Chapter 278: One Last Thing Before He Leaves

His last night was bittersweet. Both Richard and Rebecca had come over to see him and he explained to them what had happened.

Rebecca was in denial and disbelief when she heard him. But for some reason, Richard had not seemed that surprised at all. It was as if he expected something like this to happen.

After he had a lengthy conversation with them, he told them that he and Reinera would be going back to Heston. They both decided not to hide anything from them, especially since they already knew about Reinera’s true identity.

Which surprisingly made the girl feel better. He had a feeling that a lot of it was because they treated her like a normal young girl even though they knew she was a princess. It told her that they didn’t care so much about her status rather than who she was.

They didn’t do anything too special. There wasn’t a grand party or celebration, just a simple dinner like usual, but they did spend more time than normal hanging out late into the night.

The two parents even allowed Cory to stay up well past his bedtime for this occasion. Something Rebecca never allowed.

Speaking of Cory, the little boy was devastated to hear the news. He had been getting used to Julius’s and Reinera’s presence. Therefore, hearing that they would be going back broke the boy’s heart.

There were a lot of tears and snot, but Julius was already prepared. He had preemptively taken Drasil from his soul space and offered the life spirit as a sacrifice.

Thankfully, Cory had a special obsession for Drasil and his tears disappeared quite quickly once he had Drasil in his clutches.

Drasil had looked back at Julius with teary eyes, the betrayal shocking the cute spirit. But Julius understood that sometimes sacrifices were necessary.

***

The morning, all of them found themselves standing in front of the wooden beams.

Before he left, he really wanted to give this training course one last shot. He had still not been able to complete the thing. With that being said, he hadn’t given it a shot since he got his new epic-ranked enhancement skill.

“You do realize that this course is not really meant to be completed right?” Rebecca reminded him.

“Just because you keep on telling me that doesn’t mean I am going to give up, you know? It just makes me want to prove you wrong that much more,” he said to her with a cocky grin.

She shook her head and walked away, activating the enchantments on the course. “Well, don’t let me stop you then.”

He gave her one last smirk before directing his full attention to the course. The smile slipped off his face like water and he activated every one of his skills.

It was weird to think that he was feeling more nervous about this than he had when fighting the Tier 4s and even the Tier 5. When he had fought them there had been no real expectation to win. Thus, the fear of losing wasn’t really there.

However, now that he had gotten this strong, he believed that this course was definitely completable. If he could defeat a Tier 4 then why couldn’t he beat a course meant for Tier 3s? That added pressure made his heart beat a little faster and he had to use [Sage of Savagery] to temper his emotions.

So with a steady and calming breath, he charged himself full of kinetic energy. When he felt prepared, he sent himself blasting through the course.

As usual, the first stages were easy. He had those ones already figured out and breezed through them without much issue.

It was the last section that always gave him problems.

It didn’t matter if he was fast or if he noticed the threads before they hit him. The reality was that the threads were way too close together in order to dodge. It was a simple problem of being too big to squeeze past them.

He did everything perfectly, he perceived the threads, understood where he needed to place his body, and adjusted promptly. But like always, he was always tagged by a single thread.

The red light, signalling his failure once again, lit up the entire course.

He looked up into the sky and let out a frustrated sigh. The problem wasn’t even his speed, it was the fact that he physically couldn’t move out of the way in time. There were literally no gaps to go through.

The only way he could even get through without being touched would be to either teleport past the strings, become intangible like those two people he had fought, or somehow become half as big.

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None of them were actual solutions.

He would very much like to teleport but he hadn’t gotten to that point with [Flash Step] yet. It was still at level 16, even though it was one of his more regularly used skills.

The other issue was that even if it was at level 20 and ready to evolve, he would need to have a Space Concept to go along with it. Therefore, since he has been having an extraordinarily difficult time learning a Space Concept, as evidenced from his [Spatial Perception] skill which was still sitting at level 19, he was unable to teleport or use any spatial movement technique.

Intangibility also wasn’t an option. That wasn’t something he believed was even possible with his current skill set and affinities. While it would have been nice to have, especially after seeing the practicality of such a skill in action, he sadly probably would never be able to.

The last option was even more unlikely.

He knew that there were people out there who had special magic that could alter their physical forms. Types of metamorphosis and flesh magic could probably help with something like this, but once again, he didn’t have that really available to him.

So with a determined sigh, he went at the course once more.