Leonel didn't move, standing in silence for a long while. His eyes were getting heavier, but he still pushed his mind to the absolute limit. After a moment, he waved a hand. This time, another wave of about 200 or so Cloud Race members appeared. Among them, there was even the former Secretary Marquisette Maia.
Maia looked up toward Leonel with a cold gaze, but she didn't say anything.
Her two sons were in Leonel's hands, there really was nothing that she could do. While she had planned to enter the special coma-like state of the Cloud Race, under Leonel's threat, she couldn't do this.
"You'll be him until I tell you otherwise," Leonel nudged a head toward Armand's corpse.
Maia took a glance and didn't say anything. But after a moment, her aura shifted and she grew to the point where she was almost an entire two meters taller than Leonel. At a glance, even with further inspection, she looked exactly like Armand without the slightest deviation in look or aura, even her demeanor had become similar to his.
Leonel hadn't expected this sort of accuracy from a corpse. There was definitely something special about the Cloud Race's ability to replicate others, more special than he knew.
Disregarding this matter for now, Leonel sent the Cloud Race members away. They came as Cloud Race individuals and left as giants of the human race.
A plan brewed in Leonel's mind as he watched them leave. The moment he had noticed that the Taur family had not just one, but two villages, another idea began to formulate in his mind. He shifted around some of his original plans and made some small adjustments.
Maia would have originally been invaluable to clearing the coming Gold-Grade upgrade challenge, but in her current spot, she was much more useful to him.
Once this was done, Leonel claimed the now Silver-Grade city, completing his trifecta. Now, it was time to return and rest. By this point, all 10 000 of the Oryx should have gotten the rest they needed.
"Let's go."
Leonel lit the region on fire. He wanted to give off the illusion that a great battle had been fought, but while the Taur lost one village, they managed to hold Leonel off and retreat to their second city. This displayed the strength Leonel wanted to give off while also making his trap easier to hop into.
As of now, no one in the Heir Wars knew that he had Cloud Race pawns on his side, and he would keep it that way for as long as possible. By the time his trap was sprung, he would be able to raze the day side to the ground and march toward the night side. Victory would be his.
Although everyone saw Leonel's actions in impersonating the Taur family geniuses, there was nothing that they could do about it. Even the Morales family wasn't interfering with the event, and if they tried to secretly communicate, the first to notice would be Ancestor Hito. Everything was under their control and cheating at this point was impossible. It would all come down to what preparations their youths had made ahead of time.
Even so, seeing Leonel using the Cloud Race in this way no doubt made the Taur family absolutely furious. All the while, an incomplete and even false impression of the events was relayed to the Libra family Heirs. Their grasp of the situation was limited to begin with, they could only see the aftermath of the event and conclude exactly what Leonel wanted them to conclude...
Upon returning to the village, Leonel entered a pod. When he stepped out just 15 minutes later, those watching were surprised, but they had already seen the Oryx do this. They could only watch with ugly expressions as Leonel gained another huge advantage.
"Recall the troops marching in this direction, both of them."
The messages were sent out swiftly and they began their return. Leonel didn't want the troops he had sent out initially to interfere with the new
"Taur" family. After all, if there was a troop in that area that the Taur, for some reason, didn't touch, it would be exposed as an oddity almost immediately. It was best that he regroup and reassign them.
After Leonel sent out these orders, he gathered Aina and his brothers along with Raylion, Sael and the others as the Skies family took their turns in the pods.
He marked out locations on the map and sent them out. Their targets were the dungeons that had used their now three territories to memorize the locations of. With the fact he had upgraded three regions to the Silver-Grade now, they had not only spawned many more challenges, but many more dungeons as well, increasing the frequency of Silver-Grade rewards.
After sending them away, Leonel used yet another kill exchange to bring out Little Tolly.
By this point, everyone seemed to have realized that Leonel was running out of subordinates. Right this moment, he had thousands of kill exchanges, and yet he didn't use them. Instead, he converted them all into points after bringing out Noah and some other geniuses of Earth. Even when it came to the Cloud Race he had sent to impersonate the Taur family, he only sent them the 500 points they needed to upgrade to the Bronze-Grade then left them to their own devices.
As for the now over 11 million points he had now, they seemed to sit idle, burning a hole in his pocket. However, Leonel didn't seem to notice.
One by one, he took out the items the Segmented Cube had spent the day completing. After handing the Skies family their weapons and armors, he moved one to take out large bundles of what seemed to be simple plates without the slightest hint of engravings.
Leonel's three Stars appeared to his back, Runes dancing across its surface as he leapt past his village walls, appearing in the depths of the mountain range that now surrounded them.
He lifted his hands and controlled Little Tolly with one hand. In the other, he held a Life Grade Force Crafting Quill that could only be described as gorgeous. Although it was formed with an ink blank feather, every time Leonel's wrist flickered and it trembled, golden dust would sparkle down from its body, making it look as though it had come out of a fairy tale.