Chapter 898: Ch 897: A Bold Guess

"You dare to say Kalki is a minor character?" Shiroyasha stared at Ryo with open disdain.

Ryo, a little unsettled under that gaze, immediately started making excuses. "He's only eleven months old this year, not even a full year. How is that not minor?"

'Crap, so that's what you meant by "minor."' Shiroyasha's face darkened. Too tired to argue the point, she said irritably, "Kalki is still in your hands?"

She sounded genuinely surprised that Ouroboros hadn't come to collect him.

"What do you mean 'in my hands,' I'm not running a kidnapping ring." Ryo muttered, then added, "I just kept him around for a few days, purely out of humanitarian concern and at the request of his relatives."

Shiroyasha rolled her eyes at that and said, dripping with sarcasm, "And was that stay at a hotel, or a prison cell?"

It was a fair question whether Ouroboros had actually left Kalki behind on purpose, but as for Ryo treating him with any real courtesy, Shiroyasha wasn't buying it for a second.

This was, after all, the "savior" whose emergence had required the destruction of countless communities, Arcadia included. Even if Kalki himself had done nothing wrong, he wasn't exactly going to win any goodwill from Arcadia's members.

Ryo might be the exception, sure, but that exception hinged entirely on Kalki being female.

And as far as Shiroyasha knew, the current holder of Kalki's spirit rank was a boy.

So she could guess the kind of "treatment" he'd been getting without even trying.

"To be generous about it, let's call it a furnished suite," Ryo said, smiling.

A high-end "suite" sealed with authority-based warding formations, the entire cell mechanized top to bottom with his mechanical authority.

The construction cost alone put it well above any presidential suite in any hotel.

"Like hell I believe that." Shiroyasha snorted, then murmured to herself, "Ouroboros didn't take him back after all. Looks like something happened that we don't know about."

As the tenth avatar of Vishnu, Kalki, who would bring salvation, his very significance was tied to whether the crucial spirit rank of "Vishnu" would fully take shape or not.

A spirit rank like that wasn't something the two-digit powers competing for the Vishnu identity could afford to let go of.

By rights, Kalki should have been kept under close watch by those very two-digit beings at all times.

And yet here he was, left by Ouroboros's upper echelons in Ryo's care, not even recalled after the Heavenly Army's operation had concluded.

That alone said quite a lot.

Shiroyasha narrowed her eyes at the thought and asked Ryo, "Question. How many Sun Authorities is that little brat savior still short of?"

For Kalki to reach his complete form, he needed ten corresponding Sun Authorities liberation identities. So knowing how many authorities he currently held was generally enough to infer the current state of his spirit rank.

Shiroyasha figured Ryo, who needed Sun Authorities himself, would certainly be keeping tabs on this, hence the question.

Ryo thought it over for a moment before explaining. "This is purely my own guess, but I'd say only Leo has fully manifested so far. Pisces is present in him, but it hasn't fully awakened yet. Taurus hasn't come into play yet, either... Though, aside from the twelve Zodiacs, he also has the Dragon of the Twelve Time Sectors."

He paused for a moment, then continued, "And according to Ouroboros, once Kalki unlocks his identity using Taurus, Taurus will be handed over to me."

"Well, that explains it." Shiroyasha couldn't help but say, exasperated. "No wonder you got tangled up in Kalki's business, going so far as to impersonate him just to get him to safety. It was the Sun Authority seducing you the whole time!"

Ryo just smiled and didn't deny it.

The grudge between Arcadia and Ouroboros ran deep, but the price on offer had simply been too good to pass up. It wasn't like Ryo had much choice in the matter.

Of course, the real deciding factor was Queen Halloween's standing. Owing that particular lady a favor made it genuinely hard to refuse when she came asking.

But anything involving the Queen was absolutely not something to bring up in front of Shiroyasha. Mention it, and something would definitely go wrong. So Ryo kept his mouth shut on that front.

"Leo, Pisces, Taurus, Dragon, Ophiuchus. Five Sun Authorities floating around out there." Shiroyasha counted off the authorities not currently in her hands or Queen Halloween's, then wore an expression of amused interest. "Set Ophiuchus aside for a moment. The other four all happen to correspond to Kalki's spirit rank. Heh, heh, heh. Looks like they were already making their move before that war back in the Dawn Era."

"Real go-getters, aren't they, Ouroboros." Shiroyasha's smile turned dangerous.

Most of the Sun Authorities were held between Shiroyasha and Queen Halloween. In fact, at the very start, all twenty-five Sun Authorities' shares had belonged to Shiroyasha alone, back when she was still called the ShiroYoruMaou. In certain major intelligence organizations, she'd been ranked second among the two-digit powers, though in practice, she was actually the strongest.

It was only after Shiroyasha was "defeated" by the Twin Goddesses. And under pressure from the various two-digit powers, those twenty-five Sun Authority shares were sold off at high prices by Thousand Eyes and scattered among the sun gods of the major pantheons. That sparked the largest war of the Dawn Era: the Sun Authority War.

As the only two victors of that war, Shiroyasha defeated numerous holders and challengers to reclaim fourteen shares, while Queen Halloween took six.

Between the two of them, they clashed twenty times, with Shiroyasha winning fourteen and losing six.

And that was just counting the clashes between Shiroyasha and the Queen themselves, not the other two-digit powers whose avatars had also joined the fray.

Counting it all up, Queen Halloween had probably fought no fewer than a hundred battles against various two-digit beings over the matter of the Sun Authorities.

Which was exactly why the Queen was universally regarded as the least advisable of the three-digit powers to provoke.

That war among the Two-Digit powers had also caused Little Garden itself to crumble more than once, repeatedly triggering the First Demon Lord, End Emptiness, known by the title "Winds of Decadence." Some believed it to be a One-Digit existence based on its sheer power.

It was also because of this that the Little Garden Central Core imposed restrictions on the Two-Digit powers, formally banning them from directly entering the battlefield in order to maintain the balance.

Now, thinking it over carefully, Shiroyasha realized that of the five remaining Sun Authorities, all except Ophiuchus had vanished without a trace early in the Dawn Era.

Putting that together now, it wasn't hard to guess what Ouroboros had actually been up to back then.

"Dragon King, that old bastard, getting suddenly killed by the Heavenly Army? Clearly they'd exposed his identity as an Ouroboros mole!" Shiroyasha muttered this, and Ryo standing next to her felt his face twitch slightly.

Dragon King had been one of Ouroboros's own people?

Which meant the Dragon Sun Authority had actually been held on Ouroboros's behalf, all along?

Ryo thought of how, in the original story, Salamander had somehow managed to team up with Kalki, staging that whole self-directed "Demon Lord attack." His eyelids twitched.

So that wasn't even the first time they'd pulled something like this?

Salamander was a major power in North District. Lakshmi's base was in the North. Kalki's main sphere of activity was also in the North. And the missing Koumei Kasukabe had been active in the North too, which was how he'd ended up crossing paths with Willa...

'Could the North Area be Ouroboros's home base?' A bold thought took shape in Ryo's mind.

If Ouroboros's headquarters really was in the North, then the "workshop" where they forced their enslaved fourth-digit beings to produce authorities, might that also be in the North?

Which would mean, the place where Arcadia's former members were being held, might also be in the North...

At that thought, Ryoa couldn't help but narrow his eyes.

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