Dwight Howard was part of a new caste of people called nouveau destiné. The two words were borrowed from another language, meaning new Fated.

They were wealthy independent individuals who purchased an awakening stone for themselves. That also happened in the past; awakening stones were usually hoarded like skill crystals, but there was always a reason to sell. However, back then, there was a lengthy mandatory course for any new awakener without a connection to an established organization. People had to spend months being told precisely what they could and couldn't do, when, and why. As part of a Royal House, Arthur had been exempted but got his version from Tamara and Graham.

Nowadays, while still theoretically obligatory, the course could be skipped by merely paying a fine. Everyone knew that any law to which the punishment was money was only a law to the poor. To the rich, it was, at worst, the fee to do something.

The nouveau destinés were known for acting irresponsibly with their money and awakening powers, and Howard was the most extreme example anyone could get.

Yet, ironically, his research was for the greater good.

Howard had theorized mana starvation toxins would be harmful to dungeon cores. It wasn't a big logical jump considering monsters could also suffer from mana starvation and develop the same toxins as the Fated Races, as he had pointed out in a surprisingly well-written essay published in a reputable journal.

Also astounding was that he was unbiased in his research. No matter how he approached things, the results had been less than stellar. Instead of blinding himself to the truth, he had decided to conclude the experiment was a failure and end it in a few months if nothing changed when he fed his dungeon a few extra hundred people.

He was evil—but educated evil. Which, of course, only made him that much scarier.

The crime genius controlled everyone who mattered in town or could present risk, from the mayor to the Chief of Police to the League's Regional Manager to the SRT team. His network was vast, and he used a mix of subtle mind control and blackmail on some, while he went with extreme manipulation and threats on others.

The Regional Manager, for instance, had already been unfaithful to his wife for a while and on the brink of a divorce when Howard appeared. The murderer offered Chapman a way to make his wife forget everything and look the other way whenever Chapman cheated on her, which Chapman accepted. Then, Howard used it to blackmail the Regional Manager while mind-controlling the man to be overly stimulated by pretty women.

Arthur was happy he hadn't let the man look at Sophie; depending on how little control Chapman had, things might've gotten ugly.

Howard was so good at fine-tuning his actions to one's psyche, to the expected reactions based on their history and personality, that Arthur gained a deeper understanding of the human mind just from hearing Howard reveal what he did to who, how, and why.

None of his victims could escape his grasp. Skipping town was impossible because he added extreme hodophobia—fear of traveling—to anyone who mattered. They might just drop dead from a heart attack if they tried. Jorge hadn't been relevant enough to receive this treatment.

Moreover, whoever tried to report it to local authorities soon found retaliation from Howard because Howard controlled said authorities. He had made examples of enough people to still the fear of Fate into the others. Most didn't report to anyone out of town because they couldn't leave and rightfully believed Howard would at least kill them before help arrived. A few went through with it anyway, but the investigation went through Howard's people.

Only once had the governor's office sent a special investigative team from the outside, but they were unawakened. The investigators were less inconspicuous than they thought in their questions, and the biomancer ensured they left with nothing.

The governor had no reason to notify the League. No one in the city knew Howard's identity, and very few of his victims knew he was an awakener. Most believed their feelings and actions were a natural reaction to the other adversities the man put them through.

The criminal hadn't let that up to chance; his genius could also be seen in his attention to detail. The League's receptionist had said their mana scan was broken, and the owner of the roadside restaurant had claimed his mana scan had been on maintenance for three weeks. Chad even told the police to check on "Old Jeffrey." Jeffrey Potter was the only magitech technician in town certified to fix mana scans. He was also being controlled.

Howard had gotten the addresses of every mana scan owner in the city from Potter and Chapman, overloaded the objects to force them to malfunction, then made Potter delay all repairs and make the eventual repair timed to break again. The kidnapper also ensured the Regional League's office didn't certify anyone else to handle the magitech objects. There were uncertified technicians in town, but League and government organizations couldn't use them. Thus, he could stay in town with none the wiser about his awakener identity.

To most, he was just a random guy with too much money to spend on a paranoia-level security detail. To his victims, he was a well-connected monster they dreaded.

