Returner's Defiance 7

Chapter 1

"Oh, so I'm getting a new neighbor. Now, am I?" Circe teased with the wrinkle of her nose towards Merlin. The woman was the nymph of legend. Some of her exploits were blown wildly out of proportion, but her beauty was not one of them.

She had soft blue hair and red eyes with an hourglass figure that most women would die to achieve. She wasn’t overly heavy in the chest or hips, but she had a fit figure with just a feminine touch of softness. I felt her hair as she clung to my back, pressing her chest into me.

"None of that," I said, carrying a heavy box laden with Merlin's things.

"I'll be nice," Circe promised, and I squinted at her for a moment before letting it go with a peck on the cheek.

"Please do. If you scare Merlin away, I'm going to throw a fit. Besides, were you aware that Simone had tasked me with romancing her?" None of them challenged Simone’s position at the head of the ladies of the harem.

"Sex?" Circe asked, with a raised eyebrow, towards Merlin.

And I scowled at her. "Why does everyone assume that means sex?"

"Because it means sex," Circe said bluntly. "If you'd like, I can go grab all of the others, and one by one, I'm almost certain they will all confirm the same."

"No, it's a waste of everyone's time, literally, to summon them to prove I'm wrong." I shook my head with a chuckle.

"So, you admit you're wrong." Circe gave me a shit-eating grin and leaned against the wall in a way that just so happened to push her leg through the slit in her dress and give me plenty of eye candy.

"Having fun?" I asked, stopping to appreciate the display. I knew she enjoyed capturing my attention. However, I had boxes to move.

"Lots," she said simply, a grin on her face, before she grabbed Merlin's two hands. "I cannot imagine anybody would have guessed that it would be a man who would bring the two of us back together again."

I knew Circe was doing her best to try and make up.

Between her and Merlin, there was some rocky history.

Mostly, it was due to the fact that Circe seduced a man who she didn't think was good enough for Merlin in order to prove a point.

The successful seduction had him clinging to her groups of nymphs and breaking Merlin's heart.

Circe hadn't touched the man herself. She had some sense of camaraderie with Merlin and wouldn't have gone that far, which was an odd line to draw, at least from my perspective. But she’d done it to show Merlin that that man wasn’t going to commit to her.

"By the way, what's next?" Circe asked as casually as possible.

It had only been two days since we got back from the Wukong Clan, and other than stomping my father's pride into the ground when we compared stats, there hadn't been much worth noting happening. Which was to say, things were good.

"Well, with the Wukong either out of the fight or on our side, whichever you want to consider where we ended, and Shiva running a train on Southeast Asia, I think we need to set our sights on a different battlefield," I summarized.

Having both of them fighting demons, even if they weren’t staunch allies, protected our eastern front or, at the very least, reduced how many demons could amass on that side as well as kept the Heavenly Fist Sect in check as they were based in the Himalayas.

"And where exactly is that?" Circe crossed her arms. "Don't tell me you don't know. I can see that smile on your face."

Merlin was ignoring us as she started unpacking, pulling a few items out of her suitcase.

The woman still wore baggy mage robes that hid her figure, yet at the same time, the bagginess made her seem even slimmer at times.

As she moved to unpack, it shifted and pulled tight against her skin, showing off her impressive physique.

She glanced over her shoulders, her black bob shifting to the side as her ice-cold blue eyes glimmered with mirth as she caught me staring.

"South America," I said, deciding not to hold Circe’s curiosity captive longer. "We'll keep some watch on Asia, but I think, for now, I can consider it tamed."

Circe hummed in understanding. "Yeah, if the Wukong are back to being completely anti-demon, then they're going to be a pretty good buffer. Not to mention, Shiva has a new bone to pick. Even the Heros Clan has felt the rumblings as he’s chased demons all the way to the Mediterranean."

I bobbed along. "I'm thinking the same thing.

The First Garden Sect, however, is doing worse than I expected.

