Chapter 392
Matt frowned as he watched the ongoing scene below the surface with his spiritual power.
The Empire's people were almost uniformly going in the wrong direction. If he was a more cynical man, he would have suspected that someone was messing with them. But even the Corporation people seemed to be heading in the wrong direction, if less so than the Empire’s people, thanks to their initial coordination between scouts.
Looking over to Aster who was snacking on an assortment of vegetables one of their chefs had brought down, he asked. “Is there any kind of mental effect hitting the Tier 15s? They should be choosing to spread out in a spiderweb but they almost always choose the wrong direction every time. Once or twice is a coincidence, but dozens of times? I don’t buy it.”
Aster crunched through her food a few more times before swallowing. “I can’t feel anything and neither can any of our guards. There are no pervasive mental effects, illusions affecting them, or even physical optical trickery going on that might account for what we are seeing.”
“Then how can you explain what we are seeing?”
Aster flicked her ears in a shrug. “Sometimes random is random, and random can be weird.”
Matt frowned and scanned the ruin again. Once he finished checking for the obvious things and found nothing he started looking for more subtle things, like small gradual inclines or declines that might be subtly shifting people's perceptions but while there was variance in the slope of the floor it wasn’t uniform enough to explain what they were seeing. He then checked the mana flows, which almost looked like a promising lead, as the mana flows didn’t directly move into the reward room but instead swirled around almost similar to a whirlpool before being absorbed around the boss room. Sadly, the flows had no discernible relation to the movement of the Tier 15s inside.
Watching a Tier 15 Corporation mercenary scout, someone who was battlefield trained and tested, go down the path that led away from the ruin's boss room after being given the option between two paths.
He had already been inside the ruin and hadn’t felt anything odd but given his Tier that wasn’t too surprising. He was tempted to go back in and see if there was something he was missing when he watched an Empire scout finally go down the correct path.