Chapter 74: Ready
Bianca broke down the main Breaker guilds like this:
The Noble Ascendancy were born and bred as Breakers. Elitists to the core, they trained like maniacs and believed it was their sacred duty to save humanity. They made up the top 1% in talent, gear, and wealth—each strong enough to solo a dungeon.
The Bloodright of Conquest came next. Mostly middle-class, these were the people who chose to fight for various reasons. They could quit anytime, and their strength varied wildly. They were the ones who actually used the Breaker Ranking System.
Lastly, there was the Truthsong Church—once made up of virtuous folk running orphanages and public schools. When the dungeons appeared, those institutions became recruitment hubs for Crusaders. Now, most of the poor belonged to this faction.
Together, the three formed a delicate balance of power. In politics, business, or government, what mattered wasn’t your nation, race, or faith—it was your guild allegiance.
And while you’d expect them to hate each other’s guts, they didn’t. They simply used one another to handle the problems they didn’t care to solve.
Right now, Elian and his party were headed to the Flame Swallow Dungeon—another site the Church used to raise Crusaders, and one Bastion had visited personally.
It shocked him to learn the Church had subjugated both Wolves and Swallows—turning them into livestock to fuel their war machine.
I didn’t even know that eating monster meat would increase one’s base mana. No wonder it costs as much as a house.
From that standpoint it made total sense that closing both dungeons would hurt the church. Without a steady supply of monster meat, the weak orphans they take in cannot be raised to become the next generation of crusaders.
The fatality statistics Bianca showed me last night were horrifying. Only one in three Crusaders survived their first deployment. And this was them fighting in only Dungeons the Church controlled.