I Revived My Maid, Now She Hungers for My Blood

Chapter 188: Board Game Simulation

But… was that really possible?

Ember—Pandora—put the modified “observation goggles” back on.

She ignored the slight warping at the edge of her vision, the faint mental rejection that came with using the weird device. She refocused on the battle playing out on the Palmfiend’s skin.

As the fight dragged on, the situation was changing.

When The Blood Tonic and The Scalpel, two Veteran Third-Ranks, fully cut loose, deploying one nasty trick after another, the weaker Blighted Hand Wilbur became less of a factor.

He was basically support now, flanking Aldrich, throwing poison mist to screw with The Scalpel’s vision, or launching feints with that mutated fist of his.

Mostly, he was just a presence. A ghost at the edge of the fight, a disruptive threat that couldn’t be ignored. His ambush could still cripple The Scalpel, so just by prowling the battlefield, he forced the Quarry man to split his attention.

Everything looked normal?

Pandora took the goggles off again, her gaze shifting to the window, toward the two secondary battlefields outside the greenhouse.

The fighting there was intense. The sounds of gunfire, explosions, steel on steel, and the occasional roar were muffled by the rain and fog.

Nicole came to her side.

“How is it?” Nicole’s voice was a live wire of excitement. “My intel was solid, right!”

She tilted her head, looking at Ember. Her eyes, usually calm and calculating, now shone with a hungry eagerness. “So… are we going in?”

She was hoping. Praying for Ember to intervene like last time, to hit Aldrich’s forces with a thunderclap and bleed them dry.

Another defeat, more heavy losses, and Aldrich’s faction would be hurting for a long, long time.

Nicole would love to see that.

But Pandora didn’t answer right away.

She wasn’t a hesitant person.

But this time… something felt off.

Aldrich wasn’t an idiot.

On the contrary, he was a gloomy, paranoid bastard. He shouldn’t have forgotten the Scarred Woman. Especially not when he’d been hunting her just days ago…

Her thoughts tangled, a knot of suspicion and logic. The image of the distant battlefields through the window, and the crystal-clear feed of the main fight from the goggles, overlapped in her mind.

Her combat intuition, forged in red-moon nightmares and real slaughter, pulled her into the simulation. Her brain was running a wargame, substituting variables, deconstructing every move, every choice on that rain-soaked board…

Nicole watched Ember, who had gone silent, her brow furrowed in thought. She didn’t make a sound, even though every fiber of her being wanted to see Ember cut loose again.

But she got it. Entering the fray was risky. Action required caution. You had to respect your partner’s call.

Taking a deep breath to kill her own excitement, Nicole turned and walked back to the crude wooden table in the center of the room. She sat and did what she did best.

She reached into her kit and pulled out a small board carved from dark wood, pre-marked with lines that roughly mapped the battlefield.

Then she took out the pieces. Miniature figures, some carved with simple symbols. She began to process everything the Gazer Mite was seeing, everything her own sources were telling her. She simplified it, refined it, and converted it into the placement of tokens on the board.

Her gaze grew sharp, her fingers nimble. She moved the pieces, paused, then moved again. The small board became the battlefield, and she was in the center of it.

“Hmm?”

Her own brow furrowed.

“On the east side…” she muttered, her finger jabbing a corner of the board. “Why are they moving so fast? That’s not what I saw through the Mite…”

Her eyes scanned the board, her mind running the numbers.

“If they keep that speed…”

“Three minutes.”

Her expression soured.

“Three minutes, and that eastern node goes down.”

Echo Quarry wasn’t as rich or powerful as Ascension Road. You could see it in the main fight. The hastily built Ritual gave The Scalpel a boost, but it was nothing compared to the overwhelming power Wilbur had wielded at his own outpost.

This time, there were only two key battlefields. Two peripheral nodes supporting the main Ritual.

If one node fell, The Scalpel’s buff would weaken, and the balance with Aldrich and Wilbur would shatter.

If both nodes fell…

Then The Scalpel was done for. He couldn’t handle Aldrich and Wilbur together.

Not unless another one of Echo Quarry’s Veteran Third-Ranks showed up.

But according to Nicole’s intel, their other Third-Rank was tied up elsewhere. No way he’d make it in time.

If Echo Quarry was defeated, if the Garden changed hands again…

Then coming here would have been pointless.

She would have just watched a play.

From the sidelines.

Powerless to change a thing.