[Bonus courtesy of Niceee9842 <3]
Sylas could feel his mind expanding in ways that he couldn’t quite describe, but rather than feeling overwhelmed, it only felt natural.
This was what he had been most worried about. While the theory was sound, he had no way of knowing what would actually happen when he executed it. But now that things had reached this stage, there was no need for him to consider anything else.
He pressed on, his mind spiraling through the galaxy until he felt it. His Luck was like a moth to the flame, naturally and magnetically pulled toward the one location where he felt the most at home.
Earth.
If the state of his mind was what he worried about the most, this was without a doubt the riskiest part. That wasn’t to say he wasn’t worried. It made no sense to not be worried about something that was so inherently risky.
It was just that even if what would ultimately come came… he would be more than prepared for it.
This risk—he would take it, because he knew exactly how the system would react to it.
Within these next years, Earth would be protected. It didn’t matter who saw it or who knew where it was while it completed its evolution. In fact, if this worked, the time it would take to evolve would only increase, giving Sylas more time to do what he needed to do…
Be strong.
Sylas didn’t hesitate. All at once, Earth and the Sylph Planets were connected in a network, a bridge between them taking shape.
The plan of the Sylphs had long been clear to Sylas. By using Nosphaleen or the Clypsians as a bridge, they could make Earth more pliable, bending its rules and making it so that the system didn’t recognize them as the threats they truly were.
The system was strong and almost omnipresent and all-powerful, but it was still fallible. It wasn’t omnipotent in the truest extent of the word. As such, with the right circumstances, the wool could be pulled over its eyes.
If the Sylphs managed to fool the system into thinking that they were natural parts of Earth—or worse yet, if the backers of the Sylphs managed the same—the end result would only be devastating.
But if you did the reverse, and suddenly it was Earth applying its influence onto these other worlds, the reverse would happen.
Rather than the backers being accepted into Earth, it would instead be the system raising an eyebrow, wondering why there were so many people not of Earth who were suddenly being given Earth’s grace.
And in the case that this happened, there would certainly be hell to pay.
This, though… wasn’t Sylas’ goal.
As cathartic as it would feel to wipe the Sylphs from existence in exchange for what they had done, it would be a waste of his time. The Sylphs were no longer a threat, and their strongest had already been wiped out by the system.
In fact, even if it sounded arrogant, Sylas was half sure that he could wipe out the Sylphs all on his own right now if he had some time to prepare.
Their strongest might be D-Grades, but he didn’t believe that there would be many things to take advantage of.
What Sylas was aiming for was different, and that all was rooted in an oddity that he had personally experienced all those months ago.
The death of the old man who stood behind the bonfire… the very old man that had introduced him to the Frostbane Dungeon at the time.
When Sylas stepped out of that Dungeon, he found the old man dead, and a flying ship of Sylphs above his head.
He didn’t really understand what was happening back then, but then there was another oddity: the badge he received from the Level 15 he killed just outside the now-dead Lucius’ territory.
Thanks to that badge, Sylas had been able to find a store of incredibly precious ore—so precious that he hadn’t even been able to find it in large quantities even with access to the whole of the Golden Grove’s wealth.
Metarock.
What was interesting about that wasn’t the Metarock, though… it was the fact that even with all of the Sylphs that Sylas had killed, even ones far more high-profile than the Level 15, he had never found another badge like that again.
In fact, he had had a treasure in the World Scepter that allowed him to find anything on Earth he wanted and immediately teleport there. But he had still not found another Sylph with such a badge on them.
What did that mean?
At first, Sylas didn’t think much of it. Metarock was rare; the odds there would be more than one deposit were low to begin with. He should be thankful he had such a large store.
But then he realized—the point wasn’t the Metarock at all.
The death of the old man. The existence of just one badge. They both underlined the same thing.
The clashing interests of the Sylphs. They were of one race, but they were much like Humans, having their own goals, their own aspirations.
So why did so many different factions know about one world? Wasn’t it in the best interest of the one that found out first to hide it for themselves?
And why kill the old man and try to take control of the Frostbane Dungeon?
That was when the image began to be weaved in Sylas’ mind. The Sylphs weren’t just acting at someone’s behest—they were being controlled. In fact, even further, they were probably being controlled in much the same way those in the shadows hoped to control Earth.
The reason they would kill the old man who oversaw the Dungeon was probably for the same reason they needed Nosphaleen in the first place. One faction was trying to steal the hard work of another, benefiting from their own bridge plan.
In which case… the Sylph Worlds were in the state the puppet master in the background hoped to place Earth in.
Which, by extension, meant that if Sylas took hold of these Sylph Worlds and used them to form a bridge instead…
The system would sense it.
—
[Anomaly Detected]