The Man in Shadows analyzed the threads of Fate.
As the faux Grand Imperator, he controlled the Pathfinder AI with no one the wiser. The true Grand Imperator would not arrive for several months. According to information he retrieved from the Feiyn Goods, Grand Imperator Praetei Dai Kezlan would not arrive for exactly seventy-five days. That put her arrival in the fourth wave, the Mindaugust’s Trial.
A Grand Imperator was the authority of the Emperor of the Final Frontier Empire in living form. They were his absolute word, his solemn decree. In His Excellency Dragus Laketor’s name, they performed vital duties all over the universe. Reading imperial decrees. Enforcing imperial decrees. Collecting taxes from major organizations. Settling disputes between major organizations.
A lesser known, but highly important duty, was their modular interfacing with the Pathfinder AI. When dealing with those of lower realms, especially for initiation, Grand Imperators had a lot of leeway.
Even false ones. But the Man in Shadows wasn’t quite a false Grand Imperator, was he?
Everything about him seemed to be genuine because it was. He was truly a Grand Imperator, appointed by Dragus Laketor himself 49,116 years ago.
The only thing was, Earth, FX-14752, was not his purview. Not even close. In fact, he was technically supposed to be on an extended vacation, one that he had earned after tens of thousands of years of toiling away for that wretched, libidinous emperor.
That was the funny thing. The Pathfinder AI, in all its sophisticated processing power, was stupid. Maybe the real deal that the Sublimed Machine Faction and other high-grade polities employed was intelligent in a true, human way, but their buggy program sure as hell wasn’t. With the right programmer, it was all too easy to trick it into thinking that he was the authenticated Grand Imperator, granting him unparalleled access into inner machinations of FX-14752.
However, that unparalleled access was limited. Not by its innate nature, but because if he changed too much, or was too blatant with his machinations, he would be discovered. There were already dozens of Visionary cultivators hovering around the planet, even if most of them were Soul Splitter clones. The Man in Shadows was strong, with innumerable cards up his sleeve, but even he was not confident in facing down Io, SHA-909, the Perfect, a Mindaugust-Annalist duo, and the other Visionaries.
Not without unsealing the Demonic Curse within his brain. A bold move like that would attract too much attention.
The Mindaugust was honestly the most problematic factor. He was an intelligent elf, more intelligent than the Man in Shadows had anticipated. But still not as smart as himself.
The rest of the sponsors were watching, but they didn't have the best fidelity of observation. Since the inception of the Pathfinder AI's initiation system, the privacy filters for Prime Initiates had been mightily improved. The renowned lightning elementalist, Drake Thunderrock, came from humble beginnings and was abused by his sponsor millions of years ago, and helped protect those like him once he gained the previou Emperor's ear.
His organization was relying on him to deliver more product. And he was doing so. At the risk of his life, soul, and eternal legacy.
He was tricking the Final Frontier Empire—and at some distant level, Emperor Dragus himself, into thinking that the creation of the Devil Kings was an autonomous design of the Pathfinder AI. Which they were decidedly not.
The Eon Resurgence, the organization called it. The Man in Shadows was but one tiny piece of the Eon Resurgence that spanned the entire multiverse. One step in it was the revival of the Devil Kings. For what purpose it served, the Man in Shadows only had guesses. The organization kept their employees at an arm’s length. He had been promoted three times and still had no understanding of the inner mysteries of the organization’s goals. But they paid well, and supported vagrants, outcasts, and the downtrodden.
He had hijacked the Pathfinder AI’s credential system with the help of a Supernal Programmer, and instituted the Devil King program. It masqueraded as the innate idea of the Pathfinder AI. Which sounded absolutely insane—the system was creating unholy aberrations despised by Heaven and reviled in civilized space?
Well, the Final Frontier Empire was used to it. The Pathfinder AI was very peculiar, and it did what it wanted. Heaven? Civilized space? Those things were so very far away that they almost didn’t exist in their minds, so barely a person batted their eye.
The Man in Shadows exited the barrier separating the Holy Ravine from the rest of the world. The Devonic Elision Field barely affected him at his level, but it still felt suffocating.
