Sylas dropped his sister down and the two went their separate ways to clean themselves up. There were more than enough bathrooms in the house and Sylas could already smell breakfast in the air, but his mind was on other things.
‘The internet is going down, and I wouldn’t be surprised if soon all electronic devices stopped working. In that case, my goal to use a supercomputer to analyze the Basilisk King’s genome might be a pipe dream… Is the only solution to improve my Wisdom to the point I can analyze it myself?’
Sylas shook his head.
No, he didn’t have so much time to waste. He would have to find a way to get off the Brown family compound before technology became completely useless.
Soon came the third day. The day of the draft.
**
Sylas stood in a row with several other people. He could feel just from the cadence of their breathing that these individuals weren’t normal. It wasn’t just the rhythm, but the sheer length of time between their breaths. Some of them only seemed to take in a breath every few seconds, some of them only seemed to breathe twice or thrice a minute.
He couldn’t help but wonder if they noticed whether they were doing this or not.
Unlike Sylas, who only spent over a week in the Trial, they had all experienced months. This was their new normal, and they probably hadn’t registered that they weren’t acting as others did any longer.
The room they all stood in was quite simple and unadorned. There were training mats that lined the floors and even the walls. It looked like a place for combat and sparring, though there was no other equipment aside from this.
Before them, there was a group of people. Or, rather, three. Each one was headed by one of the three candidates for City Lord of the Bronze Stele: Astrid Grimblade, Malachi Grimblade, and Lucius Grimblade.
Behind Astrid in particular, Sylas spotted Mellissa, the woman that had stopped him just yesterday. He also spotted the man who had questioned him as though he was some sort of psychotic conspiracy theorist.
He noticed that some were surprised by their presences, but most weren’t.
‘Last I checked, all three were Level 9s, but Astrid was ranked first, Malachi second, and Lucius third… I wonder how large the gap between them is. Is the ranking based on strength? Or purely how close to Level 10 they were? And if it’s just based on distance to Level 10, theoretically the stronger their foundations, the more Pure Aether you would need to Level…’
It was easy to doubt the rankings at this point. Everything Sylas learned about this world made him second-guess everything else. It was as though they wanted him to take it all in with a grain of salt.
Malachi stepped forward. The first time they were all addressed, it was Astrid. It seemed that he had drawn the winning lot this time around.
“We’ve called you all forward today because you’re the elites that managed to enter and survive the Trial, coming out and becoming pillars of the family.
“You were all informed earlier that my brother, sister, and myself are in competition for City Lord. Unfortunately, that was cut short, so we will enter a new challenge. This is not all bad, as it gives us a different set of opportunities.
“Today, we’ll be drafting you all into our teams. Astrid will go first, I will go second, and Lucius will go third. We do not know much about you all, so we can only base it on what we’ve seen from your Trial performance, your Levels, and some other general information about your lives. So if you feel that you’ve been misevaluated, I can only say to prove us wrong in the future.
“We are all family here. Regardless of which of the three of us wins, we’ll all have just one goal in the future, and that’ll be to support one another and the rise of the Grimblade family.”
Malachi didn’t say much more, taking a step back and allowing Astrid to come forward.
Before all of this, Astrid had felt that going first was a blessing. But over the last three days, she realized just how much pressure there was. While she had the most freedom to pick, that came with the greatest room for mistakes.
But this wasn’t the time to look indecisive. She had to display a strong front.
“Alexander.”
The moment she stepped forward, the name rolled off her tongue with great ease.
A man stepped forward. He had a military cut and a jaw sharper than a blade.
Astrid picked him less for his performance in the Trial, and more because of his background. The reality was that anyone could get unlucky in the Trial, especially when they wouldn’t have as much information and resources on hand as Astrid and the others. Just survival alone was impressive enough.
The numbers hadn’t been released yet, but there was no doubt a worse-than-90% mortality rate for those that entered the Trial. If previous patterns remained true, about half of the people on Earth should have accepted entry. That meant, overnight, nearly half of Earth’s population had vanished.
So the real reason Astrid had picked Alexander was because his background was excellent.
He was a special forces member, handpicked out of Military College to join the Elite NIA, and evaluated to have an IQ of 147. He was cool under pressure, had experience in subterfuge and espionage, and more importantly than that, he had an inside look into the current state of the government.
There was no doubt that he was a high-risk, high-reward sort of choice.
He was exactly the kind of man that Lucius might have wanted to kill just to avoid the trouble. Right now, the government was their enemy, but to the common people, they were a force of good, while to a military man like Alexander, this was almost certainly so.
