"...She has my son, but refuses to give him up?" Emperor Rael sharpened his gaze.
His expression hardened as he leaned forward on his table, steepling his fingers. He was not pleased by the revelation that Mother Alicia had offered to him.
"And she wants to keep him because she hopes that... he can deal with fear?" Emperor Rael frowned. "I don’t understand."
"I was unable to make heads or tails of it either, Your Majesty." She shook her head. "I tried reasoning with her and threatening her, but none of it worked. She refuses to give him up."
"It seems like she has figured out that we don’t have any real leverage over her," Emperor Rael remarked. "What about offering a trade?"
"She was not receptive at all to any such offer," Mother Alicia remarked. "She does not want anything for him. At this rate, we will not be able to get Rui back. It appears that he is incapacitated in so way by his injuries, given that he hasn’t attempted to move back to West Genora."
"...What about an operation in East Genora to extract Rui?" Emperor Rael asked with a raised eyebrow. "It’s not easy by any ans, but..."
She shook her head.
"Impossible. Mother Maeria is extrely powerful. No one knows her full power because she hasn’t acted in a long ti in any real capacity. The greater the number of Mothers of Nature, the less necessary her direct involvent in anything needs to be."
Emperor Rael heaved a sigh. "I figured. For now, it doesn’t appear that she intends to hurt Rui. Assuming that her words are the truth. She could have been just lying about having Rui at all in the first place."
"That is indeed a possibility, but Mother Maeria is not a liar. She does not speak untruths," Mother Alicia remarked. "She has high integrity and does not rely on deception."
Emperor Rael scoffed at her words. "I cannot trust that. As far as I’m concerned, there’s a possibility that she’s lying. But if she’s telling the truth, then..."
Emperor Rael heaved a deep breath.
"We will just have to wait for Rui to wake up."
Mother Alicia raised an eyebrow.
"Why do you think he isn’t awake? There isn’t anything obvious about it. Yet, you seem confident that he isn’t awake."
Emperor Rael huffed lightly. "A good catch. Perhaps I do know sothing about Rui’s condition. Regardless, keep trying to communicate with her and get as much information out of her as you can. For now, that appears to be just about the only thing that we can do."
"Alright, I will continue doing that."
The Emperor of Harmony heaved a deep breath after Mother Alicia departed from his Royal Office.
The air grew tense as his expression hardened.
His golden eyes sharpened, wandering about in heavy thought.
"...It appears that Martial Transcendents are not the only ones who can sense the fear."
His tone was heavy.
Rui had inford him about the so-called Transcendent Fear that the Martial Transcendents experienced. It was sothing that was so outside of anything that the Emperor of Harmony could even begin to fathom that he put the matter aside. Sothing that terrorized the Martial Transcendents was not sothing that he could handle; it wasn’t in his place to try to deal with it.
He had implicitly left it to Rui, trusting him to deal with it as he saw fit.
Now he learned that Mother Maeria also appeared to experience sothing similar, based on what he could understand from her words.
"...There may be other parties out there besides Transcendents who experience this fear as well."
It was perhaps worth it to form so sort of task force designed to identify this fear.
But regardless, this was good news for him at the mont. If she kept him alive because she thought he was the key to their salvation, then it would an that she valued him highly and would not try to harm him in any way while he was unconscious.
ant that Rui was safe for the most part.
"Now, we wait."
There was nothing else to do in this circumstance. The effort and sacrifices that it would take to bring him back were far too much, considering that he was at the very epicenter of East Genora. Light elves were too strong within their territory, and Mother Maeria was apparently the strongest.
"Though perhaps..." he gazed at the intelligence reports on his desk about the Giant-Elven War. "Perhaps it isn’t as hard as I would have imagined."
The light elves failed to crush the Giant invasion imdiately, and the number of giants entering East Genora was not low. They simply kept erging from underwater like there was no end to them.
Ordinarily, simply mounting a brainless invasion into Genoran territory without a major logistical support and supply system was guaranteed to doom any invasion to failure, but the giants were, quite literally, built different.
They didn’t need supplies.
They didn’t need logistics.
They didn’t need anything.
They ate the attacks that the light elves threw at them, consuming them voraciously and gaining everything that they needed from them. They also did the unthinkable by diverting an extraordinary proportion of their population to the continent of Genora to utterly overwhelm East Genora’s raw territorial defenses.
"They are unreasonable, but that is what it would take to overwhelm the light elves on their territory in a frontal assault."
The Emperor of Harmony shook his head.
"I will just have to wait."
And wait he did.
He didn’t know how long Rui would take to wake up this ti. He highly doubted that it would be as long as the fourteen months it had taken him after his battle with the eldritch chira, given that Rui had spent most of the battle without using his Gigabrain technique.
However, based on the past, it would undoubtedly still take him more than a month to recover.
"The dark elven alliance has aliorated so of our desperation for allies; we can afford more delays and more gentle integration into the true world."
The Emperor of Harmony knew that to fully find its place in the true world was a process that would take more than five years, perhaps even ten years to accomplish. A continent simply appearing out of nowhere in the world was indeed that shocking for all parties involved.
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