The effects of one thousand Martial Squires dying was not small, and it rippled across the entirety of the Shionel Confederation.
Even as the elections arrived, Chairman Deacon spent his days placating the voters that he had already bought, doing everything he could in his power.
In order to not lose many of the most disaffected allies by his side, he needed to bleed capital, truly draining himself to keep them from denouncing supporting him.
However, he wasn't entirely successful, the number of allies on his side, both domestic and international, that had denounced was not insignificant.
Even if many of them weren't merchants who could vote, he had used their capital to buy many other voters.
For example, he used the support of many foreign and international nations to get better deals for entire sectors of merchants in the Shionel Confederation in exchange for their votes. Now, some of those deals were compromised by the national stakeholders withdrawing their support.
He desperately tried to fix all his problems by throwing more money and capital at them, while also compromising more and making even more promises to disgruntled voters.
Eventually, the three days of voting came to an end, and the votes were counted by the electoral committee of the Shionel Merchant Guild before the results were eventually announced and published.
[#1: Bradt Patrick: 428695 votes.
#2: Deacon Vernes: 427989 votes.
…]
Guildmaster Bradt had just barely managed to secure a win!
The part that shocked and excited everyone was how close Guildmaster Bradt and Chairman Deacon were, the former was less than one thousand votes ahead of the latter!
Although the layman didn't understand what that meant, those who possessed greater access to information and greater insight realized what this meant.
Chairman Deacon may very well have won if not for the massacre of the one thousand Martial Squires associated with Deacon Industries.
Of course, this wasn't the only factor. Guildmaster Bradt had exposed a trump card shortly prior to the elections. The trump card that he had been saving for quite some time.
The announcement of a single Shionel Dungeon map that covered the entire Shionel Dungeon had impressed the entire nation. But it was the merchants who were most shocked by this announcement from the Bradt Distribution Service.
The many clever merchants of the Shionel Merchant Guild had understood what the announcement meant.
It was Guildmaster Bradt fighting back with a well-prepared trump card to counter all of the titanic support that Chairman Bradt had amassed. It was just as powerful as a bargaining chip as the crushing of the Voider.
Rui had inadvertently become the core of both Chairman Deacon and Guildmaster Bradt's campaigning trump cards!
The map that he had almost fully completed for Guildmaster Bradt had served as a riveting turnaround that bought back much of the support that Chairman Deacon had stolen from him.
That, in combination, with the devastating loss that Chairman Deacon had suffered had tipped the balance, allowing Guildmaster Bradt to narrowly edge out a victory.
THUD
"DAMN IT!!!" Chairman Deacon struck his fists on his table as he continued banging them. "GOD DAMN IT ALL!!!!!"
He screeched, venting all of the emotions that he had bottled up recently. He clutched his hair as he breathed hard, and unsteadily. His eyes were bloodshot, and there were dark bags under his eyes. He felt as though he was going to break, mentally, even if not physically.
All the effort that he had put in the last two years had been in vain. Not only had they been in vain, but they were also detrimental since he had truly gone out on a limb with the measures that he had taken to win the elections.
It meant that he was in quite the low, lower than he had been in the past ten years. He felt as though his heart was literally burning with the death of his son, and now the death of his ambitions to become guildmaster.
"Sir!" His secretary walked in.
He didn't even deign to respond.
"Sir I just received a report from the analytics team that you put into investigating the Voider based on the intelligence that Squire Yuna provided," She told him.
That earned his attention.
His hatred for the Voider had not waned.
No.
It had only grown.
"What is it?" He growled with narrow sharp eyes.
"The prevailing hypothesis was that the Voider was a Martial Senior capable of hiding his power, thus not triggering the alarms of the Shionel Dungeon, and thus being the sole Martial Senior capable of exploring the Shionel Dungeon. It would explain the sheer amount of success and dominance that the Voider has displayed in the Shionel Dungeon, and many other oddities."
Chairman Deacon had also come to suspect that the Voider was a Martial Senior when Squire Yuna described a Senior level aura of a Martial Artist assaulting her, it would explain how the Voider could handle one thousand roots that wiped away one thousand Martial Squires by his lone self.
It made taking him down much harder. Martial Seniors were not disposable, deploying them for anything that needed to be done after careful consideration. Killing a Martial Senior was an extremely risky and taxing mission. He either needed to commit a painfully costly amount of militaristic capital or deploy other Martial Seniors, which could not be done lightly for a smaller nation like the Shionel Confederation.
"However, the analytics team has come up with an alternative possibility, and this possibility has been deemed to be of a remarkably high probability," She reported.
"What is it?" He furrowed his eyebrows.
His secretary pulled out a document, placing it on his table wordlessly. Chairman Deacon frowned at the solemn air that had taken hold as he reached for the document, opening and reading it.
His eyes widened in time as he read through the analysis and report carefully, his hands quivered in shock as he swept through the pages of the report one by one.
"Rui… Quarrier?"
