CHAPTER 67: POLITICAL DISPUTES

"Has anyone been hearing strange noises around the house or is it just me?" KiRA’s aunt, Suzen, asked with a playful smirk on her face, glancing at the couple that was drinking their morning coffee without making any eye contact with her.

"Hmm? Now that you mention it, I did hear something last night. It was like... muffling noises. I don’t know what it might be though." Aurelia, Izzy’s mother, played along with her friend.

The two of them used all means they could, even putting up a magical barrier to reduce noise, but these mothers were simply too sharp.

Even if there were no noises, they were not going to miss any chances to tease their children.

"Hmmm... you know what? It has been like this ever since the three of them came back. Do you think they brought back some kind of unexpected monster with them, Su? Should we keep watch at night?" She was glancing at the two of them as well and the two knew very well they were only doing that to tease them.

"Cut it out, you two. There’s no need for that." But then the Captain spoke up in favor of the children... Or so the two of them thought. "They are young and energetic. Let them have some fun, will you?"

KiRA’s uncle, Argon, almost spit his tea when Captain Triton teased the children with the ladies.

Both of them knew what the ladies were doing and the young couple’s silence and blushed faces only fueled their fun.

Ziggy was smiling at the scene silently, enjoying the break from his usual association work. It was such a nice thing that they were giving him weekends off.

There was nothing to do for the time being since the Objective for the second floor was to kill a bunch of creatures.

There was no need for specialized attack squads just yet so the main attack squad that he was part of was resting in their hoses.

The association’s recon teams and mapping teams were working hard to understand the environment and nature of the second floor. It seemed like the second floor would play a big role in the players’ growth.

The monsters weren’t as impossible as the first floor and if someone had been in the first floor for long enough, they could easily deal with the monsters on the second floor.

So, instead of dealing with the monsters, the association was devising how they were going to reach the required number of (500,000) individual clears.

There were more than enough players worldwide for the number to reach, but not all of them were combat players, and not all of them were willing to enter the tower after seeing the released footage of what kind of hell the tower actually was.

The floor was good for the growth of the players, but as things stood, the association predicted the required number wasn’t going to meet the quota until the last week of the given 60 days.

And truthfully, they capitalized on this fact and focused on increasing their influence around the world.

"Hmmm... The Association introduced a new tax policy, you see? They’re now opening a market for the byproducts of the tower."

The captain was reading the news while having his tea on this fine morning.

The entire family was here for breakfast after a long time. Everyone was together, chatting, having their tea, coffee, and the healthy concoction that the ladies referred to as ’healthy juices’.

The two tech-nerd ladies were experimenting with tower materials nowadays and had become self-appointed alchemists in the bunker.

They had their own plant lab downstairs. And KiRA was still finding it hard to wrap his head around the fact that they made all that within the few days they were in the tower.

"The association is good at playing politics, you know?" The Captain looked at KiRA’s uncle while showing him some data that he got from his informants a while back.

Argon looked at the information carefully and was pretty surprised.

Unlike the ladies who were busy making fun of the children and chatting about their nerdy stuff, the men were busy with the political angle that the association was playing at.

"They are doing all this without getting into any political disputes... isn’t this suspicious?" Zyon listened to the two of them carefully while KiRA and Izzy were using Izzy’s telepathic connection to talk about the night they spent.

They were having fun on one hand, while on the other hand, it was weird how there was someone watching them... the pervy voyeur was going to be either a good help, or a great obstacle going forward.

"The association is pretty strange, no doubt.

The ones that are in the operating positions are former martials or the mad geniuses that had retired. We call them ghosts of the past... but that’s not all there is.

I’ve heard there are some people from inside the tower that are guiding the officials in the higher positions and it doesn’t really sound all that nice."

Even if the western continents were functioning well right now, there were political disputes all over the world because of the fast rise of the association.

They were players and thus possessed special skills. Who knew what kind of skills they were using to expand their influence?

The public may know what they were doing, how they were doing things, but there was no government body that would give away everything that was happening within its circles.

The two former government officials knew pretty well just how crazy it would be if they started releasing everything about their workings.

The kind of things that any government body does to obtain the kind of supremacy that the association had were never pleasant. Morally or ethically, there are always things that would cause conflicts on small and big scales if the workings of the association were revealed to the masses.

Even if they had great political and management skills, what had truly made them into such a fierce power was undoubtedly their ability to keep secrets.

They had such a powerful defense system that not even the two ladies who were talking about chemistry right now had been able to breach through their information network.

"We are going to see some interesting things going forward." The captain sipped on the strange green, bubbling concoction and prayed to see another dawn.

He might have survived bloody battlefields, but he wasn’t sure whether he would survive this ’homemade’ elixir.

"Indeed. Things are going to be eventful." Sir Argon wasn’t in any better state. Both of them were lab rats for their dear wives.

Thankfully, the children were spared this testing phase.

They would be testing the final product when the tests are done though, so all three of them were preparing for the d-day already.