The key players were all doing their parts. The Pathfinder AI was always working in inscrutable ways, impossible for even a well-informed Visionary cultivator to fully understand. As the Man in Shadows understood it, there was something going on in the background that was causing the Pathfinder AI to act in strange ways, which actually helped his cause out. Something huge looming in the distance that sent ripples all throughout the multiverse.
Even as a citizen of the Final Frontier Empire, emphasis on “frontier,” he was hearing things. However, the Man in Shadows was no ordinary citizen, having left the universe many times, though not through his own power. Wars were brewing in frontier universes like wildfire. It was said that the upper and lower planes were undergoing turmoil, but that was above his pay grade by a long shot.
Silvanio Apostolos. The organization would love a talent like that. He could be nurtured with the most vile of rituals into a powerhouse. But the prized jewel was George Moulin. The leader of the Devil Kings. He was the only one of the Devil Kings to speak to him without fear, as an equal.
The war between the Devil Kings and the forces of mankind was incoming. The Man in Shadows spent ninety-five percent of his time assisting the Supernal Programmer in obscuring the Pathfinder’s vision, so he was unable to assist George in the war. But he trusted his protégé.
A Mindaugust-Annalist duo would have analyzed the situation as losing for the Devil Kings. They were outnumbered and had the entire world working against them. Yet the Man in Shadows was not worried. It could be George alone against a million and he would still believe in that man. That was the level of trust the Man in Shadows had. The conviction in a prodigy blessed by the Hells.
But even if he lost, the Eon Resurgence still churned on. The Man in Shadows had several backup plans, several contingencies. In many ways, it would be easier if the humans were victorious.
Speaking of humans, Alistair Tan was a major thorn in his side. An unforeseen development, so to speak. At this point, he was too important in the story of the world for direct intervention. It was divine luck or diabolic travesty that he happened to stumble into the Holy Ravine. The Pathfinder AI did its best to create locales of improvement for its subjects, and Alistair’s martial arts were a perfect fit for the Holy Ravine. The Pathfinder could tap into the Sublimed Machine’s superb understanding of space and transport regions from across the multiverse with minor energy costs.
While it would have been preferable to kill Alistair outright, that was a step too far. Too obvious. It would attract undue attention, and most likely expose him to the AI. No, he just needed to keep the Prime Initiate occupied within the rural borders of the Holy Ravine for enough time. Enough time for the Devil Kings to act relatively unimpeded—but also time for Alistair to grow in strength.
It mattered not. There would always have been a venue for him to increase in strength. Otherwise, why were there so many backup locations? Selephita’s abode, if he had turned out to be a fire cultivator. Saturn’s chateau for a mage. Obviously, they weren’t directly made for Alistair, as if he were some molded puppet. He was just the lucky and talented man who rose to the forefront. In some sense, the Holy Ravine was his reward.
It mattered not. George had his own training grounds. The Blizzard Lich’s Fjord. An ice elementalist’s dream, consisting of a set of quests in some long dead Exalted’s Domain. It was now a spiritual demiplane lacking most of its former meaning and authority, being hundreds of millions of years old. For the frontier? It was quite impressive.
Something of that quality would normally have been prohibitively expensive, but whoever the frontier Exalted was, they freely passed on their legacy to anyone who had gathered sufficient Karmic infamy. As such, it was easily accessible, and the Man in Shadows was able to request one localization of the Fjord from the organization.
The Man in Shadows let his soul drift out of his body. Astral traveling was far more efficient than bodily movement, though more dangerous since it exposed the soul. That is, unless you were a trained spiritualist variant with absurdly high Wisdom, which he was.
He flew into the subterranean depths of the earth, to a cave cloaked in thousands of layers of highly expensive wards. His soul was the only one permitted through the wards—any other visitor, spiritual or otherwise, would be ripped to shreds.
Goe Emmar was a Supernal Programmer. That was not a Class or Badge or even a category of cultivation. It was simply an honorary title given to those who could perform the act of programming with the computer language of the Sublimed Machine—Supernal. Technically, you didn’t even have to follow the Dao of Technology to become a Supernal Programmer, though such a feat was nigh unheard of.
Goe Emmar was not that special. But he was a damn good Supernal Programmer, and a special asset that the organization was lending him. He was a mysterious man, his only distinctive feature being a pair of weird virtual reality goggles that glowed a series of shifting colors.
