"Right, the Bingens are making poison for us to use," said Valentina, a smile spreading across her face like she had just won the lottery. "So that can help us deal with the frankly incredible amount of people we have been commissioned to kill."
She looked down at the list again, and her smile only grew wider.
The list was genuinely incredible.
There were so many names on it that even the Assassin Family, a family that had spent generations dealing with people who needed to disappear, found the sheer number somewhat ridiculous. Gaia had given them the task because she could not deal with the corrupted humans in the same way that she dealt with ordinary corrupted creatures when they emerged from a secret realm. The difference was not that Gaia lacked the power to kill them, but rather that killing too many corrupted beings herself carried a risk that she simply could not justify taking.
The problem was the Void.
If Gaia killed too many corrupted animals or corrupted humans directly, the Void could potentially obtain the special coordinates associated with her unique soul and mana signature. Once the Void obtained those coordinates, the situation could become considerably worse. Gaia would then have to ask the universe itself for assistance in getting rid of the mark that had been placed on her, and that was something she desperately wanted to avoid.
It would be stupidly expensive.
Gaia had no desire to spend an absurd amount of energy and resources fixing a problem that she could simply avoid creating in the first place. She could kill the corrupted humans herself, and from Gaia's perspective, most of them were not particularly powerful. The problem was that there were simply too many of them. Even a tiny risk became unacceptable when repeated across an absurd number of targets.
There was another problem as well.
If corrupted creatures or corrupted humans managed to kill enough humans in a single location, they could create a portal from outside their universe to Earth. Such a portal was dangerous, but it worked differently from what would happen if the Void managed to properly mark Gaia's soul. The distinction was extremely important because a portal created through the deaths of enough humans could be closed.
Once that portal was closed, the outsiders would lose their connection to Earth's location.
The reason for that was surprisingly simple when viewed from Gaia's perspective. The entire universe was constantly moving everything contained within its domain. Earth was not sitting at one fixed coordinate in an otherwise stationary space. The universe itself was moving, and everything inside it moved along with it. Because of that, an outside entity that managed to enter through a portal could not simply remember the location and open another portal to the exact same place later.
By the time they tried, the location would already be gone.
They would instead end up in the vacuum of space.
Anything that was capable of passing through those portals but could not survive the vacuum would simply die there. The universe itself also paid attention to intruders beyond a certain level of strength. It would either destroy them or prevent them from breaching its walls in the first place.
That was why Gaia considered a conventional portal considerably less frightening than allowing the Void to obtain a proper mark on her soul.
The latter was personal.
The former was temporary.
Because of that, Gaia had asked the Assassin Family to kill all the corrupted humans on her hit list. She did not want to take the risk of directly contaminating herself by dealing with every single one of them. Even if the probability of something going wrong was incredibly small, spreading that risk across such an absurd number of people made the calculation change completely.
And there was another factor.
Gaia had to invest far too much energy into directly killing corrupted humans.
It was not that she could not do it. She absolutely could. The problem was that doing so personally was simply inefficient when she had another option available. Gaia had better things to spend her energy and attention on than personally eliminating thousands upon thousands of corrupted humans scattered around the world.
The situation was somewhat like a human needing to deal with an ant.
If there was one ant sitting on the floor, you could easily step on it and move on with your day. Even a few ants would not be particularly troublesome. But if there were roughly 27,647 ants crawling around your house, the equation became completely different.
At that point, you would probably call an exterminator.
Yes, the exterminator would cost money, and technically you could kill every ant yourself if you were willing to spend enough time doing it. But that would be ridiculous when there was a simple solution available that could eliminate the entire problem. It might take a little longer, but it would save you the effort and let you spend your time doing something more important.
Gaia's situation was essentially the same.
She only needed to teleport the Assassin Family to a nearby location where their target was located. After that, the Assassin Family could take care of everything themselves. Gaia did not need to personally intervene, spend enormous amounts of energy, or risk exposing herself to the Void.
"Yes, but damn, that list is long," said Jack.
