They were happy with the current situation because Greg was gone and because what Loki was doing had gained the support of the sect, which meant that he was unlikely to be using this mission as an opportunity to kill them.
While they didn’t completely believe everything that he said, they believed that this was a good opportunity for them to earn merit points. If it were Greg who gave the order, they would have chosen to pay the fine if they could afford it.
Nothing Greg could say could convince them to risk their lives for anything. Not after they heard how he had attacked them when they turned their backs on him.
But since it was Loki who gave the order, they decided to give it a shot. They had heard some good things about him for them to be hopeful about his leadership.
After he gave the order, Loki had to make a decision between two important choices. He rubbed his chin and said to himself, "Should I go and bring them here, or should I use this time before they get here to recruit more people and earn more merit points?"
"If I go and get them, I will have to share the people in the city with them. But in exchange, they will be able to quickly help me secure the city, which means I will earn grade 4 merit points."
"The grade 4 merit points are more important than the grade 3 merit points. Besides, I won’t be able to earn the grade 3 merit points until this city has been deemed as under our control by the sect. That’s when I will earn the grade 4 merit points too."
"Since I can only earn the two of them at the same time, I should just prioritize the most important one. That means I should go and bring them."
After coming to this conclusion, he sighed and said, "It seems being a captain won’t be easy. On the bright side, I can still destroy the city if this doesn’t work out at the end. I wonder how many merit points I will earn for destroying the city?"
He wondered about the answer to that question before he said to Ivory through the speaker system, "I will be back. I want to go and bring my people."
Ivory said in reply, "OK. I’ll be waiting."
Then Loki turned the ship in the direction of his post. The ship had been building momentum since, so it quickly zipped away at top speed now that he let it.
On the way to the post, he went through the communication channel to learn what was going on. It was while he was doing this that he saw Greg’s messages and learned what had happened before Greg was dismissed from his position.
What he read made him laugh and say, "Serves him right. He will not be missed."
"In fact, I hope that crazy bastard dies. I hope he dies while begging not to be killed."
After laughing, he shook his head and said, "I wonder why he wanted to kill me, though. I was even supportive, and I was on his side concerning the mission."
"Did he think I disrespected him somehow? Or was his attempt to kill me related to his mutated Life Ability?"
When he thought of this possibility, he shook his head and said, "Surely it can’t be about his mutated Life Ability, right? He never revealed it, and I never mentioned his mutated Life Ability to anyone."
"Or was it about my mutated Life Ability? Was he jealous of me? Or did he think that it was afront that I possessed one too?"
This possibility made him shrug and say, "It could be anything with that crazy fellow. Who knows what is always going through his head? So it is a good thing that he was stripped of his rank."
As he was relishing Greg’s demotion, he got a notification from the sect that someone had bought his shares in the stock market.
This made him furrow his brows and say, "Who could it be?"
In order to get his answer, he used the token to check his portfolio on the stock market. He saw that someone had bought some of his shares. The person bought 10,000 energy stones worth of it.
Two months ago, the sect finished its evaluation of his prospects and predicted that he could only reach rank 4. Even then, they only valued him at 1 million energy stones, which is the barest minimum value of a rank 4 being.
This was an improvement over the value of his past life, but he still wasn’t satisfied with it. However, he didn’t take the evaluation to heart at all. He just bought half of it and left the rest to fate.
Since then, he has never checked the performance of his shares. He wouldn’t have checked it now if someone hadn’t bought it.
Unfortunately, the identity of the buyers of shares is hidden, so he can’t know who bought some of his shares, no matter how hard he looks.
Eventually, he gave up and said, "Maybe it is a fluke."
But he quickly realized that he was wrong about this. As he received more and more notifications of people buying his shares, he realized that this was by no means a coincidence.
Many people, for some reason, were buying his shares. As they did so, the value of his shares was rising. From the initial one energy stone per share, it had become one and a half energy stones per share in just ten minutes.
This situation bewildered him greatly. He racked his head trying to figure out why this was happening.
He asked himself, saying, "Could this be because I’ve become a captain? Are the people buying my shares the other captains or the normal soldiers on the battlefield? After all, who knows me and would be interested in investing in my future?"