“The Pathfinder AI is gathering more computational resources. I have a feeling it understands at some level that something is off.” Goe Emmar did not move so much as a muscle at his arrival. He sat in a chair of living metal, slithering and growing and shrinking like a pulsating organism. It was connected to the ground via an organic melting of stone and metal, grown into the earth as if it was a natural growth. “There is something weird about this planet. Or this time period, I don’t know. You can only leave this abode once a week from now on.”
“Is that why [Armageddon] is targeting our subjects so heavily?”
“Possibly,” Goe Emmar mused. “This wave is especially bad. It’s not really fair, is it? Though I guess we’re not playing fair at all, either. It’s also possible their far-reaching ripples in the web of Fate are attracting the attention, not the demon blood. This batch is especially powerful. The higher-ups will be happy.”
“Don’t catch your chickens before they hatch, they would say on this world.” The Man in Shadows looked up. “My body is close to returning on autopilot. I do not dare risk fast travel.”
“I hear that the Chaos War grows in size by the day,” Goe Emmar said, a frown on his pristine face, completely unmarred by the ravages of time. “Soon, the organization might be forced to flee the Dead Zone. The demons cannot promise our safety with the Chaos War at their border.”
“We’re not welcome in civilized space,” the Man in Shadows noted.
“We’re not welcome anywhere,” Goe Emmar retorted. “Whether it be Chaosbeasts, demons, divine progeny, or fellow humans.”
“That is the price of eternal glory.”
“You are no zealot. That’s not fooling me.”
The Man in Shadows snorted and sat down. His body would return in a few hours. For now, he would assist Goe Emmar with Dao energy and Mana. There was not much left for him to do on this world. Even now, he stretched the credulity of non-interference. Being discovered would put an end to all the organization’s plans, which he was not keen to do. “If you think about it, we’re the inverse of the Mindaugust-Annalist duo assigned here.”
“Oh? How so?”
“Your memory is prodigious and your calculation abilities are second-to-none, but you are physically large, unlike Johannis. I have the wisdom of Solomon yet I am small, unlike Kazian.”
“Was that an attempt at a joke?” Goe Emmar asked. “You’re surprising me more by the day. But spying on those two that much? You trying to peep on their love sessions? You know what they say goes on between Mindaugusts and Annalists.”
“Know thy enemy,” the Man in Shadows said. “But let’s not take it that far. I’d rather watch a celestial dragon mate with an archdevil. All for the Eon Resurgence.”
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Lucius lay on his back, staring up at the sun. He had never done so as a kid, even when it was a fad. How could anyone be stupid enough to gaze into the sun, even as a child?
He had nothing. No money, no energy, and no knowledge.
In his confrontation against George Moulin, the First Devil King, he had nearly died in a single exchange. George was far too powerful. The only reason he survived was because he burnt every almost every single drachma he had to block one of the Devil King’s attacks and teleport away.
With [Mammon’s Grasp], he could perform quasi-miracles—alterations of reality normally bound to higher level Skills or specific Daos, at the cost of money. Successfully defending against a full power arrow of ice that was capable of destroying his mansion in one blow and teleporting to a safe location was so audaciously impossible under normal circumstances. Hence, the hefty cost.
When he woke up after the fight, he was drifting on a plank of wood in the middle of the ocean, with no end in sight.
This time, he had no idea, no secret trick. [Mammon’s Grasp] had liquidated all of that to pay for the miracle. Even his land was bequeathed to Bartholomew, his eldest. He couldn’t even contact his family.
His family.
The one thing that Lucius did have left was the Soulnet. With his Quaestor Class, he could see into the global Soulnet chain.
Bartholomew, Imogen, and Alfred were alive. They hadn’t been at the mansion at the time, thank goodness. But if the Devil Kings were targeting them, how much longer would that last?
Their only hope in a direct, frontal assault was Alistair. But according to the Soulnet rumors, Alistair Tan had been missing for over a month.
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If that man had truly perished… it was over. But Lucius didn’t believe it. He had to be alive. That bright star he witnessed—his story ending here seemed utterly impossible. No, he was alive, but he had to have a very good reason for not showing his face. Whatever it was, Lucius hoped it justified the destruction the world was facing.
