The Martial Unity

“HAHAHA!” Kane laughed out loud. “They’re calling you the VOIDER. This shit is hilarious!”

Kane leaned forward, caressing his ribs as he laughed his heart out.

“Very funny, Kane,” Rui sighed with an amused smile as he let Kane engage in his typical teenage and juvenile humor. “I’m surprised I got an epithet at all. Seems that the gossip community for the dungeon and its adventurers has grown a lot over time.”

“Well, of course,” Kane shrugged. “I think you forget that we are naturally celebrities in this world, Rui.”

“…Perhaps,” Rui remarked. He didn’t particularly care about that, never had, and never would.

“Though, maybe slaughtering every single monster in a large town-sized area was a bit too much, if you didn’t wish to attract attention,” Kane chuckled.

That day the two of them successfully bypassed the monsters with Kane’s Void Step as planned and harvested all of the esoteric yields from the floor. Yet Rui had had Kane return from the dungeon while he decided to annihilate all the monsters anyway.

“I won’t get that many chances to hone my skill without being detected huge proportion of Martial Squires on the floor in the future,” Rui had told him back then. “I will push myself to kill all of them and gain more experience, you go back and book our rooms at a lowkey in the same way we did last time.”

Kane had tried to convince him otherwise, but Rui had been quite adamant. That day later, Rui returned, having killed all of them.

“Valuable experience is a valuable experience, Kane,” Rui informed them. “Right now we’re behind the frontier of the dungeon, but that will not always remain the case, I intend for us to be far ahead of the curve, and this experience will only be useful then. The floors get harder the deeper we go, don’t forget that.”

Kane nodded. Now that Rui had proven his competencies, Kane could only agree that he wasn’t in over his head, not that he had ever seen his friend be so. “Still, remind me why we didn’t pay the taxes. Are we thieves?”

“For now,” Rui straightforwardly admitted. “However, by the time we leave the Shionel Confederation, we will have given everybody what we owe them, and more. But we are contract violators for now.”

“…You do know what you’re doing, right?” Kane grumbled.

“Of course,” Rui chuckled. “Several merchants of the Merchant, all of whom are bigshots, are our competitors in the esoteric supplier industries. The merchants of the Shionel Merchant Guild have complete access to the data in the Shionel Adventurer Guild’s database. If we pay our taxes legally at the moment, they’ll instantly know who we are, looking at the tax registration data. That’s not good for us, because they’ll come at us guns blazing when we inevitably disrupt the market and hurt their businesses.”

“Didn’t you say that they would inevitably find out?” Kane peered at him suspiciously.

“I did,” Rui smiled. “I also said that I would need to ‘buy’ over some of ‘them’ to our sides with incentives and benefits like the map, did I not?”

“Right,” kane nodded, as he recalled Rui’s conversation. Frankly, the plan was so sophisticated that he often forgot parts and bits of it, and needed Rui to keep reminding him about it. “Well, how do you intend to go about this?”

“I intend to talk to the right people, or rather, the right person,” Rui replied casually.

“And who would that be?”

“The most powerful person in this nation, of course,” Rui replied. “Bradt Patrick. The guildmaster of the Shionel Merchant Guild, and the leader of the libertarian faction.”

“There are factions in the Shionel Confederation?” Kane frowned.

“There are factions everywhere, Kane,” Rui chuckled, shaking his head slightly. “It is fundamental to the human race to be divided on any and everything. Naturally, there will be power blocs struggling for power, with different visions, policies, and ideals regarding how things ought to be run in the country. The Libertarian Faction is one of them, and the leader of the faction is Bradt Patrick, he’s been the Guildmaster of the Shionel Merchant for quite some time now, and has been in the lead up until very recently.”

“You mean…” Kane’s eyes narrowed.

“The discovery and opening of the Shionel Dungeon,” Rui replied. “That is the variable that has shaken his dominant position.”

“How does that even work?” Kane frowned.

“It’s complicated, but the position of Guildmaster is earned through an internal election of the Shionel Merchant Guild,” Rui replied. “Thus in order to win the position, you need the most number of votes. This means you need to persuade the most number of voters, each of whom is a stakeholder and shareholder of the nation, each with their own businesses and conglomerates in the nation and out. Meaning that you need to demonstrate that giving you more power is beneficial to them. Do you know how Bradt Patrick managed to do that?”

“Not a clue,” Kane replied, bored.

“It was by tying up interests of the various groups in question with his own field of business, one which is absolutely central to the concept of business; distribution and transport.”

“You’re telling me the oh-so-mighty merchant Guildmaster of the Merchant Guild runs a measly distribution service?” Kane looked thoroughly unimpressed.

Rui sighed with a troubled expression. “Don’t look down on him. Distribution of goods and services from suppliers and service providers is a fundamentally necessary and important avenue of business. The Bradt Distribution Network is one of the most reliable, fastest, most efficient, and also the cheapest available services for the quality and reliability that it provides. Multi-national companies all over the east side of the continent have contracted the Bradt Distribution Network for serving as a very firm channel between their customers, clientele as well as the market in general, to a level that they could forget about achieving by themselves. He managed to tie up enough interests by leveraging his company to aid the stakeholders of the Shionel Merchant Guild, thereby buying their votes.”