Masteria Online: Shattering the Dark God's Grand Scheme-Chapter 88 - Nexarch

The Dark One connected Masteria and Earth in order to use the players as willing souls to train up the countless bodies that he would create to be the player avatars.

That much he understood, of course.

However, even if he had the power to entirely shut down their operation on Earth, which he didn’t, it would make no sense to do so.

This army of avatars trained by the players was not the key point that made the Dark One win.

The Dark One won because he was the strongest being alive.

The Ancient Heroes were gone, and the ones that returned were too weak to face him. The other gods had been systematically eliminated. The Empress, the strongest woman alive, could not stand against him.

The natural course of events was for the Dark One to awaken and destroy the world. This natural course was sure to occur once more if he did not drastically change events, and the only way for him to do so would involve using the power of the playerbase.

Still, he did not want that ship, Darkness, to invade Earth again. Therefore, he had to take action on Earth as well.

Renan took a deep breath, feeling his mana. It was recovering slowly, a given considering he was on Earth. He would not let that stop him. He took a look out the window, seeing the afternoon light which would soon darken.

He set back out.

Nexarch Technologies, the company behind Masteria, had plenty of branch offices around the globe.

There was one close enough for him to drive to, so he set off. The drive to the Nexarch Technology branch took Renan forty minutes. He found a parking spot on the street half a block from the building, fed the meter, and walked the rest of the way.

The building occupied a corner of the block. It was two stories tall. At first glance, it looked ordinary.

Renan circled the block.

This was the first stage. In the future he had already lived, he had never encountered a single follower of the Dark One operating on Earth.

Not until Earth had already been invaded.

Which meant that everything he was doing now was new to him.

He needed to orient himself before he could act.

And so he walked the perimeter, looking like a man who had parked somewhere inconvenient and was simply making his way around to the front entrance by an unnecessarily long route.

Visually, the building looked exactly as it should. That was to be expected, they would not purposely draw suspicion to themselves. Renan completed the circuit and stood for a moment at the corner, looking across the street at nothing in particular. Yes, the building looked alright.

What did not feel okay, what had not felt okay since he turned onto this block, was the mana.

The environmental mana level on Earth was extraordinarily low. This was simply the nature of the planet, a world so depleted of magical saturation that the entire field of magic had been consigned to folklore and fiction, practiced by no one, believed in by almost no one, a thing that existed in stories.

A powerful enough mage could use spells with that little mana, and a stronger mage still could make his own mana. However, the planet would be hard pressed to raise a mage to begin with.

What Renan was feeling from the building was not a faint, barely perceptible hint of mana. Something inside that structure was producing, channeling, or attracting mana at a level that had absolutely no legitimate explanation on this planet.

He walked off and hid himself from sight, making sure he was in a pocket of visual blindness from every accessible sightline. It would not be acceptable for him to be caught using spells this early.

Making sure not even a camera would see him, he cast. "Invisibiliy."

Renan felt the mana drain upon himself. At best, he’d be able to maintain the spell for fifteen minutes. Yet that was enough.

He walked over to the side entrance, watching employees linger nearby. He slipped inside behind a woman who was returning back into the building.

Once inside, he scanned the area. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

He saw card readers, cameras, a guard station in the lobby running a monitor array. He focused his mind.

Scan.

Despite the mana consumption taking five minutes of invisibility away from him, he did it regardless.

He felt absolutely no magical surveillance around. Every single security measure was technological.

The complete absence of any magical detection architecture was telling. It meant either that the people running this facility were entirely unaware of what they were involved in, or they had chosen not to bother securing it magically because they did not anticipate a use for it.

The employees on the ground floor were mundane. A simple glance and it was obvious. Even with his still weak body, Renan could immediately tell the difference between a regular human and a powerful warrior or magician.

And yet the mana was here. It was stronger on the upper floors. He felt it increasing as he found the stairwell and moved upward.

He kept moving, finding nothing but ordinary humans. Sensing the minutes beginning to run low for his invisibility, he was about to make his retreat when a door swung open.

Renan froze.

He suddenly felt a dark power flood the room, terrifying him. Yet upon inspecting the employees, it was obvious they could not feel it. The director spoke something about data storage, and the employees nodded and went along with it.

But Renan narrowed his eyes.

What that man had wasn’t mana. No, Renan felt a power that was active, dark, and wrong.

A spark of the deepest black, purest darkness beyond all darkness engulfed Renan’s senses. He had felt this before, after Earth had been invaded. It was for those who had submitted to the Dark One’s will, a spark of influence placed there by something operating well above this man’s level of awareness.

Now Renan was beginning to understand the threat better.