Dimensional Descent

The little pink-eyed woman felt her heart skip a beat. What was that question? Well, it was obvious. This man wanted to steal Innate Nodes. Was he an Innate Node Hunter? Those kinds of people in her Verse were especially notorious, but it didn't matter. There would simply always be a market. There were probably many in the Ocular Chaos Clan who fell into this category as well.

Was she wrong about Leonel's character? What did she know about this man anyway, and did it even matter what she thought of him? Would it change anything?

Even when she tried to be cautious against him, he saw through it and cut right to the heart of the matter with absolute ease. There was simply nothing she could hide.

"N-no... Not that I know of..."

She looked to the ground, unable to meet Leonel's eyes and worried she would expose her own. She made a mental note that unless it was a matter of life or death, she most definitely wouldn't use it. In this world, where killing was already incentivized, she couldn't give others extra reasons to target her if she didn't have to.

Leonel could tell that there was something that this woman was hiding, but this time, he didn't choose to say anything about it. Her use had run out. And unlike what she was thinking, he didn't go around hunting Innate Nodes just for the fun of it.

Maybe he would have, if for no other reason than to help strengthen his brothers and subordinates. But after learning what he had from El'Rion, he understood that it wasn't as simple.

But if you thought about it, it made sense.

The Vast Bubble was middling in the grand scheme of Existence, and yet they had a method of perfectly fusing with Innate Nodes. If that method was truly so valuable, and could change a person's outlook on progress and life, why would it be in their hands? There were only so many truly valuable things a place like the Vast Bubble could have.

in, though, were the Domain Rings. He really wanted to see

"Alright, you can go."

said this, he flickered and moved, only causing a bout of annoyance to well up inside of him. He was much slower than he had been in the

That said...

gathered Spatial Force from the surroundings and the

try to do would be

scene stunned. He was really letting her go... just like that? Like it was

eyes drifted toward the corpses around them. Each one had an orb of energy floating above them. She didn't believe for a second that Leonel had just forgotten them. He had heard her explanation

'This...'

This wasn't the only thing that was odd about Leonel. How had he not known the rules? Everyone knew the rules, even the weakest of them. They had it

top of that, he came from a verse that had a Seeded Participant and yet he didn't spawn with his group? It all pointed to the fact that maybe Leonel wasn't like them. He might be ignorant about some things, but not in everything... in fact, he might know much more than most of them about the situation, maybe even more than those families who had seemed to have begun preparing for this decades

take the energies here. With one last look, she too shot in a direction, the

...

far-off distance, his Internal Sight still trained on the little woman. When he saw that she didn't