Adam closed the door behind him with a soft click, the sound echoed faintly through the quiet room. The room assigned to him by the Church was easily larger than rooms of luxury suites from his previous world, it was furnished with polished wooden furniture, enchanted lighting crystals, and a bed so soft it felt like he was lying on clouds. And yet, none of that mattered to him.
He dropped his training uniform onto the nearby chair and exhaled deeply, his muscles aching in every part of his body. Every fiber of his body felt like it had been pulled, twisted, and reforged from the inside out. The sensation wasn't just painful, but was also exhausting in a way that went beyond physical fatigue making him mentally exhausted everyday after the training sessions.
Three months. Only three months had passed since he'd been dragged out of his ordinary life and thrust into this world. And yet, he felt like he had lived an entirely different life since then.
Adam walked toward the window and rested his forearms against the frame, gazing down at the Church's training grounds far below. Even at this hour, torches burned along the paths, and instructors were still shouting instructions, or overseeing sparring matches of the squires hoping to become knights one day.
He let out a heavy sigh. When he had first been summoned, when the gods had granted them their wishes, he had believed no, he had assumed that he was already strong compared to the people of this world. The sensation of power flooding into his body had been intoxicating.
Back then, he had thought he could stand at the top of this world in a very short time. But now, after months of relentless training, he realized how laughably wrong that assumption had been.
He was nothing in front of the true powerhouses of this world. He was not just weak, he was an ant in their eyes.
Adam clenched his fingers slowly, feeling the faint current of mana ripple through his body. He had reached the 9th Circle as a mage and the Master rank as a martial artist, an absurd growth rate by this world's standards. Any normal mage or martial artists would take decades, sometimes centuries, to achieve what he and the others had accomplished in mere months.
And yet… It meant nothing in the grand scheme of the Gods. Not when compared to the true monsters of this world, the real powerhouses. Even when the otherworlder's potential was extremely high, had multiple cheat like abilities and were even showered with resources by the church they had only reached the 9th Circle mage.
The Church instructors rarely spoke openly about beings at the higher realms, but sometimes, during breaks, the priests would let things slip. He didn't know if they did that deliberately to suppress any rebellious thought they might have or just in passing. But those levels of power they described were so far removed from them that they were more like myths than reality.
But one day, during a rest interval, one of the senior priests had said something that had shaken all of them. Their growth rate, if one considered the time frame of three months, was terrifying, but it was nothing compared to what the high ranking priests informed them.
…
"There was a hero who was summoned just like you all a long time ago," the priest had said, idly sipping from his cup. "He reached the Sage realm in the same time you took to reach 9th Circle."
The entire training field had gone silent as the otherworlders were reeling from their shock.
Adam still remembered the way everyone had turned to stare at the priest, disbelief written across their faces.
"Sage realm?" one of the other summoned had asked.
The priest nodded, completely unfazed. "Yes. And he had much more terrifying abilities than the ones you possess now."
Someone else had laughed nervously. "You're joking, right?"
But the priest had not smiled indicating that he was not telling any lie.
Adam too was surprised but he was more curious about where he was now, "Where is he now?"
But the priest became quiet while having a serious expression on his face. "I can't speak of that," he had said eventually, as he sighed. "To tell you the truth, no one knows where he is now."
This made Adam even more curious about this Hero, he wanted to ask more questions about him but seeing the priest not wanting to say anything more about him he didn't insist anymore.
…
Now, standing alone in his room, Adam pressed his palm lightly against the cool glass.
He wasn't as powerful compared to monsters like that, but he wasn't powerless either.
Adam straightened, turning away from the window and pacing slowly across the room. His thoughts churned, as he thought about his future.
He was at a crossroads, torn between fleeing this place to explore the world and staying to take advantage of the resources provided by the Church and grow stronger.
He knew the Church was watching them closely. Even when it didn't look like it, he could feel it. There were eyes on them anywhere they went, even when they were inside their room he knew someone was constantly keeping them under their watch.
Escaping now would be risky, so he ultimately decided to stay for now and grow his powers, after he reached a certain level of strength he would find a way to slip out.
And it would be extremely easy for him due to his wish.
When they were summoned they were given a chance to wish for a single power but with many constraints by the gods, and most of the others had chosen flashy powers, like elemental dominance, divine weapons and other powerful abilities.
