Dimensional Descent

The first hour came to an end and it seemed that there was absolutely nothing they could do against Leonel. In fact, many were scared to engage with him at all, worrying that if they did so, he would veer the conversation back in a direction that they didn’t want it to go.

Leonel hadn’t gotten the case slammed shut victory he wanted, after all, he hadn’t been able to force them to admit to what they had done, but that was fine. He never really expected to. Things had gone pretty much exactly how he had expected them to.

A large part of why he had been able to be successful, though, was thanks to Aina. Thanks to her, he could use the Life Tablet even under the suppression, and as such, he could understand things on a deeper level.

Of course, these things weren’t related to the actual debate, but rather how far he could push the pillars themselves.

It was very important to his goals that he could bend the conversations in the direction he wanted, but doing it too much or to too great of an extent could backfire on him instead.

He couldn’t just hop into a conversation about fire and make it about water, or else he would get dinged for it. He had to make them at least tangentially related.

It seemed that the Celestia and the others knew this as well, which was why they veered the conversation away from Leonel and made it purely about the Convergences, which was what started all of this to begin with.

After another hour passed, Leonel was still firmly in the lead, with Talon and Somnus, as well as Celestia and Verma, having gained three points each. The rest of the top ten had best one point each, and there was a clear gap between them and everyone else.

By the time the third hour had passed, they had closed it in by another three for a total of six points, while Aerin and Lyra had managed to move up to a cumulative total of four, placing them in fourth place ahead of Orion and Lumina.

It seemed that Orion and Lumina were having their own struggles. They clearly didn’t trust one another, and that made working together a nightmare. Sometimes they would even contradict one another, and because they were coming from the same pillar, that was registered as an immediate loss.

Obviously, they had only come together because they felt their individual statuses were too high to go with others, and too low to match with the Demi-Gods. But ironically, this had come back to bite them.

By the end of the fourth hour, the two Demi-God groups were only behind Leonel by a single point, while Aerin and Lyra were just three points behind. They were clearly the shocking dark horses of this event, and Leonel found himself being quite impressed by them, especially Aerin. He was very sharp and he only jumped into battles he was certain to win. At this point, he was the only one aside from Leonel who had yet to lose a single debate.

Though, that was a bit of a biased recollection of events considering the only reason the Demi-God groups had lost was because of Leonel.

As the fifth hour was coming underway, it seemed all too obvious that Leonel would fall out of his first place position.

In the eyes of the participants, Leonel had only been able to claim so many points by arguing about things entirely unrelated to Crafting, so it only made sense that he wouldn’t be able to hang in when the conversation was veered away entirely from what he was best at.

This helped many of them to relax. Leonel wasn’t some behemoth they couldn’t take down, he was very manageable so long as they stayed within the Realms of Crafting.

Soon, he wouldn’t have a superior score to them and they could finally challenge him without worrying about his muting powers.

“… I would have to say, then, that the fourth Convergence would have to be related to the Regulator or Regulators. If my position is taken to be the correct one, wherein the Point of Dimension is variable, the Point of Life is the Second Dimension and the Point of Creation is the Third, then there still needs to exist an anchor for the First Dimension, or else there is no real impetus for creation at all.”

After Celestia finished speaking those words lightly, Lumina and Orion could only bow out in defeat.

At this point, the two were trying to argue that there was no need for a Fourth Convergence at all as the Point of Dimension was exactly the representation of the First Dimension that Celestia was looking for. Unfortunately, they have inevitably failed.

Like this, Celestia gained another point, gaining an equivalent point total to Leonel. And right then, for the first time in hours, she looked toward him, a light of pride in her eyes.

However, once again, she found a smiling Leonel. No, it was more accurate to say that he was grinning.

All this while, he had just been flirting with his wife. That much was obvious by the way Aina smiled from time to time even with her eyes closed.

However, he suddenly looked active again.

“Finally caught up?” Leonel asked with a smile.

Celestia didn’t take the bait. In fact, she wanted to ignore Leonel entirely. Getting into the mud with him would just give him another opportunity to sling some more at her. She wouldn’t allow that.

She opened her mouth, ready to move on as though she hadn’t heard him, but she didn’t expect Leonel to continue first.

“Since the kiddies are done fooling around, I guess I should finally give my stance, hm? Simply put, you’re all wrong.

“The Point of Life is the Second Dimension. The Point of Creation is the First Dimension. The Point of Dimension is indeed variable… if you want to describe it in such layman’s terms. In reality what it represents is the Seed of Growth and potential.

“Not that any of that matters, considering even Lythariel was wrong anyway.”

“That… is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.”

In the end, Celestia couldn’t help herself.