The Insider System

Chapter 403: The Deal Pt.39

The light show was pretty, but Lake started to get bored thirty minutes after the clouds appeared. He understood that most of the clouds had probably appeared early, so they wouldn't miss anything since he had done the same, but surely it couldn't be much longer.

Either way, he decided to talk to his servants to see why his food still hadn't arrived. "How long would it take you to go to the cafeteria and come back?"

"It would depend on if I was eating or not."

"No, you're bringing food back to me so I can eat it."

"Oh, I'd take around 20 minutes, but I'm faster than the other two." Hearing it would take 20 minutes for his fastest servant to go there and back, Lake decided that his servant was doing a good job and tried to find something else to think about. After a few seconds, he remembered two other things he had found while gathering the things on his list, the core from Mizzly and the knife that did nothing when it was in Inner Vault.

The core wasn't something he could take care of now since he couldn't leave the balcony, but the knife was something he could look at to try and figure out what was up with it. Taking the rusty knife out of his storage, Lake was about to inspect it when he heard the door to the balcony open.

Getting ready to eat his food, Lake put the knife away again, only to hear a voice he hadn't heard in a while say his name. "Hello, Lake."

"Millie, what are you doing here? I was starting to think you had moved into the kitchen." He had wanted to see her to see how the plan to open restaurants was going, but he hadn't bothered to actually do it yet because he felt she would be too busy to talk to him.

"It's not quite at that level yet." Lake could see stress appear on Millie's face as she said this, but it quickly disappeared, and she said. "I saw your servant getting food when I was about to go home so I went up to them and asked if you were back so I could come say hi."

"Well, since you're here, do you want to watch the show together?" Lake needed more time to talk to Millie to get an idea of how things were going, and this would also help him pass the time until the Demon Lord showed up. "I was just about to ask if I could stay, like always, your room has a better view."

After having his servant bring another chair outside, Millie sat next to him and beat him to asking the first question. "So, what have you been doing at the Temple of Light?" Lake couldn't help but think back to one of the last conversations they had before he had left, where he had realized Millie felt guilty for not going out to fight when most everyone else had, but he hadn't gone to the Temple to rub her face in this fact so he just made it sound like he hadn't done much. "One of their members had been kidnapped, so I helped them out since they had protected me when the Assassins guild was after me."

"That sounds exciting. Was the person you were trying to find ok?"

"Yeah, they hadn't gotten far by the time we got to them. So how close are the restaurants to opening?" Lake didn't want to keep talking about what he had been up to, so even though it wasn't the smoothest transition, he made sure to ask Millie what was going on with her before she could ask him any more questions about what he had been up to.

"All the cooks for the first few restaurants are all trained. We'll be opening the first few once all the deals are made." Lake hadn't thought about the deal they had made with the king of the holy domain for a while, but he was sure that wasn't the only person the guild was having to deal with to make this happen.

"Is anyone trying to stop it from happening?" If they were, Lake had no problem paying them a visit the next time he went out because he wanted to get Millie's food anywhere, not just here in the guild. It was too bad that killing people would probably cause more problems for the guild. "Not really. The only people giving us a small problem are the Farmers Guild, but that's just because we plan to use Wallace's golems to grow the food. They seem to think this steps into their territory too much, but Lucas is already making them see that it's no different to us growing most of our own ingredients for potions since the food we'll be selling is alchemical in nature."

"So, is the first one still going to be here in the capital?" Lake couldn't see a reason this wouldn't be the case, but he still wanted to know if the original plan had changed because of how the war had gone for the Holy Domain. "Yeah, it is. You can actually see the building from here. Look right there." After Millie said this, she pointed at a brown brick building located in a nice part of the city.

"It's in a good spot. Lots of gold in that area." He remembered Millie planned to sell the food for cheap in some areas or something, but this first spot probably wouldn't be like that. The guild needed to make money, or they wouldn't bother doing all this work. "Where are the rest of them going to be?"

He never got an answer to this, or maybe he did, but he didn't hear it because the Demon Lord's cloud started to appear over the city, which drew all of his attention away from Millie. Soon after the rust-colored cloud appeared, three of the other clouds that had been here since the beginning started to spin faster, which he took to mean they were going to open soon.

Seeing this, Lake started wondering why the gods were doing all this in the open where people could see it. Surely, if they wanted, they could do this wherever they were before they left the clouds. There was no way the gods had no places to meet that didn't involve coming here to the mortal world.

He guessed there was a chance they wanted the people to see what was going on, but it wasn't like they would explain anything to the people watching, so he didn't think the gods cared too much if people got to see them.

It made more sense that the Demon Lord was the one who had asked for them to do all of this out in the open so people would see him making the gods give him what he wanted, but maybe he was wrong, and they had to meet here in the mortal world for things like this.

...

Donny had never felt being teleported before, but the weird sensation he had before he found himself in a new place had to be what that was. Donny started to blink his eyes to get used to the amount of light in the new place. Once his pupils had dilated to the appropriate level, Donny found he was now in the center of a room filled with at least eight giants.

He had expected to see some eventually because they were what made up most of the upper level of the Demon Lord's army since they were all technically Demigods, but seeing so many was out of his expectations. It made him feel the Demon Lord was expecting a battle to happen, but he highly doubted this just based on what he knew about the gods' reluctance to declare war.

The Demon Lord probably had a better idea of the situation, though, so his opinion didn't make him feel better. Still, honestly, he would be okay with getting caught up in a giant battle as long as someone finally put an end to the Demon Lord, even if the bastard would eventually come back like he always did.

His family had a long history of fighting against the Demon Lord before he was strong enough to keep all the gods from attacking him. And at the end of the day, a trade of his life to take down the Demon Lord was pretty good, even if he would only be dying because he happened to be too close.

Plenty of his relatives had made this same sacrifice. And while his brother probably wouldn't do a great job remembering their history and passing it on to the next generation, someone like his uncle would probably know about his death and make sure to make him sound heroic. "You come here."

Hearing a whisper, Donny returned to reality and looked to where it had come from. Seeing three other people dressed like him with chains huddled together in the corner away from where the giants were all standing, Donny moved towards them, relieved to have a chance to talk to someone in the same situation as him.