1% Lifesteal

Just a few minutes ago, he had finished an errand that should have by no means been his responsibility. Not only did he feel terrible for ruining that woman\'s day, but he had lost several hours looking for her.

"That man is truly outrageous," he whispered, shaking his head.

Slowly but surely, his steps took him back to the Santorio Training Center. There, he greeted the flamboyant clerk and made his way down the right corridor, walking past most of the facility until he reached the elevator.

Four buttons were on the side, including the one for the floor he was on. The rest were for the three upper floors. Rather than touch any of them, he took a key out of his storage ring and lifted a small, near-invisible hatch. He inserted the key and turned it. A pleasant ringing sounded from the crystal embedded into the wall, and the elevator started. But it didn\'t go up—it went down to the private part of the facility.

After almost a minute of waiting, he entered the underground chamber. The arrays of hyper-specialized machines and other equipment sat empty as nobody was using them at that moment.

Unhesitantly, he turned and walked over to a door at the far end of the room. He pressed a finger to the scanner, and moments later, the door raised. Before it was even fully opened, he was already moving his head to the right to dodge the projectile that would no doubt come.

As expected, he got out of the way just in time to avoid the 10 kg dumbbell that would have bashed his face in.

"What did I say about bothering me when I\'m training, you fucking nerd!?" Sitting on the ground of the combat simulation chamber with his legs crossed was a tall man with his shirt off, showcasing his rippling physique, scattered with a few faded scars, and his long, lush, blond hair tied into a ponytail behind his back.

This man was Jacob Santorio. A twenty-three-year-old brat who had no respect for anything or anyone.

Jacob\'s family was just powerful enough that Phillip couldn\'t use his own as a shield against him, so he had to tolerate whatever the man threw at him, be it literal projectiles or stupid errands that should be the responsibility of a hub employee.

"Sorry for disturbing you, Jakes," Phillip snarkily said. "As per our agreement, though, I do have the right to come in here whenever I want, even if your royal highness is busy posing on the ground."

"Watch your mouth, cheese steak," Jacob retorted. "I still get the final say on whether you stay or not."

While kicking Phillip out of the party would anger at least three people who shouldn\'t be messed with, that didn\'t mean Jacob was smart enough not to do it anyway.

With gritted teeth, he swallowed bile and decided to be the bigger man. "Yes, I apologize."

The blond man scoffed, "Stay quiet. I\'m working on a new ability."

It took the patience of a saint not to break at that moment and scream at the man. First, why was he making a new ability in the combat simulation chamber? Second, why didn\'t he move to a gathering chamber and do it there instead, as was proper? And third, why should the background noise of combat simulation even bother him? There was no way he was working on something delicate enough that it required absolute silence.

He knew why, of course.

Because Jacob was a spoiled ass.

Holding back another sigh, he obliged the man. He had been planning to do some practice against the dolls, but he was all right with tempering a bit until Jacob was done with whatever crap he was doing. He sat down on the ground and focused. His essence flowed into his bones. With his metal affinity, he focused on the metallic properties of calcium as—

A sudden pain burst through his head and neck as a metallic clang echoed through his skull. Opening his eyes, he spotted another 10 kg dumbbell clink to the ground nearby as a small stream of blood flowed down his head. "What the fuck, Jacob!?" he screamed, his patience finally running out.

"What the hell are you doing!?" the man yelled as if Phillip was the one who had done something wrong.

"What does it look like I\'m doing!?" he asked, plugging his bleeding head with a hand. "I\'m trying to temper!"

"You can\'t do that in the combat simulation chamber!" the man said.

He dared… He dared say that!?

A fury bubbled in his chest, but before he could say anything else, the man retrieved another dumbbell from his storage ring, flung it at him, and yelled, "It\'s my gym!"

Phillip barely dodged as the man continued screaming, "My rules! You can do whatever you want at home, but here, you listen to me!"

The two men stared each other down. Eventually, Phillip looked away with an angry grunt as he got up and walked out of the room.

Just six months, he told himself. Just six months, and you never have to see him again.

He was raised to always be the bigger man. Rather than throw a tantrum that would result in a conflict between their families, he swallowed his pride and walked away. Phillip unlocked the exit while keeping an eye on the snickering man-child.

Just as the door opened, a short-haired brunette woman wearing a skimpy outfit entered. "Hey, guys—whoa, what happened to you?" she remarked as she eyed the blood flowing down the side of his face.

This was Rachel Black, the second of the three other people in their party. So far, his impression of her was that of an easy-going… Hmm… Was there a more respectful synonym for "hoe"?

He more snarled than smiled at her as he cocked his head in man-child\'s direction.

"We were sparring, and he fumbled a bit," Jacob said in a jovial tone. "No big deal, right, Phillip?"

His strained smile vanished. Just this once, he decided to not be the bigger man. "Your boyfriend over here threw a dumbbell at my head," he informed her.

To his lack of surprise, the woman merely laughed and said, "Why didn\'t you dodge?"

What a lovely girl.

