CH732

Continuing to run but trying to keep it as quiet as he could, Ben used the time to think about what he knew and what it implied.

There were demons who could take over others and those same demons were time magic users, both of those facts seemed true with the only matter being how many there were who held those skills, especially considering that Helori believed awakened skills were at use in the mix.

Given what he knew of how the invasion took place there shouldn’t have been any awakened skill holders who’d come through the last gate but given there were at least a hundred demons experiencing the benefits of prophecy then that meant it couldn’t just be one or two of them, so what did that imply happened?

Did a group of awakened break their self-imposed rules and come through or did more than a few just so happen to awaken the same skills in the weeks they’d been there?

Or maybe it’s just the particular skills that have been awakened? I’ve been assuming that soul magic is the bit that’s being used to take it over but it is in essence something acting the same way as hive mind.

…Okay, better than hive mind since it doesn’t have the same limitations of only being available within the range I can connect to others. Ugh stupid demons and their decent affinities for life and death, they could absolutely have some other soul-based skill helping them that awakened instead.

And who’s to say it has to be a group of awakened pulling this off? If whichever one managed to awaken whatever weird soul skill this is and found another that awakened their time magic then maybe the first got control of the latter and has been able to apply their effects to everything in the group of demons it gathered? It’s a working theory at least but I’m going to need to try and confirm it somehow. But later. First thing first, let’s get a little farther away.

Distance was the most important thing to get and he wanted it in spades, running as fast as he could while also observing the chimeras’ performance on a deeper level now that he was using their bodies as his own.

With his awakened attributes, the only thing they beat him on was speed but overall their performance was excellent, the exact sort of thing that would be powerful in a fight, even if his curiosity was pulling him away from that and in a different direction.

Since coming back, there hadn’t been much opportunity to experiment with hive mind. It was a skill that was essentially illegal for him to use in all but the lightest touches after all, with the only reason he was still keeping it up being that the other three would still be under the lingering effects of Thera’s charm if he didn’t, but it was the way Thera had been taken over that tempted him to try something. Could he force them to cast spells?

He had control of their minds and bodies but did that mean he also had power over their souls? With how much danger they were in it was worth asking for the help it could bring and he looked at the skills each held before making any attempt.

While Azeezol had her corpse song she held an affinitied magic too in the form of light magic, likely not bothering to mention it during their initial meeting because it was only at the first level, and the two chimeras had a few options between them as well.

The first of the remaining by the name of Joois held both fire and water at the first level, not out of any desire to be a proper mage but instead to use in what had been his main profession as a cook before the invasion, while the second, Queemit, held an air magic at the second level she’d developed largely in part to let her make a cool breeze for herself in the equatorial city she’d grown up in.

All of them were too weak to be of much practical use and mana quantity hadn’t been something Vividus’s alteration would affect but they were options to consider and he immediately tried to take advantage of them, using one to create a breeze to cool them down as they ran while another pulled some water from the air and feeling both attempts work, with a success that would have had him beaming if not for the situation they were in.

It wasn’t something he’d be able to use often, there were few situations where he’d be legally allowed to do it at all, but he now held a method that would let his vast magic knowledge be applied to something other than just his enchanting and he immediately put it into practice as he took advantage of the light magic Azeezol held to both heal their wounds and buff them as best as he could, finding a different limit to his skill.

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Using their magic pulled from their pools, not an inherent problem since he could give some of his own over but still something to be aware of, with the additional issue being that he was limited by their level of skill. He knew up to and including what a third-tier light magic was capable of but he was playing with significantly lower limits no matter how much power he could shove into any of them to get it.

Still, they moved quicker and their wounds healed, letting them get the distance he wanted just a little faster as the hours wore on.

It was long after night had fallen that he finally stopped, with Myriad and Helori telling him they’d be relatively safe where he had ended up as he let himself fall to the ground.