Naturally, he wasn't perfect. He messed up occasionally, but his network was often good enough to swiftly deal with matters. The SRT, for one, was stationed a few blocks away and had a direct connection to the mansion's camera feeds. They came the moment they noticed something wrong and were prepared to kill everyone and everything, no matter the cost.

Howard himself had ordered them to do it, which was the only reason they could attack the target of their fanaticism. The man believed his partner in crime might do something like Arthur had done and wanted them to fall with him. Only the SRT captain had known about the dungeon, and the woman had been under such extreme compulsion that it was a wonder she could function.

Said criminal partner was called Blaze Terrell.

Terrell had read Howard's paper and decided to invest in it. Howard provided the willingness to dirty his hands, while Terrell had been the initial mastermind behind everything. He had supplied the mansion, dungeon, necklace, books on mind manipulation, and the addresses of everyone in the local League's branch and key political figures.

The Terrell Family was composed of awakeners and had been around for at least eight hundred years. The level 33 dungeon had belonged to them for generations. Long in the past, they went to war and feigned the dungeon's destruction. They hid it by burying it under tons upon tons of dirt and landscaping the whole region. The lake that gave North Lake City its name was actually artificial.

Then, when dungeons started disappearing, the Terrells attempted to prevent it in different ways. They only had the money for one null chamber and decided to invest it in their hidden dungeon. It worked.

The necklace had come from another dungeon in the distant past. It had been the reward for killing a level 70 boss, the highest-level monster the Terrells had ever killed, and the final boss in a dungeon they destroyed because it became too high-leveled. It had cost them many lives, and all they got for it was something they considered absolutely useless.

Yes, they believed an artifact that could make a level 55 awakener kneel was useless.

The Terrells had dubbed it Necklace of Monster Charming because it was similar to a vampire's charming ability but only worked with monsters who were naturally predisposed to feel attracted to the wearer. Few monsters were humanoid enough for that, fewer still cared for human beauty, and almost none were powerful, if any. Moreover, mind-controlling monsters was forbidden back then, and they didn't dare to attract the League's wrath. Thus, it had been accumulating dust in the family's coffers.

Unfortunately, their primary source of income had been their dungeons, and they were almost all gone these days. They had a hard time adapting to other businesses. So, they had been selling old artifacts for a while.

During Terrell's youth, he had been responsible for trying to make useless trinkets seem like they were worth something. While doing so, he tested them creatively, and one experiment revealed that the necklace worked on anyone with monster ancestry, no matter how far detached they might be from the monster ancestor. It was still limited to people who might naturally feel attracted to the wearer, so Howard went for female targets; it was statistically more likely to work on them.

As for the address of all League personnel, Terrell had easy access to them because he was the most recent addition to the League's Joint Command, one of the three Human Commanders.

Discovering that was shocking because Arthur first learned that Terrell was part of the Free Fate Movement. The FFM defended the extinction of the League, claiming awakeners and unawakened could govern themselves in any Fate-related matters without the need for a central body telling them what to do. They claimed the Great War was long in the past, and while the League had been valuable in its inception, it became outdated and useless.

Of course, Terrell hadn't revealed his beliefs to anyone before he got a seat in Joint Command. Now that he was there, he was the most politically active member, and the position was for life. It was almost impossible to remove him unless he was caught committing a terrible crime.

Backing Howard's research might or might not be enough, depending on his political power.

Arthur hoped it would be.

He didn't want to kill one of the League's Human Commanders.

He understood the weight of that decision but stood by it. He wouldn't accept Terrell getting away with planning, financing, and enabling mass murder and the takeover of an entire city via mind control. The prince of nowhere had been taught to despise vigilantes yet might have no alternative.

Ironically, Human Commander Terrell had been the one to enable Howard's research on destroying dungeons, which Howard wanted to use to deal with the level 95 one. The murderer believed it was a move to create a public outcry against the League when his crimes were unveiled but had been too confident in his research to care. To him, it was all for a greater purpose. It would be worth it.

