Ves woke up in his cabin aboard the Stellar Rose. He stretched his arms and tried to rise from his bed, only to find his leg was being shackled by a six-sided manacle. "Lucky!" "Meow?" Lucky stopped eating his messy black hair and jumped from his head in order to chew apart the metal manacle. Its material was just as hard as Breyer alloy, but which just happened to serve as breakfast for his cat. Once his pet freed his leg, Ves yawned and entered the bathroom. He took a quick shower while making sure to leave his Synthra Umbra underwear on. He made sure to wave his hand at the blinking eyeballs that made up the bulkheads, deck and ceiling. Certainly, stepping onto all of the eyeballs was an extremely unpleasant experience, and Ves hurried to clothe himself as fast as possible! Just like every day, Gloriana already prepared his outfit for the day for him. Her tastes grew odder and odder by the day. Ves really didn’t want to wear the puppy costume she picked this time, but it wasn’t as if he had any choice. His cabin didn’t contain any other clothes! The closet was completely devoid of any fabric and he sure as hell wasn’t going to beg a Hexer for some scraps! After he put on his dog collar on his neck, he exited the bathroom, only to meet Lucky’s ridicule. "Meow meow." "It’s not as if you are wearing a collar as well!" "Meow." "Don’t make fun of me any further or I’ll exchange our collars! At least yours has a stealth module!" "Meow meow meow!" "What do you mean its radius is not enough to hide my body!? There is plenty of room as long as I compress myself into a ball! I’ll show you how it’s done!" Before Lucky could skedaddle, Ves concentrated his mind and tried his best to wrap his scaredy cat up with his spiritual projection! Shortly afterwards, they exchanged collars. While Lucky tried to scratch the dog collar from his neck, Ves affixed the miniaturized stealth generator onto his neck. Once he activated it, a stealth field with a diameter of one meter partially enveloped his body. This led to a very weird sight where his legs and parts of his waist still remained visible. Though Ves thought about crouching and rolling his way to the dining hall, there was no reason for him to hide his presence. He shrugged and decided to walk upright. This resulted in the strange sight of a pair legs exiting the cabin and heading towards the dining hall. In contrast, a cat wearing a dog collar was nothing special! Once they reached their destination, Queen Gloriana had already seated herself on the throne. His queen wore a regal outfit that consisted of a multilayered dress. The finest fabrics of the galaxy as well as sparkling exotic jewels all enhanced her majesty to an incredibly majestic sight! "%@$*%." "Yes, Your Majesty." Ves did not approach the dining table in the center of the compartment. Instead, he moved to the side where a brightly-colored doghouse had been placed and squirmed his half-invisible body inside. "#$#%^#$*@." A number of bots carrying various breakfast dishes entered the compartments. While most of them carried exquisite gourmet foods, only a single bot arrived to serve Ves breakfast. The bot carelessly dumped the six-sided dog bowl in front of the doghouse. Ves looked pleased as the bowl contained the exact same nutrient pack mixture he tasted more than a thousand times already! "Bon appetit!" He said to himself with a smile. Ves lowered his face to the bowl and began to eat the dry mixture without any hesitation. He gorged himself so fast that it only took a couple of minutes to finish his morning meal! Since nutrient packs didn’t contain any moisture, Ves had to quench his thirst with the second bowl delivered by a bot. He lapped up with water with his tongue, which was a very inefficient way to hydrate himself. It couldn’t be helped. Ves was a dog after all. Once he waited for Queen Gloriana to finish her breakfast, she rose from her throne and slowly brought her highly-decorate robe to the doghouse. At this time, the stealth generator’s charge had run out, thereby revealing Ves in all his glory. His silly puppy costume made him look like a pug. His fuzzy pale yellow coat and his curled tail looked extraordinarily cute on him! Ves could probably win some prizes if he appeared at a dog show! At this time, Queen Gloriana extended a leash towards his neck. Even though his miniaturized stealth generator didn’t come with a hook, the end of the leash unfolded and clutched the ’collar’ like a claw. "##%##@, !#^%\u0026." "No." Ves answered. Queen Gloriana scrunched her face. "@#\u0026%@\u0026%?" Even though Ves was still hunched over in his doghouse, he still grinned at his girlfriend like a shark. "Your Majesty, if you are truly the Gloriana I know, you would have kissed me six times by now. Also, dressing me up as a puppy and making me eat from a pair of dog bowls is an excellent act. I don’t know where you got the idea from, but you obviously don’t know my girlfriend well enough! As soon as I laid my eyes on a dog bowl, I realized the flaw in this dream." Queen Gloriana’s face turned ugly. "@$\\u0026\u0026%@?" "The true Gloriana is a cat person, not a dog person! She would have dressed me up like a kitty!" Just because most Hexers had a tendency to refer to the boys in their state as puppies didn’t mean they were all inclined to see them this way. At the very least, if Gloriana was truly in charge of this charade, she would definitely dress him up like a cat! "I admit that you managed to hoodwink me for a time, but apparently you don’t know Gloriana well enough! Now that I’ve spotted the flaw in your illusion, there’s no way I’m letting this farce run its course! Break!" Ves leveraged his entire Spirituality and pushed it out, breaking some sort of shackle that had taken hold over his mind! A dreadful scream emanated from Queen Gloriana as the illusion broke apart! Instantly, her radiant skin and