Void Evolution System

"Raul!"

Valerie ignored everything that was going on around her. While Ophelia tried to figure out why Lucas had betrayed them, the rest didn't care.

He was a traitor. Nothing else mattered.

Valerie tried to heal Melania in the tshe had, but her power wasn't working. Originally, she left the blade inserted so Melania wouldn't bleed out, but that wasn't the decision she should have made.

She only realized it after following the path her mana took and sensing the changes in Melania's body.

Leaving Juno and the girls to guard the prison, Valerie hurriedly called Raul over.

"She's been poisoned," she said with a stern expression.

"I can't heal her with ordinary methods, and now that he's here, we can't lose any bit of our fighting power. I need you to put her in stasis."

The poison in Melania's body was made to instantly kill a dragon. It was vile poison that forced its victim to suffer pain even after death.

If Valerie kept trying to heal Melania with her wood abilities, she'd only rush the threat of death.

Melania needed to be carefully treated with the right antidote if she wanted to live.

However, none of those antidote materials could exist in this place, and Valerie couldn't figure out what they were when they were facing such a massive threat to their survival.

The only option was to halt the spread of the poison through Melania's body and wait to treat her until the current issues were solved.

Raul was the only one capable of performing such a technique.

And he knew how important Melania was to August.

"Leave it to me. Will you be fine on your own?"

Valerie nodded.

"We can manage. Just…try to finish as soon as possible without rushing. We'll need all the help we can get."

Raul nodded solemnly and went to work drawing an array around Melania's body.

Stasis arrays were the height of his clan's formation techniques. It was also their speciality, which was the only reason why both Raul and Valerie could maintain their hope of saving Melania.

Still, her body could only be kept in stasis for so long. She would eventually succumb to the poison if nothing was done to save her.

Valerie was certain that she could trust Raul. She heard the story of Bastille from August. These people had abandoned everything to follow him. They would not betray him.

The traitor was elsewhere, and he'd brought with him a calamity for their group.

When Valerie stood up again, her eyes were freezing.

"Get up."

She looked at Ophelia, who was unable to hold in her tears as she saw the dark side of Lucas Stroll.

In all honesty, she was fine with killing the woman now. If she was affiliated with that man, then there was no telling what she would do.

Still, she was here for August and she remembered that. He was the type to try and maintain as many lives as possible. Since Ophelia hadn't given them a reason to be suspicious, he wouldn't want her dead.

Lucas, on the other hand…

"I don't know why you'd shed tears for a shithead like that. He's a fucking asshole who dumped you by leaving you to die to enemies he brought here. Stand up and stop being a bitch. If you want to live, then you better fight."

She didn't care what bothered the woman. She didn't give a single fuck about the trauma she received due to the betrayal or the personal emotions that shocked her into such a state.

Because she wasn't the one whose closest friend just got stabbed.

She wasn't the one whose friend was dying on the cold rock.

Valerie was fuming. If she was still the sperson that she was when she met August and Melania, then she'd have already allowed her rage to put her in a dangerous situation.

But these two people had changed her.

Staying by their side, she was able to learn so much and experience so much that had been absent from her life.

Valerie had friends in the Wood Dragon Clan. She was never a loner.

However, to have people that she was willing to live and die for was a completely different feeling.

They showed her a better way to live, and for their sake, she had to find a way to get everyone out of this predicament.

Now wasn't the tto be overwhelmed by emotions. Now, they needed to be as cold as possible so they could survive and deal with everything that haunted them.

Ophelia didn't immediately respond, but Valerie's attention was already elsewhere.

Whether she died or not was her own concern.

Around this time, Wilhelm had finished his monologue.

He had sent his troops to surround the group of them, and the circle around August had been tightened.

The barrier that once separated them from the world was gone. Raul had to focus all of his energy on saving Melania.

So, without the two of them or August, there were only five of them.

This battle had already becimpossible for them to win.

However, Valerie, Raul, Yuna, Juno, and Mikaela had the sexact thought.

No matter what happened, they would survive and see the light again.

All of them, without a single member missing.

This wasn't where they would fall. This was only the start of their story.

Even if impossibility stood in their way, they were prepared to cut it down.

***

Twas in a strange state after Serena's array was completed.

The geniuses hadn't even realized that they'd entered a dilation when they found their way into the cave system.

Likely, their perception didn't find anything because it wasn't a natural phenomenon.

To make events parallel, an unknown third party influenced the cavern to extend its tflow.

That was how a week passed in the dragon kingdom in the tbetween their arrival in the cavern and the moment August grabbed the crown.

In that time, the war had not progressed much. The Sea Tribes and Wood Dragon Clan focused on stalling for time, so while losses did increase, it wasn't by a large margin.

There was one main difference between the current situation and the one from before the week passed.

The arrays being laid by the Bastille people were finished.

Using handheld teleporters and coordinates that had been plotted since before they even began operating, they were able to move with precision and spread out enough to put together the complicated arrays in a short period of time.

Their efforts could be compared to Serena and the Krone Clan in the Heavenly World. On a much smaller scale, they'd completed a similar operation.

Both arrays had been laid in tandem, and they would activate the same.

As soon as news was sent back to the Surge Dragon Tribe which acted as a control center and a connection point between all of the different divisions working together, everyone cto know the sfact.

The moment to counterattack was here.

A long-awaited revenge against the nobles, and the extermination of a threat that was once salvation for the people of Arulion…

…both would happen soon.