Markus had zero interest in wasting operational hours debating lineage or political borders with the Aurelian High Council. In the grand ledger of his strategic objectives, the courts were an inefficiency. To secure unrestricted access to the East Coast's rifts, dungeons, and raw resource lines, there was a far more direct, legally binding vector that completely bypassed imperial jurisdiction: The Adventurer's Guild International Covenant.
By ancient global decree, the Adventurer's Guild operated as a sovereign, politically neutral entity across all empires. If a group possessed sufficient tier-density, they could register an autonomous guild branch, granting them absolute rights to harvest materials, deploy forces, and hold territory without needing a single royal signature.
Leaving the noble factions to panic in their empty courts, Markus, Sloane, and Isolde Aurelian walked straight into the grand obsidian pillars of the Aurelian Central Guild Terminal.
The terminal's high-ranking Registrar—a seasoned, scarred Tier 6 veteran named Oakhaven—did not care about court gossip. He cared about quantifiable power. When Markus threw down three Platinum-grade transit tokens alongside a formal request to charter a new sovereign-class organization, the ambient magical arrays inside the registration hall began to chime in rapid succession.
To finalize a charter of this magnitude, the terminal required a direct physical calibration of the founding members' core attributes. Markus stepped up to the central runic monolith, placing his hand upon the scanning glass.
[ADVENTURER'S GUILD: CROSS-CONTINENTAL REGISTRY]
>> Guild Name: The Eternity Guild
>> Classification: Independent Sovereign Group
>> Operational Territory: Unrestricted (Macro-Continental)
>> Authentication Protocol: Core Density Validation
The monolith violently flared with an intense, silver-gold luminescence that forced the surrounding guild staff to shield their eyes. Markus's purified Level 70 core didn't merely satisfy the system's baseline requirements; it threatened to overflow the local database.
The runic inscriptions on the stone floor snapped into perfect alignment. Sloane and Isolde added their signatures to the digital slate, their raw elemental residues cementing the absolute physical validity of the application.
With the registration matrix settled into equilibrium, the central terminal generated the official, unalterable ledger profiles for the newly established Aurelian branch of the Eternity Guild
The Covenant Protection Clause: As a registered Sovereign-Class Adventurer's Guild, any aggressive deployment or asset seizure attempted by local noble houses against the Eternity Guild's property is legally classified as an international act of war against the global Adventurer alliance.
Oakhaven stared at the final printout, his hands visibly trembling as he stamped the document with the heavy gold ink of the central registry. "The... the criteria are met. By the authority of the international covenant, the Eternity Guild is officially recognized as an autonomous combat entity within the borders of the Aurelian Empire. May the stars guide your hunts."
While the ink on the global adventurer registry was still drying, the Aurelian capital erupted into a quiet frenzy of bureaucratic panic. The noble factions realized they had been entirely outmaneuvered by the international covenant protection clause, immediately buried the House of the White Frost in a mountain of sub-mems, legal challenges, and court summons.
Markus had zero intention of sitting through a single deposition. Leaving Sloane and Isolde Aurelian to weaponize their political weight and grind the imperial courts to an administrative standstill, Markus initiated a multi-world spatial jump.
His destination was the raw, untamed front line on the other side of the veil: the post-apocalyptic West Coast of the North American continent.
The West Coast was a stark, brutal contrast to the golden spires of Aurelia. Here, the Valerian Imperial Family was actively pushing to reclaim a landscape shattered by the collapse, where ruined pre-apocalyptic high-rises were strangled by hyper-dense mutation flora and shifting temporal anomalies.
Stepping into the newly erected Eternity Guild sub-command post overlooking the fog-shrouded ruins of a forgotten coastal metropolis, Markus brought the local tactical terminal online.
[ETERNITY GUILD: EARTHSIDE OPERATIONS]
>> Regional Sector: North American West Coast (Zone-05)
>> Local Stability Index: 34.1% (High Rift Activity)
>> Selected Mission Tier: TIER 5 - TIER 6 (Sovereign Debut)
>> Objective: Clear Perimeter Blockades & Resource Extraction
To establish the guild's absolute physical dominance on Earth and secure the borders of the Valerian reclamation zone, Markus filtered the active regional ledger and selected three high-priority debut missions.
