Chereads / An Old Legend / Chapter 37 - 37 - Playing Catchup

Chapter 37 - 37 - Playing Catchup

In the free week I had to prepare myself, I spent most of my time in the library trying to fill the gaps in my knowledge Owl had pointed out. Additionally, predicting that I'd be working with other people, I felt I should do what I could to avoid making a fool of myself.

The library itself was located on the first floor above ground level and occupied the entire floor, filled with seemingly endless rows of shelves, organized by a myriad of sections and subsections. It was unexpectedly open to the public, with a stairwell on one side of it leading to the main hall. Even with this though, it was rare for me to see anyone else in the library, and even when someone showed up, they would only come for one or two things before leaving. It was always quiet, but I never felt lonely.

I had come into the library with a plan of what I wanted to do. The first thing I wanted to learn more about was fighting, primarily to try to find a way I could improve myself, even minimally. I quickly found that the only thing I could do was train physically and practice focusing on the magic within my body to get it to do what I wanted. It was helpful information, but I had hoped to find something more readily applicable, leaving me with significantly more time than I originally anticipated. I used the time to find books on different sword techniques, taking notes on the ones that were the most broadly applicable.

After the daily trip to the library, I would spend a few hours in the training room trying to apply what I had learned. I found very quickly that my sword would simply slice through every possible target available, causing me to downgrade to one of the surplus swords in the room. I got the feeling my sword wasn't very happy with me using a different weapon, and I became gradually less sure throughout the week that the feeling was just in my head.

The second thing I had wanted to learn about in the library was magic. I remembered the basics of internal and external magic, but the image of Erin conjuring a town-sized pillar of golden fire left me with an itching curiosity. Thinking back to the events of that day, I remembered there were also a couple people in the fodder group who seemed to be prepared to use magic, although their movements and posture were different from both each other and Erin. This, as it turned out, was due to the fact that everyone was more than likely using different types of magic.

There exist many different types of magic, and what determines which one a person has is mostly genetic, meaning that a family will likely share a particular brand of magic amongst members. This also means that no other family will have that type of magic. For instance, there was a single family assigned the duty of keeping the various greenery installations tidy across all the cities. This family had magic which allowed them to control plant growth. Having a few of these people in each city also proved to be beneficial in the event of a beast wave as they could easily slow the beasts down by causing the grass to tangle around their legs. Of the theoretically infinite types of magic, all are like this in some way, in that they have a wide variety of uses, meaning that their strength is only limited by the creativity and ingenuity of the user.

There is, of course, a rather obvious downside to magic, being that only people born with the ability to use a particular type of magic can use it, and cannot learn other types, barring two exceptions. Both the Church of the Serpent and the Cult of the Night had their own, specific types of magic. Unfortunately, there were no resources in the library on what the Cult's magic was, only a few warnings to avoid conflict with members where possible and to end any fights quickly if they were to occur. The Church's magic, the gold-white flames, on the other hand, had rows of shelves filled with textbooks detailing how to use one's own magic to produce the various effects the Church's magic was known for. Being unable to use magic externally at all, all of this information was useless to me. The interesting, and admittedly unsettling, component of these flames was that the only thing that differentiated a burning flame and a healing flame was the intent of the user. As a final side note on this, the stakes Erin had used shortly before incinerating the town, besides being modeled after the symbol of the Church, were catalysts for magic, resonating with each other to amplify the effects of the magic being channeled through them. They did need to be placed in specific patterns to work properly, causing them to only be used for increasing the area of effect of a spell or, when placed around a small area, greatly amplifying the effect of a spell.

This did leave me with the unanswered question of what the base level of required strength was to pull off something like what Erin had done, which led me to the third and what would become the final subject of this time in the library. I didn't have much of a reference for the level of my own strength, but I still didn't feel that I was at all comparable to either Erin or Owl. I quickly found though, that there wasn't a concrete ranking system; people, hunters, simply grew stronger until they died or became worthy of being called a hero. Rather, there were a couple milestones for people to reach that marked their progress towards that lofty goal. The first of these milestones was becoming a team leader in an officially sanctioned hunter group, or in other words, a Cleaner group; the second was being yourself pivotal in the defense of a town against a wave; the third was being able to defend city alone against an entire wave or equivalent threat. This feat alone could propel someone into the legendary realm of a Hero, and if it didn't, being able to do it consistently would bridge that final gap.

