They spoke with a desperate need for validation.

They wanted to trade war stories and they wanted to bond over the shared horror of surviving the meat grinder.

Silas just listened with his expression remaining unreadable.

’Do I act like I can relate or what?’ Silas thought

He didn’t feel a single shred of camaraderie.

He looked at Jaxon’s trembling hands and Maya’s exhausted posture, and felt a disconnect from their reality.

While Jaxon was hiding behind a flimsy wooden door clutching a basic iron spear and crying in the dark, Silas was standing dead-center in a freezing monsoon, forcefully plunging a superheated mythril broadsword directly through the reinforced spinal column of a massive Mire-Drake.

While Maya was bitterly complaining about rusted iron swords and acidic toxic slimes, Brida and the girls were locking heavy steel shields against a literal suffocating ocean of corrupted high-tier flesh.

’What can I even say? Compared to the shit I had to put up with, theirs seems like child’s play.’

They hadn’t survived the same trial... They had played two completely different games entirely.

The nervous waiter returned to the table, completely avoiding eye contact with Silas.

He placed a heavy ornate silver pot of black coffee and a delicate ceramic mug on the polished dark wood directly in front of him.

Silas grabbed the silver handle and poured himself a cup.

The dark liquid steamed in the cold air of the cafe.

’It cant be that bad...’ Silas thought, he had always heard people say good stuff about Coffee in his past life and it couldn’t be too different now.

He raised the ceramic mug to his lips, took a generous sip, and instantly grimaced internally.

’WHAT THE FUCK!!!!’

The coffee was an atrocity!

It was staggeringly bitter, aggressively over-roasted, and tasted heavily of burnt acidic ash.

It entirely lacked the smooth perfectly balanced mana profile of Kaelia’s culinary brewing.

His throat violently seized.

His body’s natural gag reflex immediately triggered, screaming at his nervous system to spit the foul five-hundred-credit liquid directly onto the pristine marble floor.

Silas clamped his jaw shut.

He refused to spit it out.

He was currently projecting the cold aura of a seasoned Lord.

Spitting his coffee across the table like a poisoned toddler would instantly ruin the psychological pressure he had established over the booth.

He swallowed hard, forcing the burning acidic sludge down his esophagus through willpower.

CLINK!

He set the ceramic mug back down onto the saucer with a perfect clink, keeping his face a terrifyingly blank slate.

To distract himself from the horrific aftertaste, Silas let his Gold Core senses sweep the ambient perimeter of the cafe.

He instantly noticed the anomaly.

Sitting exactly two booths down, angled perfectly to monitor their conversation, was a young woman reading a menu.

She wore a cheap brunette wig and a bulky civilian trench coat but Silas’s perception bypassed the superficial disguise entirely.

He felt the microscopic spatial distortion radiating from the ring on her left index finger.

It was a high-grade optical refraction artifact, attempting to mask her true mana signature.

She held the menu up, but her breathing pattern was a bit too normal.

Her heart rate noticeably spiked every single time Silas shifted his weight.

’The spy from the boutique roof?’ Silas thought with a sigh. ’I don’t want any sort of issues...’

He ignored her completely.

Acknowledging the surveillance offered zero tactical advantage.

He turned his attention back to the table.

"What about you, Graves?" Jaxon asked, leaning forward urgently.

His bloodshot eyes frantically searched Silas’s pristine black clothes for any sign of a hidden wound, a bandage, or a limp. "You pulled an Excellent-Grade Blue Core at the ceremony and Commander Vesper gave you the heavy starter kit. You must have placed in the top fifty."

Silas set the ceramic mug down completely.

"I did fine," Silas stated flatly. "I survived."

He deliberately kept his answer as vague and utterly dismissive as possible.

He hadn’t officially registered his biometric Lord Title with the Association bureaucrats, so his real name wasn’t plastered anywhere on the public tracking boards.

He wanted to keep it exactly that way.

"The other people on the newbie boards don’t even matter right now..." Maya interrupted aggressively, waving her hand to dismiss Jaxon’s question.

Her innate ambition was rapidly beginning to pierce directly through her exhaustion.

She desperately needed to redirect the conversation back to something she understood: hierarchy.

"Have you guys looked at the Global Evaluation Leaderboards?" Maya asked. "The entire Association network is having a complete meltdown."

Elora’s icy blue eyes sharpened instantly. She set her porcelain teacup down.

"You are referring to Rank Number One," Elora said.

"Of course I am!" Maya said.

She pulled her sleek Spirit Phone from her pocket, tapped the screen rapidly, and projected a glowing high-resolution blue holographic screen directly over the center of the dark wooden table.

"Look at this," Maya instructed, pointing a shaking finger at the projection. "This is statistically impossible."

The digital leaderboard hovered brightly in the air between them.

The top ten ranks were heavily dominated by the elite, massively funded heirs of the continent’s largest corporate guilds.

They possessed established, intimidating names like Astral Spire, Ironclad Bastion, and Crimson Peak.

They boasted incredibly impressive survival scores, proudly detailing hundreds of routed enemies, massive territorial expansion metrics, and zero casualties.

But sitting at the absolute, uncontested top of the global list, separated from Rank Number

Two by a staggering, completely incomprehensible gap of over a thousand points, was a single classified anonymous entry.

[Rank #1]

[Territory: The Blessed Land]

[Lord: Hidden]

[Enemies Routed: 1,420]

[Evaluation: SSS-Rank]

Jaxon stared directly at the glowing blue text.

He shook his head in bitter disgust.

"It’s a corporate cheat..." Jaxon spat, his voice heavy with resentment. "It absolutely has to be."

He leaned closer to the hologram, pointing aggressively at the kill count.