"The local military cohorts have been stalled at the Cascade fault-line for three weeks," Markus noted calmly, his silver-blue eyes flashing as he synchronized the mission data directly into his personal tracking ledger. "They are attempting to fight Tier 6 gravity distortions using standard kinetic artillery. It is a waste of ammunition."
With his Level 70 core and 100% Space Mastery, Markus could read the structural stress points of the West Coast rifts like lines of simple code. These Tier 5 and 6 missions, which would require an entire army division of conventional Earth forces to contain, were nothing more than a calibration exercise for his newly stabilized Temporal Slash.
He adjusted his dark leather gloves, his traveling coat snapping against the cold, salt-rimmed wind blowing off the Pacific. The Valerians needed this coastline entirely stabilized before the deep-crust infrastructure projects could begin, and the Eternity Guild would deliver that security with absolute efficiency.
The moment Markus stepped past the perimeter line of the Zone-05 sub-command post, the ambient spatial strings within a three-kilometer radius vibrated with a distinct, unnatural cadence. It was not the erratic, jagged pulse of mutated wildlife, nor was it the heavy, rhythmic thrum of the Valerian military patrols. It was a synchronized, highly suppressed kinetic displacement pattern—the signature of professional operatives trained in advanced optical and magical cloaking.
Five distinct life-signatures were tracking his exact spatial trajectory, hanging precisely four hundred meters behind his left flank.
Markus didn't break his stride. Walking calmly along the cracked, weed-choked asphalt of the coastal highway toward the localized portal containment sector, his silver-blue eyes flared slightly as he mapped their tracking coordinates through his passive radar.
[SYSTEM COMBAT DATA: HOSTILE TELEMETRY]
>> Detected Tails: 05 Active Signatures
>> Average Core Density: Tier 5 Elite / Early Tier 6
>> Energy Profile: Suppressed Thermal + Spatial Bending Cloaks
>> Current Tracking Latency: 0.00s (Real-Time Visual Lock)
"Nagini," Markus thought back, his voice a freezing, unyielding command inside his mind. "We have company. They are utilizing military-grade spatial distortion cloaks. Slip into the secondary spatial folds and anchor behind their vanguard. Do not engage. Monitor their communications and log their origin signatures."
The shadow attached to his leather heel violently stretched, decoupling from his body without throwing a single spark of mana.
"Ah... Master... sneaky little mice are playing in our grass," Nagini purred inside his consciousness, her voice dripping with liquid, unhinged glee as her ink-black spectral form dissolved completely into the fabric of the sub-spatial dimension. "They smell like the heavy metal boxes from the central cities... so clean, so artificial. They think they are the cats today, Master. They don't know the whole sky is full of your eyes. I am sliding right behind their ears now... I will watch how they breathe, and the moment they stop looking... oh, I will count how many pieces they break into."
"Keep your distance," Markus cautioned calmly. "I am leading them straight into the unmaintained portal grids. Let them witness fear."
Two kilometers down the coast, the environment collapsed into absolute structural instability. The sky here was fractured by three massive, flickering violet-red tears—unstable Tier 5 and Tier 6 localized portals that had been neglected by the regional Earth forces due to lack of high-tier manpower.
The ambient air pressure violently fluctuated every few seconds, dropping gravity to near-zero before slamming it back down with crushing force. Corrupted mana, thick with the matte-black particles of the extra-dimensional ink, bled continuously from the tears, crystalline structures actively growing along the ruins of old-world cars and telephone poles.
[PORTAL STATUS REPORT: CRITICAL REGIONAL VARIANCE]
>> Node Designation: Rift Cluster 05-B (Unmaintained)
>> Spatial Variance Index: 84.3% [HIGHLY VOLATILE]
>> Structural Integrity: Terminal Degradation Imminent
>> Maintenance Directive: Force-Closure via Law Manipulation
Markus stopped directly at the edge of the first portal's event horizon, where raw, unstable spatial currents ripped at the asphalt like paper. He stood entirely exposed, his hands resting casually inside the pockets of his long dark coat, his back completely turned to the five cloaked signatures hovering in the treeline behind him.
To the operatives watching him through their scopes, he looked like an independent guild master foolishly inspecting a lethal anomaly alone. To Markus, the unstable portal was nothing more than a localized equation that needed to be rewritten—and the five tails behind him were about to provide the baseline data for who truly controlled the West Coast front line.