- Pursuit!

*Pant* *Pant* *Pant*

"That almost killed me!" Zex was breathing heavily as he collapsed on the floor. 'I had to put all my unspent points on agility.'

He was relieved that the increase in his speed was enough to get him clear. However, some of the shrapnel from the explosion still managed to scratch him.

He looked back at the destruction that almost claimed his life and confirmed that those heroes were...

'STRONG!'

"And I don't even have a single combat skill! How do I learn them anyway?" Zex has been bothered about this ever since he left the castle. He highly doubted that leveling up his [Farmer] subclass would give him a single combat skill.

When he was training his body, he tried to perform attack moves and even picked up a sword that was lying around in the castle… but no matter what he did, he did not learn a single combat skill. He even performed moves he read from comics and manga but, much to his embarrassment, still resulted in nothing.

'They will have surely sent some troops to check this area and they will arrive any minute now. I should give it a shot.' He looked around and formulated his next steps.

…

3 minutes later, Edge, together with 16 pursuers, arrived at the meteor crash maintaining stealth. Casting a glance around the area, he didn't find any trace of a person.

However, as a rogue, he was an expert in tracking. Silencing everything else from his senses, he locked in on a path that was created through a reaction between the natural elements and a special characteristic.

Of course, he also filtered out the special characteristics of Arissef's spell to tune out this unnatural path since he was very familiar with it. The chaotic energy that spread out due to such a spell made things easier for him to track the target since it dispersed most of the natural elements. This was a high-level version of the skill [Trace] called [Lock On].

Using hand gestures, he signaled his people to start creating a formation of encirclement on the target with himself as the base. These guards of his are kingdom elites who have been trained by him in espionage, assassinations, and subterfuge since childhood. Capturing a lone target was not an issue, much less eliminating it.

Soon, the path led them to a dark forest filled with silence. Beasts have left this area not long ago after sensing a terrifying aura that now also pervades Edge's senses. Of course, he was not fazed by such.

After all, by his standards, it was too weak!

However, despite how weak it was, the aura was currently everywhere. The trees and the bushes were infused with the same aura brought about by the mana he was tracking.

Seeing that [Lock On] was useless, he maximized his other senses to prepare for an ambush anytime. After all, seeing the situation, it was obvious the target knew he was being tracked… and it was not because they were careless enough to show any signs.

'This guy is tricky' Edge said with an interested smile on his face.

After mapping out the area with the most concentrated traces of the mana, he proceeded to the next stage of the encirclement operation, leaving the target with no escape.

A few dozen minutes passed and they completed the encirclement yet they still could not find the target.

Edge was confused. There was no ambush but at the same time, he was confident that the target did not escape. He could also sense that there was no broken link in their encirclement the entire time.

He used [Lock On] again but was surprised by what he saw… This time, not only the trees had traces of the mana… but also did each one of the pursuers. What troubled him more was that a couple of seconds later, all traces of the mana vanished like the flame of a candle being snuffed out.

"What's going on???"

...

A few kilometers away from the encirclement, a figure was moving silently like a shadow in the forest. Most importantly, this figure moved like one of the pursuers under Edge.

"Nice harvest!" It was exactly Zex who was still running from the encirclement.

Edge was initially correct in his assumption of an ambush. Zex did plan to eliminate the elites one by one but since he did not have any combat skills, he was planning to observe their movements first and decide from there.

After all, he still had [True Name Liberation] as a last resort and the cooldown would still be complete by the time the army arrives at the castle. If he could not defeat them, he was still confident that he could escape.

He wished he could stop the leakage of his mana so he wouldn't be traced easily but since he couldn't, he thought of another way.

'If I can't blend myself in… I'll just blend the environment to myself.'

Maximizing his already high mana pool due to his Intelligence stat and his rapid mana recovery due to his Wisdom stat and [Demon Regeneration], He infused the trees and bushes with black flames until he almost ran out and weaved around the area to mask his presence. Afterward, he jumped onto a tall tree and hid.

He used most of his mana up until there were around 50 points left out of the more than 1000 mana he had at maximum, reducing the amount of it leaking out from him while increasing the number of sources of the leaks.

The principle was like having a drum of water leaking due to some holes. If you decant some of the water inside it into several small containers also with some holes, the total leakage will most likely be the same but shared throughout different containers. In the end, the drum which has the same content as one of the containers will leak at the same rate despite it being a larger container. In essence, although his body being different, will have the same amount of aura as the trees and the bushes he infused. He also spread out the black flames he was regenerating every second. This method provided him with a successful camouflage technique from the aura and mana sensing skills.

