Chương 93: Heavy Heart III

Lilia sat on the floor with a blanket covering her tall figure; her breath mixed with the chilling air of her room, creating a mist whenever she exhaled as she idly enjoyed her view of a peacefully sleeping June within a translucent pod flush with the floor. Her cold, glassy eyes, which were reminiscent of an ice rink, were relaxed and half shut, failing to fall asleep, and her cheeks were a rosy pink.

In her lap, she held a tabloid-shaped device with a silvery alloy rim encompassing a watery screen displaying live footage of June's training, but why in particular was Lilia using a small tablet to watch her partner's shirtless form engage in rigorous training instead of using the bigger display screen that encompassed the entire wall at the foot of her bed?

'Because it's harder to hide it? Aren't you supposed to be the reserved one?'

'Yes, but I want to see better!'

'No! That's embarrassing. What if Mortimer walks in again? And it's my turn to be in control today.' Today was day 11 of the games, or month 11 for the gladiators within the games.

A portion of the Royal Faction went rogue and revolted, wiping out a decent chunk of their own numbers during the end of day 9, and the rebellion was annihilated by the Royal Faction's Dreamers by the end of day 10, so for the last 2 months within the virtual realm, Brighthaven's pursuers have had their hands full dealing with dissenters and internal strife.

Brighthaven, on the other hand, continued to flee from remnant Royal Faction scouting parties, and other than the occasional encounter, the scouting parties often turned into boons for Brighthaven since desertion rates among the Royal Faction were steadily growing. Approximately 15, 000 remained of the initial 580, 000.

Approximately 9000 now belonged to Brighthaven after Royal Fractionates switched sides, and Brighthaven's Dreamer count had increased by 12, which made 19 Dreamers total, including June, the meteor twins, and the four remaining Dreamers. The Royal Faction, on the other hand, still had over 150 Dreamers; they lost a few dozen after the revolt, while others defected to Brighthaven.

The Royal Faction numbered approximately 6000, but their main force was crumbling under poor leadership and the horrible treatment of their own faction members. Most of their soldiers and members were captured and forced to work, and even if they willingly worked, they were constantly mistreated unless they were a Dreamer, rich, or royalty. Dreamers were treated equally to royals in that faction, and serving with that faction often came with benefits and perks once the games were over.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. It's the straight-laced Brighthaven against the Royal Faction; it was a hopeless battle for Brighthaven, but people loved an underdog with hearts of gold. The situation for this year's games was truly a black and white scenario of good and evil, the people vs. the cabal, not to mention people seemed to take a great interest in June due to both his skills and flesh-shaping capabilities.

A fairy tale evil, helping the people unconditionally despite wanting to return to his love waiting for him at home, was a romantic story the papers and bards loved to obsessively reiterate.

Both of Lilia's alters struggled not to manifest a folding fan and cackle like a mad woman at hearing her peers talk well about June, but she wanted to let out a cartoonishly evil persona whenever someone gushed over him around her, because, regardless of whether they have a crush on him or respect him, at the end of the day, June was all hers.

She even found herself as the local June expert called on by the Brighthaven fan club, which was a bit embarrassing, but unfortunately for her, she ended up giving the fan club a leatherbound copy of 236 pages of part 1 of everything good about June with MLA-formatted citations, which the fan club now treated like a bible.

'I hope that doesn't come back to bite us one day.'

'…' On another note, tomorrow would be the start of sudden death within the virtual realm. As much as Lilia hated spoilers, she was intrigued to hear from one of the visiting organizers that one of the four events this year would not be the rumoured demon-class nightmare, which was falsely spread by the organizers to garner attention, but a low noble-class nightmare instead. She even double-checked with Mortimer himself.

'The only way they would win would be to combine forces.'

'The Royal Faction won't be combining shit, sister. They're pompous idiots who treat anyone weaker than them in any way like dirt.' A High Demon-class Nightmare is a borderline Low Noble-class Nightmare in terms of pure strength. The difference lies in intelligence; every nightmare is spawned with a flaw, a trait of eccentricity. A higher-class nightmare with the trait of collecting tongues would happily form alliances in order to just collect tongues.

Their intellect grows steadily through each rank, while their power explodes drastically, often meaning that the best way to dispatch or simply relocate a nightmare would be to play on its eccentric traits, but simultaneously, the smarter a nightmare was, the more it was capable of resisting its compulsive trait, making it harder to deal with and, at times, borderline impossible to fight against.

'You don't think they…?' Lilia shuddered at the thought of what her sister was insinuating. It was common knowledge that the Colosseum figment could create monsters with power, akin to imps and demon-class nightmares, within the virtual realm, but a noble class often had equal or superior intelligence to humans.

'The Colosseum can't make intelligent beings…' The only truly intelligent creatures within the virtual realm were the gladiators, who were still real people outside the realm.

'Why else would they specify Noble-class?' A high-class demon within the virtual realm would be the same as a low-class noble in terms of pure power. But the organizers specified the noble class, instead of the demon class, which meant….

'No way!?'

'They couldn't have?' The specification may have meant that they were sending a real noble class in as a gladiator.