But Adam had chosen something else. He had wished for Ability Imprinting, this power allows him to copy others abilities and imprint them on him or others.
But this ability had constraints of its own, the abilities he copies from others gets downgraded and it was up to his mastery to take them to their full potential. And there was also a cap on how many abilities he could imprint and hold at a time.
Even though there were these constraints he felt it was an extremely overpowered and broken ability, he might appear weak compared to the others at present, but once he developed the powers he had copied from the other summoned he would be unstoppable. And on top of that nobody other than the gods knows about his true ability as he had hidden it very carefully.
It was a broken ability because unlike the others, he wasn't bound to a single path.
He had been careful and deliberate what to show to the Church. He had only ever displayed a single, unimpressive ability, something he had copied from another summoned. A somewhat powerful enhancement ability from the downgraded version from Divine Enhancement, which allows the user to augment their attacks to be stronger multiple times than they originally were.
This caused the church to lose interest in him and pay him less attention as his ability appeared much weaker than the others. They thought he was mediocre, but he didn't mind it one bit, in fact it suited him perfectly.
Adam opened his eyes slowly and he smiled faintly. There was one ability he had copied which would help him in his escape.
It was called Absolute Concealment and it belonged to one of the girls in their group. She was a quiet one, always staying in the background and barely spoke to anyone. Her presence was so faint that everyone around her forgets she was even there.
Her ability allowed her to become completely undetectable, even by beings several realms above her. It was not invisibility or illusion but complete erasure of her presence, the ability worked on conceptual level to conceal her presence.
Right now, the ability was not as powerful as the original one, and Adam would have to personally master it to its full potential. He was just waiting to increase his realm and master this ability so that he could slip out of the watch of the church undetected.
"For now," he murmured, "I'll stay here."
He would slowly grow stronger and gather as much information and money he could before leaving.
…
Arthur stepped out of a bluish portal and onto the cold metallic floor of a vast space station.
The air had its familiar sterile smell to it. He stretched his body as he felt the shift in gravity from Thyrandel and his body recalibrated instantly.
He then made his way through the corridors, greeted briefly by passing officers and engineers. Admiral Kane was in the command deck when Arthur arrived, already mid-discussion with several of his old companions.
"Look who finally decided to show up," Kane said dryly when he noticed him.
Arthur smirked. "Miss me?"
"Unfortunately," Kane replied.
They exchanged a few words regarding updates on battlefield movements, casualty numbers etc. Arthur listened quietly, absorbing everything.
The Chimerians had retreated and stopped their assault on the Milky Way galaxy. And that was what bothered him, so he was going to personally investigate it now.
After confirming the data, he nodded and turned away and exited Kane's office.
He teleported out of the space station and after multiple jumps using his teleportation's full capacity, he took out the Spear of Heaven (SOH) for the first time.
The colossal construct emerged from his dimensional storage. It was approximately three thousand kilometers long, and fifteen hundred wide, its spearhead-shaped frame composed of alloy X, proton cannons and adaptive shielding that made this behemoth an imposing looking structure.
It was not just a ship, it was like a mobile fortress, a laboratory and a weapon of mass destruction.
Arthur appeared inside the central command chamber, a vast circular space lined with holographic panels, and layered data streams.
"Guardian," he said, stretching slightly.
[Welcome back, Commander.]
"Plot course to the Chimerians' home world."
There was a pause for a second. Then… [Confirmed. Calculating optimal trajectory.]
The SOH then entered a wormhole, and with its speed it only took a little more than seven hours to exit the Milky Way galaxy, reach the Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte galaxy and enter the star system where the Chimerian's home world was at.
It exited the wormhole in stealth mode so that no radars of the Chimerians would be able to detect its presence.
Arthur, who was taking a nap, was woken up by the Guardian AI.
[Commander, we have reached our destination.]
Arthur yawned, rubbing his eyes as he floated up slightly and a holographic projection appeared before him, displaying a massive world wrapped in layers of artificial infrastructure.
"That's their home?" he asked.
[Affirmative.]
Arthur narrowed his eyes. "Scan for the strongest life signatures on this planet."
The AI, after a few seconds, marked three locations on the hologram. Arthur nodded slowly and vanished from the ship.
He teleported outside of the SOH and kept it back inside his dimensional storage. Then he shot towards the planet like a falling star.
***
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