‘I never thought you will be this sensible.’ Queen Alfreda smiled as she eyed King Arthur, ‘I might have misjudged you.’
‘I am just doing what any of you would have done.’ King Arthur answered.
Everyone glanced at each other before agreeing fervently to his statement, knowing damn well that none of them would be as accepting as him.
‘He even tried to guilt-trip them.’ Felix was left speechless.
They might not show it, but Felix knew that King Arthur had caused them to feel a bit of guilt for his situation.
Naturally, Elder Dragon, High Chieftain Lokaka, and the Empresses couldn’t care less, but the others were affected.
This was going to help King Arthur big time.
‘How about we make our decision now?’ King Arthur suggested, ‘I believe most of us in favor of the deal, so there is no need to prolong this and cause more chaos in our cities to arise needlessly.’
‘I agree.’
‘Likewise.’
‘My thoughts exactly.’
As expected, the majority wanted to finalize the deal right now not because of the reasons stated by him…But, because they believed that King Arthur might have a change of mind if they gave him more time to think about it!
They had no clue that King Arthur, Candace, and Felix were hoping for them to accept their deal as quickly as possible before they get exposed!
Felix wasn’t delusional enough to believe that the Darkin faction primogenitors would keep their Intel about the war to themselves.
However, since they couldn’t interfere in mortally matters at all, they weren’t able to rat on Felix to the ten rulers.
They were bound to be found out by the rest of the primogenitors when their descendants would come to ask for their confirmation.
This would shatter their already broken reputation in the primogenitors’ council.
Felix knew that the only method for them to be helpful was if their descendants released the information to the ten rulers, and they backed it up.
Unfortunately, Felix had taken down all the authoritative figures and pressure the others so hard with the invasion, they wouldn’t have time to even scratch their ass!
That’s why Meriam, Mammon, and a couple of Annihilation Fiends were doing their very best to keep gremlins king Tyrdag from touching his AP bracelet!
‘How distasteful.’ Elder Dragon sneered coldly, ‘Why bother have such an alliance if we will roll over at the first enemy we meet.’
‘We have no time to garner to your wounded pride or repeat our reasons for taking this deal.’ Queen Alfreda asserted calmly, ‘Voice your vote and beat it.’
Elder Dragon might be the strongest in the alliance and considered as the big boss by the public, but in this council? No one really feared him or respected him with the authority of having two votes.
After all, he couldn’t even care about his own race when his pride was on the line, why would he care about other races?
So, most of the decisions he made were always on the selfish side.
Fortunately, even though he was the only one with two votes, the others were rational to always take the smartest decision for the benefit of the entire alliance as a whole.
Nine votes always beats two.
‘Tsk, if this is the path you chose, then keep me out of this nonsense.’ Elder Dragon huffed in displeasure and logged off instantly, not bothering to even voice his votes.
“What’s his issue?” Candace titled her head in confusion at his early departure.
“Don’t mind him.” Queen Allura informed, “We have come a decision to accept your deal.”
“You have made the right decision.” Candace smiled.
Since only High Chieftain Lokaka and Elder Dragon opposed to this deal, there was no need to start a voting process.
As for the tenth unknown ruling power? Since they weren’t participating in this meeting, their voting was voided and could be ignored…The same applied if one would rather not vote.
It was done like this, so no one would be holding major decisions’ hostage by not voting.
“However, we still would like to iron some details before making it official.” Queen Alfreda stated.
“Of course.”
“As starters, we would like to have no part in this war…So, you have to keep your forces attacking us to make a strong case that we can’t provide assistance to our members.” Queen Alfreda disclosed cunningly.
Since only the inner circle of the alliance were forced to provide military assistance to other members, the only way to bypass this rule was by being attacked as well.
It didn’t matter if just one planet or hundreds were attacked…The rule book stated clearly that reinforcement must be provided only when their own safety wasn’t endangered.
In fact, just the threat of releasing void creatures in their cities could be used to make a strong case to avoid helping the Darkin faction.
‘Looks like they want us to keep attacking from space to put a display to save some face water while at the same time reducing our voidlings at a steady pace.’ Felix narrowed his eyes, ‘How cunning.’
Felix knew that this condition was going to be a major pain in the ass since they would be forced to keep releasing voidlings on thirty races!!
This would in turn make it more difficult to prolong this war since their forces would be exhausted at a rapid pace!
Felix understood as well that the alliance would be the ones winning from this condition whether the war ended quickly or not.
But, he could only agree to it since he had to give them something in those negotiations.
If he didn’t want the negotiations to go smoothly, he would have reduced the deadline to merely an hour, this would force the alliance to take the drastic decision of going to war regardless of what.
‘Candace, agree to their term.’
“We will do our best to put a good show for your people.” Candace answered.
“Good, we also want you to retract your threat without involving our deal for now.” Queen Alfreda added.
People might be smart enough to figure out by themselves that the alliance must have made a deal with the Void Nation, but the alliance would never admit it outright.
“We are fine with that as well.”
“One last crucial detail.” Queen Alfreda narrowed her eyes, “Leave the civilians of your enemies outside the war.”
“Aren’t you asking too much of us?” Candace stated indifferently, “This is still a war, and we will use any measures available to win it. If they wanted to use their civilians as shields, they will leave us with no choice but to act upon it.”
Felix knew that there was limit to how much merciful you could be in wars.
For example, allowing the civilians five days to evacuate was his limit…If the Darkin faction refused to allow their own people to evacuate, that wasn’t his problem.
The rulers could see that Candace wasn’t planning to budge on this condition.
‘We already gave up on them, we have no right to interfere in their lives anymore.’ King Arthur pressured, ‘So, let’s not act like we are some self-righteous white knights and just sign the damn deal.’
This was the last nail in the coffin…No one dared to disagree with him, knowing that they would appear as nothing more than hypocrites.
After all, they couldn’t throw their people to the wolves and tell the wolves how to eat them…
So, they could only drop this condition and voice their final approval of the deal.
“Great, how do you like to proceed?” Candace inquired.
“Since we can’t be signing any major contracts with an outsider without including the entire inner circle in the decision, how about we take ancestral oaths for a temporal deal?” Queen Allura suggested.
“It will work on us, but how can we trust that it will work on them? We aren’t even addressing the real leader.” High Chieftain Lokaka grumbled.
“You’re really delusional if you thought that we will break an oath we make on the primogenitors’ names.” Candace sneered, “If it wasn’t for our respect to them, we wouldn’t have allowed you to to create this alliance in the first place.”
This was quite true since the void race exited even before the foundation of the alliance.
If it wasn’t for them fearing and respecting the primogenitors, they would have already owned the universe and everyone on it eons ago.
“I guess we can concede that to you, but what about your leader?” Queen Alfreda stressed, “We aren’t going with this deal unless he took the oath before us.”
“We thought you will say that.” Candace smiled and displayed a premade video, showing a humaniod dark misty figure with merely three purplish eyes on his face.
With a sonorous voice that seemed to have come from the depth of an abyss, the figure made a bold statement, “I swear on the names of the primogenitors that as the king of the Void Nation to accept the agreed upon conditions of the deal between my nation and the alliance until we sign a contract to join forces for good.”
The moment he finished with the oath, the prerecorded video stopped playing.
“Your turn.” Candace smiled charmingly.
