67 New Skill Acquired?

-One month later-

Sitting cross legged in his own area right outside of the village was Leo. Since the time that he handed over all the elemental books to the Chieftain to help build the village's forces and develop their foundation, Leo was in a small area where he lived by himself.

On occasion, Maria would come and visit with him, hoping to spar and to understand Leo and his thoughts. The two started to become a little closer as time went on and Maria started to mature in her thinking outside of the battlefield.

Although Leo was unwilling to take Maria as his own woman, their relationship started to blossom into a brother and sister type relationship. They would share meals together, train together, and help each other with understanding their respective elemental affinities.

Maria's father had the lightning elemental affinity, while her mother had the water elemental affinity. Unlike her father, Maria took after her mother and had the water elemental affinity. Even though she could use her water element in a more offensive manner, Maria tried to train more on the medical side.

The light element which was extremely rare and special and was used mostly to heal the wounded, the water element also had some similar characteristics to it as well. Maria was a woman and the village had its rules against women entering the battlefield, but Maria felt that if she used her element in a medical sense, that it would be the most diplomatic way to convince the masses to allow her to partake in missions and raids.

The day before this one, Leo asked Maria for some privacy for the day. Not understanding at first, Maria outright refused Leo's request. However, after some debating, Leo finally convinced her that they would be heading out soon on a mission and that today is when he would break into another level of understanding.

In truth, Leo wanted to shoo Maria away so that he could experiment a little more with the screen and cards he had. If he were to spend an entire day doing this, how many more secrets could he unlock for himself?

After eating breakfast, Leo got right to work and started by looking over the cards he had left to see what he could trade them into the screen for. Originally, he wanted to exchange the cards for as many attribute points as possible, but this time, Leo had other plans.

After shuffling through all the cards available to him, Leo realized that he could exchange them for quite an array of different skills that were not based on the elements of this world. One skill caught his eye and he was extremely excited to test this one skill in combat.

Exchanging the card for the skill, Leo ran outside and ventured out towards the mountains behind the village. It was known now that the bandits that threatened the village, had their headquarters stationed quite far from the village and on the furthest left of the mountains. Knowing this information, Leo headed towards the right of the mountains to test his new skill on some predators.

In the perfect world, Leo would want to test new skills out against weak spiders to slowly kill off the Spider Queen's forces but traveling so far just to potentially kill only a few dozen spiders when there were thousands, seemed too ineffective.

After traveling for over an hour, Leo finally came across a panther type animal that looked incredibly vicious and hungry. Instead of sneaking up on the panther, Leo revealed himself to it in a carefree manner. Though the panther seemed formidable, it was only glowing orange, so Leo knew that if the new skill did nothing, that the panther wouldn't threaten his life.

Up until this point, the only opponents he had faced, could only threaten his life if they unleashed a killing intent that subconsciously made Leo become tense. Otherwise, Leo was always able to go toe to toe with his opponents before needing to unleash his full power.

As the panther saw Leo reveal himself, it immediately got up and quickly pounced towards Leo at its full speed. While this was happening, Leo could only smirk before yelling out the name of his new skill as he raised one of his hands.

"Life drain!" he shouted as a mysterious fog started to form from his hand before spreading quickly towards the panther. The panther seemed like it was not bothered by this strange fog as its movements did not slow down in the slightest.

Wrapping itself around the panther, the fog started to release a faint glow as the panther started to slow down its movements, before finally stopping as it glared at Leo. Knowing that it was at the mercy of Leo, the panther growled non-stop at him hoping to scare him off.

However, Leo only let out a sinister type laugh as he watched the panther try to struggle free from his grasp. "Even though this skill is unable to allow me to take the energy it drains from my opponents and add it to my own, it still seems incredibly effective in battle. I wonder if this skill could have a similar effect when I face a horde of low tier spiders?" Leo said to himself as he watched the panther.

After several minutes, it seemed as if the panther no longer had any energy remaining as it just looked at Leo, hoping for it to be released and to continue living. This panther seemed to be living a carefree life before this situation it found itself in and now it finally started to realize how much it valued its life.

Beep! Beep! Beep!