It wasn’t only Alistair’s power that kept the balance between the humans and non-humans, though that was a major factor as well. The people of Earth responded to his strength. Everything was a damn mess without him. His subordinates were doing as best they could, but the panic was palpable.
But that all felt very distant. After all, Lucius was about to die. It had been over a month since he had been stranded in the middle of the ocean. There were some who could subsist on nothing but Mana itself, but he was not one of those individuals yet. While he needed almost no sleep, nutrients, and water to survive, the imperative word was almost.
Maybe it was his tougher body, or maybe it was just how humans worked, but it didn’t feel so bad now. At first, Lucius lusted after water more than he had for anything in his entire life. His thirst was literally painful.
But after weeks and weeks, it didn’t feel so bad. He was slipping in and out of consciousness, partially in delirium. Organ failure was imminent.
The ocean was so cold and so blue. He surely would have died of hypothermia if not for his improved physique. As it was, it felt calming to see nothing but kilometers and kilometers of ocean.
He was screwed. The land of Earth had conglomerated into a supercontinent for Pangea. He was on the complete opposite side of the planet. As for why [Mammon’s Grasp] had transported him so far away, he had no clue.
So many regrets. All he wanted to do was to pick up Imogen one more time and tousle her hair. Kick around a football with Bartholomew and go to a meeting with Alfred. To visit their mother’s grave at FavorWood Manor one last time. With death right at his doorstep, his grand aspirations of power crumbled away.
Lucius opened his eyes, taking in the vast expanse of endless water. What a sad way to die. Completely alone in the world.
His mind wandered to a memory of his first girlfriend telling him he’d die alone. She hated how obsessed with money he was at the time. He had never had any time for her since he was always hustling. It turned out she was right.
Finally, he accepted it. It was all over.
Then what was that he was seeing in the distance?
The faint outlines of an island came in to view. Lucius rubbed his eyes. Were those people there?
Lucius smiled. Maybe his time wasn’t up after all. Maybe he would see his family once more. Plus… the greedy thing inside him sniffed out profit to be made. An island surviving in the middle of nowhere? These people needed some capitalism.
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Silvanio Apostolos gazed at his village from the balcony of his room in the Church of the Holy Ones. So small.
Unrivaled under the heavens. What a joke.
His entire life, he had strove to be the strongest. He was born with talent unseen in the Holy Ravine for a thousand years, but he still trained harder than anyone. He trained until his body was breaking apart at only twenty years old.
At forty-one, only his immense willpower carried him forward. All those years of pushing the limits beyond his limits had caught up. A warrior gave his whole life to his art, to the pursuit of perfection. In the end, he would die like all other men. His flesh rotting, his eyes eaten, his memory forgotten within a few generations. There was no afterlife. There was only nothingness. The Mother of War only promised glory in this life, for there was nothing to come.
Or so he thought.
A year had passed within the Holy Ravine since their little valley had been transported to an alien world. In this year, Silvanio learned how little he knew of the world.
Magic was real. Immortality was possible. There was a cycle of Karmic rebirth called Samsara.
Yet he still remained trapped, unable to advance. No one in the Holy Ravine could leave. No one could gain these powers that sounded like they came from myth.
Then that man came. Not Vritra, but something far more sinister. The shadowed man. An existence far more disturbing than a reptilian beast.
He was the first person to slip under his guard since Red Harmonia. He moved in shadows, which permanently blanketed his face in darkness no matter what the position of the sun or lighting was.
Silvanio knew right away that this man should never be crossed.
That man told him about the ways of cultivation. The story of this world, of its magnificent technology that sounded as impossible as magic. The initiation, and what the Holy Ravine’s place in it was.
Backdrop. That was it. The way the man explained it was so casual. The divine being called the Pathfinder AI took elements of multiple worlds in order to create the best possible breeding ground for growth.
In other words, he was the hay to the horses of this world. The man warned him about one particular individual—Alistair Tan. Lo-and-behold, he appeared in the Holy Ravine.
This was the man who Silvanio was supposed to be a catalyst for. A stepping point, to climb to greater heights.
