Path to Transcendence

Chapter 291: Hard Decisions To Make

He gave himself a proud mental pat on the back for a job well done. He hadn’t believed that he could avoid all of Tia’s vines while severely limiting himself to a Tier 2’s strength, but he had. Thanks to that stupid obstacle course at House Easten, it gave him the ability to do so.

“How did you avoid all of them?” She asked him, shock still present in her eyes.

Julius looked over at the girl, who looked utterly lost. She probably hadn’t believed he could easily make it through her vines. Though, it wasn’t as easy as he made it look. If he had been using his entire strength, then that would be a different story, but since he had been using kinetic energy to limit himself artificially, he was probably as weak as he had been when he first arrived at Goldencrest.

He was probably even weaker than then since he had to focus on using his skills to handicap himself, limiting how many other techniques he could use at once.

“I told you, your aura makes it pretty easy to determine your intentions. I also just used my mana sense to see where you were creating the vines beneath me. I didn’t even use my perception skill to do so. If I had, I would have had an easier time,” he explained to her.

He was telling the truth, too. He had not used [Spatial Perception] to detect the vines. There wasn’t much need to do so, either. The mana of the vines she created underneath him had released quite a bit of excess mana that he could easily detect.

Her aura also told him what she had been planning when she sent the initial wall of thorns at him. There was no real intent to attack, which was how he knew she was planning something else, and he let her know exactly all of that.

After he was done explaining it to her, he watched as she looked down at her feet with a frown.

“Look, I didn’t do this to embarrass you, but I wanted to show you that people can avoid your vines without any unusual or rare skills. You shouldn’t only be worried about people destroying your vines or dodging them with an intangibility or teleportation skill. There are other ways.”

“I know, and I’m not forgetting that I am the person who asked for your help in the first place,” Tia said while gnawing on her lips in frustration.

“What do you think I should do?” She finally asked him.

“Well, I think you need three things. One is that your vines are too conspicuous. I was able to sense them easily, and while most people won’t have my mana-sensing abilities, they should be able to figure it out, too. You can easily train with Joshua who is trying to learn how to use his skill without wasting mana. It’s for a different purpose, but it should still help you out,” he said to her.

“And the other two?”

“Well, the second thing is that your aura basically lets your enemy know where you are aiming. That is why Polux knows where to dodge and where to smash through. But that can be solved with an aura item that hides your aura. If you donʼt have one, I can give you one of my items, but you should start training your aura. Trust me, there are many more applications other than limiting what people can sense from you.”

“What about the last thing?” She asked with a soft frown.

“You should, at the very least, make yourself a harder target to hit. It is almost like you are waiting for your opponents to come to you,” he said with a shake of his head. Even when he had gotten close to her, she hadn’t made a single attempt to move away or avoid him.

“What do you mean? I don’t follow that one,” she said, her frown growing larger.

“Imagine if you used your vines to shroud your position or use them to buy you more time to reposition. You might not be able to fight your enemies with your fists, but you might just be able to avoid them long enough until your magic works.”

He could see that these words seemed to break through to her, and realization blossomed on her face.

He sighed as he finally made some progress with her. Who knew that helping others train could be more stressful than his own training? And this was taking into account that he regularly lost limbs or spontaneously exploded during his training.

***

Julius had just left the training room and was heading to the library, where he was supposed to meet the others. Reinera said she might drop by, too, but she had been really busy as well.

Her family might have allowed her to stay, but she had to uphold certain requirements if she wanted to. She didn’t fully explain them to Julius, but she said it wasn’t that bad, and he believed her when she told him.

He had almost made it to the library when he felt a group of people approach him, and he recognized a couple of them.

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“Oh, look who it is,” Adam scoffed at him.

Julius already had an idea of what was going on, and he didn’t even bother to respond, simply continuing to walk.

“What? You’re too good for us now that you are all chummy with the princess?” Adam called out again.

While he has been receiving a lot of attention recently because of his relationships with Reinera and the others, he also has to deal with people like this.

People who didn’t quite appreciate that he was so close to the princess were usually the same ones who wanted to get close to her themselves. As such, they were properly jealous of him and what he had accomplished.

Most of them firmly believed that it was all luck and that if not for him being transported alongside her, he would have never gotten the opportunity to even talk to her. What they didn’t know was that they had known each other prior to the incident. Something he wasn’t in a rush to tell them. He had a feeling that it would only make them more angry.