Nodding, he smiled a bit. "Maybe if the inside of my head was as lightweight as yours, I would have been a bit faster," he spat as he looked away and turned to the exit.

She gaped at him, muttering, "What a prick," under her breath, while Jacob\'s searing gaze burned a hole into his back.

He was interrupted as yet another person walked in. It was a brunet man this time, his moderately aged face showing numerous scars all over it.

Theodore Osborne.

Out of the three teammates he had, he hated this man the least. He was a bit of a suckup, but at least he was an equal-opportunity asslicker.

"Hehehey there, kiddo. Things got a bit rough during practice?" the older man asked as he playfully slapped his shoulder. "Here you go; I\'ve been working on it a bit; maybe it\'ll help," he said, raising his arm and channeling his holy affinity.

A basic healing ability flowed through the man\'s fingers and drastically eased the pain Phillip felt. It was at supernatural quality, as all holy-affinity spells were, but it was weak, just strong enough to stop the bleeding for the time being until he applied a more permanent solution.

"Thank you," he said as he walked past the man and strode off into one of the gathering chambers.

"Hey, Theo!" Jacob greeted the newcomer. "Did you hear from that guy yet?" he asked just in time for the doors to slam shut and for Phillip to be left in silence.

What an exhausting bunch. He desperately hoped that whoever passed that damn interview wouldn\'t be a total asswipe.

***

Theodore walked into the room, walking past Phillip and Rachel.

"Hey, Theo!" Jacob greeted him. "Did you hear from that guy yet?" the man asked just as Phillip walked out of the room, cradling his bleeding head. The doors closed.

He paused for a moment, pursing his lips. He hadn\'t heard anything from Liam yet because… well… the two of them weren\'t really friends. But frankly, even with that…

"I haven\'t heard anything from him," he said, shrugging. But he knew what to expect from dealing with the man for a while. "Don\'t get your hopes up, though…

"That guy is probably too stubborn to show up."

***

Standing just a bit inside the realm, practically right in front of the large passage, Freddy tugged on the woman\'s arm, keeping her in place and waiting for her to answer his question.

She looked back at him. "What?" she asked, her voice shaking slightly.

"I said," he repeated himself, "what do you want?"

To his absolute bewilderment, the woman suddenly teared up. "I\'m… I\'m sorry! Did I offend you somehow?" she asked meekly.

"You are the one who brought me inside yesterday, correct?" he asked.

"Sh-should…" she stuttered. "Should I not have done that?"

"No, I mean—" He suddenly found himself struggling to find the right words.

"I\'m sorry!" she apologized again. Then she started sobbing.

He abruptly let go of her arm and took a step back. The parties around them looked in their direction and stared daggers at him. Frankly, he wanted the earth to open up and swallow him whole.

"Please," he started, placatingly raising his arms and softening his tone as he worked to salvage the situation. "Stop crying. I just want to know why you approached me the other day."

Her breath caught in her throat as her eyes, shining with a bright spark of hope, lifted to meet the two holes in his helmet. "Are you gonna give me—"

His finger instantly shot out and pressed to her bloated lips, stopping her before she could finish her question. "Let\'s go somewhere private, okay?"

The woman, now silent as could be, swiftly nodded.

The two of them made their way down one of the safer paths, then climbed over the rocky terrain until they found a small, hidden hole, perhaps five meters in diameter, located between several bigger boulders. They made their way down, where he sat on the nearest stone, placed his elbows on his knees, and crossed his fingers.

The woman looked uncomfortable under his stare.

He hadn\'t asked to talk to her simply out of the goodness of his heart. The primary reason he was there was because of the woman\'s conversation with that man. He said something about her making gorel corpses rot and wither away.

Normally, most people would presume that meant she was a death-affinity archhuman. But that didn\'t make sense. Death-affinity casters could do that, sure, but definitely not at her level of power.

His guess was that she was a life-affinity archhuman. And if his hunch was correct, he had a rough idea of what her talent did.

"You…" he started, squinting his eyes beneath the helmet. "Your talent has something to do with life sparks, doesn\'t it?"

The woman\'s eyes briefly widened, but she wasn\'t too surprised. She nodded. To anyone who knew what life sparks were, it was pretty obvious.

That thing Madame had given him after killing the doctor was, in essence, a captured life spark. All the vitality, or rather, the "life force" a living being held in its body, was part of its life spark. Things didn\'t truly die until all the cells in their body were dead, so if someone forcefully removed a life spark from a recently deceased corpse, it would immediately start rotting as all the cells ceased functioning at once.

The only reason he had this knowledge was because he was researching ways to get his hands on something like that doctor\'s heart. That had been one of the best tools he had ever had in his life, and this woman might just be the key to getting his hands on it again. Because there was no hope of getting it otherwise.

It wasn\'t like he could buy it at a store. Only four-star archhumans had the power to capture life sparks without a designated talent, and stepping into contact with a Lord, let alone getting one to do what he wanted, just wasn\'t possible for him.

He took a deep breath as he pondered his next words. First, he had to know what exactly she wanted from him and why. "I\'m going to ask you again—what do you want?" But before the woman could answer, he added, "First, tell me why you approached me."