Terrell notwithstanding, the FFM had some good arguments about awakener and unawakened co-existence, but the League kept to old beliefs. Even the two other Human Commanders protected the League's duty to the world with teeth and nails despite humanity having a much shorter lifespan than dwarves and elves, which made humans more prone to ideological shifts. All Joint Commanders but Terrell agreed that the moment the League was gone, anarchy would descend until a new central body rose to rule over awakeners. They had all reason to believe it would be tyrannical, not bound by the League's traditional ethics and morals.

Not that they could do anything about it; the League's destruction was only a matter of time.

Terrell was one factor causing it. He was creating so much internal friction in Joint Command that the other races resented humans for his appointment more and more. He was good at how he did it, forcing the other Human Commanders to take his side in matters they would rather not.

That was made worse by the growing border tension between the Fated Races' nations. There were too many people in the world, but all the good land was taken. A neighbor that looked different from you was the easiest target to hate. Racism was rampant, and in fact, the prejudice against half-monsters that Arthur had seen was just a side effect of the racial purity defended by at least a fifth of all countries in the world, from all races.

A divided leadership couldn't properly deal with external threats, and the FFM was a very real external threat.

The Free Fate Movement was composed and used by almost everyone with an agenda that included the League's destruction. Howard didn't know if Terrell had hidden intentions but guessed yes. Almost every FFM member, sympathizer, or backer with any power or status in society wanted at least a piece of the largest orichalcum deposit in the world.

The ore was desired for two primary reasons. First, orichalcum was one of the ingredients to produce voidsteel. It was the first time Arthur and anyone in his group heard about that, but it was an open secret these days. Any unawakened who wanted the League gone also wished to control voidsteel weaponry production to ensure the awakeners never ruled over the world again.

Second, orichalcum was incredibly valuable. Not only could it produce voidsteel, but it was also the most existent metal known to the Fated Races. There was a lot of money to be made by gaining even shared ownership of the deposit.

Arthur found it almost poetic how the League had greatly profited from stopping the last war for control over that resource yet was now threatened by it.

Most unawakened leaders also wanted custody over the level 95 dungeon. Most agreed it was responsible for lowering the world's mana levels, though no one knew how or why. While awakeners generally wanted to reverse the process, many unawakened who had gained a taste for power in the last centuries wanted anything but. By protecting what they believed to be the only entrance to the dungeon, they could ensure it continued existing and taking mana from the world forever. Their positions would never be threatened by a new era of awakeners.

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Howard said some even defended unblocking the entrance and having the dungeon suck all mana in the world at once—the stupidest idea Arthur had ever heard.

Last but not least, many who wanted the League gone were merely a bunch of "jealous ungrateful assholes," in Tamara's words. Her curse showed how much it offended her. They claimed the League was morally obligated to share everything it had and knew with the world. Everyone wanted to know the secrets to produce voidsteel, ICMC, and medicine.

By the way, the latter had revolutionized health care. Arthur had noticed the lack of sick people but never thought deeply about it. He should have. Nowadays, most diseases could be cheaply cured with medicine, primarily alchemic, though awakeners also owned most purely technological pharmaceutical companies. Some more challenging conditions were treated for free by the League. The only limiting factor was getting to a high-mana region with a biomancer, but most governments paid for transportation when required. It was simply too reasonable an investment.

The girl Arthur had found in the dungeon was one of the cases where even a biomancer couldn't heal something. Such patients were offered free palliative services or the option to enter the level 95 dungeon for a few real-world years while the healers sought a solution. Almost no one chose to enter the dungeon because it seldom was worth it, especially considering how good the palliative care was, but there were a few desperate people here and there.

Speaking of revolutionizing the world, the Intent-Conducting Miniature Crystals were both a blessing and a curse. If anyone could use it to manufacture enchanted items, unawakened only needed to learn how to produce ICMC to feel like they could replace awakeners in yet another front. Awakeners made themselves seem less and less valuable.

That naturally wasn't true. The unawakened couldn't feel and intimately understand runes like awakeners. Only enchanters, those whose "element" was pure mana, could. Even Arthur would need to collaborate with enchanters to translate his elemental knowledge into pure runes. Then again, society needed only enchanters, not elemental awakeners, or so many seemed to believe.