Some of Adam’s friends started to chirp at him as well, but he kept ignoring them. He used [Sage of Savagery] to distance their voices. If he could handle the pain of exploding his limbs, he could handle the annoyance of a few arrogant nobles.

However, his continuing avoidance of them seemed to piss them off even more because he suddenly found himself getting grabbed by the shoulder.

Although these weren’t the first people to try to get a rise out of him during this past week or so, this was the first time someone had tried to put their hands on him.

This time, he didn’t ignore them and slowly turned to Adam, who gripped his shoulder tightly.

“You think you can just ignore us? Do you have any idea who the hell we are?” The boy said with gritted teeth.

Julius glanced over at his shoulder to look at the hand that was still latched onto it. “Why do you like grabbing people so much? This is like the third time you have grabbed me,” he said to the other boy.

“Huh?” Adam tilted his head and asked confusingly.

If he were Tier 2 or someone weaker, it might have bothered him more that this boy was tightly squeezing his shoulder. But although the boy was clearly trying to intimidate him by squeezing hard, it felt more like a soft, reassuring pat.

He didn’t think that Adam knew that Julius was Tier 3. He didn’t think many of the students knew that he was just quite yet. It wasn’t exactly something he had been sharing with people. He had told his friends, but that was about it.

It was also doubtful that Adam and his buddies would be as aggressive if they knew this.

“What are you guys even looking for? Are you trying to pick a fight? Or are you simply relieving some of the frustrations you have been having?” He asked calmly, looking at each one of them.

“No, we just don’t think a person like you deserves to be anywhere near the princess,” Adam said to him angrily.

Julius did notice that some of the other boys seemed a bit confused by Julius’s nonchalant behavior and the fact that he wasn’t bothered by the tightly compressing hand on his shoulder.

“Is it really your business, though?” He asked.

“Yeah, it is. Us nobles need to stick together because otherwise commoners like you will try and take advantage of our generosity,” the boy said firmly, almost as if he actually truly believed in what he was saying.

“If we are being accurate, the two of you are not nobles. You are a noble. She is royalty. Trust me, she was quite insistent on the difference when I made the same mistake,” he said with a light laugh.

However, his joke seemed to fall flat, and instead, all he got was a noble in his face for his troubles.

“What did you say?” Adam said, barely controlling his anger as he got within a foot of Julius’s face.

“I said that she is royalty and you are a noble. So when you said that you nobles needed to stick together, it wasn’t exactly correct,” he said, unbothered by the boy’s threatening posture.

While it might have worried some, he didnʼt feel the slightest bit nervous after fighting a Tier 5 and beating a Tier 4.

He knew that he shouldnʼt be egging the boy on, but he couldnʼt help himself. The boy was acting like a spoiled brat, and he couldnʼt muster any sympathy to feel bad about it at all. The boy had come onto him, and if he wanted to have some fun, then Julius was obliged to let him. It wasn’t his fault if the boy’s confrontation didn’t go according to plan.

“You better watch your tongue, commoner, before I rip it out of your mouth.”

Julius sighed at the boy’s theatrics and the sight of the other boys beside him trying and failing to look scary.

“Look, just get out of my way. I have things to do,” he said before he turned around and walked away, ignoring them once again.

With that being said, he couldn’t say he was surprised when he felt a fist flying toward the back of his head.

He didn’t even bother to try to dodge it. The punch didn’t have any Concepts or overwhelming power, which is why, upon contact, he barely felt a thing. It was just a dull thump.

However, he was still a little peeved that Adam hadn’t even had the courage to punch him in the face.

When he turned around again, he observed the stunned and confused looks on all of the boysʼ faces. They had seen the punch and heard it make contact with him, but they also saw that he barely reacted.

Adam was already preparing to attack again, and a couple of the other boys were leaning forward.

Understanding that they wouldn’t let this go easily, he decided to take matters into his own hands. So he quickly extended his aura to them and ripped through their willpower. He saw the shock and pain they felt when this happened.

Once they were defenseless, he used kinetic energy to lock them in place.

He ensured that his brief usage of aura didn’t hurt them too badly. After he did that, he didn’t even bother to look at them again. He went on his way, putting the entire incident to the back of his mind.

He had more important things to do, such as choosing which cake he wanted to try first tonight. He had just bought some specialty cakes from a new bakery, but he was left with a hard choice to make. Did he want strawberry or chocolate?

He let out another sigh. So many hard decisions…