Salem was left with a very large problem thanks to leon's movement into the other kingdoms. as much as she wanted to avoid getting on his bad side it was clear to her that if she doesn't start making moves herself leon might very well unite the entire world under him. this was obviously not good for her since thanks to the argument she had with ozma when he betrayed her she knew of the condition the god of light stipulated for the twin gods return. basically the requirement was for all of humanity to work in harmony with each other.
If all four of the divine artifacts were brought together and this condition was met then the gods would descend to live amongst the people again. to any normal person this sounded like a good thing but salem hated the gods with every fiber of her being so she wanted to keep them out of remnant permanently. even an idiot could tell that leon's actions had the potential to bring humanity together under one roof. to counter act this possibility salem knew she needed to step on leons toes a bit.
She sent her most powerful creation to date to attack atlas and effectively ruin leon's hard work in reforming it. monstra was a massive grim that salem slowly grow over her extremely long life after ozma's betrayal specifically to flood the kingdoms he was so proud of with a never ending horde. though to be fair to leon , salem was planning to sack the kingdom anyways but his actions merely pushed that plan forward. salem had also discovered a very big problem recently when her people reported on finding the artifact chamber under beacon empty. the migration of the grim in the area to other locations verified the fact that the artifact had been moved recently as well.
The biggest problem with this new information was that ozma had long since left the area by the estimated time of the artifacts movement and the lack of aura for it in vale also meant leon didn't take it. this meant that someone had snatched up the artifact and now she had literally no clue as to it's whereabouts anymore. as much as she hated ozma for what she has suffered because of him she could at least acknowledge that he was smart to place each artifact under heavy protection in each of the original kingdoms.
Now that there was an artifact unaccounted for in the wild salem now had a chance to snatch it for herself without a huge amount of preparation. if she could get whatever the artifact was as well as the one in atlas salem would effectively own half of the full set. with this in mind she sent out monstra as well as one of her less used creations that she called scout's which were tiny and weak avian grim the size of mice that's only redeeming feature was their extremely fast flight speed.
Grim were naturally drawn to the aura of the artifacts and by using a whole swarm of scout's salem could scour the entire world in a short order to find the missing artifact. the last time salem used these grim was when she initially started to race against ozma to snatch them up. leon noticed the fast moving tiny grim almost immediately as the swarm started out their search at the now abandoned lake before spreading out. even after exerting himself in order to catch one for examination he didn't learn much from the thing besides the fact that they were fast as fuck.
The only thing leon had ever seen that was faster was himself using his hell flame to propel him forward which should explain how stupid quick they were. leon needed to use his rakurai in order to capture one of them instead of chasing it futilely due to it's ability to make sharp hard turn on a dime at that extreme speed. leon could only chalk that particular feat to the fact grim don't actually have organs in the traditional sense and as a result didn't need to worry about the g's crushing them.
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