Hearing Raymond's hearty laughter, Alvin shook his head, chuckled, and hung up...
He'd been prepared for something like this, but he hadn't expected it to happen so soon!
Sure enough, once he'd stepped beyond Hell's Kitchen, trouble had gradually come knocking.
He had too many friends...
The Peru Plan slowly taking shape, a trade monopoly within the Solar System, the Dark Aster—a force capable of intimidating the entire Solar System—two friends rich enough to rival nations, a future female billionaire among his students, and a queen's lover in Asgard...
In some people's eyes, he was no longer the lazy principal who stayed holed up in Hell's Kitchen and never set foot outside.
The World Security Council and the leaders of the allied forces weren't fools. It wasn't hard to foresee that squeezing the Dwarves too hard would provoke a backlash.
Those people were pressuring him to "take a side," to see whether he'd stand with humanity or with the entire Solar System.
If he stood with humanity, Alvin could easily imagine the allied forces on Nidavellir deliberately provoking the Dwarves, then using the lives of tens of thousands of space marines to force him to cripple their strength.
If he stood with the entire Solar System, everything would simply return to how it was before. The Dwarves wouldn't dare do anything, because they knew Alvin could destroy them at any time.
Only an "obedient" Alvin could put everyone at ease!
A wealthy Alvin wasn't scary, and neither was an Alvin with power beyond measure.
But if Alvin became a nexus of power, those political animals would be terrified.
Because the rise of an Alvin like that meant he could shatter the existing "power ecosystem" at any moment. It meant the "power structure" humanity had built over the past several centuries