A whole week had passed since, and Eo had noticed something slightly disturbing.
Kyros' growth was extremely fast.
As expected of a protagonist.
He had already formed a large friend group. That itself wasn't too disturbing to Eo; it was just as prophesied. However, why were all of them getting so strong? At this rate, Eo wouldn't be able to steal the spotlight from them like he had always secretly hoped to!
Eo only had one week left before the trip to Dewspin Peninsula. If he wasn't able to take the initiative in terms of strength, he would be left behind in the dust after the trip. The trip was bound to be an invaluable learning experience. Plus, it could hold interesting treasures that could greatly increase the strength of their team. Eo just knew that something like that was going to happen. It was a strange gut feeling.
Eo thought back to his fight with Jimean. He had used the thought-gel as another way to manipulate his dagger-chains, and knew that being able to do this gave him a massive advantage. As far as he knew, he was the only one able to take out his essence-gel and separate the essence out of it. To control his thought-gel more freely, he needed to make it even more pure.
Eo furiously purified his thought-gel until he reached 85% purity. Thought it was more exhausting, he could swing around his gel-covered daggers with more deft and precision than ever before. Eo was irritated that effort went up exponentially to match purity. Eo then practiced synthesizing metal faster. In one minute he could produce 5 dagger-chains as opposed to before. However, he knew they were of the same thin quality as before so he decided to just stick to two. Those two would be much more sturdier though.
Eo of course spent days swinging around his thought-gel. Right now he could make it cling onto objects, but he made it a goal to be able to climb upwards without the need of any objects. He didn't want to use chains all the time.
Eo made a surprising discovery as well. Over the next few days of browsing scientific documents concerning thought-gel, Eo found out that thought-gel indeed had a name. It was apparently called tangiform. Eo was disappointed that his findings weren't something he could keep. What he also found interesting was how much the document attacked the concept of tangiform. It called the separation process as "horribly inefficient: to even reach 50% purity one must either have an absurdly innate understanding of the mysteries of essence or an absurdly large essence pool to compensate for the energy burn required for the manual conversion." Eo laughed when reading this. He had managed 60% on his first attempt, and by the time he had fought Jimean he had gotten it to 80%. Now he had 85%, and he thought the authors of this scientific finding weren't even essence users themselves. Come on though, he's not even a Yellow Rank… there's no way they can't be more talented than him.
Or so he thought.
Eo was working on his metal synthesis when Kyros found him.
"It was Eo, right?"
Kyros stood at what could be a "respectable distance" away from Eo. He had heard rumors that the entire Red Jacket gang now bowed down to Eo, and was slightly wary of him.
Eo turned.
"Oh yeah, hey there prota- I mean, uh, Kyros. What's up?"
Kyros looked at the 20 feet of metal spooling out of Eo's hands like a broken tape measure and started sweating nervously.
"Uhh, that's an interesting training technique. I don't think I've ever seen it before…"
Eo's head immediately snapped towards Kyros, confused.
"It's Basic Training Pose #4: Standing one foot ahead of the other: both gates forwards pointing and a complete synthesis burn. Wait, have you been paying attention in class?"
Kyros blinked, just starting to realize that Eo had been doing a rather basic pose. Then he got annoyed realizing that he got asked if he payed attention in class by someone who always slept in class.
Kyros coughed.
"Of course I realized. I just didn't notice until now."
Just then, Utaris and the rest of the Essov gang walked in for their daily training with Eo.
Kyros' eyes widened.
Utaris glared at Kyros.
"Our fight. Not over. We have an even stronger boss."
Kyros turned slightly pale and then backed off slowly.
It's true, he thought. Eo somehow managed to get the Red Jacket gang under his leash. Kyros walked backwards into one of his friends.
"S-sorry Antra!"
"I-it's fine, great hero!"
"Please don't call me that."
Kyros quickly looked at Utaris, who's teeth grinding could probably be heard for miles when he witnessed Kyros being called that.
"E-Eo," Kyros said. "How could you let such people into your team! D-doesn't this sort of disturb you?!"
Kyros was betting from his previous interaction with Eo that he would be a more rational person.
Eo shrugged. "Eh… not really."
Jimean pushed his way through until he was face to face with the savior.
"I've heard about the fight you had."
"Who are yo-"
"And I'm angry I didn't get to beat you up."
"Uh… who i-"
"Our team is going to beat your team! Remember that!"
Kyros stopped to say one more thing.
"Remember, this isn't going to be a competition or anything. We should work together, in fact. Is that good, Eo?"
Eo's face lit up.
"Good idea! I like competition! Let's compete for most monster kills!!!!"
Kyros facepalmed.