Wolf

System Notification

You have received a message from Competitor: Christopher Sinclair

“There are three pieces of information. One is about one particular faction, another is about the executives themselves, and the last one is about how executives affect a faction’s power.

The first thing is the identity of the Ascendency’s hidden leader. She is an evolved species of dragon known as a chaos dragon, and her name is Tiamat. They almost never make appearances in public, so very few people, even amongst executives know what she actually looks like.

The second piece of information is about something that the executives refer to as the ‘Summit.’ It is another System organized event like the Administrator Dungeon. All executives must attend, and it happens one year after the end of every Administrator Dungeon Run.

The Summit has two focuses. One of them is to unite all of the executives as a sort of social gathering to introduce the newest executives.

But the main purpose of it is to give the Sub-Administrators a chance to kill the Administrators and become Administrators themselves. The Administrators and Sub-Administrators – excluding the ones from the most recent Administrator Dungeon – are all placed within a small dimension of the System’s making for a period of one month.

Since the only way to become a Sub-Administrator is to clear the Administrator Dungeon as one of the fourth through tenth place victors, they are almost as powerful as the Administrators, if not just as powerful. Even without the extra privileges that come with the Administrator rank.

The final piece of intel is how having an executive affects the overall strength of a faction.

More often than not, the larger factions will measure their strength based off of four different factors. One of them is how many executives they have. Then there is the number of ‘irregulars’ they have, which basically means the number of people that have gotten lucky somehow and gained their power through means that aren’t common for others.

After the irregulars, there are the initiators, which of course are those who have been through an initialization and survived.

Lastly, there are people like you.

Harbingers.

The first two things are unknown to most of creation, but the third one was pretty well known amongst many circles.

I will not say where I got this information outside of it being from a planned sponsor.”

The first piece of information in the message isn’t actually anything new to me, since I remember Diane talking about Tiamat at one point during one of my ‘physical therapy sessions,’ but the part about the Summit is new to me.

As for the part about the individual faction’s strengths? That is also new, but I feel like it wouldn’t have been very hard to find that out on my own.

I casually toss the amulet towards Lily before muttering my thanks to the two and continuing my way through the snowy wasteland whilst consumed by my thoughts, leaving the two Competitors behind as a light blizzard begins to kick up in the area.

An executive Summit…

A place for executives to gather in mass.

I continue skating for several minutes as I think, only stopping once to kill an angry snowman by pulling the ice core from its head to my hand through my ability before crushing it.

“Wait a second…” I mutter as I come to a sudden stop. “Could this Summit have something to do with Diane’s actions…?”

Executive Stream

Diane winces as she hears Wolf’s words through the livestream.

“It looks like he's figured it out,” Leo says with an amused grin before turning towards Diane. “It might be harder to get him to become your heir now that he knows why you want an heir so badly. Even if it’s only a speculation.”

The center screen in the luxurious room shows Wolf as he stands unmoving on his make-shift ice rink while rubbing his chin and looking down at his feet.

With a light chuckle after seeing the look on Diane’s face, Leo turns back to the screen next to Wolf’s. One showing Ruth as she makes her way through the thirty-fourth floor without too much trouble thanks to her status as an undead.

While undead do not have a complete immunity to the cold by any means, they do have a decent resistance towards it. Enough so that even a half-undead creature like a dhampir would be able to make it through the frozen wasteland that is the fourth floor theme without having to rely on items to warm up.

“This is going to complicate things,” Diane mutters with a frown on her face.

“Yep,” Leo says before glancing at her again out of the corner of his eye as he continues, “and to think that you were just extremely happy with that favor your subordinates managed to get for you.”

Diane winces at this as she watches a strange look cross Wolf’s face before he glances up with a frown and continues his way through the floor.

“Everything is going to be a lot harder now that he knows just how much he is actually worth to you, even if he doesn’t know why you chose him,” Leo says as the smirk slowly clears from his face. “So, what are you going to do about this?”

A few seconds pass in silence before Diane turns to look at Leo and says, “What I’m going to do? I am going to come clean to him before he figures everything out on his own. Otherwise, it would probably just make it even more difficult for me.”

After a brief look of surprise, Leo turns towards Wolf’s screen and says, “That’s probably the best course of action right now.”

Diane silently nods with a frown on her face as she looks at Wolf’s screen again.

‘Talk about taking one step forwards, only to take about five steps back,’ she thinks to herself whilst watching Wolf skate through the floor.

Wolf

An hour later

It’s hard to say for certain without actually asking her, but I get the feeling that Diane is obsessed with getting an heir because of the Summit that will happen after this Administrator Dungeon Run.

Although, when you think about it, if I do survive this run and become an Administrator, I myself would have to participate in those Summits, even if I don’t actually have to participate in the fighting portion of the first one after the Run.

This thought is probably one of the only things keeping me from being fully convinced that it’s her reason for needing an heir. After all, why choose an heir because of the Summits when the heir is just going to have to participate in future Summits as well?

The only answer to that that I can think of is that she might be a target for someone, but I don’t actually know how strong Diane is when compared to the other executives.

I groan at the subject before shaking my head and deciding to focus on something else as I continue through the floor.

At one point over the past hour, I did some research about the last part of Christopher’s intel and confirmed that it was correct.

It’s kind of surprising that the System includes millions of planets, and even thousands of galaxies – only including the ones initialized into the System – and yet, there are only maybe three or four factions that actually have spaceships.

Then again, with both the System and magic in play, they didn’t exactly need to build on their technology.

And from what I could find, most factions just use magic to get from planet to planet via a planet’s exact coordinates. After that, they can use the fast travel menu to get back and forth between the planets individually, and the portal menu – which is an extremely expensive System Access that allows someone to place a System Portal that only they can activate down for a large price of SP – for mass trips.

Which would explain why a faction’s strength is generally determined by their individual member’s strengths, and not their numbers or tech.

“Wuhwuh”

I turn to my right with a hint of irritation at the oddly cute noise before using my ability to rip the core out of another snowman.

These things are so annoying. I can’t sense them with life sense for some reason, and since they are in the middle of a blizzard, and are made of snow, which gives off ice element, I can’t sense them through that either.

They don’t even make any noise!

Although they also can’t do shit to me either. Which is a plus.

Anyways, angry snowmen aside, I should talk to Diane about all of this later.

She has some explaining to do.