"Let's wrap this up, we shall be receiving guests soon." Taking all the mercenaries and alchemists to their temporary cells within his airship, Rick took some of his crew to inspect some of their findings.
"Lord Jupiter, we've arrested twenty-five members of the alchemist guild, three silver-rank explorers, one gold-rank fighter and forty mercenaries as well as their advanced elemental weapons." A member of the crew read the report of the situation while Rick passed through the base. After inspecting the whole installation, not only there were signs of most tools and large objects being removed some time before, even their archives were deleted.
"They knew we were coming. Most probably, these people are just the low-graded subordinates, leaving only those without any memory about what they were working on just like the others we caught before. Send the report to the guardians, I suppose the party is about to start." Until now, they have invaded and arrested hundreds of people, yet they were still kept in the dark. It was common sense that some real expert would have appeared by now, but it was only his guess. If he was right, then they would start moving really soon.
One hour later, a large airship, a modificated model owned by the guardians landed next to the base and numerous agents started leaving the ship one after the other before two figures slowly walked. A man in white coat and a blue-haired young female wearing a white mask.
When Rick spot them, his lips raised within the mask while both the man and the female nodded with their heads before they lead him to a private room on the bigger airship.
"Big bro Rick." Artemis sat beside Ares and gave a light smile to him. Rick scratched his head when seeing this new awkward air around her like a proper girl in her teens. Thinking how much she matured on the past months, he showed a light smile when trying to remember how she acted like a big brat when they first met.
"How are the matter back in Eden?" The air suddenly grew colder as they started to talk about some serious issues. Ares and Artemis had been pretty busy the last few months with lots of work.
"Like you said, the entire flame union departed from the guild together with a few other elemental masters and vanished from Eden by the time we sent the police force to arrest them for treason." Then Ares spent the next hour explaining all the political changes on Eden and how things had become much more tense over there. Most of the really powerful beasts also were nowhere to be seen, with even king-level beasts leaving they territories behind. This was being kept secret from the people at the moment in order to not make things worse.
In terms of forces, just the beasts alone had more than thirty times the numbers of experts and some of them can even spread faster than any human like the rat, rabbit and ant-type beasts. Even the true protector of Eden, Sky, could not protect the island if those beasts had a way of crossing the ocean.
There was also the king of the oceans, the water beast god. Then only neutral beasts that do not participated in the war between humans and beasts. When they finished talking about the matters in the island, Rick turned to Artemis who slowly turned red from his constant glare. Since the three of them were alone, they removed their masks and Rick was still startled by how more beautiful she became in a short span of a few months. He knew that this change was brought by her breakthrough to the third stage four weeks ago, the wind element around her gained a new aura of life and faint green light could be seen in the corners of her eyes.
"I'm going to see what we've found in their research facility while the two younglings can chat alone for a while." Rick turned his eyes to Ares only to see the latter looking at him with a evil glint full of hidden intentions. Only he knew how Ares and the others were trying to bring him and Artemis closer, something he didn't have a interest at the moment, but how could he simply reject her?
Suddenly both him and Ares who was leaving the room turned stare upwards with grave expressions, Artemis soon noticed the same thing and the light in her eyes grew dense. With his energy vision, three huge sources of energy, two red and one green quickly approached their location from above just before they heard screams of loud explosion from outside. Together, him and Ares reached the same conclusion as they rushed to the source of the light.
"Elemental Kings!"