"No independent Lord, not even a highly funded Purple Core genius, can drop into the Novice Trial and rack up fourteen hundred kills in seven days! That requires a functioning, established military base... It requires a permanent logistics line."

Jaxon scoffed, taking a long drink of his water.

"Some massive trillion-credit guild like the Territio Syndicate must have found a critical software exploit in the Sovereign Realm’s overarching rules... They probably funneled a veteran mercenary army into a novice anchor point using a loophole to secure the SSS-Rank payout."

"The global news feeds are literally saying the exact same thing," Maya agreed, leaning closer to the hologram, clearly fascinated by the mystery. "They’re offering billions of liquid Spirit Credits to whoever comes forward and officially claims the territory but the Lord is keeping their identity completely hidden."

Maya looked at Elora, then back to Jaxon.

"If it’s not a corporate guild exploit," Maya whispered with her eyes wide. "Then whoever runs ’The Blessed Land’ is a literal monster."

Silas sat back against the plush velvet cushions.

He picked up his ceramic mug and took another slow guarded sip of his horrifically bitter black coffee, masking his internal disgust.

He looked directly at the glowing blue text projecting over the table.

He stared at his exact kill count snd he stared at his flawless SSS-Rank evaluation.

’What the hell man... why is the exact kills even public too?’ Silas thought.

He felt zero urge to brag to these traumatized rookies.

He felt absolutely zero desire to walk into an office and claim the billions of credits the corporate guilds were desperately offering.

Fame on Earth was a critical vulnerability.

It invited highly trained assassins directly to your doorstep.

It triggered massive corporate espionage campaigns.

It generated endless political headaches that he simply did not have the patience to navigate.

As long as the rest of the world firmly believed "The Blessed Land" was just a massive corporate exploit, they would leave him entirely alone to build his empire in the shadows.

Maya watched Silas carefully.

She saw his complete total lack of reaction to the global anomaly.

Maya grew visibly frustrated.

She desperately wanted him to engage...

’I need to change my tactics.’

She turned her body slightly angling her posture directly toward him.

The deep crimson flush returned heavily to her cheeks as her eyes tracked over the broad heavily muscled expanse of his chest hidden beneath the black shirt.

If she couldn’t bond with him over the shared trauma of the trial, she would aggressively assert her own value by proving to him she wasn’t just pathetic dead weight...

"I might have placed low globally" Maya said with her voice dropping into a softer, noticeably more boastful tone. "But my initial summoning portal was incredibly generous... I pulled two C-Rank heroes on the final day. The one that lost his arm and the other one from one summoning ticket..."

Silas looked at her. His expression remained blank.

"Good for you," Silas replied mechanically.

Maya entirely ignored his blatant apathy, leaning across the table a little closer to him.

She deeply wanted to see a flash of genuine human jealousy in those terrifying golden-ringed eyes.

Wasn’t he disappointed that he had lost her? Since he rejected her...?

"They are both male entities," Maya bragged, a smug satisfied little smile touching her lips.

She paused, making sure he was listening to the description.

"And honestly, Graves... they are absolutely, devastatingly gorgeous. Tall, incredibly broad-shoulders, perfectly sculpted aristocratic features. They practically worship the ground I walk on. They refuse to leave my side. It’s honestly almost distracting having them patrol my keep."

She stopped talking, waiting for Silas to scowl.

’Why the hell is she telling me that? Does she want me to describe Brida?’ Silas thought.

She wanted him to feel inadequate.

Maya desperately needed him to realize that she had highly valuable options, that she directly commanded beautiful fiercely devoted men who hung on her every single word.

She wanted him to see her as a prize...

Silas just stared at her.

He simply looked at her with the dead exhausted eyes of a veteran architect watching a toddler aggressively boast about building a crooked sandcastle on the beach.

’She pulled two men so what?’ Silas thought.

His mind instantly drifted back to the massive, blood-stained stone courtyard of the Warlord’s Garrison.

’I command seventy highly leveled, heavily armored female killing machines who lock iron shields against beasts without flinching... I command an SSS-Rank Goddess of nature and I command a Royal Elven Arcanist who could do so much more.’

The incomprehensible gap between their respective realities was almost comical.

"Make sure they keep their swords sharp," Silas told her bluntly. "A pretty face won’t stop a Hobo Goblin from tearing out their throats in the dark."

Maya’s smug smile instantly shattered.

Her mouth fell open in sheer indignation.

She had practically shoved her success directly into his face, attempting to spark a rivalry, and he had completely brushed it off like a minor irritating inconvenience.

Maya bristled, highly jealous of his unbothered detached nature.

She opened her mouth to snap a venomous retort back at him.

However before Maya could launch her verbal counterattack, Elora finally made her strategic move.

The ice queen reached out with a pale finger and tapped the center of the glowing holographic projector.

The global leaderboard instantly vanished, replaced by the dark polished wood of the cafe table.

"Enough," Elora commanded.

Her voice wasn’t loud, but it was enough to make all of them on the table focus on her and only her...

"We didn’t gather here tonight to trade pathetic survival horror stories or brag about our basic, randomized summons. We are here for business."

Jaxon blinked, sitting up slightly straighter, pulling his attention away from his water glass.

"Business?" Jaxon asked, wiping his mouth. "What do you mean?"

Elora folded her hands neatly on the table.

Her icy blue gaze swept over Jaxon, then Maya, and finally landed heavily on Silas.

"Out of the hundreds of students in our graduating class, we are the only four individuals who actually survived the Novice Trial and secured active, functioning territories in the Sovereign Realm..." Elora stated clinically, establishing the parameters. "Valoria City is a massive, highly lucrative economic hub, but our local Lord Association is severely lacking in top-tier military representation."

She paused, letting the reality of their status sink in.

"The City Lord... my father is looking toward the immediate future."