That was the summary of the complaints and rampant greed afflicting the world.

In the past, the League would've been able to shut down all opposition, but things had changed. Howard even insisted the nice stuff the League did for the world was just bribery to try to survive a bit longer. The fact was that the League of Fated Races had never been so weak.

Three hundred years ago, when the world's mana levels were becoming unsustainable, it dealt with mana-mad awakeners the usual way: dispatching stronger awakeners to deal with it. However, dungeons started disappearing not long after. Sending strong awakeners against mana-mad ones soon became unsustainable simply because there weren't enough strong awakeners to throw at the problem, and the ones still around were too valuable to risk.

The decrease in awakener strength was unavoidable. Fewer dungeons meant levels being capped because any awakener could only kill so many monsters when it was their turn to delve into a dungeon, which happened after facing progressively longer queues. Only those who owned a dungeon had any hope of reaching a higher level, but it was also limited to the dungeon's monsters' levels. And once the monsters' levels got too high, the dungeon had to be destroyed or blocked because it might overflow, further limiting how many were available.

To make matters worse, the number of awakeners didn't immediately decrease. It had been expected in the past for countries, Houses, and powerful awakeners to hoard awakening and extending stones. Then, when the stone's newly found scarcity made them much more valuable, many didn't resist the temptation to sell more and more of them. Yet, awakening was just the first step to whatever they sought, be it longevity, power, or smarts. Everyone needed stat points, and the most straightforward way to get them was by killing monsters.

So, there was a higher demand and lower supply for dungeon delving.

To put matters in perspective, the Golden Kingdom alone had had three to six hundred dungeons at any given time in the past. Today, the entire world had only around three hundred delvable dungeons.

The lack of strong awakeners and the greater numbers of weaker ones caused mana madness to become a sort of epidemic. The League had to deal with them but didn't want to risk the remaining few strong awakeners. So, they went the obvious route: use disposable troops. Unawakened were equipped with voidsteel and trained to fight the weak awakeners.

The strong awakeners never felt threatened by it. Voidsteel was called anti-mage steel because it had always been useful almost exclusively against mages. Even if a warrior was in constant contact with voidsteel, they could fight without skills, with their stats halved and decreasing over time. In the past, affluent ones even wielded voidsteel weapons to fight mages.

Non-firearms voidsteel weaponry wasn't as effective against said warriors. Enough strength could make the skin stop voidsteel arrows, and enough agility could let them dodge melee voidsteel attacks.

Voidsteel firearms and bullets were more dangerous. Unlike a simple voidsteel sword, ammunition was easy to manufacture and use, even if the material was exceedingly expensive. A voidsteel bullet could pierce a warrior's skull, and biological beings couldn't function without a brain. Shoot them from enough angles, and they were bound to fall eventually.

Even so, while those bullets were potentially lethal, they weren't flawless. Power, money, and influence could protect one against them because a powerful firemancer or someone with an enchanted object like Arthur's sword could produce enough heat to defend from voidsteel. Also, unlike blades, bullets were shot from afar, giving awakeners time to protect themselves creatively. Arthur had done it with his metal spheres and plates, and most elements had their tricks.

As for ordinary guns and explosives? They could only do so much against a powerful or magically protected awakener.

So, the League had distributed voidsteel guns to deal with awakeners afflicted with mana madness. As expensive as the alloy was, training unawakened to use it was still cheaper and more effective than any other solution in the long run. It was also more convenient than having the few powerful awakeners run around dealing with weak mad dogs and risking their lives.

Unfortunately, the world's mana density started lowering faster than ever about a hundred years ago.

To Arthur, that was further evidence that the level 95 dungeon was responsible for the mana drainage. A century here was about one year on the inside, coinciding with the time he started killing dragons. The dungeon had started draining more mana from the world to make up for the mana it used to spawn the monsters.

Eighty years ago, even a level 1 awakener had to plan well before leaving a high-mana area. That was inconvenient but still not terrible. Awakeners could still get to a high-mana region quickly enough.

And then, sixty years ago, everything changed.

