Chapter 262: Parents and Preparations (Patreon)

Edi

“Go do work. I need to meditate.” With strength nowhere near enough to actually push him, Edi’s mother shoved him out the door of her apartment on Earth and Edi couldn’t help but smile, using telekinesis to fly toward the nearest teleportation platform.

He’d been an idiot before, worrying his mom wouldn’t be able to advance. Sure, she wasn’t as talented as he was, and C rank might be her limit, but her Law talent was above average for the Heavenly Soul Universe, where the average talent level was high E rank, and the worth of the resources she’d used could be counted in B rank credits. She’d just been depressed after losing his step-dad and he’d been too stupid to see through her hiding it from him.

Once she’d taken a bit more time—and seen how much Edi’d been worried about her—her main Law had easily advanced, and now she just needed one more advancement, one where she currently had no bottlenecks, to reach C rank.

Thinking back to how stupid he’d been, and how his master, who’d almost certainly seen through his mother’s situation, had manipulated him, Edi couldn’t help but feel a bit embarrassed. Sure, he wasn’t the only one she’d manipulated, her main goal likely to use him to lower the distance between Vanar Tedros and the native forces of the Heavenly Soul Universe—the man at the time closest to the other outsiders—but she’d used Edi’s heightened emotions to teach him multiple lessons in a way very hard to forget, and it was only recently, nearly three years later, that he’d realized what she’d done.

Shaking his head, Edi teleported to the main teleportation platform of his master’s private C rank planet in the Heavenly Soul Universe, Juno, and there he could sense all the recently kidnapped C ranks his force had procured, all standing or sitting in individual cages made of silvery metal floating around the large valley where the teleportation platform had been set up.

Each cage had been forged by Lord Aalam using Edi’s master’s power, so anyone placed inside had all their contracts weaker than a blood oath silently cancelled, making all 1,457 prisoners—filling up only about 7% of the cages—free from their former obligations, but, even with most having been fighting in wars, often against their wills, and all being C ranks who didn’t need to eat or sleep, none were happy to be caged up, and they were all confused about how exactly they’d ended up in their current circumstances.

According to what Edi knew, 1,113 of them were Lord Aalam’s half siblings, his mom having apparently birthed around 1,728 new children after the second War of the Chosen the United Federation of Planets had participated in, and the others were unrelated talents his master felt would be worth raising. Of Lord Aalam’s other siblings not currently in the cages, most had died in the wars every single one of them had been forced into, a few dozen were about to enter the finals of the C Rank Universal Tournament, and five were cruel assholes his master had no interest in saving and so hadn’t tried to steal, but, primarily due to where they’d grown up, every single one was a C rank, and each of them had far more real world fighting experience than anyone in the Heavenly Soul Universe other than Lord Isaiah and Mr. Tedros.

Still, fighting experience didn’t translate into experience not being scammed, so, when Edi’s master had somehow found out their identities, it had been pretty easy to get them to accept a blood oath for Fabled to Empyrean grade armors, and accepting that oath is how they’d become slaves of Lady Diana Alvaro and eventually ended up here, finding themselves teleported directly into a cage when they’d just been trying to return home.

* * *

Daevic

Daevic flew down and took a seat next to his father, Thunderstrike Taravan sitting on a mountain on his B rank planet, looking down at the planet’s biggest city. Already fully healed from being cooked and partially eaten—A rank level Vitality making such things easy to recover from—his father looked healthy, his azure hair lustrous, his dark skin flawless, but there was a lifelessness in his azure eyes which Daevic had never seen, and it was unnerving him more than even when he could tell his father was about to rage.

“You wanted to see me, father?”

“Yes.” Taravan’s voice was also lifeless and he didn’t turn to look at Daevic even while speaking to him. “I wanted to say sorry.”

“Wh-what?” Daevic felt his heart start to beat faster and he didn’t quite know how to feel, more shocked than anything else.

“I have never treated you right, the same with your sister.” Daevic watched as his father, that cold and hard man who never showed weakness, sighed. “And it was never your fault.

“The two of you just represent everything in my life I have no control over, and I took out my frustration about that lack of control on you.

“It’s not your responsibility your mother, that ugly bitch, effectively raped me to produce the two of you. It’s not your responsibility your uncle, that bastard who could only use three Laws to form his Law energy, suppresses me to the point I can’t find enough primal energy to level up. And it’s not your responsibility the enemies your mother made empowered Vanar Tedros and stole away what little chance I had to advance in the future.”

Daevic’s father still didn’t look at him and instead looked up at the sky. “And it was stupid of me to be jealous and suppress you when I could have been a good father and gotten your help after you rose to my level.”

Daevic’s father stood up and finally looked down at Daevic. “Your uncle has given me an order and, if the Heavenly Spark Soul King appears in the C rank Universal Tournament finals, I’m going to have to give my everything to kill him, resulting in a System quest which will almost certainly destroy my empire and end with me killed. So, before my death, I felt I should at least apologize to you.”

Then, without another word, Thunderstrike Taravan turned into lightning and disappeared, Daevic left there, his mind overly focused on the tears he’d seen in his father’s eyes.

* * *

Joma

Joma La’Vordi, the Alchemist of the Deep Woods, looked over at where her daughter was training, using no artifacts to draw out a huge runic array made purely of severed space in Joma’s specially made training cavern, and she yet again had to stop her emotions from showing in her aura.

Her mind kept going back to several years before when Yorick Strong, one of the five competing candidates to be the next head of the Quintessence Merchant Union, had come to visit her to pick up a set of pills, especially the subsequent contract she’d signed that day, loaning the man virtually all her wealth in exchange for a single artifact.

No matter what, everything would change with the upcoming finals of the C rank Universal Tournament, Joma either dying or, somehow, escaping from gods. And she hoped it was the latter. But, whatever the case, she mainly hoped her child could be safe and, if possible, happy.

* * *

Vanar

Vanar stepped off the teleportation platform and looked around at where the C rank Universal Tournament finals was going to take place, an absolutely humongous space station in the middle of nowhere.

Shaped like an extremely large circle, with a radius of roughly 5,000 kilometers, the station surrounded an empty area of space which would be expanded even more using spatial magic to be used as an arena, the size of an entire planet not large enough for C rank fights without any Law suppression.

Owned and operated by a group of humans specializing in spatial magic, the station had a very large outdoors section, the entirety of the internally facing 10 kilometer wide side feeling almost no different from being on a planet other than that you could see more of the ring when looking up, and having no night time. But, while Vanar personally found the design very cool, he’d had to listen to a multi-hour long rant from Lord Aalam on just how impractical such a ‘halo ring’ was, accidentally learning just how easy to destroy the station would be, and that had taken away a bit of the wonder.

Whatever the case, this is where Vanar would be staying for the entirety of the finals, along with other participants, their guests, and many spectators, so he would just make the best of the situation he could, immediately flying toward where he knew the mansion he’d been assigned as a contestant would be located, the same location where he’d meet the other members of the Za-Lord’s Guard so they could look out for each other. And there, once he got situated, and his brothers in arms all came to join him, he spent the next several days waiting.

The main part of Lady Li’s plans would be initiated starting from this point and, while Vanar only knew about the schemes he was directly part of, there were almost certainly multiple others occurring at the same time, and they were likely just as extremely ambitious as the one he knew of to revive Lord Aalam’s sister. Whatever they were, however, Vanar was hoping for his own sake that they’d all go well, having grown to rather like the cultivators and monsters from the Heavenly Soul Universe and not wanting to see them all annihilated.