Dimensional Descent

"Who are these people?"

Within the Arundo family, a young man with a dark expression sat, staring out toward the 'heart warming' meeting between Elthor and the other geniuses of Earth. Of course, in the perspective of others, this was anything but a wholesome moment. He would have liked nothing more than to put an arrow between their brows.

Osron wasn't a person he knew personally. In fact, on a normal day, Osron wouldn't even be worthy of carrying his shoes. However, in this sort of situation, things were very different.

Every action made by a member of the Arundo family, especially when the person was as high profile as Osron to begin with, was a potential boon or blight on their reputation.

To a high level family, reputation was very important. Though it wasn't exaggerated as a saying like 'Perception was Reality', it wasn't very far off.

When a family grew as large as the Arundo, they actually entered quite a precarious state. They had so much territory to govern, rule and, most importantly, protect. In such a situation, their soft skills became far more important than how large their fists were. Even the Luxnix family experienced such a thing, or else they wouldn't have gone into such a state of hibernation for three generations.

To make a complicated matter simple, the stronger your front as a family, the more battles you could avoid because those far weaker than you would know not to waste your time.

As an example, take the Arundo's territory. They might very well have dozens of much smaller families surrounding them. Under normal circumstances, due to the prestige the Arundo family had built up, these lesser families would never deign to attack them.

Arundo would still be able to deal with them. But, such a thing

in the same way a chess grandmaster would know to resign when a game reached a certain point because they had trust that

believe they lacked the skill to 'close out the game', it would begin

was: Deterrence. Only with strong enough Deterrence could a family occupy large amounts of territory while

course, the youth who spoke was one of the Arundo family's two candidates for their Crown Heir position, Isac. Much like the others of the

they are,

a mischievous streak between his eyes as he seemed amused that Isac wasn't as well informed as he was. Of course, the only

us both. I don't know about you, but I have no intention of inheriting a laughing stock of a

his distant cousin's lack of a

had the far better social network. On the other hand, Isac was the stronger

so bad. Not every Crown Heir duo or trio was at each other's throats like Rychard and Gradeyr had been. Though, that was also because Ysac was quite easy going while Isac was

one. They were indeed a united front

at the Luxnix estate. There were even reports that a pillar of light was viewable from outer space. There's been a muddying of the details, but

Isac didn't seem to

resurfacing about him in the last few months. I thought it was just some political scheme to deal