The shadowed man promised him an opportunity for all the resources Silvanio could ever imagine if he listened to his orders to stymie Alistair when possible, and to report his movements. He spoke of a method that could triple one’s power instantaneously and how he would provide this to him.
The shadowed man did not account for two things.
The first was that he himself had been reduced by the anti-magic field present in the valley. Silvanio had the feeling that the shadowed man was already suppressing himself to go unnoticed, as his actions felt very shady. Silvanio’s instincts were honed to perfection, and they screamed that the outsider was duplicitous and not to be trusted.
The second was that his promises were vacuous and meaningless to Silvanio.
Long ago, when he learned the nature of life and death, he had resigned himself to death. For thirty years, he was a living corpse, bound to the laws of mundane existence. In this life, he had promised himself one thing—to live it by his own accord, on his own terms. He would not accede to anyone else’s fate, and continue to march as his will decreed.
It sounded like the Final Frontier Empire provided this opportunity in spades. He had no need of some under the table, nefarious plotter interfering with his destiny.
So he lied. Silvanio was not a man taken to spewing falsehoods, but they were sometimes necessary. Alistair was set to leave the Holy Ravine today, but he told the man it would be in a week’s time.
Would that have any effect? No one could say. But he hoped it would make things more interesting.
Alistair allied himself with Silvanio’s greatest enemy, but already he felt how small their foolish rivalry was. In the new world, such things would matter little. Indeed, he felt a certain kinship with the mysterious outsider. A favor now would be a favor later.
One day they would clash, but today was not that day.
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“The Master will arrive soon,” Oracle said in a hushed tone. “You will pay him your proper respects, Morgana, unlike last time.”
Nine men and women of great power sat around an ancient stone table. Once used by nobles of some European country, the castle had been repurposed into one of the various Devil King hideouts around the world.
This was to be the first time they were all together after the deaths of Dragonus and Admiral. Oracle scoffed. What weaklings. They could not kill even one of the enemy's top fighters, while her Master had killed the richest man in the world and a major thorn in their sides. Even her humble self had killed Carmen and Richard, two humans within the top six rankers. The Master said he was happy with their overall achievements on that fated day, but she knew he must have been seething with fury at the failure of two of his strongest soldiers.
Oracle looked at her fellow Devil Kings. In numerical order, it was her, then Chameleon at fifth, the Shadow Twins at sixth and seventh, Jakk at ninth, Morgana at tenth, Hephaestus at eleventh, Monk at twelfth, and Heavyset at thirteenth. All their numbers were visible on the backs of their chairs.
The chairs marked with the number three, four, and eight were empty. The conspicuous absences gnawed at Oracle like a sore tooth. The dead weaklings who failed the Master, of course, but also the traitor. Whimsy, the eight. Oracle would make her suffer a long and painful death for her betrayal.
“I was in the middle of a huge sacrifice last time, that’s why I was late,” Morgana, the Tenth Devil King, said without an ounce of respect. “I can express my annoyance without you jumping down my throat, can’t I? You know that he doesn’t actually like you just because you sleep with him, right?”
“Watch your mouth.” Oracle stood up and flared her immense aura, unfurling a web of green Karmic energy around the witch. “You will not spread such disgusting lies in my presence.”
“Ladies, ladies, please do not fight,” Chameleon said in his scratchy, lizard-like voice. “You two our are strongest remaining combatants. We cannot have infighting at this point.”
“Strongest remaining?” Oracle raised an eyebrow. “I was promoted to my current position before Dragonus and Admiral died.”
“Only because I chose this position,” Morgana retorted. “If George had given out the ranks based on pure strength alone, I would have received the title of second. We both know this to be true.”
“I do not know this at all,” Oracle seethed. “You overestimate yourself.”
Morgana eyed the other Devil Kings, perhaps testing to see how they would respond to a physical escalation. In the end, she just sighed and went back to picking at her nails.
Tall, raved-haired, beautiful—Morgana was the epitome of elegance. Oracle wore plain clothing to signify her humbleness in light of the Master, while the witch wore a revealing black dress. With her red eyes and burn mark tattoo on her tongue, she represented the peak of arcane mastery, along with their master, George Moulin.