A helpful surprise was that when he was observing his surroundings, he realized that his black flames felt like they were eyes that he could open at will.

As he decided to open one, he found that the vision around the tree was clear to him like a CCTV from his previous life but the view could move in 3 dimensions.

Astonishingly, when he opened each one of them, real-time images were being transmitted to his brain but such an operation dealing with so much information was very taxing to his brain and consumed his concentration heavily. Just like a supercomputer running various programs.

The more that are running, the more demand for the processor. So he decided to keep only a few of those "eyes" open.

He could observe everything that was in a 20-meter radius away from a tree he infused.

However, to his disappointment, no skill was generated even from this.

This all changed when a pursuer touched one of the infused trees.

System: Initiating Skill Learning.

…

System: Connection lost, Skill Learning interrupted.

'Wait…' Zex's heartbeat rose at the first prompt but fell abruptly as he heard the second one.

He first deduced that being in contact with a person with a learnable ability would initiate a learning sequence. However, these pursuers couldn't keep touching the trees for a long time.

Incidentally, the same situation happened with the other pursuers as some of them were jumping from tree to tree. After being disconnected from the infused tree for a few seconds, the learning sequence aborts.

Then, Zex thought of a daring idea.

'What if…'

A pursuer jumped onto a tree branch and observed his surroundings and positioning. The encirclement formation needed to observe proper pacing and one should neither be too fast nor too slow in capturing the next position, else there would be gaps for the target to escape detection.

However, it was precisely due to this window that Zex succeeded in his plan.

When this pursuer had contact with the tree, Zex transferred a part of the black flames he infused in the tree towards him.

System: Initiating Skill Learning!

System: 10%

System: [Fleet Footwork] Learned. + 5,000 Exp.

System: 20%

System: 30%

System: [Black Ops Training] Learned. +10,000 Exp.

…

System: 100%

System: [Assassination Mastery] Learned. +20,000 Exp

System: [Espionage Mastery] Learned. +10,000 Exp

…

System: [Hidden Weapon Mastery] Learned. +20,000 Exp

"O...P…" Zex held his breath throughout the entire duration and finally let out some air and 2 letters.

Finally, he discovered how to learn skills and gain experience at the same time… Upon observation, the black flames that he transferred to the elite acted like a remote flash disk that transferred data to him in real-time. It was masking itself as part of the energy that circulated in the pursuer's body which contained records of the training he had gone through. These records were then being transmitted to Zex via his connection with the black flames, emulating the records and saving them into his own body.

In other words, it was like he was remotely downloading programs from the target and installing these programs into himself.

However, he will need to digest them and properly make these programs his own before being able to use them. Luckily, he had enough time in his Mind Space.

'Isn't this pretty convenient???' Zex was in such a good mood at this discovery.

After this, he tested it a few more times on the others and also observed the first one he extracted some skills in.

He found out that despite trying it out with the other elites, the levels of the skills he had already extracted from the first one did not increase by much, and the Exp rewards were based on the difficulty and scope of the skill learned. It was most likely due to them being trained in the same programs.

However, he also learned some other useful but unrelated skills like [Carpentry], [Knitting], [Cooking], and so on, most likely from the different skill sets these pursuers practiced in their spare time.

Additionally, further testing showed him that infusing more black flames hastens the process. Despite this, he didn't want to risk it since that monster was still tracking him.

He already learned his lesson from the other scary hero.

After the prompts stopped, he immersed himself in his Mind Space to inspect the new skills he gained.

To sum it all up, he unlocked a lot of classes, most notably the Ninja, Assassin, Thief, and Rogue while learning all their skills. At least those that were practiced by the elites.

This did not mean he was on par with those heroes just yet but the pursuers were another story.

He was able to pass off as one of them perfectly after taking the time in and out of his Mind Space to familiarize himself greatly with them and also because he knew the formation techniques they practiced. He calculated a gap in the formation they were performing where he could successfully escape unnoticed. Of course, knowing each pursuer's location due to the black flames helped a ton.

Despite this success, it only made him realize how much of a gap those heroes had over him.

"I thought with combat skills, I could take them on..." Zex bit his tongue as he was thankful that he was able to understand all this before he decided to clash with them.

He looked up and saw that it was close to midnight.

'The army would take 2 days of travel to arrive at the castle. The cooldown for [True Name Liberation] is 1 day. I need to do something before dawn.' Zex thought.