Slime Evolution

Chapter 395: 395 - Trapped?

Gideon walked to the head of the meeting table, resting his spread hands on the wooden surface.

His gaze, now an ordinary brown instead of the bright gold he’d once carried before losing his race, swept over each of the officers present with a cold intensity that made the cleric look away.

"I heard your discussion from the hallway," Gideon began, his voice coming out rougher and less melodious than when he’d been an elf. "Your lack of vision disappoints me deeply. We’re in the middle of a race for Thalendor’s sovereignty, and you’re all acting like frightened accountants."

"Leader Gideon," the blue mage tried to justify, straightening the floating report pages in front of him. "We’re just worried about the sustainability of our financial model. The maintenance cost of this building, a thousand gold coins a month, is eating up a huge chunk of our reserves..."

"Our headquarters is our greatest marketing weapon right now," Gideon cut in, his tone leaving no room for argument. "It shows the other nobles and new recruits that the Broken Suns command great resources. Without this facade of power, Thalendor’s Council would never have handed us that big contract. I believe the image we’ve built so far is already enough to keep our plan moving, so next week will be the last week of zero fees for members."

The officers leaned forward, attentive to his orders. Gideon continued, gesturing with his right hand for emphasis.

"We need to make the most of this final period of free membership to drain every bit of human capital available in Thalendor. Demand that veteran members invite as many novice and independent players as possible over the next seven days. And to make sure they work with full commitment, we’re going to triple the real world bonus paid for every successful recruitment during this special recruitment week."

"Triple it?" the archer’s eyes went wide, quickly running the numbers in her head. "That means fifteen hundred credits per member in the real world! Gideon, the cost of that is going to be..."

"The cost will be covered by our sponsor, a few tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even a few million credits won’t be an issue for an investment like this." Gideon explained, with a cold smile revealing perfectly aligned teeth. "With a massive member base locked into guild contracts, we’ll recoup every coin spent so far in under a month of collective grinding. Besides, the minor noble families backing us have promised to release a second round of funding as soon as we prove we have full control over the Players’ workforce in the city."

Gideon leaned a bit further over the table, his eyes gleaming with dark determination. "We have to make sure Astralis Requiem or any other independent group gets choked out before they even manage to breathe Thalendor’s air. If we control the mid level players, we control the resources, and eventually, our voice will carry enough weight that the Council will have to listen to us."

The discussion among the leaders went on for the next two hours, but, to Lohan’s disappointment, the meeting’s focus shifted entirely to bureaucratic and administrative details of no importance to his mission, though they might still prove useful to Astralis.

They discussed transport routes for ore from a common mine they’d found, guard shift scheduling for the headquarters, and minor squabbles among the noble families funding the guild.

Not a single word was said about the northern rift, about how they’d padded the contract, or about the supposed temporary suppression spell Yrneha suspected to be a fraud.

Lohan’s clone stayed still at the base of the wooden cabinet, feeling time drag on relentlessly as the Collective Synaptic Sync fed the tedium of that meeting into his mind.

At the table downstairs, Alice and Dylan kept faking interest in Garius’s reports, drinking cheap wine and listening to inflated stories about the Broken Suns that made them want to roll their eyes with every sentence, but it was becoming clear the time they could keep stalling was running out.

Through the mental link, Lohan relayed his frustration to Lisa and to the two partners downstairs.

"I’m not getting anything..." Lohan said, his mental voice loaded with a fatigue that came from the effort of paying attention to so much useless dialogue. "They’ve spent the last two hours discussing rent fees, recruitment bonuses, and how Gideon wants to triple the real world payout to get more scouts before he shoves the knife of fees into them. Not a single compromising mention of what they did at the rift or of the Eldamar."

"That’s terrible, Halon." Lisa replied from outside the mansion, her mind working fast. "Yrneha isn’t going to consider the mission complete with just reports on their internal accounting. We need proof of the fraud. Without that, Thalendor’s Council won’t withdraw the political backing the Broken Suns have."

"What do we do now, Halon?" Alice asked mentally, keeping Lily’s innocent smile up while pretending to listen to Marcus’s advice on how to hold a shield. "We can’t keep sitting here pretending we want to sign their contract forever. If we leave now without giving a definitive answer, they might get suspicious of us."

Lohan made a tough call, feeling the weight of his position as Astralis’s Vice President demand its price.

"We’re going to have to play the long game," Lohan announced, his core pulsing with resolve beneath Alice’s clothes. "I’m going to leave my clones hidden at strategic points throughout the guild to try to catch any useful information. But that means I’ll have to keep my main body near the guild to receive and process what these clones pick up over the next few hours... maybe even a few days."

Dylan tensed his jaw slightly in his Dan persona. "Halon, you know what that means in the real world, right? If you leave active clones continuously feeding information through the Collective Synaptic Sync, your main body in Elysium can’t log off from the game. If you disconnect, your clones vanish."

"I know that, Dylan." Lohan replied, resigned. "But I don’t have a choice. I’m going to have to stay connected without interruption, keeping my consciousness active somewhere safe while my clones monitor the Broken Suns. It’s our only shot at getting the proof we need to secure our sovereignty in Thalendor and clear the path for Astralis."

"You’re crazy, Halon." Alice remarked, with a trace of genuine admiration and worry in her mind. "Staying hours, maybe days, trapped inside the game without being able to see the real world or rest your brain in an actual bed... don’t worry about your body, I can go to your apartment and make sure it’s safe there."

"Thank you, Lisa. I’m counting on you for that." Lohan wasn’t worried about leaving his body vulnerable there. With Slime biology, he could hold out for a few days just living off the passive digestion he had in the real world, and he trusted Lisa enough to know she wouldn’t do anything reckless with his body.

What he didn’t know was how the fox’s imagination was teeming with thoughts she hadn’t even realized she had until that moment.

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