Dimensional Descent

2033 An Hour

Leonel's body flashed, and his vision sharpened. Others couldn't maintain their sense of direction in the middle of a teleportation, one would end up feeling weightless and would become unable to tell which direction was up, which was down, and where left and right was.

However, Orinik had miscalculated. Not only could Leonel maintain his sense of direction, even his vision wasn't obstructed. He could feel the swirling mass of space splitting open before him.

Leonel had known that he could do this intuitively, but this was the first time he had truly done it. He could feel that his comprehension of space was shifting and molding to the changes around him, but he quickly snapped out of it and suddenly reached forward.

Orinik, who couldn't see or orient himself at the moment, felt a suffocating pressure squeeze around his throat. At first, he thought it was just an oddity of the teleportation, but when his vision cleared, his pupils couldn't help but constrict.

To his horror, Orinik looked forward to finding Leonel right in front of him, his throat clamped down. Right to his side, Rychard was in a vice-like grip as well, both of their feet dangling from above as they struggled to push blood flow to their brains. While practitioners of their level could last a very long time without breathing, that was only if their blood continued to circulate normally. Leonel's palms weren't just restricting their breathing, his fingers clamped down on the important blood vessels of their necks, making them feel light-headed as they struggled.

"Help! HELP!"

This was Orinik's only option. He felt that they should be close enough to Xavnik's territory now, calling out should bring down hell upon Leonel. In fact, because he had brought Leonel, he might not even get punished for this failure. Orinik could tell that while Xavnik was hyper fixated on First and Second Nova as his only competition, only he knew that Leonel was a true monster.

Orinik had tried to explain these matters to Xavnik in the past, but the latter simply brushed it off. How could Third Nova believe that a Sixth Dimensional existence could threaten him?

Then again, Orinik had a hard time understanding what it was that Xavnik was thinking half the time. Even now, he wasn't 100% certain of what his plans were, all he knew was that he needed help right now, and a lot of it.

So long as Xavnik could come with his army, there would be a chance for survival. Leonel should also be smart enough to know that he wasn't a useful bargaining chip, so he just had to…

Orinik froze, his body shuddering.

This location… This location wasn't right.

"Oh, you've noticed? If I can orient myself in a spatial tunnel, you think I don't have the ability to step out of it early? Did you think I would let you drag me into such a trap?" Leonel tilted his head somewhat, his smile light and inviting. But at the moment, it looked like nothing more than a reaper's kiss to Orinik.

"You know, they say that scheming is useless in the face of absolute power," Leonel continued, "and I think that's actually true. But the difference is that the definition of 'absolute power' from person to person differs greatly. To you, I've long since reached that level. Against me, no amount of planning, no amount of preparation, no amount of scheming, would be useful."

Orinik felt his heart shatter. It wasn't literal, but his body felt like it had lost all of its strength. Hanging in the air, looking into Leonel's eyes, feeling his cold indifference, he realized that the boy back then he could have crushed with a single hand had long since soared well beyond him.

If he had only known that the Leonel he met back then was a young man who hadn't even been in the Dimensional Verse for even a handful of years, he would have understood things much more thoroughly. They had simply never been on the same level.

To his surprise, though, Orinik felt his badge shatter. It wasn't him who had done it, but clearly Leonel.

Rychard's heart was even more dead than Orinik's was. He didn't even react to his badge shattering, the blacks of his eyes sinking deeper and deeper. He had well and truly lost.

Orinik felt a sharp pain before he disappeared, feeling that something had been gouged out of his body, but he didn't have the luxury of thinking about it. He already knew that the moment he left, he would find himself in the hands of others. His life was pretty much over now…

Leonel didn't care very much about the feelings of the two of them. He had always been a compassionate person, but he was just as easily able to turn it off against the people who targeted him.

He didn't blame Rychard in the past for what he had done. Back then, when the latter tried to marry Aina, he hadn't even cared to go and stop the marriage in the first place, so how could he retroactively be enraged by such a thing? What he hated Rychard for was not for this, but rather the rumors he had spread about his mother. That was simply unforgivable.

If it wasn't for Alienor telling him that he was more useful alive back then, Leonel would have long since killed this person. But then he had the audacity to hold a grudge and target the Ascension Empire years later.

Then there was Orinik. The "rumors" he had spread back then about the authenticity of Leonel's Amethyst Token were true enough. Leonel wasn't enraged by this, he was enraged by the intention behind the action, and then the further steps he took to profit from his and Aina's life and death after they had entered that dangerous Zone.

The two of them didn't deserve his sympathy and he didn't care for it. They were only alive because they were more useful that way.

As for the sharp pain that Orinik had felt before…

Leonel looked down at his hand to see a bloody organ. It was a gallbladder of sorts, but this was filled with poison. But what was interesting is that when it was implanted into a body, it worked almost a lot like an Innate Node would, but this Innate Node was capable of evolving.

It was fascinating.

Leonel didn't believe that Orinik had been born with this organ naturally. He had found it by scanning Orinik's body with his Dream World and around the location this was found it, there were almost unnoticeable irregularities. This meant that this wasn't an original part of Orinik's body.

"Somebody implanted it? So they gave him this ability, he wasn't born with it… But how could it be so seamless? Who has the skill to…"

Leonel's gaze narrowed. It had to be Third Nova. In fact, it was very likely that Auran had been poisoned as a result of this and that was why he had lost so easily and silently.

Orinik wasn't a demon, but somehow he was able to gain demon-like characteristics through this method…

Leonel shook his head. Just what was going on?

The Silver Empire had ties to demons. The Morales family had ties to demons. The Suiard family likely had ties to demons. The Three Finger Cult had ties to demons.

What was the story behind this? Was the Demon Race infiltrating the Human Domain like the Cloud Race had? Something wasn't adding up here, it didn't make any sense to him at all.

Why did so many powerful existences have ties to the one race that was the most "evil"? There wasn't even a religion that worshipped demons, at least not out in the open, this was how against demons the Human Domain was. Even the Spiritual Race could have such a religion, but the Demons had never been allowed such a thing.

And now there were even people creating demons?

Leonel was truly speechless. He didn't have an answer for any of these matters.

With a frown, he stepped through the air. Beneath him, there was still nothing but vast ocean, he had stepped out of the spatial tunnel long before they made it to the continent, so he actually wasn't very far from the Water Lotus Territory.

After returning, Leonel saw Aina who rushed over with a slightly worried expression on her face. However, Leonel only smiled.

"I have some work for you, can you create an antidote for this poison?"

Aina nodded. "I can do that."

"I'll need to send one out of here for Auran. You'll probably need to make it more potent, though. I'm only about 60/40 on whether or not they use the same poison. But if I'm correct, it's like the same derivatives, but just far more powerful."

"Mm," Aina nodded. She didn't know who Auran was, but she assumed that he must have been Second Nova. Leonel at least kept them updated about certain things. "Give me an hour."

Those paying attention to this situation were rendered speechless. An hour?

They looked toward Auran's body. He had been silent for a long time, but his skin was already turning a terrible black-purple color that wasn't natural in the slightest. Even his sweat had begun to turn toxic and foul.

This person was already at a point that only an Ancestor of the Omann family could cure him. How could a Sixth Dimensional little girl possibly have a solution in an hour?

But under the astonished gazes of those there, Aina actually cut the bloody organ open and swallowed the contents.