There was not a hint of hesitation in Nero's movements that betrayed his thoughts, but internally he was genuinely surprised. Silas' ability was genuinely a ridiculously useful augmentation ability. He could not help but imagine how many secret compartments he would have found if Silas had been with him in the cathedral, or how many secrets he would have learned down in the Vault.
At the same time, he began to wonder if his experience was different, or if it was normal for innate abilities to not only be so versatile and varied, but also so powerful. His understanding was that humans unlocked relatively normal innate abilities, and that their true strength relied in Eldrim cards.
Only after becoming a Mystic, and unlocking a profession, which had their own associated abilities, were humans somewhat capable. But the innate abilities he had been seeing lately were quite a bit absurd. Or perhaps he was only being exposed to the best of the best abilities as a result of being filtered out by the army.
For example, Commander Dagon Thomas, who was an Ascendant, had a relatively mundane innate ability of increased strength. That was more aligned with what Nero had been taught in school about humans and their abilities.
In fact, growing up he had encountered many people with ordinary abilities, such as improved hearing or eyesight. He once had a visiting school teacher whose innate ability was perfect memory. He had once attended the funeral of a major who died fighting a curse. The man had numerous accolades and awards, but his innate ability was the ability to trigger a sneeze in any animal.
Those were all very one dimensional abilities, and what he had come to expect. But lately, he had been encountering a lot of people with complex abilities, with more than one facet to them.
Patrick, for example, had passive defence. But his defence was based on how much cold he could absorb. Measuring cold was a strange concept, but that is what he needed to do because he genuinely needed to be in a colder environment to effectively use his ability.
That was besides the point. The point was that two elements had come into play with his ability: defence and cold.
Nero's own ability was similar, in that it absorbed heat, so in a sense it had a cooling effect, but it also produced something called aetheric fire. Two elements had come into play.
Gabriel's sand was far from ordinary, and after his recent upgrade Nero suspected it had three elements instead of two, with shapeshifting being one of them. Maximilian and Arter were much the same. Nero could not even begin to understand if Silas' ability counted as only one element of numerous, but it was powerful nevertheless.
What was absurd was that Bael, whose ability seemed like passive healing, had a single element ability as far as Nero could tell, but it was incredibly overpowered due to how quickly he healed!
What Nero didn't know was that Bael's ability was even stronger than it seemed, since every time he healed from an injury, his body was slightly stronger.
Nero had no idea what any of this meant, but it was a passing thought anyway. He didn't have time to focus on such things. They had to temporarily stop at an intersection so that Silas could study the clues, yet the blood was getting ever closer.
Unwilling to wait till the blood came closer, Nero used his Cyroflame, spreading it across the walls and the ceiling so that it could quickly feed on all the accumulating heat.
As always, his blue flames quickly consumed the ordinary ones, and the temperature rapidly started to drop. Chaotic winds began to flow between the intersections, forming mini-hurricanes, yet Nero ignored them all. Instead, he waited till he felt his flames were strong enough, then brought them down and blocked the path in the hallways through which the blood pool was progressing.
He could have just directly sent the flames to the pool, but honestly the danger he felt from the pool was so great he did not think that he could stop it at all.
He was fairly certain that the blood had somehow crossed the threshold of the Neophyte realm, and might even be near the very peak of the Initiate realm. Why the fog wasn't acting against it, he could not say. All he could do was see how long he could hold off the blood.
It did not take long, maybe only a couple dozen seconds before the pool met his blue flames.
Nero could not see what was happening since the fog blocked the view, but he could feel it.
His flames were not immediately extinguished, which was great, but they were sizzling and flickering, rapidly growing weaker.
"Silas, how much longer?" Nero asked.
The danger was worse than he expected. Even if Nero caused massive flames, and grew his own to be much stronger, he could only delay the blood pool for a few dozen seconds at most.
"Getting the recipe? As long as I'm not interrupted by berserkers and Mutts anymore, it should not take long. Making the card itself? Nero, honestly, it will take a while."
Nero grimaced. It was time for a new strategy.
"Do you have any cards that can produce water? Or better yet, let me control the water that is produced?"
Silas simply handed Bael his grimoire and told him what pages to get the cards from. He could not afford to be distracted right now.
"What do you have in mind?" Bael asked in a whisper, so as to not disturb Silas.
"Use the water to build a wall, blocking out the entire path, and make it as thick and dense as possible. I'll freeze it."
Following Nero's instructions, Bael began producing the wall of water while Nero started to freeze it, forming a wall of solid ice. He was not sure if this would work any better than just blocking the blood with his flames, but he was running out of ideas.
"Come on, we need to move further," Silas said once he'd written down the recipe, and then led the group deeper through the fog.
Every time they stopped, Nero and Bael began blocking off corridors using ice walls, completely uncertain if they would even work.
"Silas, will you have all the ingredients for the recipe?" Nero asked eventually, realising he had overlooked one critical piece of information.
"To be entirely honest, I brought along a small artisan kit with me to make cards on the go, but while I have most of the common ingredients, I've run out of ink," Silas admitted. "But that was already during the last chamber. We had to… we used human blood as a replacement for the ink, since it can carry aether as well.
It's not the best, and reduces the durability drastically, but it gets the job done."
His voice was a little shaky as he talked about it, but that was it. Clearly he didn't want to think about it.
"I'm also running low on papers," he said very quietly. "Hopefully I'll have enough."
That was not good for papers were the most basic and common materials to form the various layers of the card. Each card, depending on the recipe, had various layers.
These were problems he literally couldn't do anything about at the moment, so he pushed it to the back of his mind.
"The ice seems to be working," Nero said, trying to share a bit of good news. "But we don't know how much time we've bought for ourselves. Let's hurry up."
Nero looked at his watch, and there were only 35 minutes left till the two hour mark. This was really cutting things close.
He tried to think of other ways they could escape, but with the blood blocking the way, he was completely out of ideas.
He couldn't help but wonder if the reason he was sent here was actually because the sages didn't want to use Fair Weather, or because someone just wanted him to meet with Bael in secret. If it was the latter, and things didn't work out, avoiding the use of Fair Weather would become the most counterproductive plan possible.
Nero did not let his thoughts wander, or else he might end up cursing Unity, whatever it was.
"We're here," Silas said, as he brought them further into yet another sealed door.
Silas immediately sat on the ground and pulled out his artisan kit from his backpack, while Nero and Bael began blocking off the paths using walls of ice, making them as thick as possible.
The three of them worked quietly, with only the crackle of newly forming ice breaking the silence. Nero resisted the urge to check his watch every few seconds, for knowing the time would make no difference to him whatsoever.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, he soon discovered something to distract him from his urge to check the time. The pool of blood had reached his final ice wall.