Path to Transcendence

To his immense surprise, Aubrey didn’t gloat or boast about winning. If anything, she seemed upset with him. He didn’t know why, and when he tried asking, all he got in reply was a loud huff before she walked away.
It was so odd, usually she would never lose an opportunity to tease him or to gloat about her victory, yet she didn’t. He probed her aura with his own, feeling suspicious that something might be wrong. There was even a chance that this wasn’t actually...
“What are you doing?” She swung her head back around to glare at him.
“What?” He acted innocent.
“Why were you probing my aura like that?”
He stayed silent and pretended that he didn’t hear her, walking by her as he searched for a token or any treasures hidden in the bodies.
“Wait, did you think…” she trailed off and rolled her eyes. “You are such an idiot,” she finished and shook her head.
“Rude.”
He didn’t understand women.
***
“Found it!” He said, exhausted, and sighed in relief. The stench was really becoming too much for him. Aubrey was lucky because she was using her clones to search the bodies, but all he had were some mana constructs stuffed in his nose, which were annoyingly insufficient in blocking out the smell.
The fact that a good number of them were burnt didn’t help matters, but he endured it, and because of that, he found a token stuffed inside the chest of one of the dead monsters.
Aubrey quickly came running over to him with an excited look on her face. He threw it over to her, and she reflexively caught it mid-air. That was a mistake, though. The token was covered in the monster’s revolting fluids.
“Ack!” She shouted and dropped the token to the floor.
He laughed at her reaction, but failed to react when she decided to wipe her hands all over his neck.
“Motherf—”
This time, it was her laughing at him.
“Touche,” he said with a conceding nod after he used some aura to clean his neck.
She cleaned the token off and fiddled with it in her hands. “So what now?” She asked him.
“I don’t know. Keep on looking for more tokens and treasures seems like the only real option. We both have two now, and I feel like we will get more as long as we continue to head toward that pillar of light,” he answered.
“Sounds good. Maybe we can find Derek and Edgar along the way, too,” she added.
He nodded. “Yeah, hopefully we come across them. Let’s deal with these people before we head off, though.”
She scrunched her brows in confusion. “What people?”
“The people who have been watching us for the past couple of minutes,” he said with a shrug.
“Are you just telling me this now?” She asked him with a disappointed frown.
“They didn’t seem to be interested in attacking us, so I didn’t think it was worth mentioning,” he said with a shrug.
“Well, how many of them are there?”
“Four,” Julius said simply and nodded in their direction.
Aubrey tightened her lips and looked around her, trying to see if she could find these four people.
Julius had already locked eyes with the mage who had been hiding them, so it didn’t matter. They knew that the jig was up and revealed themselves.
Julius was a little suspicious. He didn’t get a good feeling from these people. However, he had been surprised more than once in the past. Who knew? These people might have been friendly and he was wrongly judging them from their appearances.
These four people were all guys and the one in front held a massive shield at his side. However, despite the shield being so large, he moved silently and with grace.
Julius could tell right away that this one was pretty strong.
“See? I knew they spotted you,” one of the other guys with a bow teased his teammate.
“Yeah, you really need to improve that stealth skill if you can’t even hide us from a kid,” another jumped in. He was tapping his sword against his thigh as he spoke.
“You guys can use your own stealth skill next time if you want to whine about it. Oh yeah, you can’t, they either suck or can’t hide all of us at once,” the mage said snarkily.
“Mine doesn’t suck,” the swordsman muttered.
“Hmph, yeah, it does,” the archer scoffed and said without hesitation.
“Do you guys need something?” Aubrey interrupted their little comedy routine. She wasn’t friendly to these people at all.
“Oh! So cold,” the swordsman said with a fake pout.
“Yeah, we were just waiting for you guys to finish. We didn’t want to interfere in your fun,” the mage added.
Julius could feel ripples in their auras. They were lying.
“Oh yeah? So then why were you hiding?” Aubrey asked with an expectant look. She didn’t look like she believed them either.
”Better safe than sorry,” the shield warrior said with a deep grumble. Julius didn’t detect any ripples from his aura. Either he was telling the truth, or he was good at controlling his aura. Neither was good news.
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“We came over because we wanted to see if you wanted to team up or something,” the swordsman said with a practiced smile. His teeth were perfect, beautifully straight and white pearly teeth.
“No, thank you,” Aubrey said immediately. Not even giving it a second or two of thought.
Julius could see that this decline irritated the swordsman and the others. However, they each hid their reactions well. It was only because he was watching so closely that he noticed.
“Oh come on! We are trustworthy,” the mage commented with a light laugh.
Julius felt some fluctuations in their aura when this was said. He had gotten pretty good at deciphering emotions from flashes of aura, thanks to Drasil, which meant he was pretty good at knowing when someone was lying or not.
That was strike two.
“I said I am fine. You can leave now,” Aubrey said, her face completely stoic.
The swordsman walked up to her and pleaded with begging eyes. “Come on, gorgeous! We will be a lot more fun than the kid, I promise,” he said while staring down at Julius. There was a taunting look in the man’s eyes now that he wasn’t looking at Aubrey.
A flash of irritation washed through Julius. However, he kept his cool and stepped between the guy and Aubrey.
“She already told you the first time that her answer is no,” Julius said calmly and looked at the other three guys. “I think it is time for you guys to leave now.”
The swordsman clearly didn’t like this. The guy grabbed onto Julius’s shoulder and tried to shove him away as if Julius wasn’t worth his attention. Julius didn’t budge an inch. This surprised the guy, and he looked down at where he was trying to push Julius and used a little more force. The result was the same, and there was a hint of unease in his eyes.
