Chapter 166 Gliding

"The city fell?" Leo asked with a shocked expression on his face.

"Yes. The cultists somehow managed to get through the wall and they attacked everyone in sight. We managed to escape the city and fled in this direction, finding the soldiers that were defending this place.

They fought to defend us as well at first but as I said already, they ran away in the middle of the night and left us here." The woman explained.

" Why did you stay here? You could have run towards a nearby town or pushed for one of the other cities."

" We knew this was something important, that's why the soldiers were protecting it. There is no garuntee we could have made it to a safe place so we all decided it would be better to stay here and try to defend this thing until someone else arrived to help us, more soldiers for example." The woman explained.

" You were lucky I arrived when I did, the cultists had an Imperium with them. Even trained soldiers wouldn't be able to deal with their abilities." Leo said.

" We are grateful for your help but I don't understand how you found us. None of us saw you arrive..." The woman said with a curious tone.

"The thing you've been protecting until now was a Gate. It allows instant travel to other Gates, I used the one in the capital to come here since the Gate in Zoren wasn't working anymore." Leo explained.

"So it really is something important?" The woman asked, her mood slightly lifted.

"Extremely. These Gates allow us to move our soldiers around much quicker, which means we can defend the towns and villages that would normally be days away.

If the cult captures a Gate then they could use it to suddenly appear inside our cities and launch surprise attacks, so it's important they don't get their hands on it. You've all done well to defend it, thank you." Leo said in a grateful manner.

The people seemed pleased to hear that they weren't wasting their time defending nothing. But it felt like there was more to their sudden mood improvement.

The middle aged woman noticed Leo's confusion and chose to enlighten him "We aren't like you, we don't have amazing powers or combat training. Regular people aren't able to contribute during war, aside from farmers and blacksmiths perhaps. We're happy we were able to help the kingdom and from what you've said it was actually a big deal." She explained with a smile on her face.

" I see. Well, you've done more than anyone expected of you. How about we get you all somewhere safe now?" Leo said as he pointed to the Gate.

The people followed Leo as he walked towards it, a white energy still flowing through the stone arch.

"If you step through here you'll arrive in Veneria. The Royal Army won't just accept a bunch of random people appearing in their base so I'll come back with you to explain." Leo said.

Everyone showed their agreement and understanding with this plan and stepped into the Gate behind Leo.

It didn't take long for Leo to explain what had happened and order the soldiers to take care of the civilians, providing them with somewhere to sleep, giving them food and medical attention as well as anything else they might need.

He then called for two squads, each consisting of mostly regular soldiers and some Infernai, to defend the other side of the Gate.

The squads arrived within an hour and went through the gate with Leo. He informed them about the situation, how the cult seemingly attacks regularly.

After warning them, he started running in the direction of Zoren at a moderate pace, moderate for him at least.

Once the Gate was out of sight and he was sure nobody could see him, he stopped running. 'It will take too long to get there on foot or on horseback. There's only one way to get there faster.'

[Leap]

He crouched down and gathered all his strength, then pushed off the ground and went high up into the air, easily reaching a hight of 100 meters.

'Flying is impractical right now because it uses too much Energy, so it's a good thing I came up with an alternative.' Leo thought as he reached the apex of his jump.

[Glide]

Instead of falling straight down, his body started to move in the direction of Zoren. He was still descending but much slower than he was moving forward.

Glide was a skill created by doing multiple different things at once. Using his Energy, Leo would manipulate the wind around him and create an air current that went in the direction he wished to move.

The force of the wind current isn't strong enough to move Leo's body on its own, so he incorporated Absorb and Redirect as well.

He would only use Absorb on the force generated by his descent, not his forward movement. This way, his falling speed would be reduced slightly.

Then he would do the same with Redirect but this time the Energy would be directed away from himself in a diagonal direction behind himself and down. This would propel him forward and upwards slightly.

The Energy used to create the wind current was mostly recovered thanks to Absorb, meaning the cost to use this skill was reduced to manageable amount.

Initially the skill used four Energy per second but through the use of Absorb, two Energy would be recovered every second. Meaning the skill only costs two Energy per second.

Compared to [Fly] that uses 7 Energy per second, this is far more practical. Although Fly is faster and allows more control over movement, there is no way to recover Energy while using it.

'Using Fly in controlled bursts was only slightly better than using it normally. I'm glad I managed to think of this as a replacement until I have more Energy to use.' Leo thought as he glided through the sky.

'This is more practical but you had to level up both Absorb and Redirect so they would be powerful enough to achieve this.' Dreifus said.

'I would have taken them both to level five if the system didn't stop me.' Leo said with an annoyed tone.

'Who would have thought the system would place restrictions on your growth. Even Authority can't be leveled up until you meet the condition.' Dreifus said with a curious tone.

'Yeah I know. I was expecting it to increase the number of skill points required by a huge number, going to fifty or something but what it gave me was arguably more difficult.' Leo said.

'Ive been thinking about it for a while now and I think the restrictions are to protect you.'

'Protect me? In what way?' Leo asked.

'When you use your transformation there's a big penalty after. I don't think it's a penalty, I think it's just the damage that's done to your body as a result. Whe you use it, you're accessing power that your body isn't ready for and that hurts you.

The condition is there to force you to get stronger before increasing the skill level because the skill would become too powerful for you to handle and could cause you harm.' Dreifus explained.

' That does make sense... So by that logic, my transformation might not improve as I grow stronger but it's penalty might decrease instead?' Leo asked.

' Yes, because you would be able to handle the power better, making the strain less intense.' Dreifus replied.

Leo thought back to when he checked on the Authority skill after he increased it to level 2. Instead of telling him to get more skill points, he saw a different message appear.

[A higher evolution is required to increase the level of this skill]

The same message appeared when he tried to level up Absorb and Redirect passed level 4. 'It didn't specify how many evolutions I need or how many there are to achieve. I'll just have to do what I can to gather the source materials.'

The requirement for evolution was to gather 30 source material. The only way to aquire source material, that Leo is aware of, is to kill an Imperium. So far he has only managed to collect 4.

'Killing that many Imperiums isn't the problem, it would take some time but that's alright. The problem is that I almost never encounter them. True, I've been kept away from the fighting for a while but even then the Imperiums didn't make an appearance very often.

There are ability users fighting for the cult, they abandoned Infernum and joined after we were attacked three months ago. Other than that, they are mostly made up of regular people.

The only reason they've been able to fight the Royal Army to a stand stoll is because of Trent and his beasts. Everytime the war tips in our favour he just abducts a town or village and turned them into beasts, killing a large number of our fighters and evening the playing field again.'

Thinking about this, Leo knew there was only one way to tip the scales in the kingdoms favour permanently.

'Trent needs to die. The next time I see him I won't hold back...I'll make sure he can't escape.'