His voice was grave as he said, "When the first world disappeared, I only blinked. I quickly accepted the loss as a fluke. It was a pain to lose it, but I moved on with my life."
"Then a second world was lost. This was more painful, but I was willing to accept it as a coincidence. It is a far-fetched coincidence that two small worlds would be lost in the span of a few days, but it could happen, so I was willing to let it go."
"However, it didn’t stop there. A third world was soon lost. At this point, I knew that it was intentional and that someone was targeting me."
He sighed as he said, "I didn’t want to let it go, but if you had spoken to me then, you would have convinced me to give it up. After all, the loss was likely to outweigh the benefits."
Then his voice became bitter with anger as he said, "Unfortunately, a fourth world was lost. That was the moment that I knew that I had to fight. I knew that I had to get to the bottom of the disappearance, or I would forever be at risk of having my worlds stolen from me."
"Then the fifth world was taken, which confirmed what I suspected. I expect that the sixth world will be taken soon. So the time for talking is long gone. Now I have to fight to prevent my other seven worlds from being taken."
Since she wasn’t going to convince him, she said, "In that case, you should sell the small worlds you have as soon as possible, so that no one will be able to steal them from you."
Monarch Many Eyes nodded in agreement and said, "I will do that now. That way, when the worlds are stolen, they will be stolen from others. I might be able to use this to make more people get angry at this thief and join hands with me in taking them down."
Seeing as her suggestion had been taken, she said: "Do you still need me to help you find the person?"
She hadn’t been willing to get involved in the matter. But now that more people could be involved, she felt more comfortable about meddling in this business.
However, Monarch Many Eyes shook his head in reply and said, "Not now. Even if you could find them, you would notify them that someone is looking for them. Your eyes don’t have the same stealth capabilities as Eye Trackers’"
"What I want you to do is stick with us until we find this person. Once we find them and you lay your eyes on them, we won’t need the stealth anymore, and they will be unable to escape from you ever again."
In response, she nodded and said, "That sounds feasible."
She didn’t like that they would have to slowly track the thief down when she could directly figure out their current location with little effort. But she understood the importance of stealth, so she couldn’t refuse.
In fact, she thought it was a good idea to keep the thief uninformed that some people were tracking them. Unfortunately, she couldn’t track in stealth because the probing of her Divine Metac would behave like an attack, which would alert the other party and make them prepare for an attack.
As someone who thought that fighting was a bad idea, she has to agree that fighting might not be so bad if they can catch the enemy off guard and ambush them with the advantage of numbers on their side. So she decided to go along with this plan, no matter how boring she believed it to be.
Just like that, all the work of finding the thief fell to Monarch Eye Tracker. Not that he minded the work. He liked tracking things, and he was being paid for his work, so he was having a generally good time with this job.
After a while, Monarch Eye Tracker found traces of the thief. Then he led the way in pursuit of the thief. Monarch Many Eyes fell behind him. Monarch Star Divination was the last in line.
The floating eyeballs around Monarch Many Eyes looked in every direction around him, which granted him a 360° field of vision. The best part is that the eyes can leave his body and travel away for an indefinite distance.
The ability to send his eyes away from him is how he was able to find so many worlds. He sent the eyes away into the void between worlds to search for worlds for him. Meanwhile, he was safe and sound in his hideout.
His eyes were so good at their jobs that they could inspect worlds for him, so he never had to visit any of his finds to examine them. He even used his eyes as sentries to watch worlds on many occasions.
The main problem with his eyes was that he didn’t have many of them to use. He had a limited amount and had to decide between using them to watch the worlds that he had already found or sending them into the void to find more worlds.
After grappling with the decision for a while, he chose to send the eyes out to find more worlds. He made this decision because he didn’t expect anyone else to find his worlds and because the more eyes he had searching for worlds, the faster he could find more worlds.
However, he still left one eye behind to patrol the small worlds. The eye would go around all of them, checking on them. There were twelve worlds in total, so it would take a long time for the eye to check them in turn.
Using one eye to keep an eye on 12 twelve worlds was quite a stretch, but he had never had any major problem with this arrangement for over 300 years. So everything was fine most of the time.