Julius, on the other hand, just looked down at the guy’s hand and back at his eyes. His irritation was slowly building.
“I said leave,” Julius said sharply, no longer being polite.
The swordsman’s practiced smile slipped from his face, and he stared at Julius with a vexed expression.
“If you don’t want to do it the easy way, then we can just take what we want instead,” he said with a nasty snarl.
“That’s better,” Julius said with a sigh. He had been getting tired of the theatrics. Why couldn't they just attack them from the start? It would seem that Aubrey felt similarly.
“Two,” Aubrey suddenly stated firmly, causing him to look away from the guy and at her instead.
“Two?” He repeated questioningly.
“I want two of them to myself, don’t interfere.” She told him, sounding eerily composed and serious. The two of them were completely ignoring the other four people in front of them.
He was about to argue with her, but one feel of her aura was enough for him not to argue. Ever since their time in the Endless Forest, he realized that all of his friends had grown—some in different ways than others.
In Aubrey’s case, she had become much more mature and committed. Julius loved Aubrey no matter her many faults, not even her immaturity and tendency to shove her own foot in her mouth could make him dislike her. But in recent months, she has grown substantially.
He had been slowly noticing it in the recent weeks, but seeing her not tease him about the bet she won confirmed it. She had changed and truly matured.
“Two, but if you look like you are going to die, I am stepping in,” he conceded.
She looked like she was about to argue with him, so he cut her off before she had the chance. “That is my condition; otherwise, I will deal with them myself.”
She reluctantly nodded and swiftly began infusing mana into her body. Brilliant purple mana covered her body as her crystal defensive skill formed over her skin.
“Okay, put everything you have found on the ground. All your tokens and treasures,” the swordsman demanded with a shiteating grin. Julius and Aubrey barely heard him. They were too busy gathering their mana.
“What are you—?” The swordsman tried to ask, but was already getting punched in the chest by Aubrey. The swordsman was forced to release Julius’s shoulder and went flying back.
Julius watched as various attacks closed the distance to them. His teammates had reacted in quite an impressive manner.
One was a simple mana bolt, plain but powerful. There were some additional aspects to it that stood out, such as the sturdy structure of the spell. It didn’t have much, but many people would likely find it difficult to disrupt the attack. Furthermore, considering that it came from the shield warrior, it was quite an impressive display.
On top of that, there were several spears of ice coming at them from the mage. Much like the shield warrior, these projectiles were very sturdy. Julius could also sense some powerful Ice Concepts tucked inside these spears. They were freezing the air as they approached.
Finally, and probably the most worrisome, was the barrage of extremely fast arrows raining down on them. These arrows were plentiful, and they were dangerous. Each of them had this deadly feeling of death and toxicity that set off his alarm bells.
He glanced at Aubrey and back at these incoming attacks. Then he decided to take care of the archer and the mage first. Letting Aubrey have the two warriors instead.
His aura expanded, snarling as it touched upon these people’s auras once more. Their intentions toward him, and more specifically toward Aubrey, made him sick and angry. While he had met plenty of decent people, even amongst his opponents, these were not good people. It made what he was going to do to them easier, so that was a silver lining.
He allowed this apathy and anger to feed into this aura, fueling the already potent, ruinous effect. All of these attacks made contact with his aura, and while he could have stopped most, if not all of them, he decided to let some of them through.
Aubrey had asked him to let her fight two of them after all. He would give her this chance to grow on her own. He wouldn’t always be there to protect his friends, and this was the perfect chance for her to test herself.
He mainly focused on the death-attuned arrows. He ripped apart their mana structures; his aura was like a sledgehammer as he shattered the arrows into little mana particles. The Death Concept coming off from these arrows was more challenging to handle, but to his surprise, his Phoenix Concept roared to the surface even without his intent to do so.
It felt like it was responding to a challenge, and his Phoenix Concept devoured the archer’s Death Concept like it was nothing, displaying how much more potent and authoritative his concept was.
The archer flinched in pain as he must have felt some sort of backlash from a collapsed technique. Julius smiled at that and dashed toward the archer and mage who were still toward the backlines.
The swordsman had already gotten back up and, alongside the shield warrior, attempted to stop him from doing so, but they were just too slow. Fast for Tier 3s, but pathetically slow to Julius when he was pumping so much aura, mana, and kinetic energy through his body.
A sword flashed over his head as he leaned down, and the shield bearer attempted to slam him with his massive shield. They were grinning as they tried their best to kill him, constantly looking in Aubrey’s direction. Julius could practically taste their anticipation, and that made his final bit of patience snap.
Julius usually held back his aura on account of how destructive and deadly it could be, but these circumstances were different. He didn’t bother holding back his aura anymore. It was released in an explosive wave, directed at these people.
He didn’t want his aura to destroy their skills. No, he focused his aura to do one thing.
Cause as much fear and pain in these four people as it could. He wanted them to suffer a little bit, and he smiled when he heard their cries of agony and distress. The two warriors were closer, so they had to withstand more of it than the archer and mage.
Their cries only made him ramp up the pressure, letting his aura run rampant as it wreaked havoc on these scumbags. The only reason he stopped was because he heard Aubrey shouting at him, reminding him of their agreement.
He grimaced, but nodded. He did promise her, and he would allow her to have her chance. He dashed forward and backhanded the swordsman with his right hand, sending him flying toward Aubrey. The shield warrior was a bit more hefty, so Julius opted for a front kick, sending the armored piece of shit toward her as well.
As much as he wanted to take out these two, he held himself back. Thankfully, there were two more eager volunteers nearby. He smiled viciously at them and enjoyed seeing their shocked expressions.
He was going to have some fun.