"Goddammit."
Zarek threw the clothes to the side. There really was nothing good to use here. He should have expected that a man with the body of a boy wasn't going to have anything that fit him, but it annoyed him anyway.
Maybe he was just going to have to raw dog it for a while. Or maybe he'd find a beast to skin.
He shot off into the distance, circulating [Godsfall Eclipse Resonance]. It was quite ironic. He had even died in his third life just for the sake of getting [Limit Break], only for one of its most useful functions to become useless.
The good news was that even though there was no point in trying to use [Limit Break] to elevate his Growth Potentials anymore, he was still able to use it to Limit Break his Core Stats.
Plus…
'It's not completely out of the realm of possibilities that I could Limit Break my Growth Potentials. Axiograft is unranked from what it looks like. It doesn't appear on the scale at all. Theoretically, there might be something beyond SSS+. Unless Axiograft just glitched.'
There was a chance that Axiograft was simply an anomaly. After all, Zarek could still use Harmonic Recall, Atom Link, and even Temp Duplicate as though nothing about them had changed at all.
As far as he knew, the individual Talents that made up a fused one shouldn't be able to be accessed so easily. There was something off about it.
Though aspects of them would still be there, in action they wouldn't still have their individually defined abilities. So the fact Zarek still had access to them made him think that maybe it wasn't that Axiograft was beyond SSS+, but instead that it couldn't be ranked like normal Talents could.
Either way, only time would tell. If he was going to stumble onto an opportunity that opened up an option for him to go beyond SSS+ in Growth Potential, it would have to be something as enormous as what created Axiograft in the first place.
And that… couldn't be easily replicated.
Even if he found another Eclipse Rank Challenge Hub, it had to be remembered that the reward it gave was based on what it thought you needed the most. There was no guarantee that Zarek would get a boost to Growth Potential at that point.
Maybe it would give him the fourth and final Talent. Maybe it would upgrade his Ashen Gate to not only store Ashen Souls, but multiply them in power, or maybe even allow him to use their abilities. Maybe it wouldn't have anything to do with his Core Stats or Talents at all and instead be related to his Profession that he was suddenly getting a lot more leeway out of…
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Zarek streaked across the snow so fast it really would have looked like he was teleporting if he wasn't leaving such a long streak of green in his wake.
His limit of three Skills with 10 uses each seemed to have gone out the window.
Well, he was still limited to just 10 uses, but that was a problem related to his poor control over his Profession. It still had a lot more room to grow.
However, in terms of the number of Skills he could tattoo onto himself? It had easily increased by a factor of ten.
In fact, Zarek wasn't entirely sure he had a limit right now at all. There was something about his state of Core Harmony that muted the clashing effect his Matrix Tattoos would have usually had on his body.
Certainly, he had a limit. It was just that it almost wasn't worth finding right now.
For all intents and purposes…
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
… He was flying high.
"He's returned."
The words set off waves in the council room.
They had all seen Zarek hop into that portal. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened. But… this was the first time in recent history that anyone had actually returned.
Most often, those that returned would also do so from wildly different timelines as well. Those lost to the past would often be erased through the paradox that destroyed them from the inside out. But those that landed far off into the future usually ended up being important assets for the Association.
Someone who returned so close to the time they had left… Well, this was unheard of.
The reason was clear enough. Time was infinite in almost both directions. If you went to a place that randomly transported you, you would be lucky if you even landed in a time where time itself mattered in the first place.
You were more likely to land in the universe when it was nothing more than soup, or in a far-off future where laws had begun to disintegrate beneath their own heat death.
Those that had had a meeting about Zarek's status as a Sin looked toward one another. If there were any questions before, this confirmed it for certain. Thanks for reading—brought to you by M|VL|EMPYR.
"Kill him."
These words were no less of a stone's throw into a calm lake.
The man who spoke them sat on a throne with a far higher seat than the others, and yet he was eye level with them all. His beard was gruff and ragged, his eyes bloodshot.
This was none other than the current head of the Imperial Wind Lineage, a man who by right would technically be Thalion's great-great-grandfather.
It only made sense that he wanted to see Zarek dead and gone. But saying such a thing out loud not in a private meeting, but in a group of them all…
That was a different matter entirely.
It was just as Zarek expected. There was a rift in the Hero Association.
None of them were fools. They could feel that their former power was slipping away, and it was becoming more and more difficult to reach the heights they once had.
This batch of Demon-level geniuses had great potential, especially the top two. While Urouge, well… many felt that he had potential to stand toe to toe with them if he spent less time on petty tricks and scheming—not to mention raising his liches and summons. But he also had time…
It could be said that there were three absolute geniuses of this generation. And yet, compared to those of the past…
It was really hard to say if they were truly on par.
These old men and women knew of the struggle between the Hero and the system. But they felt a bit like a kayak stuck in the middle of a raging storm that could tip even the Titanic over. As a result, there were a good portion of them that actually felt they would be better off following the system's wishes.
They felt that this time they would be ready. If they integrated aspects of the Turned into themselves and became monsters, then when they reached this cycle's peak evolutionary state, it would be the right time to turn against the system.
None of them were foolish enough to believe that the system would be satisfied after all of this. It would never be satisfied. That was why the timing would be so important.
However… there was another half that believed that this was the most foolish thing they could do. For them to play right into the system's hands when even the Hero couldn't rein it in was the pinnacle of stupidity to them. They felt that they should fight against it every moment that they could.
For a long while now, these tensions had been brewing beneath the surface, but no one had ripped the bandages off.
No one was surprised, though, that it was the Imperial Wind Lineage that snapped first.
Every one of them was weakening, but it seemed that the first domino to fall would be the Imperial Wind Lineage. That was why they had sent Thalion in with the token badge to begin with.
While everyone else was still trying to decide which side to pick or was still preparing to strike at the other side at the right time, they were already in the midst of suffering.
It was hard to care about the benefit of humanity when your people would likely be extinct in a few more generations.
This seemed like an exaggeration. After all, they were just growing a little bit weaker with time.
But that wasn't the case…
This was the Hero Association. In order to stand here, you needed merit. And that merit was left to these eight families and the quadrants of the last bastion of humanity that remained.
That was to say that every one of the eight Demons—or, rather, seven plus Thalion—had come from one of these prestigious families. And the reason these families were so prestigious was because they were the vanguard of one of the eight gates that protected this quadrant of the universe.
The last true expert of the SSS Class the Imperial Wind Lineage had was the old man right here. But he didn't have much life to live. Maybe in at most another generation, he would have to go off beyond the gate and do as his ancestors before him had, fighting until his last breath and hoping to form a Hero Spirit that could be passed on through the generations.
But the odds that he would fail like so many others had were too high. And by then… there wouldn't be another SSS Class to replace him.
Thalion was that last hope.
And the moment his will crumbled beneath that Eclipse Threat, that hope was extinguished.