Chapter 291: Hard Decisions To Make

He gave himself a proud mental pat on the back for a job well done. He hadn’t believed that he could avoid all of Tia’s vines while severely limiting himself to a Tier 2’s strength, but he had. Thanks to that stupid obstacle course at House Easten, it gave him the ability to do so.

“How did you avoid all of them?” She asked him, shock still present in her eyes.

Julius looked over at the girl, who looked utterly lost. She probably hadn’t believed he could easily make it through her vines. Though, it wasn’t as easy as he made it look. If he had been using his entire strength, then that would be a different story, but since he had been using kinetic energy to limit himself artificially, he was probably as weak as he had been when he first arrived at Goldencrest.

He was probably even weaker than then since he had to focus on using his skills to handicap himself, limiting how many other techniques he could use at once.

“I told you, your aura makes it pretty easy to determine your intentions. I also just used my mana sense to see where you were creating the vines beneath me. I didn’t even use my perception skill to do so. If I had, I would have had an easier time,” he explained to her.

He was telling the truth, too. He had not used [Spatial Perception] to detect the vines. There wasn’t much need to do so, either. The mana of the vines she created underneath him had released quite a bit of excess mana that he could easily detect.

Her aura also told him what she had been planning when she sent the initial wall of thorns at him. There was no real intent to attack, which was how he knew she was planning something else, and he let her know exactly all of that.

After he was done explaining it to her, he watched as she looked down at her feet with a frown.

“Look, I didn’t do this to embarrass you, but I wanted to show you that people can avoid your vines without any unusual or rare skills. You shouldn’t only be worried about people destroying your vines or dodging them with an intangibility or teleportation skill. There are other ways.”

“I know, and I’m not forgetting that I am the person who asked for your help in the first place,” Tia said while gnawing on her lips in frustration.

“What do you think I should do?” She finally asked him.

“Well, I think you need three things. One is that your vines are too conspicuous. I was able to sense them easily, and while most people won’t have my mana-sensing abilities, they should be able to figure it out, too. You can easily train with Joshua who is trying to learn how to use his skill without wasting mana. It’s for a different purpose, but it should still help you out,” he said to her.

“And the other two?”

“Well, the second thing is that your aura basically lets your enemy know where you are aiming. That is why Polux knows where to dodge and where to smash through. But that can be solved with an aura item that hides your aura. If you don’t have one, I can give you one of my items, but you should start training your aura. Trust me, there are many more applications other than limiting what people can sense from you.”

“What about the last thing?” She asked with a soft frown.

“You should, at the very least, make yourself a harder target to hit. It is almost like you are waiting for your opponents to come to you,” he said with a shake of his head. Even when he had gotten close to her, she hadn’t made a single attempt to move away or avoid him.

“What do you mean? I don’t follow that one,” she said, her frown growing larger.

“Imagine if you used your vines to shroud your position or use them to buy you more time to reposition. You might not be able to fight your enemies with your fists, but you might just be able to avoid them long enough until your magic works.”

He could see that these words seemed to break through to her, and realization blossomed on her face.

He sighed as he finally made some progress with her. Who knew that helping others train could be more stressful than his own training? And this was taking into account that he regularly lost limbs or spontaneously exploded during his training.

***

Julius had just left the training room and was heading to the library, where he was supposed to meet the others. Reinera said she might drop by, too, but she had been really busy as well.

Her family might have allowed her to stay, but she had to uphold certain requirements if she wanted to. She didn’t fully explain them to Julius, but she said it wasn’t that bad, and he believed her when she told him.

He had almost made it to the library when he felt a group of people approach him, and he recognized a couple of them.

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“Oh, look who it is,” Adam scoffed at him.

Julius already had an idea of what was going on, and he didn’t even bother to respond, simply continuing to walk.

“What? You’re too good for us now that you are all chummy with the princess?” Adam called out again.

While he has been receiving a lot of attention recently because of his relationships with Reinera and the others, he also has to deal with people like this.

People who didn’t quite appreciate that he was so close to the princess were usually the same ones who wanted to get close to her themselves. As such, they were properly jealous of him and what he had accomplished.

Most of them firmly believed that it was all luck and that if not for him being transported alongside her, he would have never gotten the opportunity to even talk to her. What they didn’t know was that they had known each other prior to the incident. Something he wasn’t in a rush to tell them. He had a feeling that it would only make them more angry.

Some of Adam’s friends started to chirp at him as well, but he kept ignoring them. He used [Sage of Savagery] to distance their voices. If he could handle the pain of exploding his limbs, he could handle the annoyance of a few arrogant nobles.

However, his continuing avoidance of them seemed to piss them off even more because he suddenly found himself getting grabbed by the shoulder.