The woman swallowed. "Because you have a supreme—"

"You\'re wrong," he denied instantly. "I don\'t have a supreme-quality healing talent." Frankly, he knew that he couldn\'t truly hide it anymore, but if he kept denying it, the woman could possibly reveal how she found out.

"You do!" she yelled. "Sorry, I didn\'t mean to yell… uhm…"

"Why do you want a part of my body?" he probed, but immediately spotted hesitation on her face. "I know for a fact that it has something to do with whatever illness you have. I don\'t know if you\'ve seen a mirror, but you look way worse today than you did two days ago."

She winced at that.

"You can choose to hide whatever you want," he said, "but don\'t expect me to cooperate with anything if you aren\'t going to be honest with me." That much was only fair. Unless she proved that her talent wouldn\'t hurt him, he did not intend to deal with her.

Taking a deep breath, she sat on the ground and crossed her legs. The action appeared painful, given her wincing and hissing. Then she raised her palm before her body, and a moment later, a small, pink light shone above it.

His eyes widened when he saw that.

"My talent," she started her explanation, "is Life Spark Manipulation."

He swallowed. That was something, all right. A life spark existing detached from a living creature was absurd enough and already something only a talent could achieve. Now, depending on what she could do with it, it could either be a godlike power or, judging by her current condition, a mostly useless one.

"I can manipulate life sparks in certain ways," she continued. "But there are conditions, and it\'s far from as straightforward as I hoped it would be when I got my talent. First, I can \'steal\' the spark of any living organism without a soul. This includes plants, small bugs, recently killed creatures, or fresh body parts. Then," she said as she lifted her second arm and manifested another, slightly brighter spark, "I can merge them." She immediately demonstrated.

But the caveat was instantly apparent. Once the two sparks fused, the resulting one wasn\'t as bright as both of them combined, but somewhere in the middle. "As you can see"—she sighed—"this is relatively useless. But there is another function." There was a small plant growing to her side. It was a leafy, dull green bush. She reached for it and tore off a handful of leaves. Then she extracted its spark.

While slightly weaker than the others she had shown, the biggest difference was that this spark was flickering. "When a living being is injured or sick, their life spark grows unstable. Once the affliction heals, the spark will stabilize again. But while it\'s still unstable"—she brought the other spark closer to the unstable one and fused them, but this time, the result was different: the spark didn\'t grow at all, but it did stop flickering—"I can \'feed it\' another spark to stabilize it."

She turned around again and tore off another handful of leaves, this time from an entirely different plant. "I can also do that while the spark is still part of a living organism." She proceeded to insert the newly combined spark into the damaged plant. The missing leaves grew back instantly, springing into being with such speed that it left him shocked for a moment. But again, the downside was readily apparent.

While the plant was whole again, it was now sagging slightly, with signs of discoloration appearing along the leaves\' surface.

His eyes went from the sagging plant and flicked over to the woman, whom he found sighing sadly. So that was what happened to her. She must have healed an injury through such a fusion and was now suffering the consequences.

But something else was on his mind. "Is your talent illegal?" he asked bluntly. If the reason she had approached him was what he thought it was…

"What?" she asked, clearly bewildered. "No! Why would you think that!?"

"That side effect," he pointed out. "Is it because the spark is from two different species?" If that was the case, then she could only heal herself with the sparks of other humans.

"No!" she denied, but then frowned and thought of it. "Well, no, not really. There would be a problem if I tried using a plant life spark to heal an animal, but as long as it\'s two animals, two bugs, or two plants, there shouldn\'t be any problem with that… specifically…"

"So what\'s the catch?" he asked.

"Well… an unstable spark digests the stable one. It uses the digested life force to fill its cracks, but that isn\'t a perfect solution. A life spark is everything an organism is. All of the imperfections and flaws are built directly into the life force. And if imperfect life force is used to heal an injury—"

"The healing will also be imperfect," he finished the sentence for her, finally catching on to what she was looking for.

She nodded. "When living things get injured, the spark loses life force. I can sense this, and back when I met you, I thought that the gorel you were fighting was the thing I was looking for, but it… It wasn\'t; it was you," she said, eyes burning intensely as she stared at him. "If what I sensed was the life force lost during a minor injury, I can\'t even imagine what your life spark looks like. If I took it out of your body, it would probably blind me!"

He didn\'t appreciate that phrasing, but he let it slide in favor of continuing to deny it. "But that doesn\'t mean that I have a healing talent."

"Well," she started, "it is either that or you\'re the richest person on the entire planet," she said, laughing a bit with an awkward smile on her face.

He nodded. He knew about her talent to confidently say that she wasn\'t a real threat. Thankfully, she still didn\'t know how his talent worked—

"Also, I saw you step on a plant on our way here. From the life force that was released, a very small part of it was filtered and absorbed into your body. Is that how your talent works!?"

He grabbed his helmet and sighed deeply. "Fuck my life…" he whispered.

Now then. How should he shut this woman up?