" I frowned, thinking back to the most recent reports I had received.

Eve and her sect weren't pushovers, and in my first life, they and experts from the Amazon had dealt with most of the threats in South America quite handily.

Seeing them struggling now was concerning enough that it needed my attention. Variables could have changed.

"Eve is a prickly one," Circe said. "I mean, are you sure you want to add her to the harem?"

I deadpanned. "Who said anything about adding her to the harem?"

"Well, I mean, you're going off to save yet another ravishingly beautiful woman.

Honestly, Bran." Circe lay herself on me and batted her lashes.

"You're going to have to be careful. There are ladies who think that their turn is coming up and they just have to be a little more patient who will be frustrated to wait farther back in line. "

I squinted at her, wondering what nonsense she and Simone had been up to. Hopefully, they hadn’t made promises to any of the Mul Branova, but I’d made myself clear to Simone, and she’d never go against something I specifically forbade. But trusting my women, I turned back to Merlin.

"I'm not touching this," she said, holding her hands up in the air. "I have enough trouble unpacking my suitcase and settling into a new room."

"That'll barely take you the afternoon," I said, only to get faintly narrowed eyes from Merlin in return.

"Not that it needs to take you any amount of time. Anyway," I added, a smile rising on my face. "Oh, look at that. Things to do. Always things to do." I quickly performed an about-face as both women behind me chuckled lightly at my antics.

It was good to be back home.

"All right, you two," I called, walking between them and first giving Merlin a peck on the cheek, and then one for Circe, before slipping out the door.

There was still too much that I needed to do, and while I would love to hang around and banter with them, as soon as I dropped off Merlin's belongings, I did need to get moving.

As I stepped out into the hallway, more of the Mul Branova swept through the halls, spotting me and smiling as they waved delicate fingers.

"Lord Bran," they all greeted me with smiles.

"Ladies." I nodded to them and continued my way through the Citadel of Blood, experiencing much of the same everywhere I went.

The Mul Branova were critical to the function of the citadel and of everything I was building in this second chance at life.

The demons, after several wars and internal conflicts that they had stoked, had finally won and captured Earth over a 500-year extended siege in my past life.

But now that I knew where the hidden enemies lay, I was starting to dare to hope that in this life I could resolve the battle in a much more contained war.

Humanity would fight over the scraps of Earth later.

However, if I could remove the taint of the Demon Lord—and all, if not most, of the demons' influence by pushing them out and creating a culture that would carry forward against them—then I had hope that Syssy's sending me back, at whatever cost she bore from it, would not be in vain.

At least, that was the hope.

In some ways, I was well ahead of my expectations.

In other ways, I was woefully behind. This time, I had not only gotten through the Trial of Kings, but I could also say that the others who had passed were deeper allies.

Yet at the same time, those who had been a part of the Demon Lord's destruction in my first life were now dead.

A taint that lasted past the Demon War and sparked the second, the Wukong Clan, had been dealt with. New allies in Princess Almeria's people had been saved.

But I still had issues that needed to be solved. The Heavenly Fist Sect and its deep-rooted demonic corruption would still need to be cleansed. It was the heart of the Demon Lord's strength and not something I could approach casually.

I needed to continue to whittle away the Demon Lord's strength, and right now, that meant going after his fragments.

One of the most dangerous aspects of the Demon Lord was his ability to split himself.

I suspected that a fraction of himself was what I destroyed when I attacked Camden at the tournament.

Likely what we’d dealt with was an incredibly small fragment of the Demon Lord's strength, and destroying it had done little to set him back.

With that information now in hand, I needed to find stronger fragments, and given his knowledge of the future, the best way I could find his fragments was to identify where the greatest deviations between my past timeline and this one were occurring.

Those would likely be where his fragments were soaking up instances and shifting the balance.

I grinned.

South America was exactly where I needed to be if I wanted to start strangling the Demon Lord's strength.