These Familiars Are Strange

When they saw Leaf approach, the other leaders of the top contender teams all turned to look at her.

But there were some that looked somewhere else after a while.

One of them was Huang Tuo.

As for the one that he was looking at…it was naturally me.

In fact, it seemed like he was more interested in me than he was in Leaf and the World Tree Team. It was just that it wasn't a good thing that he was interested in me, it was because he had hostility towards me that he was looking at me.

It seemed that he still remembered what happened with the Master Gnome and held a grudge over it.

The other two that looked elsewhere were the leaders of the Dark Knights Team and the Luminous Knights Team.

I was surprised by the two of them staring right at me.

They had been looking at Leaf and the World Tree Team at first, but then they suddenly turned their gazes to me.

The way that they looked at me was as if they thought that there was something special about me.

But there was nothing special about me that I had shown during this time. There was no reason that they should have been looking at me like this…

Since I had attracted the attention of three of these top contenders…No, four of the top contenders since I came with Leaf and the World Tree Team, it was only natural that I attracted the attention of the last top contender as well, even though I had no connection to them.

At the same time, I also attracted the attention of many of the other teams.

Many of them had confused looks since they had no idea why I was the center of attention like this.

But eventually all that attention was taken away from me when the leader of the Luminous Knights Team said, "I'm sure that we all know why we're gathered here."

The leader of the Dark Knights Team followed up with, "Since we're here, let's discuss the terms of our cooperation."

The way that the two of them spoke was as if this was already something that was set in stone. It was as if no matter what anyone else said, it wouldn't change their minds or the minds of anyone else.

In short, they just didn't care about anyone else's opinion on the matter.

But there was no one that objected to this.

Everyone had seen what had happened and knew that they wouldn't be able to take on that turtle alone. They had even seen how the other teams had been overwhelmed by the manta rays that the turtle controlled, so they knew that they wouldn't be able to get out of this alone.

Now that the five top contenders were even willing to work with them, that gave them more confidence.

Though absolute loyalty was definitely impossible.

This was just an alliance of convenience because of the situation that they were in. If someone had the opportunity to steal the kill on the final boss, there was no doubt that they would do it.

Of course, the top five contender teams also knew this and wouldn't give them the chance.

Everyone was just using everyone else.

Once that was established, it was time to decide what their target would be.

It wasn't as if they would be able to directly target the turtle, so they had to find something else to target.

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The second reason that everyone had been gathered like this was because they wanted to share information. They wanted to see if anyone actually had any information about the turtle and what they had discovered in this castle.

Only it didn't seem like anyone knew anything.

"After coming to this castle, we searched in a few rooms, but we weren't able to find anything."

"We were too busy watching the turtle head and the manta rays to find anything else."

"No matter how we went around this castle, it didn't seem like there was anything special here."

It wasn't hard to tell that they were being sincere about this.

Even though they had gone through the castle, they actually hadn't found a single thing.

I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed with all of them since it should have been clear what the target was. But thinking about it, since they weren't even willing to fight the manta rays and grouped together like this…

It only made sense that they didn't go check out the glowing rooms even though they should have been able to see it.

The glowing rooms just attracted too much attention for them to ignore.

After everyone shared that they had no information, it seemed like things were becoming stagnant. It seemed like this group was nothing more than a headless chicken with how no one offered a lead to follow up on.

That was until Leaf suddenly nudged me.

I was surprised to be nudged by her like this and I was even more surprised by the look that she gave me. It was clear by the way that she looked at me that she was implying something.

At the same time, it seemed like she knew something that I didn't want her to know…

I thought about how Leaf and the World Tree Team had suddenly appeared out of nowhere like that. There was no one on our team that had been able to sense them approaching, so it could even mean that they had been watching us from the beginning.

No, with the look that she gave me, it was almost certain that she had been watching since the beginning.

It was hard to tell exactly when she had started watching, but she had certainly been watching for a while.

That meant that they should know about the glowing crystal attached to the turtle…

With a sigh, I raised my voice to say, "I have something to share. I actually found something interesting earlier."