Chapter 120: Iris
Leon studied her for a long moment before speaking. "Why would you think that?"
Her chin lifted slightly. Some of the embarrassment from being caught muttering to herself burned away almost instantly, replaced by something firmer, more defiant.
"Because it’s nothing but the truth," she said.
Leon leaned back slightly in his chair, turning the words over.
He’d heard talk like this before, plenty of times actually, scattered whispers passed between bored students during slow afternoons back at the academy.
Half-joking theories about Sysmus Grande secretly being some hidden villain, a shadowy architect pulling strings behind the system’s creation for reasons nobody could ever quite explain.
He’d never taken any of it seriously. Stories like that always followed the same pattern. They were usually dramatic claims, vague implications, with nothing solid enough underneath them to actually hold weight once you pressed on it even slightly.
He’d grown up believing exactly what the academy taught instead.
Sysmus Grande built the system as a gift to humanity, a tool meant to help people survive against the dungeons and monsters that had begun appearing decades ago, back before players even existed as a recognized concept.
To Leon, it had always felt like the only explanation that actually made sense. Why else would something so essential to survival exist at all, freely available to anyone capable of awakening it?
He’d never questioned that reasoning. Not once. Not seriously, anyway.
"Where does he think all the information generated by the system goes?" the girl asked suddenly, cutting cleanly through his thoughts.
Leon blinked, caught slightly off guard by the sudden shift in direction. "What?"
"The system," she said, slower this time, as though repeating herself for someone who hadn’t quite kept up. "Every talent out there, skills, and attributes... even the notifications that pops up in front of your eyes. Where does all of that actually go?"
He considered the question seriously for a moment. It wasn’t something he’d ever really stopped to think about before, not beyond the basic explanation drilled into every academy student early in their training.
"It’s linked," he said. "Like a cloud. Every player’s system connects to the same network. Whenever something happens, a newly awakened talent, a new skill, anything, it gets uploaded automatically. That’s how it’s worked since the system was first created."
That much, at least, he was completely certain of. The cloud sat quietly at the foundation of everything, the invisible structure holding the entire system together.
Normally, guilds could retrieve a player’s details from this cloud, allowing them to check their attributes and know their power level.
However, they couldn’t check their skills of the items kept in their inventory, since those were more personal to the player.
This was how proper ranks could be assigned to players all over the world, with the exception of S-rank which wasn’t that simple.
Leon however, wasn’t in any guild, so no one had extracted his information from the system cloud.
Due to this, no one knew the truth about his talent and how he could extract legendary items.
Nonetheless, the cloud was, without question, one of the most essential parts of what made a player a player in the first place.
"And where does that cloud actually go?" she pressed.
Leon frowned slightly, genuinely searching for an answer and coming up with nothing solid.
"I don’t know," he admitted. "I never really thought about it beyond that."
Most players never did, honestly. The cloud simply existed, quiet and constant, running steadily in the background of everyone’s daily lives the same way the sun rose each morning without anyone stopping to question why.
Nobody sat around wondering where their own uploaded data physically ended up once the system finished processing it. It just worked, and that had always been enough.
"Where do you think it goes, then?" Leon asked, genuinely curious now despite himself.
The girl hesitated. Her mouth opened slightly, then closed again, as though she were quickly reconsidering whether she actually wanted to say the words sitting right there on the tip of her tongue.
"To the people who’ll destroy this world," she said finally, her voice dropping slightly as she said it, almost as if she expected someone might overhear.
Leon stared at her, waiting for something more. Some kind of explanation. Some detail that might make the statement sound like anything other than the exact kind of wild, baseless claim he’d already dismissed a hundred times over during his years at the academy.
Nothing came. She simply stood there, watching him carefully, clearly expecting him to take the words seriously despite how little context she’d actually given him to work with.
He couldn’t quite help himself. A short laugh slipped out before he could stop it, quiet but unmistakable in the hushed stillness of the library around them.
It sounded exactly like every other half-baked conspiracy he’d overheard growing up. Confidently stated without a single shred of actual proof attached to back it up.
The girl’s face flushed instantly, color rushing to her cheeks the moment his laugh reached her ears.
Whatever composure she’d managed to hold onto through the earlier embarrassment of being caught muttering clearly snapped apart the instant she registered his reaction.
"What’s so funny?" she demanded, her voice sharpening considerably.
Leon raised a hand slightly, though he made no real effort to smother the amusement still lingering at the corner of his mouth.
"Nothing," he said, though the tone betrayed him entirely.
"This is real," she snapped, cutting him off before he could add anything further. "These things are real. Not just some fantasy story you can sit there and laugh off."
Her hands had curled slightly at her sides, fingers pressing tight against her palms.
Whatever she believed, it was clear she believed it fully, with an intensity that didn’t match the usual half-hearted way most people repeated rumors they’d merely overheard secondhand and never actually examined for themselves.
Leon studied her carefully for a moment, his earlier amusement fading slightly as he took in the sheer conviction written across her face.
It didn’t prove anything on its own, conviction alone rarely did, plenty of people believed things passionately that turned out to be completely untrue.
But it was enough, at least, to make him reconsider brushing the conversation off entirely without giving it a second thought.
Still, something about the whole situation nagged quietly at the back of his mind. A random civilian standing in the middle of a public library, speaking with this much certainty about secret conspiracies tied to the very foundation of the system itself, wasn’t exactly the kind of person he expected to run into on an ordinary afternoon.
"Are you a player?" he asked, the question slipping out almost before he’d fully decided to ask it.
The reaction was immediate. The girl stiffened visibly, her shoulders drawing tight, her earlier sharp confidence faltering for just a moment before she caught herself.
Her eyes flicked briefly to the side, toward the nearest shelf, then back to him, the movement small but unmistakable.
"No," she said, the word catching slightly as it left her mouth. "I’m not."
Leon studied her for a moment, genuinely surprised by her answer.
Somehow, given how confidently she’d spoken about the system only moments earlier, the sharp certainty in her voice, the way she’d thrown around terms like cloud and network as though she used them daily, he’d half expected her to say yes without hesitation.
But to think she wasn’t even a player, yet went around believing conspiracy theories.
"You’re not a player?" he asked again, just to be sure he’d heard her correctly.
"No," she said, steadier this time, the earlier stumble from before smoothed over now that she’d had a moment to collect herself. "I already told you."
He nodded slowly, filing the detail away. It made her earlier claims about the system a little stranger in his mind, though not necessarily any less believable.
If anything, a non-player holding such strong, specific opinions about how the system actually functioned struck him as more unusual, not less.
"What’s your name?" he asked, deciding a proper introduction was overdue at this point.
She hesitated for a second, her eyes flicking briefly toward the book still resting on the table between them before settling back on his face. "Iris," she said finally.
"Adam," Leon replied, offering the false name easily, the same one he’d already given the old man back in Ratdale only hours earlier.
It came out smoothly now, natural enough that he barely had to think about it. One day into wearing this disguise, and already the lie felt like second nature.
Iris studied him for a long moment, her expression unreadable, as though weighing whether to actually trust the name at all.
Then, almost against her own better judgment, she reached out and pulled the empty chair across from him away from the table, settling into it slowly, her posture still carrying a faint stiffness that suggested she hadn’t fully decided whether this conversation was worth continuing.