Erin being able to affect an entire town at once would, in theory, put her around the second milestone, but her having done so with help implies a lower ranking. This was fundamentally why it was much more of a soft ranking system than anything; there were too many variables and potentialities that went into strength for a single scale to be truly useful. Even the rank of Hero wasn't a true rank, as there was a vast gap between the older generation Heroes and the newer generations. Experience played the largest part in this strength gap, but there were also simple generational strength differences that came and went in waves. There were a few things I read implying a gradual decline in strength over time, both amongst Heroes and the regular folk, but this very well could have been due to the presence of strong individuals growing over time making threats look lesser.

Throughout everything I had read, there was sporadic but consistent talk about the strongest Hero, something that wasn't quite agreed upon. There were a number of Heroes who could wipe out an entire wave in what amounted to a snap of their fingers, but that was ultimately what constituted the baseline of the top level of Heroes. At that point, only particularly impressive feats would display the true abilities of these Heroes, which only amounted to anecdotal evidence. The only way there was to actually know how strong Heroes were in relation to each other was when they had arguments between themselves and decided to fight about it, something that rarely happened and usually resulted in a large amount of damage to the surrounding areas. Once again, this wasn't a good method of ranking the Heroes, except for saying a specific person was stronger than specifically one other person.

With that said, there was one Hero no one had fought with in centuries. Before that, he had finished every fight quickly and efficiently, with little damage to the surrounding areas and to his opponent. This was the first official Hero of the third generation, the oldest Hero still alive, and one of the few Heroes with a completely flawless combat record; the Hero known simply as Owl. A few things clicked into place with that revelation.

While I sat on that information, I looked into the beast side of the strength equation. I had seen exactly four types of beasts. There were the two basic beasts, being essentially a big and small version of the same thing, and it was those two what comprised the bulk of beast waves. The Anglers were a bit above them, being very evasive but otherwise physically weak. They also apparently had the ability to slightly warp people's minds to make people less likely to notice them. The Lure was far more formidable than them, which caught me by surprise until I remembered it had single-handedly wiped out five presumably competent hunters at once. The thing that made it so dangerous to weaker hunters was its ability to hypnotize them, forcing them to look at it while it used a type of psionic magic to turn the hunters' brains to mush. Prolonged eye contact would also sear the image of the thing into people's retinas. This was a sign of a particularly unfortunate death as it meant the Lure had plenty of time to torture its victim.

Beyond what I had seen, there were dozens of other types of beasts that had been spotted over the years, all of vastly varying strength, with some appearing only in waves, and others simply appearing on their own and causing mass panic in the area. Owl's comments about beasts preferring to act alone was true as well, with only a select few types of stronger beasts preferring to get weaker minions to do the hard work for them. Waves were always led by a beast, with larger waves naturally being led by stronger beasts, and the larger the wave was, the stronger the beasts would be that comprised it. I realized that this was why Owl seemed particularly worried when he realized there were two Anglers. At the time, he couldn't have been sure how many more there were, nor how many other types of beasts there were. It also explains why he was very unconcerned once I returned to the town, having had time to determine that the two Anglers and the Lure were all that were present.

At this point, most of the main questions I had had been answered, and though I could've spent months in the library, my free week was almost up. I wasn't particularly concerned about what I hadn't been able to learn about, as I'd have plenty more opportunities to fill the gaps in my knowledge. Instead, I was discontented at my lack of progress physically. Beyond getting the hang of basic sword stuff, I hadn't made any noticeable improvements, and while a week was too short a time to expect to see any meaningful improvements, the lack of progress towards even a small improvement left me frustrated.

In any case, the only thing I could do was keep moving forward. I returned to my room.