He was still reading through the entire list, and the more names he saw, the more ridiculous the situation seemed. It was one thing to hear that there were corrupted humans hiding inside governments and important organizations. It was another thing entirely to see the sheer number of names written down in front of him.
"I am in serious support of asking the Great Houses to research better methods of finding corrupted humans," Jack said.
The others immediately agreed.
The sheer size of the list was becoming genuinely frightening.
The Assassin Family was accustomed to killing people. They had built their entire profession around secrecy, assassination, infiltration, and eliminating dangerous targets. Even for them, however, seeing so many names in one place was unsettling.
"I will tell the rest of the representatives at the next meeting," said Valentina.
She was disturbed by the number of people on the list as well, and more importantly, she did not want corrupted humans gaining influence within Europe. If there were already this many hidden inside the United States, there was no reason to assume Europe was completely safe. The possibility alone was enough to make her uncomfortable.
"But you do have to admit this will be fun," Valentina added with a huge smile beneath her mask.
The rest of the group also smiled.
Their expressions were hidden beneath their masks and hoods, but their eyes made their feelings obvious.
They had been asked to break into some of the highest-security locations in the world and eliminate a surprising number of people. For members of the Assassin Family, it was almost like being handed the greatest challenge of their careers.
Even the Pentagon was on the list of possible targets.
That was where a significant portion of the American military was stationed, and the president had already given orders to kill every corrupted human that could be identified. Unfortunately, that plan had not gone as expected. Before the military could take any meaningful action, the secret realms had begun opening, and the situation across the country had rapidly deteriorated.
Even if only ten secret realms were completely uncontested and required outside forces to assist them, that did not mean the other secret realms were doing much better.
Many of them were barely functioning.
They were in chaos, severely understaffed, and fighting for their lives.
The military forces that would normally have been used to investigate corrupted humans had instead been forced to defend secret realms and fight the creatures emerging from them. The entire country was dealing with too many emergencies at the same time, and there simply were not enough people available to handle everything.
That was precisely why Gaia had asked the Assassin Family to deal with the corrupted humans.
She had lost faith in the ability of the United States to handle the situation itself after everything she had already done to help them. Gaia had given them opportunities, information, warnings, and changes that should have made dealing with the problem considerably easier.
Yet somehow, things had still reached this point.
Hell, it should never have gotten this bad in the first place.
There was not a single documented report of someone being approached by corrupted humans.
That was something Gaia was still trying to understand.
She knew that corrupted humans were approaching people, but she had not found any reliable reports from the victims themselves. It appeared that nobody who attended those mysterious meetings had ever made it out afterward. That alone was concerning, but there was another problem that bothered Gaia even more.
The number of mysteriously missing people inside the government was simply too low for her liking.
Gaia could find every human on Earth.
She knew where people were and what they were doing. Someone going on vacation did not fool her. Someone going adventuring did not fool her. Someone disappearing into some remote location did not simply vanish from Gaia's awareness.
And yet corrupted humans had somehow managed to hide their corruption from her.
That irritated her immensely.
What irritated her even more was that nobody had noticed the alarming number of missing people and investigated properly. The evidence had been there, but humanity had failed to connect it. Gaia could have created another subconscious system specifically designed to monitor unusual disappearances and investigate suspicious patterns, but she was already maintaining countless such systems.
Every system Gaia established required energy.
It also required at least a small amount of her attention.
She could afford both.
That was not the point.
The point was that she should not have to do it.
Humans were supposed to be capable of noticing when people started disappearing from important positions. They were supposed to investigate strange patterns, compare records, and determine what was happening. Gaia could intervene if something threatened the planet, but she did not want to become the only entity capable of noticing every problem.
There were already enough things demanding her attention.
She had a world to improve.
She had ecosystems to restore, humanity to monitor, mana to understand, corrupted creatures to deal with, secret realms opening across the planet, and countless other problems that required her attention. Creating yet another subconscious monitoring system was possible, but it was still an unnecessary burden.
Gaia had better things to do with her attention than constantly compensate for humanity's inability to notice obvious problems.
She wanted to improve the world they all lived in, not spend all her time cleaning up problems that humans should have been capable of discovering themselves.