her regal dress disappeared, revealing the true culprit behind this trap! "I knew it! It’s you!" A mummified female body wearing an outdated vacsuit uttered an unnatural scream at Ves! Her raging voice overlapped like a thousand screaming hags! "@Y#\u0026*##*%^@#\u0026$*#$#$^#\u0026%^*!" Unfortunately for them both, Ves didn’t understand Cassandra Breyer’s words at all. This was incredibly odd as Ves could talk with cats and exobeasts with no problem. How come he failed to understand the mummified woman’s voice? If he was unprepared, then the woman’s unintelligible screams would have damaged his mind. However, it was too late now that he actively shielded his mind! The spiritually-charged words washed against his mind without gaining entry. Ves became as firm as a rock as he let the attack pass him by! "BEGONE!" The remnants of the illusion tore apart entirely after another outburst! Ves managed to free himself from his hijacked dream! As Ves woke up for a second time, Ves immediately leveraged his Spirituality and inspected every part of himself and his surroundings. Lucky woke up from his place at the foot of the bed and looked at Ves with curiosity. "Meow?" "Looks like you’re real." Ves sighed in relief. Now that he was alert to the possible threat, Ves scrutinized everything in far greater detail. Nothing seemed amiss, both visually and spiritually. Though the illusion that had trapped him somehow managed to bypass his defenses and contaminate his mind, it wasn’t perfect. Ves inspected his own mental space over and over again but found no hidden threats or other abnormalities. "What a frightening attack!" Ves whispered and touched his face as if to confirm it was still real! The illusion that engulfed him seemed to be completely nonsensical, yet Ves behaved as if it was all completely normal! Being shackled to his bed, surrounded by eyeballs while he showered, putting up a dog costume and eating his breakfast like he was a puppy should have alarmed him right away! The fact that he didn’t question it until he spotted an obvious flaw was very concerning to Ves! This mental attack was far more sophisticated than anything he experienced before, and the frightening part about it was that it could very well happen again! "This witch!" Ves cursed. He had no doubt that the undead woman was behind this insidious attack. Whether she wanted to kill him or take over his mind, there was no doubt in his mind that she had bad intentions! Of course, it was partially his fault for inviting such an attack. He knew that Cassandra Breyer was clearly an extraordinary spiritual sorceress, yet he greedily exploited her self-replication ability anyway! If Cassandra didn’t counterattack in some way, then she wouldn’t have lived up to his expectation of her strength. "It seems I’m truly in trouble now!" One of his fears came true. Now that he stopped the production loop, the mysterious escape pod was left intact, giving the corpse inside plenty of time to perform some tricks! Ves had a lot of questions right now. For one, how could she launch an attack on him while the fleet entered FTL travel? "Can she ignore the obstacles isolating the Scarlet Rose and the Stellar Chaser?" Perhaps Cassandra possessed the capability to launch an attack on him no matter the distance! A more important question came to mind. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺 "Can I resist this attack again?" While the illusion that gripped his mind was extremely sophisticated, it didn’t actually carry much strength! Ves was able to break it after two spiritual outbursts. Either Cassandra held back, or her condition limited her strength. Ves guessed that the latter was the case. Cassandra was already dead and there was plenty of weirdness going on with regards to her circumstances. His best guess was that spiritual sorcesses like Cassandra and his mother both employed techniques that preserved their lives after death. However, everything had a price. His mother had to live like a ghost, while most of Cassandra’s spiritual strength was occupied with maintaining the existence of her corpse and escape pod. If Ves assumed that most of Cassandra’s strength was locked in maintaining her own state, then she didn’t actually have that much strength left to mess with his mind. He relaxed after coming up with this theory. While he wasn’t sure if this guess was correct, he intuitively felt that he wasn’t far from the truth. In any case, the automatic operation that allowed her body and escape pod to replenish over and over again must place an incredible burden on Cassandra Breyer! Even if she was one of the strongest spiritual sorceresses in the galaxy, continually converting energy to matter was an enormous burden! Ves grew confused as he recalled some of his experiences while he fell under the illusion. Even though he treated it as an attack, was that truly the case? "It could have been a nightmare." Maybe he was overthinking the matter. It might be that he had just been subjected to a dream created by his own unconscious mind! Ves shuddered. "That’s certainly not the case! This is definitely a deliberate attack! It doesn’t have anything to do with me! I would never enjoy such an odd dream!" After making up his mind, he grew somber as he began to consider how to guard himself against a similar attack. Cassandra Breyer could pull him into an illusion once. What stopped her from doing it again? If Ves was awake and alert, then he had plenty of confidence in foiling such an attempt. Now that he was aware of the possibility, he could easily detect if his mind was being influenced! Yet the problem was that Ves wasn’t always awake and alert! Even when he was awake, he couldn’t concentrate his mind every single second of the day! As for the times when he fell asleep, there was no question that his mind would fall into its most vulnerable state! "This is a calamity!"