Ah, sweet silence. While there was a certain catharsis from the screaming, nothing quite beats silence. After a few more moments of savoring it, Joy made the tough decision to break it.

“Go ahead and head back to your boss, Jack. And make sure to mention how disrespectful…”

“Devon, his name was Devon.” Jack said quietly.

“Cool, make sure to mention how disrespectful Devon was to the rules your boss laid out, and how rude he was to me. Because of my excellent mood, I won’t even demand reparations, so long as he doesn’t demand to see the body.” Joy spoke, her mood still riding high.

“Okay.” Jack whispered, resigned to the punishment he was certainly in for.

Watching his retreating back, Joy let out one final contented sigh. She’d been tense for a very long time now, and having something to let her aggression out on helped a lot. The fact that he died was certainly unfortunate, and it made her cringe a bit at her lack of finesse, but it’s not like it was murder. Manslaughter at most.

Finally home

She took a quick look in the mirror before her shower, a very luxurious thing in the Undercity, hence the stink, and what she saw startled her. Her hair and eyes, marked violet by her birth, were now a deep shade of green, so dark it almost looked black. She’d heard rumors that the system had a sense of humor, but she’d always written them off as ramblings from people with too much free time.

But the system had literally made her green with envy. What the fuck.

It’s not like this would have any real impact on her, people dyed their hair all the time and colored contacts were far from advanced tech, but seeing such a distinct part of her identity vanish was more than a little disconcerting. Not to mention the robberies, they all made sense now.

Joy had thought it was a little strange that the muggers who had been ignoring her for years had a hard-on for her credits all of a sudden, but did they really not recognize her as a noble now? Did they think noble blood was only superficial? Did they not see her other features? Her high cheekbones, regal bearing, and beautiful visage, are they nothing in the face of colored hair and eyes?

That made the robberies somehow more offensive, the fact that they thought they were robbing a commoner! The gall!

Calm, calm. Remember, I am no longer a noble. Claiming otherwise could get me killed. Not that the bastards bother to watch down here.

The ever-present threat of nobility is the only reason people didn’t impersonate, defame, or otherwise badmouth the higher class. Little did they know, nobles have such a small presence down here that it might as well not matter.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The sniveling little [System Seer] was a strange exception, but it's not unheard of for young nobles to exercise some of their sadistic tendencies on the animals that lived down here.

It’s not even particularly discouraged, a lot of noble scions have to practice their torture lessons somewhere, and with a perfect source of sub-humans just sitting there… why not? Or so was their thought process.

Joy always found it distasteful and unbecoming to flaunt their power over the Scorned, you don’t brag to a dog about being superior, so why do so to a Scorned? Granted, that was before she had to live with them for five years, and as much as she looked down on them, they were distinctly human, despite what her former contemporaries might say. They may be un-evolved savages, but they are people.

They're only filthy animals metaphorically.

Shaking herself out of her thoughts, she finished her shower, relaxed, and thought on her situation. Realistically, it boiled down to two options. Hide and try to fly under the radar for as long as possible before inevitably dying, or hide until she’s strong enough to not need to.

The problem with the clearly superior second option is that she would need to be stronger than an entire fucking empire. Oh, and Kingdom, too. The Astexians wouldn’t just let a threat like her exist unimpeded.

No one could fight an army single-handedly, well maybe the Devourer could, but that guy didn’t count, he was too busy eating stars anyway.

She would need an army. The problem there lies in convincing anyone to side with an upstart nobody that wasn’t even class 2 yet, and that’s not even mentioning the fact that nobles have complete control of the infrastructure of the empire, and not by controlling the workers or anything like that, they literally were required for it to function.

You took out the Raijin family? Say goodbye to the entire electric grid, their Power, [Empire’s Conduit] was hereditary and increased the efficiency of the grid so much that it couldn’t function without them anymore, and such a story was not uncommon.

When Joy first heard that, she thought it was the dumbest thing she had ever been told. The first question she asked was, “What if someone targets them intentionally”

She was laughed out of the room. The Solistaris Empire was currently in only one war, the Beast War. Who else would they be attacked by? They were the only human nation in this universe and the others as far as they could tell.

So getting the commoners to side with her was out the window immediately, they wouldn’t sacrifice their comforts. And the Astexian peasants were literally a universe away, so that wouldn’t work either, she would have to conquer their whole world for that to work.

A universe away. What a trip learning about that was, Joy had assumed when she was a child that the Astexians were like neighbors, and in a way they were, because although they may be a universe away, you were never more than a few hours away from them.

In the center of our System, not the magic kind, past the Astral Gate, a massive dimensional gate that separated our universes, the Astexian’s realm resided. A beautiful world densely packed with mana, the chaotic force of creation.

They have been in a war with the Echidnites for untold generations, a beast-like race of feral warriors that attack relentlessly.

Who would think of revolting in a situation in a situation like that? A few dumbasses, but they have long been taken care of by the Royal Family. They had the only hereditary Mythic Power in the Universe, though only one could have it at a time, currently that was Emperor Brontes IV, the single most powerful, sane, human alive.

And those were the forces she was arrayed against. Two universes of powerful as fuck people. Joy didn’t even know who the strongest Astexian was, they’d had magic for so much longer it wasn’t even funny, they didn’t even have a System for Machine’s sake! They were just like wizards and artificers from old-world stories, and as magic originated from their universe, they didn’t need a system to survive the ravages of mana.

Wow, I got wildly off-topic there

She’d guess that getting off-topic was pretty normal when you were arraying yourself against the entire fucking universe and an infinitesimal portion of the multiverse, too.

Fuck.

Well, Joy would be damned before she gave up without a fight, but the chances weren’t looking good. She would not supplicate to a universe that wanted her dead. She’d make ‘em fight for it.

Now she just had to figure out how.