Rick tried to gain access towards the Lost City using Richard, but the latter was too busy handling the pressure exerted over him from Lara. When things looked dire and hopeless for him, the great news of the offer from the various forces in the city came to save his neck.
He didn't even hesitate to accept what they offered. They provided him with lots of forces, funds, and even products and lands to support his stand in the Vancouf family.
The internal clash that was about to get over just got hyped up. It was like a fire that was this close to dying, before someone poured an entire bucket of gasoline over it, letting it ignite fiercer and flare up.
The effects of this clash extended to cover the entire city. The portal zone was the only thing that kept working normally, while any other place was filled with fights, shouts, and runners for their lives.
Seeing this city from above would make anyone inwardly sigh in regret. The ferocity of battles reached a stage where no one cared anymore about preserving the city. All started to develop such a dangerous mindset; if I'm going to lose, I'll take everyone and everything down with me.
William was inside the Lost City, receiving updates about the ongoing battles happening up above. Lara didn't hide anything off him, and even asked for his opinion all the time.
She got shocked when Richard got revived at the last moments instead of getting crushed. But to William, this was expected, this was going according to his plans.
The different forces in the city would be total morons in his eyes if they didn't take this chance to support Richard. That was why he advised her to keep her top force hidden and well rested, not showing off all of her might.
She agreed to do that, not because she got what he guessed. She failed to read the entire situation like always. But she agreed to his suggestion because she felt like crushing Richard didn't need to use her full might.
Yet when Richard made a comeback, her stored elite force proved to be useful. The first thing Richard tried was an attempt to assassinate her. She was already lowering her guard, but thanks to William's early suggestion, she had trustable force by her side, enough to protect her life.
The attack failed, but it exposed one shocking secret, not only to Lara and her entrusted circle, also to William.
"Using dark masters to kill Lara? There was no time for him to ask for such help… And even if he got the mind and resources to hire assassins, they'd need lots of time to arrive here… That means he got ties with the dark side a long time ago…"
William was now roaming the entire city, collecting materials. The task that he thought it'd be easy and wouldn't take much time proved to be a bit challenging.
Monsters didn't fully retreat from the Lost City. Lots of monsters kept walking around, trying to locate any hidden masters or something.
William would prefer to wait for things to cool down, but he saw lots of materials appearing the next day, mostly on the streets outside.
When he heard about how intense the fights up there were, he decided it wasn't time to wait or rest. So he risked it and started running around the city, starting a new round of fight against these monsters.
But he didn't hate such battles. He gained more dark gold cores in the process. And when he roamed the city, he managed to spot lots of dead monsters, the ones which died at the hands of the army that chased him before.
He couldn't absorb these cores for sure, but he could use them in his training. Besides, to make the desired weapon, he needed to use dark gold cores. He planned to use the Scarlet Bears cores, the couple hundred left cores he had for years now.
Yet limiting the construction of this weapon solely over one type of monster cores wasn't favourable. It was better to include two different cores, with two different elements at least in the process of making this weapon.
So, William didn't hesitate to fight the roaming monsters while walking around the city. He kept gathering up all the materials and monster cores he could find.
The only downside for this was his continuous depletion of his elixir stores, in addition to the time he wasted in doing this. He estimated before to take up to seven hours to visit the entire city and gather all the materials in it. But in fact, such a process took him one and half days straight.
During which, the intensity of fights at the surface city didn't get any weaker. In fact, Lara was facing a hard time, especially when the entire city turned on her.
The elders close to her saw a dark future ahead of them. Even if she managed to control everything at the end, things would end up ruined to a degree beyond saving.
Elder Stark was having lots of headaches. Many places in the city already got destroyed, and it was clear by the end of this war, there would be no city at all.
"Tsk! I couldn't believe when we got the chance to rule over everything, we are going to lose the city, literally all of it…" he was now sitting on a balcony on a suite where Richard used to stay.
He came here in the past day, crushed all the resistance that youth had, to end up finding only emptiness waiting for him. He knew Richard escaped, and soon he heard the news of the different forces' movements to support Richard.
It was clear since that moment that this entire war was going out of control. Lara was feeling down as well, having the same thoughts as him.
Everyone in their faction were having the same kind of dark thoughts. A blessing that they all waited for happened, to reveal its true face as a deadly curse.
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