1825 Happened To Cross Elder Avan, it suddenly all slipped into place. After the Skies family was betrayed, they immediately concluded that someone must have betrayed them. How were they the only ones to suffer while the Viola and Chaotic Water Sect had gotten off free? Something felt fishy to them. However, they had no evidence so they could only roar out in displeasure and rescind their allyship. This was the best they could do. After this, the Viola family realized that it needed to change tactics and chose to conquer the Rain Galaxy swiftly. This was a Galaxy right adjacent to the Milky Way, it was both not too close, and also not too far from the Ascension Empire. It was the perfect launching pad for war. Not knowing that the Chaotic Water Sector had already placed its pawns in the Rain Galaxy, the Viola family attacked swiftly, eradicating them before they could react. At the same time, the Rain Galaxy probably allowed it to happen, thinking that it was part of the plan until it was way too late. In their panic, they sent out help signals, help signals, of which some were intercepted by the Viola family. There was trouble here, though. The Viola family had designed their signal catching net to deal with technology of the Human Domain, but they had no idea how to counter and trap the Force Arts of the Cloud Race. Only Shield Cross Stars and the Void Palace were well informed enough about the technological advances of the other races that they could be confident in snagging all of these signals. Due to this mix up, the Viola family foolishly believed that they had caught all of the signals, having no idea that they weren't dealing with humans, but were rather dealing with Cloud Race technicians. But this was where Shield Cross Stars shot itself in the foot. At the same time that the Viola family was gathering information, so too was Shield Cross Stars gathering information, using far more sophisticated methods. But as the Viola family was intercepting messages, it snagged some of Shield Cross Stars' signals. When the Viola family Force Artists were decoding these messages, they obviously had no ability to decode the Cloud Race Force Arts, so they instead ended up decoding the Force Arts of Shield Cross Stars instead! The network of Shield Cross Stars was well encrypted, but that was only in house. All of the encryption was completed on the back end, but why would they be worried about encryption when they were in the process of intercepting the signals of others? In an irony of ironies, Shield Cross Stars had ended up opening itself up to a breach while trying to breach others, leading the "locations" the Viola family decoded not being the location of the Cloud Race members like they should have, but instead the locations of the Shield Cross Stars stations! The Viola family thought that it was targeting the remnants of the Rain family, or more accurately, what remained of its lingering attachments to the Chaotic Water Sector. They had wanted to maintain decorum with the Sector, so they chose to attack anyway despite knowing that it was likely related to their people, and to their surprise, they actually found people... not realizing that they had never been attacking the Chaotic Water Sector to begin with. It was a shit show, a complete shit show. However, even so, Cross Elder Avan was raring to go. Through this coincidence, they had actually weeded out such a large base of the Cloud Race. Under normal circumstances, Shield Cross Stars might choose to bide their time and wait, seeing if more of the Cloud Race would expose themselves. But the humiliation caused by the escape of ""Zulgella", "Urrith" and "Winword" had caused a huge blow to the prestige of Shield Cross Stars in the eyes of the people. Shield Cross Stars needed a big win, and they needed one now. In fact, Cross Elder Avan moved out personally, wanting to vent some frustration himself as well. Plus, this way, he could absolutely guarantee that there would be no more escapes. He was still entirely oblivious to the fingers pulling at his puppet strings from the shadows. *k In recent days, Graros had been feeling somewhat anxious. He had reacted to every situation perfectly, and yet things still felt like they were slowly getting out of his control. First it was the failure of the sneak attack to begin with. He should be in the process of conquering the next half of Earth's territory after having already stormed through claiming the first 50% in just a single day, but that had failed. The second was the attack on the Rain Galaxy. Although he had nonchalantly allowed the Viola family to take it, he had been carefully rearing that piece for decades already. In fact, his intentions went so far back that he was even part of the first assault on Earth after it entered the Fifth Dimension. While he used the Rain family and those other galaxies as a cover, he had moved quite a number of pieces in the Milky Way to buy time for the penultimate moment. But the straw that almost broke the camel's back was the Viola family's swift attack on "their" branches. The Viola had attacked seemingly random places, places that Graros couldn't wran hic head arniind whv thew wanld attack Rut he alen canldn't ack the Vinla familv ahant it hecance then it wnnld make it ahvinne that he knew which nlacec thew chanld have heen attacking instead. Although he had lost exactly zero men to those attacks, they left him more uneasy than anything else had. It felt like a shadow was slowly wrapping around his neck and he had no idea what to do about it. The pressure had reached its peak today. His face was entirely drained of blood and he was even finding it difficult to maintain his human form. Sometimes, he found himself almost slipping back to his Cloud Figure. And then, it happened. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! All across the Chaotic Water Sector, the vicious sounds of battle erupted. Shield Cross Star moved with an unquenchable momentum, crushing everything in its path.