Leon stood perfectly still, his hand frozen halfway through a gesture, like his body hadn't yet received the instruction to retreat, or reach for his sword. What he was seeing didn't fit into any category of threat he'd dealt with so far.
The woman lay motionless beside the couch.
At first glance, she looked like a dream that had forced its way into reality without asking permission.
Her hair was black as a starless night, long, sleek, spilled across the floor like ink poured too generously. Her skin had that unnaturally clean, pale tone that couldn't be achieved with makeup, lighting, or genetics. Long lashes cast a delicate shadow over her cheeks, and her features were so perfectly balanced they looked less like chance and more like design, like art.
And the wings…
The black, feathered wings spread across the wooden floor carried both weight and majesty at once. Every feather lay perfectly aligned, gleaming with a matte darkness that didn't swallow light so much as bend it, wrapping her in an aura of something that simply did not belong to the human world. They were enormous, far too large for a cramped living room, and yet they suited her with a naturalness that made it feel like they'd always been there.
Leon felt his heart accelerate.
Not from fear.
From something worse.
Entranced, he took a step forward without even noticing. His thoughts began to blur, like someone was slowly turning down every other stimulus until only her remained, her presence, her beauty, that unsettling, unnamed allure that made the rest of the world stop mattering.
For a split second, an absurd, invasive thought surfaced in his mind:
That he should kneel.
That he should be grateful for the mere fact he was allowed to look at her.
That his place was somewhere low at her feet, silent, reverent, with no right to questions.
Leon's mind went empty.
Then Cold Mind slammed into him.
It wasn't the gentle cooling he'd felt before. This was a sudden, brutal shock, like an icy wave crashing through his brain, freezing his thoughts in place and shattering that unnatural infatuation in an instant. Leon sucked in air sharply and stumbled two steps back, nearly tripping over his own feet. His hand flew to his chest automatically.
"What the hell…?!" he shouted, his voice higher than he wanted.
His heart was pounding like it had lost its mind.
And only then, in that shock, he realized something else. His eyes dropped to his boxers, and heat rushed to his face.
"No… no, no, no," he stammered, horrified, seeing how his body had reacted against all logic and common sense, like the very existence of that woman could bypass his will and reason without asking permission.
A cold shiver ran down his spine.
It wasn't embarrassment.
It was fear.
Because it hit him all at once: this wasn't "normal beauty." Not something you could ignore or explain away. This was beauty that consumed. Beauty that took control. Beauty that made a lesser being stop thinking and start serving the mere fact that a higher one existed.
"If not for this…" he whispered, feeling Cold Mind still clamped around his thoughts in an icy grip, "…I could've stood there for hours."
Standing, letting his gaze drift back to her again and again, like seeing her for the first time every time. Tracing the line of her body without hurry, without time, lingering for too long on details that shouldn't matter, on the subtle rise of her chest with each breath, on the smooth skin exposed between fabric and wing.
Standing, feeling his thoughts slowly dull, flatten, until only the need to look remained. Nothing else. As if the simple fact that she existed was enough to make his body respond, betraying him without asking, without shame, like it was natural. Like it was expected.
Standing, until kneeling stopped being a choice and became an obvious truth in her presence.
Leon looked at the unconscious woman again, this time from a safer distance, his heart still beating too fast and his mind painfully clear on one point:
This wasn't an ordinary being.
He stole another glance at her from the corner of his eye, more curiosity than desire, but the memory of that sensation returned instantly, like an echo that refused to fade. And in the same moment, Cold Mind reacted again, sending a short, freezing pulse through his head.
"Ugh…" he hissed under his breath, irritated at himself.
His jaw tightened, shame and anger mixing together, because the idea that beauty, no matter how otherworldly, could reduce him to the level of a horny dog felt almost insulting. He frowned harder, as if sheer expression could force his brain into obedience. And when he looked at her again, he deliberately lowered his gaze to something he'd missed through that cursed trance.
The wings.
They were still unimaginably beautiful, nothing had changed there, but now, with a colder gaze, he saw far more than majesty. In many places the feathers were broken, frayed, some torn out entirely, others stuck together with dried blood. The wing structure itself looked unnaturally warped in places, like something had struck them with tremendous force, or dragged them along the ground, leaving them incapable of flight.
