My Ultimate OP System: Summoning All Dragons, Gods, Heroes & Villains-Chapter 52: Piecing The Puzzle

Isabella sighed again, as her fingers unconsciously rubbed against the bracelet on her wrist.

"What if I don’t want him to know?" she said, still not meeting Rayleigh’s eyes.

Rayleigh’s expression looked a bit serious now. "Why wouldn’t you want him to know?"

Isabella finally looked up at him. "I’m not ready for the other things that come with it, Ray."

The bracelet wasn’t just any piece of jewelry. It was an artifact specifically designed to suppress and hide one’s true magic power. Isabella had been wearing it for months now and It was the only reason she’d managed to keep her reawakening hidden from everyone, including her father.

After all, a Grand Caster’s magic power was not something that went unnoticed.

Rayleigh stepped closer. "But why? Sister, do you understand what you’ve accomplished?" He gestured toward her with both hands as if trying to physically emphasize his point. "No one, and I mean no one, has reawakened at the age of nineteen. Not even in the last hundred years."

He reached out and gently took her hand. "But my elder sister has been able to do it. That’s nothing short of phenomenal, Bella. You’d receive so much praise from Father. Our status in the family would also be elevated to the highest."

Isabella sighed, pulling her hand back slowly. She turned away from him, walking toward the window and staring out at the palace grounds.

"Ray..." she began in a quiet voice. "In this house, we’ve only got ourselves."

Rayleigh frowned but said nothing, letting her continue.

Isabella pointed toward the far wing of the palace. "Mother spends too much time on that side of the palace to even count. She’s barely even here anymore."

She turned back to face him. "And while it wouldn’t be bad to let Father know, we have to consider that there are ten others who would get absolutely pissed off at news like this."

Rayleigh opened his mouth to respond, but Isabella held up a hand.

"Just so you know," she added, "I do not want to be in their line of sight. I’ve worked really hard to stay out of their stupid games, Ray. So can we please drop it now? Please?"

The King had twelve children from five wives, and his children were locked in a constant, suffocating struggle against each other for their father’s approval, his attention, his respect. It was exhausting, toxic, and utterly draining.

Isabella was the only exception. She had made herself the exception on purpose.

In fact, that level of toxicity was exactly why she pushed so hard to enroll at Belsorth Academy in the first place.

It gave her a legitimate excuse to always leave home and breathe.

Rayleigh stared at her for a moment, then sighed and shook his head with an amused smile. Finally, he nodded in agreement.

"Alright, alright. I get it."

Isabella’s face immediately brightened, then bounced over to the bed and patted the space beside her enthusiastically.

"Good! Now come sit and tell me all about your journey to the Demon Continent!"

Rayleigh chuckled and walked over, dropping onto the bed beside her with a dramatic groan. "Oh, Bella. I’ve got a thousand stories about the absolute savages they all are."

Isabella grinned, pulling her knees up to her chest and leaning forward eagerly. "Start from the beginning."

——

Eventually, Maya and Wilson left the compound, and right now they were getting into the vehicle they came in.

As they settled into their seats, Wilson turned toward his sister with a puzzled expression. "Why did you just tell them about Hitman X? Wouldn’t that increase the suspicion they already have of us?"

Maya started the car but didn’t drive yet. Her hands gripped the steering wheel tightly as she stared straight ahead.

Then she lifted her right hand and looked at it. It was shaking slightly, and blood trickled from her knuckles where the skin had split during her clash with Nina.

"What I just did," she began slow, "was to give them valuable information in regards his life, which is at stake."

She flexed her fingers, watching the tremor. Then she added, "Hopefully, this is the last time I’d be dealing with the name Stark."

Wilson nodded, though he still looked worried.

Maya shifted the car into gear and drove off without another word.

—-

Several minutes later, Ethan stepped out of his shower fully refreshed, with no stains on his face or blood on his body.

He walked into his room wrapped in a towel and immediately remembered his bed was still split in half from earlier. He sighed, shaking his head at the sight, then walked over to the couch instead and sat down.

On the small table to the side was the bullet, the one with the carved "X" on it.

Ethan picked it up and studied it, turning it over slowly between his fingers.

Then he quickly reached for his Arcphone, with an idea forming in his mind, which he needed to verify.

When he unlocked the device, he noticed about seven message notifications from Isabella.

His chest tightened for a brief moment, but he chose to come back to those later. Right now, he had something else bugging him.

He clicked through the interface until he reached the icon for the Online Space, this world’s equivalent of the internet.

Though calling it that was generous.

The Online Space was painfully limited. It didn’t have nearly the breadth of information you’d expect from something meant to connect people and store knowledge. Most people still preferred reading the papers.

In fact, the Online Space barely stored a total amount of information that would even fill up the bookshelf of a single library. It was just that limited.

The only things stored there were extremely important events. News that shook the city or the country as a whole. Major incidents and Disasters.

One of which was the death of Isaac Hargreeves, father to Lucy.

Ethan typed into the search bar: "Death of Isaac Hargreeves."

The results loaded almost instantly, and Ethan leaned forward, scrolling through them.

Most people already knew the story of how Isaac died. He’d been killed by a ranger assassin. Shot to death while sitting in his car, from over two thousand meters away.

It had been a clean one shot with no witnesses.

Ethan clicked on one of the results, and it brought him to a page with a few lines of text and an image.

The image was a black silhouette of a head with a red question mark in the center. It was generic, ominous, and meant to represent someone whose identity was unknown.

Beneath it, in bold letters, read the words: "Killed by Hitman X."

Ethan scrolled down further and found a news report from two years ago. In it, the chief investigator at the time had made a public statement:

"We’re yet to fully confirm this, but we have every reason to believe it was the handiwork of the notorious hitman known only as X."

Ethan stared at the screen for a moment, with a frustrated look on his face. Then he muttered to himself, "So the man who killed Lucy’s father is out for me too."

He set the device down as his thoughts began to wonder.

——

By evening, Eduardo returned, and the events of earlier that day were explained to him in full detail.

The moment he heard about the assassination attempt, Eduardo’s face went pale, then his expression turned into pure fury.

"Master Ethan!" he said in a voice that trembled with rage. "I should have been here. I should have..."

He stopped, clenching his fists tightly, then bowed deeply.

"Please accept my sincerest apologies. I never knew my device was out of reach, or I would have returned to the manor immediately."