Dimensional Descent

Leonel spent some time with his brothers before returning to the Lab Setting. He didn't establish a connection with the outside world because that could lead to some issues, which was why he had taken so long to break the news to them and also why he hadn't really been communicating with Aina either.

The Force Arts the Gathering of Kingdoms worked on were far beyond what level King had been on, and before his recent breakthrough, King had practically been a suffocating influence to Leonel.

So, it wasn't Leonel's place to make large deductions about how everything worked. For all he knew, if he projected his voice to the outside world, then it would register Anastasia's world as part of the Gathering of Kingdoms and try to take hold of it.

While the Segmented Cube was the greatest treasure ever created by the best Crafting Race to ever exist, the Gathering of Kingdoms was literally created by the God Beasts of Creation. They still couldn't be compared.

This was to say that there was no guarantee that the Gathering of Kingdoms Stele couldn't integrate Anastasia if it wanted to. So Leonel had to tiptoe around the topic, at least for now.

As for Aina, he wasn't worried about her in the slightest. He didn't need to watch her battles to know that she was absolutely crushing it.

And crushing it Aina was. She made it into the Penultimate round without even breaking a sweat. This was a round if 100 of your world's people made it into, your world would survive.

To go from such a large percentage of a population of tens of billions at worst, to just 100 to meet a quota, one could imagine just how difficult it was to make it to this stage.

Now, there was just this final hurdle between Aina and the final round.

The Penultimate Round was scored differently from the others.

Everyone would fight ten battles. This battle would be scored on how long it took to finish and then weighted against how well your opponent did against others.

people in this round were far fewer, because the odds that one could make the Penultimate Round and not have a world strong enough to reach the percentage

that didn't mean that they were all in the clear. Just looking around the city,

there was a different type of anxiety taking hold, one that read

not on an existential dread, but rather their desire to be rewarded by their

said that there was a

been a long while since the Gathering of Kingdoms Stele rewarded anyone. Many believed that the treasures had run out and without the God Beasts of Creation to create more, it was useless to hope

that thought that the Stele was just waiting, biding its time for someone worthy. There were a limited number of resources remaining, so its standards just kept increasing

for that last sliver of survival and on the other, there were those

should have been on the former side, she was extremely relaxed as

ticker appeared before her and she

her vision cleared, before her, there was

his eyes blinking with surprise before he

from the Preliminaries was still in effect, so technically, with so few left, it was only a matter of time before Aina was put up against one of them

chances to fight, losing the first round and potentially ending up heavily injured would end up impacting

performance until now, Thorne wasn't very moved because the victories of

course, there was a

from the very beginning, while Aina's had been near the bottom of the barrel. As the rest of the competition was weeded out, she had

prince. This wasn't a sign of disrespect, but rather the exact opposite. It was just

didn't bother to