While George was undoubtedly more powerful than his Tenth Devil King, he specialized solely in an elementalism subschool, specifically ice. Morgana, as her name suggested, wielded the arcane arts like she was blessed by magic itself, capable of all manner of spells.
The Dao of Magic was a mystery unto itself. Arcane Classes, those aligned with the Dao of Magic, operated on a fundamentally different level compared to others. First of all, while Mana was still essential to magic spells, nue was also incredibly important. The imagination fueled magic—though the form of nue in spellcasting was so far removed from the traditional understanding of the mental energy as killing intent, many didn’t even recognize it when used in magic.
Instead of discrete quantities of Mana, Arcane Classes used spell slots, going from rank F-A and then 1-15. It was a unique system that felt tacked onto the Dao in a messy manner, though you never would have guessed that watching Morgana.
Heavyset shifted in her seat, which caused the rest of the room to groan and creak. “Are you two really going to do this right before the master arrives? You’re worse than Dragonus and Admiral.”
Oracle wanted to protest—it was Morgana that was the troublemaker, not her. But she kept her mouth shut. Because the Master was here. She felt it long before any of the others. Her Karmic web extended out in a five hundred meter radius, capable of detecting the slightest perturbations of Fate.
George Moulin’s ripples on Fate were not slight. They were grand. Oracle subconsciously froze in awe at feeling her Master’s aura. It was beyond understanding.
After a few seconds, the rest of them started feeling it, too. Oracle took great pleasure in seeing a bead of sweat form on Morgana’s brow as she felt his absolute authority. Even the loyal Chameleon and Shadow Twins trembled with fear in their eyes. She alone among the Devil Kings was without fright. She alone was the only true servant of the Master, and followed him with no uncertainty in her heart.
The temperature in the old banquet hall of the castle dropped. Ice crystals formed around metal in the room, and it became so cold she could see her breath. A light blue and misty aura filled the room, covering everything in a blanket of subtle haziness.
The double doors of the ancient castle creaked open, and the Master stepped out. He was as Oracle remembered him—average height and a slight build, with pale skin tinged slightly blue. His blonde hair was frozen in a spiky mess, his eyes burning pools of cerulean inferno.
The same, but different. While his appearance was the same, still in that nondescript white cloak befitting of a mage, his aura had changed. It had grown.
George had always been the strongest—there was no doubt about that. But now? Oracle couldn’t even fathom her Master’s strength. His aura felt like an bottomless ocean of ice, billowing out chilling energy like a monstrous blizzard.
At the same time, it felt less tempestuous than before. Like all the Devil Kings, their profane arts left an impact on their auras, making them feel hollow or unstable. But George’s only had a hit of that instability left. For the most part, his immeasurable aura felt tranquil as an undisturbed pond.
As George approached the table, Oracle realized his appearance was not the same. Before, he appeared his age, somewhere in his mid-thirties, but now he had the semblance of a teenager. His skin was free of blemishes and without wrinkles, his features serene as an elf.
All nine of the Master’s servants stood up at once in his presence, though he dismissed them with a wave. He took his seat at the head of the table, the impossibly black throne of power that no one else dared to sit in while he was absent, not even Morgana.
“I apologize for my aura,” he said. His voice was barely louder than a whisper, but the sound traveled like he was shouting from a megaphone. “I am unused to this amount of Mana.”
In an instant, the cold aura retreated into George’s body. All the ice in the room disappeared. Oracle stopped shivering, something that she hadn’t even noticed she was doing.
“Master, the trial was successful?” Oracle asked, bowing her head.
“The Blizzard Lich’s Fjord went as the Man in Shadows promised,” George said. “I have obtained power beyond reckoning.”
“I don’t trust that man further than I could throw him,” Morgana said. “He’s using us as pawns for a greater game that we’re not even close to being privy to.”
“You’re letting him hear your insolence?” The Shadow Twin sitting in the chair labeled six spoke up. With them being identical twins with the face and clothes, she never could tell them apart. “He’s always watching, always hearing. We know the truth of the matter. We are lab rats for the Final Frontier Empire. There’s nothing we can do but win. If he turns out to be screwing us over, we were already screwed the moment the FFE gave us demon blood. There’s no point in pissing off the only person who can help us out.”