Cold Mind kept his thoughts in line as he carefully shifted his gaze from the wings to her body, not as someone bewitched, but as someone assessing a situation. Her robe was riddled with holes, torn, soaked through with blood. Beneath the thin fabric he could make out injuries, long cuts, bruises darkening under the skin, places where flesh looked tense or reddened, as if it was trying to regenerate… if it even could.
"You…" he murmured. "You look like you've been through a war."
He tore his gaze away sharply as he felt his body trying to react again, tension in his boxers turning almost painful, like his organism was ignoring every rational signal his mind was screaming at it. He took several deep breaths, slow, forced, until Cold Mind pressed down harder, steering his thoughts back into place.
"Focus," he whispered to himself. "This isn't… normal."
Leon swallowed and turned his head again, forcing himself not to look at her face. Even now he could feel something deep inside trying to take control again. So he fixed his eyes only on the wings, their size, their structure, the way they didn't belong anywhere in his understanding of reality.
"This…" he said quietly to the empty apartment, "this isn't someone from my planet."
The words came out without drama, without grandeur, just a simple statement of fact that didn't fully land until a second later. He frowned at the black feathers, their majesty surviving even through damage, and shook his head as if trying to physically dislodge the absurdity.
"People in my world don't have wings like that," he added, firmer now, like he needed to convince himself.
And that was only the beginning.
Because when, against his better judgment, he let himself remember her face again, that sensation returned, weaker, muffled under Cold Mind, but still there. Still wrong. He'd never heard of anyone looking like this. Not "pretty." Not "beautiful."
Just… perfect.
Like everything that existed beside her was, by definition, a worse copy.
"This isn't normal," he said more softly. "This isn't… human."
That was what terrified him most, not the beauty itself, but the fact that his mind, his will, his instincts had wanted to submit. That some primitive part of him had been ready to kneel, to offer himself, to disappear as an individual, just to be closer to what it had labeled perfection.
Cold Mind kept him anchored, but even with that help Leon felt like he was balancing at the edge of something he still couldn't name.
And then a thought hit him, one he wouldn't have allowed into his mind even an hour ago, slamming in with brutal logic.
"If…" he began slowly, "…if she isn't from my world…"
He fell silent.
His heart sped up again, this time not from desire or fear, but from pure existential shock.
"Then other worlds have to exist," he finished in a whisper. "Other races. Other… everything."
The theory was a grenade in his head.
It shattered everything he'd ever treated as obvious: history, physics, biology, the very meaning of being "human." All his life he'd assumed humanity was alone, that the universe was empty or indifferent, and if anything existed out there, it was distant and unreachable.
And now the proof lay a few meters away, unconscious, bleeding, wings broken, on the floor of his own living room.
Leon stood in silence, feeling that awareness tear his thinking into fragments. It was too big, too sudden, too violently incompatible with everything he knew to accept easily.
He didn't want to believe it.
But he couldn't deny it either.
Because whatever was lying there…
…it wasn't just "another weird thing about this world."
He stayed still, breathing shallowly, as his thoughts began lining up into a chain he couldn't have formed hours ago.
If you looked at it coldly… in the context of everything he'd already seen.
The system.
Stats.
Skills.
Rewards for killing.
"This… makes sense," he whispered, more to himself than anyone else. "If other races exist… other worlds… then the system wasn't made just for humans."
He remembered the early notifications, dry, emotionless lines of text appearing after every fight, whether the target was a zombie, a mutated animal, or someone who had been human not long ago. The system didn't judge. It didn't ask for motives.
It recorded a fact.
Kill → reward.
The thought made him swallow.
His gaze, against reason, slid back to the woman with black wings lying unconscious on the floor. A being whose mere existence could break an ordinary person's will, make him want to kneel and surrender without even knowing why.
How much… the thought flickered through his mind.
How many stats would you get for killing something like that?
How much Strength, how much Agility, maybe something more, for taking the life of a being that, even wounded, radiated something that made his heart race and his mind want to shut down?
Cold sweat slid down the back of Leon's neck as, from the corner of his eye, he looked toward the bathroom, toward where he'd left his sword.
And he felt it.
A thin, sharp spark of excitement.