their very first moments together. He pushed a memory down that thread, a memory so clear and strong that Scarlett would not just see it, but feel it in her bones.
He sent her the memory of the Blood Arena in the Crimson Shoals.
In Scarlett’s mind, the cold, quiet control room of the relay vanished. Suddenly, she was back in the zero-gravity arena, a place of spinning rocks and deadly energy fields.
She saw the brutish pirate king, Gorok, laughing at them. She saw him pointing at her and the other women, calling them Ryan’s "pets." She felt the hot, white-hot rage that had filled her at that moment.
And then, she saw Ryan. He was standing in the center of the chaos, his body a calm anchor in a storm of violence. An enemy champion, a huge, snarling alien, was charging at him from behind, its claws ready to tear him apart.
In that moment in the arena, she hadn’t thought. She hadn’t made a plan. Her body had just moved. Her Void Weave power had activated, and she had become a shadow, a blur of motion driven by a single, overwhelming, primal need: Protect him.
Ryan sent her that feeling, the raw, possessive ferocity of that moment. It was a feeling that was deeper than thought, older than logic. It was the instinct of a wolf defending its pack, of a fire burning away anything that threatened what it loved. He wasn’t telling her what to do. He was reminding her of who she was at her very core.
On the platform, Scarlett felt the memory wash over her. Her mind, which had been racing, trying to figure out how to break free, suddenly went quiet.
The Silent Minister, the relays, the plan—it all faded away. The burning fury in her eyes softened, replaced by a deep, focused calm.
She understood.
She closed her eyes. She stopped pushing against the invisible wall. She let her muscles relax. She let go of her tactical mind, the part of her that was always calculating angles and weaknesses. She shut down every part of her brain that was trying to win.
And then, she let her instincts take over.
She didn’t try to attack the Minister. She wasn’t thinking about the Minister at all. In her mind, she was back in the Blood Arena. And a threat was coming for Ryan.
She moved.
It wasn’t a lunge or a strike. It was a single, fluid motion, a dance of pure, protective instinct. She spun on her heel, her body moving not toward the Minister, but into a defensive position in front of where Ryan was standing. It was an act of pure, unthinking defense, an instinct to put her body between him and a danger that wasn’t even there in the real world.
The Silent Minister’s power was built to stop intent. But this action had no intent. It wasn’t an attack. It wasn’t aimed at the Minister. It was just an instinct.
The conceptual block, the rule that had frozen them all, simply didn’t recognize it. It was like trying to catch water in a net. The action was too pure, too simple, to be stopped.
Scarlett’s spin was graceful and perfect. As she moved, her hand, holding one of her phasing daggers, swung in a wide, natural arc. Her dagger, which could phase through solid matter, passed through the very edge of the Minister’s invisible field of power without any resistance at all.
The Minister’s eyes went wide with shock. For the first time, her calm, serene expression broke. She saw the dagger coming, but it was too late. She had been so sure of her power, so certain of their helplessness, that she had let them get too close.
The tip of Scarlett’s dagger, still moving in its graceful, unintended arc, sliced cleanly through the white fabric of the Minister’s robes and bit into her shoulder.
It wasn’t a deep cut, but it didn’t have to be. The moment the dagger made contact, the illusion shattered.
POP.
It felt like the whole universe suddenly took a deep breath. The heavy, oppressive feeling in the room vanished. The invisible walls that had been holding them all in place were gone.
The Silent Minister cried out, a sound of surprise and pain. Her perfect peace was broken.
Ilsa’s rifle roared, its energy blast hitting the platform near the Minister’s feet and sending up a shower of sparks. Scarlett, now completely free, felt the world snap back into focus. She ripped her dagger free and dropped into a low, ready crouch, a deadly smile finally spreading across her face.
"The volume’s back up," she said, her voice a low growl. "Let’s make some noise."
The fight for the Veiled Nebula was back on