Contract Marriage To The Alpha King 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 241 - 챕터 250

Alexander’s POV The night didn’t settle after that. It hovered. The warded suite breathed around us, walls etched with adaptive runes that shifted color in response to our combined presence—storm-silver threading through witchfire gold, pulsing like a shared heartbeat. The academy was listening. Adjusting. Learning, just like the Reach had. Elara didn’t let go of my hands. Not when the healers finished their scans from outside the wards. Not when Damian’s voice came through the scry-line, low and controlled, issuing orders to triple perimeter patrols and lock down veil-sensitive corridors. Not even when exhaustion finally crept into her shoulders, tension loosening one careful notch at a time. She stayed anchored to me, as if the moment she released her grip I might dissolve back into absence. I understood the instinct far too well. “You should rest,” I said softly, brushing my thumb over the faint scorch mark along her wrist—a residue of ward-break magic. “You burned yours

Alexander’s POVDawn crept over Raven University like a thief testing locks in the pre-light gloom—hesitant fingers of fog curling possessive around the jagged gothic spires and mist-shrouded training fields, reluctant ghosts unwilling to yield to day. No triumphant golden sunrise shattered the veil; the sky hung bruised and low, heavy clouds roiling in lazy counter-currents that mirrored the fractured, inverted heavens of the Veiled Reach—purples bleeding into sullen indigos, edges crackling with suppressed lightning. Thunder grumbled like a beast's distant belly-rumble, a low bass vibration thrumming through the flagstone quad, syncing perfectly with the academy’s wards: their glow now a mesmerizing harmonious blend of violet-storm azure, attuned fully to our diad's resonance, pulsing like the heartbeat of some colossal, awakened entity. The air tasted electric and alive—ozone sharp and metallic on the tongue, undercut by the rich, loamy damp of fog-kissed earth and the faint, acri

Alexander’s POV The laughter didn’t echo.It pressed.Not sound, not vibration—pressure, folding inward like a hand closing around the spine of the world. The ruins groaned beneath it, stone screaming as stress fractures spiderwebbed outward from the sealed vein, ancient masonry surrendering to a force that had finally decided subtlety was inefficient.The Hunger was no longer testing.It was arriving.The ground split with a thunderous crack, and this time there was no slow emergence, no probing tendrils or exploratory guardians. The plaza collapsed inward, stone dropping away into a vast, lightless chamber beneath—the true bowl of the Reach, a cathedral carved from raw absence.And from it—Something stood up.Not a body. Not yet.A silhouette first: colossal, asymmetrical, layered in shifting planes of shadow and condensed ley-mass. Veins of stormlight and voidfire threaded through it like a corrupted circulatory system, pulsing in irregular rhythms that made my limiter shriek in

The Hunger — POV Time, as mortals measure it, resumed its illusion.For me, there was only sequencing.I mapped the academy the way one maps a circulatory system—not by walls or wards, but by pressure points. Where ambition pooled. Where resentment coagulated. Where fear thinned the barrier between restraint and action.The academy believed itself fortified.Stone remembers otherwise.I brushed the outer layers of its consciousness—not touching wards directly, not challenging their geometry. That would have been crude. Obvious. Instead, I traced the assumptions beneath them.Assumption: Authority is stable. Assumption: Knowledge is centralized. Assumption: Threats come from outside.Such comforting myths.Such useful weaknesses.Within the lower spires, a mind paced in restless loops.A senior adjunct—brilliant, overlooked, precise to the point of brittleness. She had written half the current containment protocols yet signed none of the final approvals. Others spoke her work aloud an

Elara's POVThe council chamber didn’t erupt.That was the most dangerous part.No raised voices. No threats. No dramatic invocations of ancient authority. Just a subtle tightening in the air—like a room deciding how much oxygen it was willing to spare.“Of course,” the councilor said smoothly. “No one is speaking of force.”Alexander’s storm shifted—minute, contained, lethal. I felt it brush my awareness through the bond like the edge of a blade being tested for balance.Force never announces itself, I thought. It arrives wrapped in procedure.We left the chamber without agreement, which meant the agreement had already been made without us.The corridor beyond felt longer than it should have. Sound dulled. Even our footsteps seemed reluctant to echo.“They’re going to escalate,” Alexander said at last.“Yes,” I replied. “But carefully. They’ll want it to look reasonable.”“Reasonable to whom?”I didn’t answer right away.To everyone who wasn’t us.A pair of guardians stood at the nex