Transmigrated into Eroge as the Simp, but I Refuse This Fate

Chapter 307: Kael Blackwood

“Undetected?” Damien echoed, voice low.

Kael didn’t respond, but the smirk on his face didn’t fade. Dominic, however, stepped slightly ahead, his tone more clipped now—informative.

“If you’d entered through the sanctioned Cradle zone in Azaria,” he said, “the Dominion would have logged it. Monitored it. And others would be watching too. There’s no way to veil that kind of awakening—too much mana, too much spatial distortion. The noble houses would notice. Your name would spread before you even finished.”

Damien’s gaze narrowed. The threads clicked together.

So that was why. Why this place existed. Why they’d traveled so far, under silence, using a private Elford gate. Not just for safety. For secrecy. For control.

This wasn’t just an awakening.

It was a concealment.

“That’s why you’ve been preparing all this,” Damien murmured.

Dominic gave a single nod.

Kael finally spoke again, a little sharper now. “This site? It’s under Volcara Pact jurisdiction, but the territory’s not theirs.”

He gestured broadly to the open expanse, the glowing pylons, the pulsing veins of crystal.

“This whole stretch of land—compound, systems, research dome—it all belongs to Blackspire Industries.”

The name hit.

Damien’s brow twitched. His head turned. Slowly, eyes narrowing as they landed on Kael again.

“…Blackwood,” he said quietly.

Kael raised an eyebrow.

Damien’s gaze moved now—not just to his hair, the easy stance, the slow grin—but to his eyes. Crimson, like cooled iron under firelight.

Eyes like Iris’s.

“You’re a Blackwood,” Damien said.

Kael’s grin widened just slightly. “Sharp eyes. Took you long enough.”

Damien’s breath hitched, just faintly, the sound drowned beneath the distant hum of pylons and the crackling shimmer of rain breaking against the outer dome.

Blackwood.

The name tasted sharp now. Metallic.

Not just because of the red eyes. Not even because of the impossible coincidence with Iris. But because the moment Damien’s mind whispered Kael Blackwood, old memories surged forward—scraps of information the former Damien had read, stored, then dismissed as distant politics.

But they were still there.

Flashes.

A scandal. A jurisdiction collapse.

The Incident of Veldrith. A city brought under Blackspire protection, its population absorbed into a new mana-seeding initiative… only to be lost. Every soul. Not burned. Not killed.

Gone.

No trace. No bodies. No final signal. Just a whole district collapsed into ether. The headlines at the time blamed a Cradle-related rupture. Experimental Awakening stabilization, one report claimed. Weaponized mana, said another. But the constant across them all—

Kael Blackwood’s name.

He was the one in charge.

And then he vanished.

Dominion records scrubbed most mentions after that. No public trials. No declarations. Just silence. The kind only a high-seat family could enforce.

Damien’s gaze sharpened.

His voice, low. Careful.

“…Kael Blackwood. You’re that Kael Blackwood.”

Kael tilted his head, eyes still amused—but there was a new weight in his stance now. Less casual. More… honest.

“I see the reading didn’t go to waste,” he said. “Guess the old records weren’t buried deep enough.”

Damien held Kael’s gaze for a long moment.

The man didn’t flinch. Didn’t posture. He stood as he was—casual, dangerous, disarmed by choice, not by necessity.

The strange thing was… the game hadn’t mentioned Kael Blackwood. Not even once.

Which meant everything Damien was piecing together now—the fragments of memory, the weight of the scandal, the reality of the man in front of him—was inherited. Legacy knowledge. The leftover impressions of a boy who lived in this world properly, before the player behind Damien ever existed.

And that made Kael all the more unsettling.

Because nothing in his stance screamed “criminal.” Nothing in his mana screamed “failure.” In fact, if Damien had to guess—

’He’s stronger than my father. Or close.’

There was no outward display. But the restraint itself was the signal. The way Kael moved. The way the rain curved around the edges of his mana like it knew to respect him.

Dominic hadn’t spoken again, but Damien felt his gaze shift slightly.

Then came the words.

“That was a set-up,” Dominic said, low.

Damien turned toward him.

Dominic’s tone was clipped. Controlled. But not cold. He was about to explain more—likely the parts Damien hadn’t seen. The political fracture. The power struggle behind the Veldrith Incident. The names that signed the silence.

But before he could, Kael raised a hand.

“Let’s not fill the kid’s head with unnecessary information,” he said.

He smiled—but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Ten years have passed anyway. Let the past stay buried.”

A pair of armed sentries approached from the main perimeter line—one in reinforced combat armor marked with Blackspire insignia, the other a sleek-bodied automaton with glowing blue circuits running down its limbs. Both came to a precise halt before Kael.

“Director Kael,” the armored one said, voice crisp. “The ritual locus has been stabilized. Operations command is ready for transfer.”

Kael gave a simple nod. “Good. Take us there.”

With a sharp salute, the pair turned and led the group deeper into the outpost. Damien followed, his eyes sweeping the space with increasing curiosity—and calculation.

This wasn’t just a launch site for Cradle access.

It was a complex. An industrial node. Possibly even a research wing.

On their path, they passed several personnel in motion—some wearing robes laced with mana-reactive threads, clearly Awakened specialists; others in light tactical gear, manning consoles and data cores. Drones hovered across the upper airspace, scanning and mapping in real-time. In the distance, massive towers pulsed in a slow, methodical rhythm, their cores housing what looked like containment rings.

Damien’s gaze drifted further. There—half-obscured behind a secondary wall—he saw the upper edge of what could only be called a holding pen. The walls around it were plated with obsidian mesh, layered in etched runes, and the top… was open.

A low sound carried across the wind. Faint, distorted. Like a scream passed through static.

No—several.

Kael didn’t pause, but his voice cut through without turning back.

“They’ve been trying to break the reinforcement layers again. It’s getting more frequent.”

Damien glanced at Dominic, but the older man gave no reaction.

Kael continued, casually. “We haven’t cleared the outer perimeter fully. This was once part of a raw zone. Still tainted by residual echo bleed. There’s things in it that don’t die the normal way.”

They rounded a final bend—and the main site came into view.

The ritual platform wasn’t just a platform.

It was a construct layered over a chasm—an enormous sinkhole, lined in concentric rings of mana-absorbing stone. Cables trailed downward like roots, feeding into unseen mechanisms below. Suspended above it all was a cage of crystal and alloy, spinning slowly, cradling a mirrored mana core. And beneath that, a glyph—a single massive spiral etched into the stone, the exact shape Damien had seen in Kael’s documents.

Pulled chaos. Torn order.

A Cradle gate.

Damien stopped near the edge of the drop, gaze sharp.

“You’re trying to map the Breach,” he said.

Kael’s lips twitched. “Trying?”

“You’re doing more than opening access. You’re studying it. Locating its anchor point. And if those creatures are still alive…” He exhaled slowly. “You’re adapting something from inside. Maybe even trying to recreate it.”

Kael didn’t deny it.

Didn’t confirm it either.

He only smiled—a long, crooked curve of the lips that didn’t hide a thing but said everything.

“Sharp eyes,” he said again. “But let’s focus on keeping you alive first.”

Damien’s eyes didn’t leave the spiral. Not yet.

But in the back of his mind, something tightened.

Because this wasn’t just a launch site.

It was a bridge.

To something not meant to be reached.