Ch72.The Calm before the..

As I have been focusing on my last few Runes, my clan members have made their move, constantly provoking Derolo, aiming to cause as much trouble for him as possible whilst my Shadow Guard infiltrate his territory, aiming to discover the reasons behind his sudden interest into the Drug lord.

Now publicly, the reason I am 'attacking' Derolos men, is because he or his men have been entering my territory without permission and he has not been showing me the proper respect I deserve. I have been playing on my physical age, using it as an excuse to do something typical of a child, throw a 'tantrum'.

This will distract people from my actual objective while also ensuring that people don't get any ideas that I am doing this for the 'Drug Lord', the reason that I want to project is that I wish to remain as the Drug lords only 'dealer', hopefully this can act as a viable reason for me to , in essence, declare war on Derolo.

Derolo didn't wait too long before responding, he almost instantly retaliated by sending his gangsters to attack any of my clan members that happened to leave my territory. He then went a step further by sending some of his gangsters to cause trouble in my territory, attacking my protection clients businesses and harming their interests.

This caught me off-guard and has caused a small turbulence within my territory while creating many annoying troubles for me, since I didn't think he would go that far.

This in turn, forced me to up my game and kidnap most of the gangsters that have entered my territory and I forced them to constantly fight in my arena, working them to death by making them fight for days on end.

I also made sure to not share any of these profits with Derolo, I flat out ignored the 'fee' I have agreed upon with most of the bosses. My blatant provocation has caused Derolo to take a few more drastic measures, he proceeded to start trying to seriously main my clan members, going so far as trying to cut off their arms and legs!

After a few weeks of constant back and forth between the two of us, the situation has almost reached a breaking point, we are both rearing to charge into the others territory and launch a full on comprehensive war!

It was at this point, one of my trainee Shadow Guards entered my study, I looked up from my Rune research papers and motioned over to him to sit down while saying, "Is there any news yet?"

The Shadow Guard responded, "Yes sir! We have managed to discovered the reason. . . It turns out that Derolo has somehow gotten a hold on some specific data about the nightclub and its profits. He has a booklet on how much money is made as well as some of he connections that have been made by the 'waiters' during the event. He has already recreated a nightclub of his own and is just waiting for the drug lord's contact before he announces its launch..."

In an absolute Rage I slammed both of my fists down onto my desk, causing it to shatter and everything contained within scattered all over the room, "HOW DARE HE!! HOW DID HE GET THAT INFORMATION? TELL ME NOW!"

The shadow guard nervously responded while quickly standing up from his chair, "Sorry sir! We haven't figured that out just yet, but after a small investigation we believe that there is a .. traitor within the nightclub who has been providing this information to Derolo.."

I sat back in my chair, taking a few deep breaths, trying my best to gain control of myself and to not to rage out. After a minute or so, I responded, "Do you know who it is?"

The shadow guard responded in a slightly shaking voice, "No sir, we don't know, but we are already working on a plan to thin out the possible suspects."

Sigh, I knew this day would eventually come, but I still hoped it wouldn't… I guess trusting my clan members to accept all the benefits that I provide while, in return, granting me their absolute loyalty, is just wishful thinking. It seems that I will be forced to go forth with … 'that plan' … I have been trying my best to avoid commuting to this, simply because it will cost me an absolute fortune to carry out. It would seem that I now have no choice but to do so.

Well that will have to be put off for a while as the first thing I need to do is to figure out who this traitor, or traitors, are. Nobody besides my Shadow Guard and Birdhead know about the real reasons behind my attack on Derolo, therefore, nobody should know that I have been investigating Derolo and his actions. I must take advantage of this and use it to discover any traitors within my team, sigh…

I looked up at the Shadow Guard and spoke, "I have a plan to weed him out, I will need you guys to monitor all of the nightclub clan members. I will explain some more details to you later when we gather all of the Shadow Guards. This will be an important assignment and I need you guys to really focus on this one."

After sending him off, I sat back and contemplated my next course of actions, 'I need to set up the 'Drug Lord' as soon as possible, maybe I can use this to expand my drug operations. I will need to put some extra thought into this and properly plan my following actions.'

'Although I would like to be the only one selling, if I can manage to successfully pin the Drug Lord as the supplier and sell these drugs to 'dealers' for an extra large profit, I could potentially make much more money. I just need to make sure that I adjust the prices appropriately and that I will always sell the drugs at a cheaper price than my competition, this will ensure that I don't get overtaken by the other Bosses.'

After finalizing my next course of actions, I need to figure out how to deal with Derolo and our current situation, since it has reached a point where things could break out into a full blown war at any time. I am just about ready to create my last Runes, so I need to slightly de-escalate the situation, for now. As soon as I advance into Circle 2, I will be ready to launch a comprehensive attack.

For the next few days, I focused on finalizing all of these plans while pacifying the situation with Derolo, by literally taking a step back and having my 'hunters' return to my territory and just defend the borders, or so to speak. I told them to, for now, just focus on defense and make sure that Derolo doesn't try anything drastic. If he loses patients and does, they will immediately contact Nafets and get one of the three graduates to keep the situation under control.

After that, I made my way to the Academy in order to finalize my preparations and get ready to advance into Circle 2. This has been a long wait and with my next few Runes to complement my next Circle, I will receive a much needed power boost.

As I arrived at the Academy, I made my way to Epolenet in order to complete the last step of mastering the Runes creation process.

The last four Runes that I am going to create will, hopefully, cover a few of my immediate weaknesses; they are the 'Shadow Connection' Rune, the 'Beastial Instinct' Rune, the 'Compression' Rune and then lastly the 'Build Up' Rune.

I have decided upon these Runes after extensive consideration and I believe that they will be able to consistently beneficial me in the long run.

The Shadow Connection Rune is actually quite simple, it merely allows me to make a connection to a shadow within the surrounding area. This would usually be considered a useless Rune, but regarding me who has Shadow space, this is an absolute game changer. I will be able to make a connection with any shadow in the surrounding and then use that shadow to enter my shadow space and, theoretically, I should be able to move between shadows thus enhancing my movement ability drastically.

The 'Beastial Instincts' Rune would usually allow a person to tap into their own inherent suppressed instincts and use them in an instinctual manner, similar to how an animal naturally would. For me, however, I am hoping that it will allow me to utilize all of my accumulated Beastial instincts and then combine them together into some sort of super beast. This will passively allow this human body to both drastically increase in sensory abilities while providing me with some sort of sixth sense that most animals have.

The Compression Rune will allow me to compress my body without losing any power. This is important as with my physical growths current trend, I will easily surpass four meters within the next few years and that will just be the will just be the start of an endless growth cycle. I don't know if my body will be able to handle that crazy growth and even if it could, it would be super inconvenient to live at that size. This Rune will allow me to constantly compress my body into more manageable sizes whenever I get too large to handle.

The last Rune, 'Build Up', works in a similar fashion to 'Tension Release', but differs in that I can build up more than just tension and then I am able store that 'build up' for later use. For instance, I would be able to gather a great deal of Tension with this Rune prior to a battle and then slowly release it during the duration of a fight without me having to concentrate on constantly building up tension within the fight.