1363 Escape or Gamble?
Leonel came to a pause, his gaze sharpening. His makeshift spear was gripped in his hands and his senses were primed.
Their journey through this hive had been too smooth. Remembering back to the map Little Blackstar had gotten them, there was only one more hive to go through before they could escape this part of the Void Battlefield. But, it was all too convenient.
Little Blackstar had managed to move fast enough to avoid the initial lock of senses that could have gone poorly for them. However, he had still ended up being detected by the Shadow Sovereign Rapax. Knowing this, the fact that they had only been hounded by a single Tier 9 Runed Rapax was too odd.
Then there was something else to consider. From Little Blackstar's memory, the Shadow Domain of the Shadow Sovereign Rapax had been far smaller than it should have been while deployed. In fact, it was only two or three meters in diameter, a size when compared to the scope of this network of Nests was like a needle drifting through the ocean. If it wasn't because Little Blackstar was trying to blanket everything, it would have never been a problem.
One might not understand why this was so odd. Given the fact that maintaining a Shadow Domain was so taxing on the user, wouldn't it make sense to keep it as small as possible to begin with? Since the Shadow Domain followed its deployer as its epicenter, it was much more convenient to maintain a small Shadow Domain, especially for a hand to hand combat race like the Rapax. So long as they were fighting an enemy, three meters was more than enough to keep their target within frame.
Leonel had, of course, thought of this as well. But, he still felt that something was off.
For one, a Shadow Domain wasn't under constant deployment. It required active thought and action to use. That meant, if one was focused on maintaining your stamina, you wouldn't deploy it at all.
Secondly, if under normal conditions you wouldn't deploy a Shadow Domain, that would mean that there were very few instances where you would. One such instance was for the purpose of what Little Blackstar had tried to do by helping Leonel and Aina. However, another one should be battle.
The issue was… Neither of these reasons made sense. Why would a Rapax be fighting in their own Nest?
Of course, this was an odd thing to say considering they had been invaded by the likes of Leonel and the others, but the problem here was that a Rapax of such status wouldn't personally help deal with what amounted to small fry in their eyes.
'Something about this just feels… off. This sort of trial is too dangerous to begin with. Thrusting us all into enemy territory like this without an easy way to come back just makes no sense. This feels like a stealth mission, but Void Palace isn't a place that grooms assassins. There might be one or two Factions within that cater to that demographic, but definitely not enough to throw an entire generation under the bus like this.
'I would understand if we were just thrown onto the Battlefield itself and it was just a matter of survival. But a Rapax Nest? That's more than a little excessive.
'Plus, from mom's story about her relationship with dad, she wasn't even allowed to step onto the Void Battlefield until she became a Galaxy Ranked disciple. And even then, she had dad as a supervisor to protect her.
'Did things really change this much? Is there new management? Is it possible that I'm being targeted? Or is it because this generation is more talented than others?
'But if it's because we're more talented, even if you upped the difficulty by a margin, was it necessary to react to this good news by throwing us into a fiery pit of hell?'
Leonel didn't even know what to think. Still, everything seemed to point toward this matter being a special event of sorts. If he was correct, then the odd coincidence of the Rapax he had met until this point being so manageable might not be such a coincidence at all.
Leonel explained his thoughts to Aina.
"… So you think that the Rapax are occupied by something, which would explain the oddity of the Shadow Domain that hurt Blackstar?"
"I think so. It would both explain why this Shadow Sovereign hasn't come after us yet and why we've only run into manageable enemies. In fact, the only Sixth Dimensional Rapax we ran into was due to the fact I forced us to teleport together. If we had teleported individually like was intended, I have a feeling that we wouldn't have had to deal with even that."
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"If it really is a special event like you said, then there's two possibilities. The first is that we're supposed to take advantage of this lull in security to escape as fast as possible. Or…"
"Or we're supposed to go to the center of the Nest to begin with," Leonel finished.
In truth, Leonel should have thought of this long ago, however, his life experiences had skewed his bias too far.
Someone who innately trusted organizations might have already thought that there was no way the Void Palace would send their students to their death. As such, they would conclude that this couldn't possibly be an impossible task and that there was either a hidden challenge here or the Void Palace had made it easier to escape.
Leonel, however, who always seemed to have terrible luck with organizations, only really trusted himself. As such, he had little to no expectations of others helping him to remain safe at all. As such, in an irony of all ironies, Leonel, who had one of the sharpest minds of this generation, was actually one of the last to figure out something so simple.
"What do you want to do?" Leonel asked. "Escape or gamble?"
Aina smiled. "Let's have fun."
…
As expected, Leonel was correct. The greatest geniuses of this generation, a group that would have been Amethyst in almost any over Selection year, had already begun to converge upon the central Nest.