’It should be about time.’

Associate Producer Gard sat at his monitor in silence. He was watching some of the movement across his screen.

By his side, a sealed black letter sat, one that he would send out in case of the worst potential outcome. Should that occur, his life would be all but over.

But he would certainly be taking Caldrin with him.

’One... two... three...’ Gard nodded to himself. The black veins in the strip of his exposed brain writhed for a moment before settling down. There was a strong flushing sound that came from his heart and the veins calmed, returning to their usual size.

The first image he flickered toward was of a familiar creature with sickly white, reflecting skin.

The Syrn. They were a menacingly toxic race with innate abilities that made the skin of lesser races crawl.

The Syrn cut through the air in whipping lines of black. It faced no air resistance at all, the dense black it was emitting erasing everything it came across as though it didn’t exist at all.

The second image was of an enormous being with brownish tan, rocky skin. It landed on the ground with shuddering booms, wiping out entire swaths of forest. Even the Fog of Chaos seemed to disperse to make way for it.

It wore nothing but a pair of shorts that looked oddly like cut-off jeans with frayed edges. And for some other peculiar reason, it seemed to insist on jumping across hundreds of meters at a time instead of just running.

The Dormaji were an interesting and very intelligent race of beings. The problem was that their flesh wasn’t very elastic and their hearts had difficulty pumping blood through their bodies properly.

As such, they had shut-off valves within them to increase efficiency, and one of the valves that was turned down the more of their strength they needed to use was actually their brain.

Simply put... the more strength they had to use, the more stupid they became.

And then came the last image.

’... How truly... unexpected...’ Gard thought to himself.

Any one of the Dormaji or the Syrn should be able to get it done. However, Grey had surprised him too many times now. Because of that, Gard found himself feeling more and more on edge.

This was already the contingency plan of his contingency plan. He didn’t have another lying in wait, and he had already withstood a great amount of pressure because of what had happened.

The Great Udon’s segment was heavily screened and edited. While it seemed like it was live, it hadn’t been.

When the Great Udon selected his candidates for highlight, the Associate Producer whose jurisdiction said candidate fell under had the right of a final pass at the editing before it was taken to the final stage.

Usually, this process was used to make sure that a candidate was painted in the same light an Associate Producer wanted. For example, they wouldn’t let the Great Udon paint a Genesis Candidate they had spent ages story-boarding as a villain into a hero.

But those moments aside, this was also the chance for them to make sure that the Great Udon didn’t step out of bounds.

The Great Udon was a loose cannon, everyone knew it. But the Hosts of this season of the Genesis Games, the Monelay, were going all out to earn their place on the Genesis Council. While the Great Udon was hard to control, there was no doubt that he had brought the Genesis Games out of a rut of low ratings before he was banned from hosting.

Even Gard didn’t know how many strings the elders had to pull to get him back on for the 3021st season.

It was Gard’s job to edit out the mention of Zone 234, even the Great Udon didn’t expect it to make it through like it had.

As had been said many times before, in the early game, the more experienced Races had meta’d and game-planned the first arc to hell. The only real entertainment outside of unexpected surprises came from the Cracked World.

The Great Udon clearly wanted to play this up. The Cracked Worlds weren’t chaotic enough for him, and he believed that the only way to get the true entertainment value out of them was to get the other worlds to interact with them in the early game.

And Gard let it happen.

Unsurprisingly, his own overseeing Producer and the family were very much not happy about this. Compromising Zone 234 was as good as compromising at least half of the Cracked World, and would ultimately mean that Earth would be wiped out of candidacy before the second of three Chapters was through.

But if they knew the reason Gard had done this, they wouldn’t hesitate to agree.

News was already starting to spread of Grey’s multi-Frame. It was still kept tightly under wraps for the most part, and only some truly big players and hidden shadows knew, but it was spreading.

Right now it was a situation where so long as things stayed at this level, it would be fine. But this would certainly be the last chance they received.

If Grey somehow survived this, there would simply be no hiding it anymore. Then the Genesis Council would come forward with questions of its own, wondering why the Monelay had broken the one rule they had.

At that point... heads would roll.

But there was one shining light at the end of the tunnel, and that was the third image on his screen right now.

It was a floating cloud of swirling blue-white, crackling with white lightning. Its armor was jet black and hovered on its body as though it really had substance and form.

The Volathari.

The very same Race of being that had appeared in the Great Udon’s first three highlighted choices.

There were probably four main dividing levels of races in the universe.

The Genesis Races stood at the very top.

The Cracked World Races stood at the very bottom.

The bulk of the Races fell into either Lower Races like the Syrn and Dormaji...

And then there were the Higher Races...

Races that this being fell into.

Races that were largely unmatched and untouched beneath the Genesis Races.

And now one had chosen to target a Cracked World.

Gard could not believe his luck.

That was when his communication device rang.