The world's mana density became so low that voidsteel melted instead of dissipating. The easiest way to deal with the alloy was taken from all awakeners; mere heat wasn't enough anymore. The liquid voidsteel continued moving forth, piercing spells and magic artifacts and weakening the awakener on contact.

Suddenly, the League found out it had armed the world with weapons very good at penetrating any awakener's defenses.

It might be another story if there were enough high-level well-trained awakeners around, but circumstances were what they were. Even "powerful" awakeners—level 50 was now considered an almost impossible dream—were no longer safe in low-mana regions. Shoot them with voidsteel from enough angles, and they'll fall. Their enchanted protective gear won't matter, forcing them to use mana to protect themselves in creative ways. A geomancer, for instance, might go underground or create a solid rock wall that the voidsteel bullets can't pierce. However, the mana expenditure also worked against them. If they used all their mana, they would die when there was no elemental mana in their body to sustain them in a mana-deprived area. You only have to prevent them from getting to a high-mana place to get rid of them.

One way or another, the awakener would die.

There was also a cultural factor involved. Awakeners could just buy protection from unawakened. However, even using unawakened in the League had been a major controversial shift. The thought of being protected against mere unawakened by other lowly unawakened was inconceivable.

Awakeners defended the world against monsters! They couldn't dread mere unawakened!

The League cowered in fear anyway, but with the added stupidity of not protecting themselves with unawakened troops. High-mana regions became bastions, lofty towers they seldom left.

In such a scenario, the League had to loosen all their laws because simply traveling to punish perpetrators was too dangerous.

At times, said criminals were also too powerful. Those who disregarded anti-dungeon-research rules, for instance, were usually dungeon owners. They could grow stronger than anyone else. Even if the League wanted to stop them, they had no power to accomplish it without heavy losses, and every loyal awakener was too valuable. Using voidsteel weaponry against them might work, though they could just bunker down in their dungeons, where the metal instantly dissipated when molten, and they could use mana at will.

There were still plenty of rules and laws governing awakeners, but primarily because the rulers of high-mana regions agreed. Only a few laws were still enforced by dispatching awakeners no matter how far they might happen, despite how dangerous doing so would be to the ones delivering justice.

The League's pride was also a matter of politics. The League created Laws that had to be followed by everyone because it was too powerful to be questioned. It needed to appear strong and unbeatable. If it only used unawakened to deal with other awakeners, the status of awakeners would fall in people's minds. Those people would wonder why they had to obey awakeners when the unawakened had the power to oppose them.

As time passed, people wondered anyway.

Forcing rules upon the unawakened was no longer as natural as breathing. Unawakened leaders and awakener sympathizers had long understood the situation. The League increased its bribes more and more, which, paradoxically, included more voidsteel guns.

The world's leaders smelled weakness, and in geopolitics, that was like a shark smelling blood in the water. They didn't want to slowly push back against the League as they had been doing for so long while testing the waters. In fact, some even resented being overly cautious when the enemy was so weak. They wanted the League to just disappear already.

It would be costly to invade and fight awakeners in high-mana regions, where they could use their magic at will. Their defensive enchantments would also be able to withstand extreme pressure. Nevertheless, the gains vastly outweighed the risks.

That was especially true because current-day decision-makers took no part in the wars they started, unlike almost everywhere in the past. They could just throw countless bodies of unrelated people against their enemies and reap the fruits of their sacrifices.

Said countless bodies were another issue. The world was filled with way too many unawakened. The Great War was long in the past, and no worldwide war had been fought ever since because of the League's rules. It had also been many hundreds of years since the last dungeon outbreak. Only the eventual natural disaster acted as populational control.

Awakener population had moved in the opposite direction. Fate had significantly increased how easy it was to receive them as boss rewards, but it didn't make up for the lack of dungeons. The number of awakeners had steadily declined, and it would only worsen now that, according to Howard, even old awakening stone reserves were spent.

So, the world's leaders could just sacrifice enough bodies to defeat the awakeners. They only needed to ensure those bodies would want to throw themselves at their enemies. Hence, the manipulation of public opinions, like in the newspaper—which the League couldn't punish, or it would work against them.

