Rui almost felt his heart palpitating as he tried calming himself down. He was glad that he was paranoid enough to memorize the position of every single corpse, otherwise, he would have never noticed that one of them was missing.
(‘Wait, calm down,’) He narrowed his eyes. (‘The roots did damage this floor heavily, maybe she got buried deep under rubble,’)
He immediately focused his senses deep underground, sweeping across the bedrock of the entire floor, praying that he found her.
(‘Shit…’) He realized that she was nowhere to be found.
He had simply inputted the entirety of his spatial vision into his Mind Palace when he swept his senses across the corpses, thus he had also inadvertently memorized their physical traits and their appearances.
He could clearly tell that one corpse was missing.
(‘But how?’) He narrowed his eyes. (‘How could a corpse just disappear?’)
The first possibility that came to mind was that she was faking her death and possessed some strange obscure technique that killed any and all physiological indication of life. That would mean that even if Rui spent a lot of time scanning her body, he might not have noticed that she was alive.𝑶𝑽𝔩xt.𝔠𝑂𝓜
“Shit,” He cursed, he was in deep trouble if this was the case. The worst part was that this was the worst timing. He was extremely weakened and could not afford another fight until he regained his full power.
He quickly summoned some physical rejuvenation potions, consuming them rapidly as he felt a surge of energy. He also summoned a bucket worth of heavy and highly nutritionally dense food pills, consuming them rapidly as well.
It was sub-optimal, but he would be able to regain Squire-level combat prowess at the very least, even if he was far from his peak.
His evolved digestion system gulped up all the nutritional bio-available mass, quickly integrating it into his body.
He heaved a sigh of relief as he finally felt power in his body.
First, he analyzed his circumstances.
The worst-case scenario was that she managed to get away alive by faking her death, that was the scenario that Rui went with, for the time being.
The consequences were not immediately dire, but she had probably seen him fighting extensively, thus she might have gotten a good description of his physicals. That alone would be quite dangerous. She probably saw him killing Captain Deacon, which, if Chairman Deacon found out, would exacerbate his hatred for Rui.
If she saw his appearance in the later stages of the fight where his mask broke, then he had no words, he had truly fucked up.
“I need to get Kane, and we need to get outta here,” Rui murmured.
However, they could not afford to return to their inn, which was courting death. Rui had already cleared the dungeon, thus his desire to stay in the Shionel Confederation was effectively down to zero.
As long as he cashed out his consolidated gains, he was fine.
(‘Thankfully, Chairman Deacon is at the arguably most busy moment of his life, he does not have any leeway to focus on me at this particular moment,’) Rui was truly grateful that the timing of this was in his favor.
Chairman Deacon was at the most important juncture of his entire life. He needed to focus everything on the elections and make sure nothing went wrong at the final moment. Even if he did take a moment to mourn the loss of one thousand Martial Squires and his son, he could not pay too much attention to the Voider, even if he would be burning at his very gut to do so.
Still, Rui did not think that Chairman Deacon was the most rational man in general, he especially didn’t have any expectations when the man was grieving the loss of a son.
(‘It may be time to leave the Shionel Confederation…’) Rui narrowed his eyes.
Without any further ado, he left the floor looking for Kane.
“So you’re telling me someone who saw you fight is out there somewhere?” Kane grimaced once Rui found and told him everything. “Damn, what do we do?”
“Well, just witnessing my fight does not mean the one who escaped knows my identity,” Rui explained. “What that means is that our identity will not necessarily be revealed, it will make their investigation easier though. Even the Martial Union will have a hard time hampering the investigation. What we need to do is kill any incentive to investigate us, by leaving the Shionel Confederation forever.”
Kane nodded. “Alright, so we anonymously withdraw our revenue and then leave?”
“We’ll need the Martial Union’s help with that, as specified in our contract,” Rui nodded. “As long as we disconnect cleanly, we should be able to kill the investigation.”
“But Chairman Deacon knows you’re the one who killed his son,” Kane made a complicated expression. “He’s not gonna stop investigating because of how much he’s going to hate your guts.”
“That doesn’t matter, his alliance is going to crumble because he got all of his allies’ Martial Squires massacred, he’s going to lose the election and lose support. People are going to stop caring about us because the only reason we were a problem is because of the Shionel Dungeon,” Rui explained. “With the Shionel Dungeon being cleared, nobody’s going to care to put in the effort to investigate us since we won’t matter anymore. Chairman Deacon is the only one who’s going to care, and he’s much more limited in his own capacity than when he had the support of many domestic and foreign stakeholders who no longer have a stake anymore. On top of that, once all the Martial Squires began leaving the country in droves and returning home, trying to find the identity of the Voider will be basically impossible.”
Kane looked relieved hearing that, nodding in response to Rui’s words. “That makes sense, the threat isn’t acute, and won’t last long. Looks like there won’t be any problems at all.”