The Martial Unity

Sage Neyfid gritted his teeth at the woman before him. Yet, she was entirely unperturbed by his anger. She simply sat there, staring at him through her thin spectacles, waiting for a response.

"You can't do this…" the man growled. "Mearsheim promised me that she would invest in our party to help her find infected worlds! I demand to speak to her now!"

The woman sharpened her eyes. "As I have told you, Miss Mearsheim is busy and is unable to speak to you at the moment."

"…Why is she doing this?" the man growled. "We are one of the best exo-reconnaissance teams in the game. I am a senior Sage, and I have four excellent tracking and sensory-oriented junior Sages under me. We have an establishment of long-range astronomical surveillance apparatus that isn't easy to come by. You may have gotten lucky with an infected world recently, but that isn't always going to happe—"

"Enough."

The woman, a powerless civilian, had the audacity to interrupt him. "We do not owe you an explanation. This matter is settled."

RUMBLE

The land beneath them began to quiver as the Martial Sage's rage leaked out into the environment around him, causing tremors to spread across the entire area.

"…Sage Neyfid, will I be recalled to call for security?" she asked with a stronger tone. "Because if not, this meeting is over. You may send an email to our company if you have any other inquiries and we will get back to you in three business days."

She got up, her smart briefcase floating up and following her with each step, before leaving the room, leaving the Martial Sage filled with anger and frustration. The worst part was that he didn't understand what the hell was happening. Their party offered reasonable prices for the services they offered. They identified planetary anomalies and then actively investigated them with five Martial Sages, one at a time. It was painstaking and difficult and yielded very few successes, but the gains from even a single infected world were so high that it was worth it.

Now Terrestrike, which had been starving for infected worlds recently, was, all of a sudden, completely uninterested in their services despite just having signed a rather solid one-year contract with his party?

He didn't get it.

He ran into his teammates as he exited the branch office of Terrestrike. Two men and two women rushed to him the moment they spotted him.

"What did Miss Mearsheim say?" Reynold asked with a serious expression

"Did she clear up the misunderstanding? It was a misunderstanding, right? There's no way they canceled the contract?" Kayria asked anxiously.

"Don't be stupid, a company like Terrestrike doesn't make mistakes like that," Marnek remarked with a scoff.

"I can't believe we got canceled from such a big gig…" Monica muttered.

Sage Neyfid stared at each of them with a serious expression. They all looked to be in their late twenties or in their early thirties, despite technically being older. New Martial Sages had begun looking younger and younger with each passing year.

This was the result of not just the Era of Expansion, but rather a trend that had been set into motion long before by the Emperor of Water, who developed a method to trigger artificial breakthroughs.

For decades now, Squires broke through to Senior at a younger age, Seniors broke through to Master sooner, and for the past eighteen years, Masters had begun breaking through to the Sage Realm at an absurd rate.

As someone who was a Martial Sage long before this happened, he had found this trend to be truly regrettable. It had made him miss the Age of Martial Art, where things had been simpler, and his status would have been higher, but alas, there was nothing he could do about it. The world changed, and he had chosen to get on board by taking it in stride to start an exo-planet reconnaissance team looking to make it big.

Except it had just been taken away from him. The biggest contract that he had landed recently with Terrestrike had just been stripped away from him for reasons he couldn't even fathom.

"We lost the contract," he came clean with a defeated voice. "Miss Mearsheim didn't even bother speaking to me directly. She had one of the company lawyers take the meeting and ended it abruptly, as if…"

He gritted his teeth, clenching his fist. "…as if I wasn't even worth the time of day to spare."

It was a brutal world, but he had thought that as a Martial Sage, he was beyond the point in life where the uncertainty of life would touch him, but the Era of Expansion was the most ruthless phase of human civilization he had ever lived in. He even preferred the Era of Darkness compared to this nightmare of an age where his power meant less than it ever had.

"Did they tell you why?" Reynold demanded to know.

The man shook his head. "Not a word."

"Well, whatever it is, it seems to be a huge reason, considering that we're not the only ones who are affected," Monica muttered, staring at her commpad. "It's not just us. Other parties like the Trailhunters, Blade of the Stars, and Night Fury have also been getting gutted, and not just from Terrestrike, but numerous other mining companies as well."

The Martial Sage's eyes widened. "…What?"

He quickly pulled out his commpad to verify the news, and it was clear. Not just from the intelligence networks that he had cultivated, but also from his personal acquaintances and friends. The news was spreading fast. Not just that companies were firing parties and companies in the business of finding infected worlds, but also the reason that they were doing it."

Sage Neyfid's eyes widened. "EsoQuest Solutions has found a second infected world…?"

"Huh?!" Kayria's eyes widened. "Isn't that the new company that found the most recent infected world? How did they find another one in rapid succession just ten days later? That's impossible. The odds of that happening are basically zero!"

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