NOVEL NEXT Chapter 515: A sudden thought.
After planning and orchestrating the construction of the teleportation array, Arthur was no longer needed at the site. The project had been properly delegated to Alfie's capable hands with full royal backing, allowing him to step away from direct oversight responsibilities.
So, he simply decided to leave the guild headquarters.
Arthur had been busying himself with recruitment campaigns, infrastructure projects, and strategic planning across multiple continents, deliberately maintaining a relentless pace that left no opportunity for idle contemplation. He understood his own psychology well enough to recognise that the moment he allowed himself to relax was the moment he would start obsessing over Charlotte's current medical procedure and the uncertainties surrounding her recovery.
I've recruited almost all of the neutral or allied S-rankers on Earth, Arthur thought to himself as he reviewed his recent achievements. There aren't many left, unless they are newly awakened and currently hidden from intelligence networks.
His approach to building a global network had been remarkably successful, securing alliances with individuals whose combined capabilities would reshape humanity's response to the dimensional crisis. The Power Guild now represented the most formidable organisation in human history through the simple carrot and stick method, albeit Arthur barely had to use the stick.
The reason Arthur wasn't actively seeking Earth's rumoured SS-ranker was that he genuinely believed that his sister Charlotte held that distinction. Everything about her condition, her mysterious talent, and the way her body struggled with mana before Armageddon made perfect sense when viewed through the lens of unprecedented power.
If he had possessed the choice to make Charlotte a normal person before Armageddon's appearance, Arthur would have done so without hesitation. Being Earth's champion had brought nothing but misery to her life—separation from her family, medical complications that threatened her survival, and the fact that she would be forced to keep hunting for the rest of her life.
Arthur found himself questioning how different his life trajectory would have been if Charlotte had awakened as a normal, manageable talent like everyone else. The complications arising from her unique condition had contributed significantly to their eventual capture and separation. Without such extraordinary circumstances drawing attention, they might have remained safely anonymous within the general population of awakened individuals.
He wouldn't have been caught so easily, after all.
But as Arthur thought more deeply about the circumstances surrounding their capture, he began recognizing inconsistencies that had troubled his subconscious for months without receiving proper attention due to complications that kept arising.
Something felt fundamentally wrong about the way he had been identified and apprehended by American military forces.
Certainly, Armageddon's system restrictions prevented players from altering their facial structures through conventional means, which had massively contributed to Adam's ability to recognize them, which led to the hospital encounter with Donald. But even accounting for those limitations, the sequence of events contained elements that defied reasonable probability.
The logistics alone seemed improbable when considered carefully. There were hundreds of countries participating in the dimensional crisis, with ten million beta players distributed globally across every continent and major population center. The statistical probability of the person responsible for investigating his identity being located within rapid response distance of Detroit was incredibly slim.
The government's facial recognition systems are powerful, certainly, but they can't operate effectively from rough sketches or partial descriptions, Arthur reasoned with growing suspicion about the efficiency of his capture.
Government surveillance technology was advanced, but it wasn't magical. Identifying specific individuals with no visual data across global databases required more precise information than Adam could have provided during his initial report.
At most, Adam would have been able to provide a sketch of him. Other than that, Arthur couldn't think of anything that the lieutenant would have been able to use to identify him.
After considering the anomalies for several minutes, Arthur decided to cease his analysis. While he might have been betrayed by someone with access to his location or identity, the fact remained that determining the source of such betrayal would be extraordinarily difficult given the time that had passed and the complexity of the circumstances involved.
Wait... maybe it was someone at the hospital itself, Arthur reconsidered as a new possibility occurred to him. But why would hospital staff report me to military authorities? What motivation could they have had?
The thought carried disturbing implications about the nature of surveillance during the early stages of the dimensional crisis. Had hospitals been instructed to monitor and report unusual cases involving awakened individuals? Were medical facilities serving as intelligence-gathering points for government agencies?
Back then, I was nothing but a scruffy orphan from the slums, Arthur reflected with bitter irony. A slum rat, as they say. That could have been a factor that made me someone to report. After all, I was paying for my sister's treatment whilst clearly having no money to eat.
The fact that his presence could have been reported to the military suggested that there was pre-existing surveillance protocols specifically designed to identify and track awakened individuals through medical system interactions.
Of course, these were mere assumptions that Arthur was having and building upon. It wasn't based on facts or any evidence that he had extracted from anybody who was involved.
Arthur's frown deepened as he considered how many other families might have been separated through similar identification and extraction procedures disguised as medical intervention or protective custody.
Just the thought of being betrayed by hospital staff was deeply frustrating and genuinely infuriating to Arthur. The violation of trust during Charlotte's most vulnerable moment—when she had needed medical care and he had needed to focus entirely on her welfare—represented exactly the kind of betrayal that fueled his growing hatred for those who had orchestrated their separation.
Understanding the specific mechanism of his identification might provide insights valuable for his revenge against those responsible for destroying his family's peace and security. He didn't want a single person involved in the separation and deterioration of his sister's health to be left without punishment.
Arthur ground his teeth and clenched his fists as fury built in his mind, the emotional intensity reminding him exactly why he had dedicated time to the retribution against those who had wronged them.