Arthur had been stunned to find out the League was still willing to compromise despite the endless pushes. Their official stance was that they wanted to stay around for as long as possible in case something went wrong but accepted they might no longer be needed to protect the world from itself in the future. They didn't mind giving up on almost everything they had as long as they kept the Avaria Regulated Region to the very end.

It was only sensible. Giving up ownership of an expensive material needed to produce voidsteel would be stupid. Letting go of a dungeon so dangerous that its overflow was considered just short of a world-ending event was lunacy.

Sensible or not, it created an impasse that couldn't be solved.

Things were a little more complex here and there, but that was the gist of it. Every factor fed back on each other, and things snowballed out of proportion.

In other words, the world was "sitting on a powder keg," as current people would say. Unless Howard was delusional in his reports, it was obvious which side Arthur would fight for. His decision was based on a simple and indisputable fact:

The level 95 dungeon had to go.

The League didn't control all its entrances, and it could overflow any time now. Unlike what some believed, those pesky voidsteel weapons would be useless in an overflow. Voidsteel bullets and shrapnel might kill low-level monsters but would be useless against even level 50 lightning elementals, much less level 95 dragons. Tens of thousands of lightning elementals filled a single room and could wipe out entire nations.

Fighting for the League didn't mean fighting only unawakened. The lack of dungeon outbreaks also weakened the honor among awakeners, especially the nouveau destinés. They didn't see themselves as the world's protectors, only people with supernatural powers. They wanted to use their power exclusively for their benefit.

Everything felt like the natural consequence of everything else. Fate, Arthur even agreed with some of the Free Fate Movement's arguments.

But Dwight Howard was the indisputable proof that a strong League was still needed.

The mansion's red room wasn't just a front as Arthur had imagined. Howard had also experimented with his biomancy on "willing" and "aware" participants under mental control. Nothing sexual, but that was no reprieve. The depths the bastard had gone to understand some magic runes and the human body were unspeakable.

It felt almost mocking that Howard belonged to the side Arthur wanted to fight for. The bastard was a nouveau destiné but understood political movements enough to know that awakeners' status would suffer a violent shift once the FFM dealt with the League.

Howard might still have existed in a world with a powerful League to limit and supervise awakeners, but he would have had a much harder time doing what he had done. His actions would be impossible if other weak awakeners like him were around. Tools like mana scans had already proved their inability to prevent a sufficiently driven awakener. In many instances, only an awakener could stop another.

To the prince, there were only two solutions to prevent new Howards from coming to be: a world filled with awakeners that limited each other or a world where awakeners were gone.

He didn't like the latter, but he could accept it if it happened. That is, as long as all dungeons also disappeared. If a single dungeon remained, awakeners would be needed. And he suspected that many dungeons would remain.

Yes, the prince felt confident that dungeons would stop disappearing after the level 95 dungeon was gone. He had found it too coincidental that the dungeon he saw in the forest disappeared when he was about to enter it. That was even truer for Terrell's dungeon disappearing less than a minute after Arthur entered it.

The average time for dungeons to go away was six hours. Someone evidently didn't want him to witness what happened to the core when a dungeon disappeared. The only one who knew how powerful he was and might fear him was the level 95 dungeon core responsible for the decreasing mana levels in the entire world. If it could do that to a planet, it had the reach to also destroy dungeons, though Arthur didn't know how or why.

He would wait and see. Who knows? Disposing of that dungeon might be enough to thwart the incoming war. Or it might ignite the conflict out of revenge.

Arthur hoped for the former. He would reveal part of his power to the world by destroying the dungeon and maybe with other feats.

The League needed strength and mana, and he would deliver both on top of a return of dungeons and the threat of overflows.

The prince had heard things so vile he felt dirty just to be in that house, yet the future hadn't felt so bright since his return. He knew what to do to make things right. He didn't even have to consider the moral implications of forcing the world to re-adapt to mana and dungeons; if he didn't destroy the level 95 dungeon on time and it overflowed, no one would be left to re-adapt.

Delving into that dungeon was more critical than ever, but Arthur wouldn't head there at once. He would instead spend half a day freeing Howard's victims from mind control. And before that, he would do something he had been postponing for a while.

It was time to open the storage safe his father had left him and see if it had anything he could use.