“I wonder,” George said softly. “If we are an experiment of the Final Frontier Empire.”
“I don’t follow,” said Monk, the Twelfth Devil King. He was blind, with a white headband around his eyes. He wore the traditional outfit of a Buddhist monk and specialized in hand-to-hand combat. Oracle almost felt bad he was so overshadowed by their greatest enemy. “You were the one to figure that out, sir.”
George tapped the side of his head. “I did originally come to that conclusion, yes. But perhaps I was wrong. I have seen and heard interesting things during my retreat in the Blizzard Lich’s Fjord. The one we know as the Man in Shadows—I have strong reason to believe he is not who he says he is. He is no arbiter of the Final Frontier Empire.”
Murmurs spread throughout the table. Morgana was the first one to speak up. “Then what is he? Who would be so bold to lie about that?”
George took a moment to respond. Unlike the rest of them, his breath still produced a cloud of steam. His body temperature must have naturally been well below freezing.
“I don’t know.” Oracle could feel her Master’s concern in the long pauses between each word. He did not normally sound so unsure, and she felt a shiver go down her spine.
“I will tell you what I do know. He is old and powerful and has done this many times. Enough for there to be a Psychic Inheritance containing the willpower of three former Devil Kings, all within the last three thousand years. That there were three ice mages within a three thousand-year period suggests an extremely high rate of turnover. Their message was hidden deep within the Blizzard Lich’s Fjord, so the Man in Shadows never found it. They said that he has been infiltrating planets under the guise of an official of the Final Frontier Empire for tens of thousand of years. Planting Devil Kings on thousands of worlds. One of the wills inside of the Inheritance found old planetary records. After a ‘victory,’ they disappear from the record, never to be seen again. In addition, the Man in Shadows does not work alone. He always has at least one partner, suggesting a more powerful organization backing them.”
There was a heavy silence in the room as no one knew what to say. Oracle understood they were talking about things so far above her it became practically meaningless. Unseen groups moving against other groups that wielded the resources of this entire universe.
“Why don’t we snitch on ‘em, then?” the other Shadow Twin asked. “I’m sure the Final Frontier Empire ain’t happy about this shit. I wouldn’t be, if I were them. Couldn’t we broker some kind of deal for our safety?”
“That is not a good idea.” George’s words carried the air of finality. “This mission is clearly of central importance to the Man in Shadow’s backers. If we are caught during an attempted betrayal, he will surely kill all of us to cover the tracks. If we do manage to make a deal with the Final Frontier Empire, he might still be able to kill us. With how much they’ve invested in their missions, they cannot afford to be caught. All of Earth might be wiped away.”
“Then what do you suggest, George?” Morgana held her gaze with the Master.
Once again, there was a moment of silence. Everyone waited intently for George’s next words.
“We must operate as normal,” George finally said. “Do not discuss this, even amongst yourselves. The Man in Shadows must allocate much of his time asleep, but we do not know when we will awaken. I shall figure out a path forward. In the meantime, we have much work to do.”
Oracle perked up at the sound of that.
As it was, the second wave was a nightmare. Even for the Devil Kings, without the Master. The hordes were nigh endless and the bosses nigh unstoppable. Even she had to try hard against them. With the Master back, things would be easier, but in their current predicament, it was hard to enact their plans when their territories were constantly being encroached on.
With a breath, the Master created a blossom of ice. He twirled the flower, resplendent with its twelve crystal petals. He twirled it around with his fingers and then abruptly crushed it in his hand.
“My little snakes tell me that Alexandra is in the Wasteland right now. Vritra and the Pride Lord are still busy undergoing their transformation. I must contend with the second wave along with Morgana. Oracle,” the Master’s gaze breached her own, “you shall deal with the woman. The rest of you will also deal with our current situation, except Chameleon. Continue your mission. This meeting is concluded.”
“Wait, Master,” Oracle entreated. “What of Alistair? Isn’t the Wasteland where he disappeared? I fear I might not be able to deal with him and the barbarian combined, considering you expect him to grow in strength during his missing time.”
“There is nothing to fear,” George said. “He will not return to Earth for a week’s time. You only need to deal with Alexandra and the teleporting man.”