Sylas’ bare feet raced across the snowy plain, his Scorned Wraps acting as his only protection. Swirling masses of heavy snowfall curved around his body, his speed quite fast.
Up ahead, he noticed lines of trees beginning to manifest, so he quickly shifted toward that location for some more cover. Although he was decently assured that there was no one nearby, it was hard to tell what sort of monsters he might be dealing with when he eventually did run into someone.
Better safe than sorry.
‘Should be close…’
Sylas had only just had the thought when his target appeared at the edge of his visualization range. Spotting it from a far distance, he realized that the collection of seal-skin huts was exactly what he was looking for.
Clypsians…
It was so very odd. They seemed to be prisoners, and yet not. But it was the saddest sort of sight to see.
The reason it was so hard to tell was because they, themselves, didn’t realize anything was wrong with it. They thought that this was just the life they were meant to live, that they were already as free as they could be.
If one was raised from infancy to fall to the heels of slavery, then what could you measure your life against to understand that this wasn’t how life should be?
Maybe if there were clear masters and overlords breathing down their necks all the time, things would be different. But from what Sylas could tell at a glance, there was nothing of the sort.
Unfortunately, because of that…
‘I won’t find my target here…’
Sylas shook his head.
Finding Overlords wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be. Everyone on Earth was an Overlord, but what Sylas hadn’t realized until he tried to find them on the Level 30 Bazaar was that so many worlds in the galaxy were so far removed from their days as Summoned Worlds that many had lost their Overlord status, diluted it, or otherwise never had it in the first place.
Earth was a unique case where the only intelligent creatures present were humans themselves. But what about worlds that had more than one of them? Of course, only one could be the Overlord Race, so something had to happen to those that didn’t make the cut.
In this case, however, the Clypsians were prisoners and were simply never meant to be Overlords in the first place. The moment they lost their Summoning, they had lost all such rights as well.
‘There’s still something peculiar about this…’
Sylas couldn’t get that nagging thought out of his head. It all stemmed back to just how easy it was for him to use his Luck here. That had to mean something—he just wasn’t sure what it was.
No… he had an inkling, he just didn’t have the full picture yet.
…
Sylas eventually rounded the territory enough to find another encampment, and then another. But every time, he found a collection of tents and no one with the status that he was looking for.
It made one thing clear to him. If he wanted someone with Overlord status to take advantage of, he was going to have to take quite a bit of risk.
‘Deeper.’
There was certainly someone overseeing things here. They wouldn’t just let the Clypsians, with all their talent, live out their existence on a planet they had such strong affinity with without any sort of oversight.
Objectively speaking, the average Clypsian was far more talented than the average Sylph. They had to be kept under tight control.
After investing so much time already, Sylas knew that he might just fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy, but he had belief in his own deductive reasoning—maybe to a degree that was almost too exceptional.
But his arrogance had gotten him this far; why couldn’t it get him even further?
As he slipped forward, weaving between the encampments and slowly picking them out from a distance, he found them getting bigger and bigger, while the Clypsians with them…
‘They’re growing stronger.’
Sylas realized then that this wasn’t just a place to keep and store Clypsians, but it functioned almost eerily similar to a normal society with strict hierarchies.
Larger encampments had more Clypsians, which fostered more competition, which grew more talents. The edges carried the weak and weaker, while the closer to the center you got, the more powerful they became.
These Clypsians, though, no matter how strong they became, remained under tight restraints and control—the prison-like elements becoming more and more obvious as Sylas progressed until he saw his first walls of icy blue steel in the distance.
The metal itself was gorgeous, but its function was far less so.
Sylas began to see Clypsians that walked about with chains on their hands and feet, some even around their necks as though they were fashion accessories.
They went to their jobs wearing them, shopped at grocery stores with them—they were even so used to them that Sylas’ senses picked up on several couples using them as leverage in their intimate moments.
None of the Clypsians seemed to understand that they were imprisoned at all.
‘Do they really not know? Then why was Nosphaleen’s dedication to escape so strong? There must be a secret uprising amongst them somewhere, it’s just a matter of where exactly that is…’
Sylas wasn’t too interested in finding the uprising itself, but rather the strong oversight he was sure it would have. Because the odds the Overlord he needed would be among them was exceptionally high.
And then he finally spotted it.
It was the largest of any of the encampments he had seen, with steely blue walls 20 meters tall—a tower that was at least five times that height peering over the entire radius of the small city with its position right at the center.
This time, it was so large that Sylas didn’t even need to use his visualization at all, though he had already travelled deep enough that he knew it was far too dangerous to continue using it so casually.
However…
‘Danger. Too dangerous, far too dangerous…’