Dimensional Descent

1853 Queen

Leonel didn't understand what the existence of that young man and the ring could possibly mean. In fact, he doubted that even if his Ability Index wasn't restrained that he would be able to figure it out. He simply didn't have enough information and everything was a jumbled mess.

What Leonel did feel was correct, though, was that that young man probably wasn't the only one. He had only checked one side and he presumed there was an entire region barred in around him. In that case, there were probably several other regions just like this one.

If he was honest, though, he wasn't 100% certain of this either. For all he knew, they were the only two.

Without his Ability Index, Leonel couldn't calculate something as complicated as how long it would take their two regions to become one, but what he did know was that there was a time limit. This was why he didn't waste time running along the barrier to check his hypotheses. He only had one life and he had to protect it well, and in this situation, that meant strengthening himself as much as possible, and as quickly as possible.

Because he didn't have any Internal Sight to work with, Leonel couldn't just casually blanket hundreds of kilometers like he was used to and hunt down the beasts he was facing one by one, so he had to use other methods.

'This method is a bit dangerous, but it's the best I've got right now... Bait.’

Leonel extended his distance from the fallen wolf corpse after wiping his arm down to the best of his abilities using its fur coat.

Leonel almost cut himself on the sharp bristles of its coat, but thankfully he realized the problem in time and ran his forearm and hand along the grain. At the same time, he made a mental note of this instance.

With most of his advantages stripped from him, he had to take advantage of the ones he did have. His abilities and other Lineage Factors were gone, and his mind wasn't as fast as it normally was, but his memories and skills were still there.

If the flesh of the wolf beast was so sturdy, its protective coat was definitely on another level. He had to find an opportunity to craft something more protective than the nonsense he was wearing right now. He might only have access to Spear Force, but Force was still Force. So long as it existed, he could use it to draw Force Arts.

When Leonel had this thought, he felt his heart shudder.

He had never really thought about the consequences of drawing Force Arts with other Forces outside of Soul and Dream Force, but just now he felt that it should naturally be possible.

No, more specifically, he felt that it would be possible with Spear Force, this was a very clear and distinct difference because Weapon Forces were somewhat different from other Forces.

In fact, in some ways, it acted quite a bit like Dream Force, especially in the way it reacted to Artistic Conceptions.

Leonel felt that he had gained another piece of the puzzle toward formulating the next level of his grandfather's spear technique.

'The first is here," Leonel thought, losing the strands of his other thoughts the moment he sensed a beast approaching.

Unfortunately, in this state, he couldn't focus on more than one thing at a time. But right now, the evolution of his Spear Force was less important than strengthening his body as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

Leonel wasn't ignorant to the fact that this breakthrough would also help his chances in this tribulation, but he was also aware that it was potentially fleeting while there was a very real opportunity for growth right beneath him.

Leonel's gaze sharpened and he descended toward his first victim.

*%

In the outside world, a sort of silence had fallen in Leonel's absence. His disappearance had been silent, and yet it was almost immediately felt, almost as though a safety blanket had vanished. Everyone seemed to realize then what kind of looming presence he had only then.

Even so, life was forced to go on and due to Leonel's preparations, things remained smooth and steady with progress moving quite seamlessly.

On that day, Aina stepped out from her own personal seclusion.

Other than the time she spent with Leonel, she had spent practically every waking minute meditation on the Blood Sovereign tablet. It could be said that her gains from it were no less than Leonel's gains from the Emperor's Might Tablet. The only difference was that rather than being an additional ability of hers, it seamlessly fused into her current battle style, and as a result, her growth felt more exponential than linear.

The first person Aina saw when she stepped out was actually Harmony. She sent a glance toward her with every intention of just ignoring her entirely, but to her surprise, it was actually Harmony herself that spoke.

"Where is he? Why can't I sense him?"

she interacted with the world on her own, she gained names like the "Sword Monstress". It could be said that she wasn't very good at niceties.

"He is currently busy," Aina replied simply. On her hand, though, there was a slight change, and that was the fact that Leonel's Spear Domain Ring was actually now on her finger.

Whether by conscious choice or not, it actually took the place a wedding ring should have had, something that Harmony seemed quite sensitive to.

Harmony sneered. "There's no need to gatekeep his whereabouts. If I wanted to steal him from you, I would have done so long ago. Though I can't promise that my sister will be as nice as me. Since he's not here to tie me down, I'll just leave, then."

Aina didn't seem to react to these words at all. Or, at the very least, her expression didn't shift. Even so, Harmony suddenly found that she couldn't move a single inch and her pupils couldn't help but constrict.

Aina didn't move an inch, and yet Harmony found her blood vessels constricting, her heart beat seemed to forcibly slow and her skin reddened as blood rushed to the surface.

Harmony's body pressed up against the wall as though a noose was pulling her up. She quickly found her feet dangling from the ground and the veins in her neck popping wildly as flashbangs went off in her vision. She seemed to be able to breathe just fine, and yet couldn't seem to get enough air at the same time.

Fear took root deep within her heart.

She had seen Aina many times during her stay here, how could she not? She had already been stuck here for several months. In fact, she vaguely knew that Aina was a target of the Three Finger Cult and had even thought of snatching her while Leonel was gone.

During this time, she hadn't felt a sense of threat from Aina at all, she had just assumed that Leonel had chosen her because she was so beautiful. It only felt right, the most powerful man would be with the most beautiful woman, it was a legend as old as time.

Harmony had never seen Aina do anything but laugh and smile and cling onto Leonel every waking moment, in fact she had felt a little disgusted by the act making sweeping assumptions about their relationship.

It was only now that Harmony knew exactly how wrong she was.

The pressure she was feeling suddenly vanished and she fell to the ground with a heavy thump, her heart finally beginning to beat normally again.

Aina walked away without another word and Harmony could only watch as her back receded.

It seemed that in the absence of the King, there was a more than capable Queen.

Aina's gaze flashed with its own cold light. If others wanted to test Earth because Leonel had disappeared for a short while, they could taste her ax.

At that moment, in the depths of a hidden world, there was a storm brewing.

News of what had happened to the four Great Families had yet to spread back to its normal channels, but this was only to be expected. With every last one of them having been wiped out by Leonel, who would be there to report back?

However, there would, of course, be normal communication between the two sides, the fact that this contact had suddenly stopped abruptly and without warning was bound to raise its own sort of speculation.

Unfortunately, there were very tight constraints on these four families. If there weren't, why would they incrementally release their people like this? As such, it had been impossible for them to send others to check on the situation for a long while.

In an irony or irony, though, Leonel's actions in assimilating so many World Spirits with Earth's had stabilized the region ahead of time.

The good news was that the number of powerful Zones that appeared were less in number and frequency.

The bad news was that the next batch of four Great Family geniuses could exit ahead of time, and these geniuses would be on a completely different level in comparison to the ones Leonel had originally faced.

Leonel's Queen would face her own challenge.

Stepping out from seemingly thin air, a small group of red haired and eyed young men and women appeared in the depths of Earth's wilderness.

"Our base should be on the Moon," one of them said. "We will head there first and question them about the lack of communication."