Reincarnated Hero System

“Is that one’s spear tip also a fragment of the original sword?”

[Yes,] Kayla replied. [I’ve been searching for the remaining fragments, and once I locate them all, I’ll gather them for Evan so he can restore his sword’s full power and Ego.]

“Ego?” Eliza repeated, immediately picking up on that word.

[It wasn’t fully developed, but before the sword broke, a nascent ego had begun forming due to how much Evan used it, and the connection he’d formed with it.

It’s beginning to awaken in response to him recovering his memories of his time as ‘Prisma’, and Evan has sensed it too, which is why he now calls it by its original name.]

This was quite a lot of information for Eliza to take in all at once.

She went silent for several minutes before finally taking a deep breath and answering Kayla’s first question.

“Yeah. If giving up a weapon will make Evan stronger, why should I hesitate?”

Just as she said that, there was a massive energy burst from Evan and Leoniel’s direction, and Kayla immediately raised her hand, conjuring a barrier that blocked the wave of ice expanding in nearly all directions.

She clenched her fists, and the ice shattered, clearing their view and allowing them to see what was now happening in the battle between Evan and Leoniel.

Evan had a swirling Vortex of ice around his body, rising toward the sky, freezing the surrounding land and conjuring a blizzard.

Around Leoniel was a sandstorm that clashed with Evan’s Vortex, the two elemental forces tugging against each other and wreaking havoc on the land around them, which was what had created the wave of ice that had nearly reached Eliza and Kayla where they were.

Grinning, Evan stabbed his sword into the ground and said, “Let’s take things up a notch.”

Releasing more of his magic power, he spoke, “Blessing of Destruction: First Activation.”

Immediately, his body was enveloped in a crimson glow, and the total power Leoniel could sense from him spiked. Ambient law energy was rapidly drawn in to fuel the Unique Skill, and a crimson glow bled into his golden ice.

“Second Activation,” Evan said, and a wave of crimson energy expanded around him, forming a simple domain within which his blizzard intensified, enabling it to push back Leonie’s sandstorm and forcing the man to pour more magic into his Unique Skill to fight back against it.

Evan extended his right hand, forming an orb of crimson-gold ice inside it before speaking.

“Pseudo-Authority of Destruction.”

He clenched his fist, crushing the orb within his palm, and from the sides of his fist, crimson-gold ice streams erupted, arcing through the air like cracking lightning toward Leoniel’s position.

Seeing this, Leoniel immediately narrowed his eyes, his sclera turning amber yellow and his pupils slitting like a reptile’s.

Immense magic power poured from his body, turning the ground around him to grey stone as the sandstorm surrounding him intensified beyond the level of a natural disaster, threatening to engulf the entire island.

The swirling winds grew fast enough to slice through mountainous rock, and the individual particles of sand carried negative status effects that affected living and non-living things alike.

But just before the arcing ice streams could meet the empowered sandstorm, a spear coated in green light descended from above, crashing down between them and releasing a burst of green energy that expanded in all directions, colliding with both of them.

Immediately, Evan deactivated his Blessing of Destruction, the crimson-gold glow vanishing from his ice as it crumbled to the ground, and Leoniel’s eyes returned to normal as his sandstorm dissipated.

“That’s enough from both of you. Any more and I’ll have to expend limited charges of my skill to start healing you,” Eliza’s voice echoed as she landed, one foot on the butt of her spear stabbed into the ground.

Seeing this, Evan smiled wryly, while Gideon and Grace were shocked, having not noticed when Eliza had left their side and how she had reached the centre of the battle in an instant.

“That was dangerous, Liz,” Evan said, walking up to her. “You know you’re still an Inferior Legendary. Interfering could have gotten you hurt.”

Eliza jumped down from her spear and landed on the ground, unearthing the weapon before turning to Evan.

“Do you lack that much control over your own power that you would harm me?” she asked.

The question made Evan stop in his tracks, then he burst into laughter and replied, “Obviously not.”

Clearly, Eliza trusted his control over his power, confident he could restrain himself from harming her, which was why she’d boldly interfered to halt the battle between them.

Leoniel, on the other hand, wore an expression of confusion. “Inferior Legendary, you say?”

He glanced at Eliza, unable to sense Legendary Level power from her at all.

“Yeah,” Evan said. “I mean, come on. I have thousand-year-old enemies after my life. Do you really think I wouldn’t take steps to empower my companions so they can stay safe even when I’m not around?”

The logic made sense, but Leoniel still couldn’t detect any Legendary Level power from Eliza, and this was someone who’d seen through the powerful concealment of the two assassins planted among Sharon’s maids.

Eliza noticed the confusion in his gaze and sighed softly. “Do I really have to explain myself to you?”

Shaking her head lightly, she asked, “You were trying to gauge my Existence Level by sensing my magic power, correct?”

Leoniel nodded silently.

“Then it’s only natural that you’d fail because I do not possess the magic power typical of a Legendary Level existence. I can convert my magic into ether, and from ether into pure life energy,” Eliza said with a shrug.

“In public, I convert about 70% of my magic into life energy, constantly boosting my vitality and durability.

What you’re sensing now is the remaining 30% of my magic, which is far below what a Legendary Level existence would have at base. As such, you misjudge my Existence Level to be below what it actually is.

And since you can’t directly sense life energy, you can’t tell I currently have an absurd amount of vitality and durability, enough that even if your two attendants attacked me at full power, I’m pretty damn sure I’d only come out with a few flesh wounds that would heal within a minute.”

Eliza’s explanation left Leoniel genuinely shocked.

“My goodness, I never even considered that possible.”

Eliza wasn’t hiding her power. She was simply using so much of it constantly that she appeared weaker than she actually was.

Leoniel reasonably assumed that just as Eliza could convert ether to life energy, she could reverse the process, turning life energy back into ether for offensive use.

He could also sense a faint ice affinity from her, and the spear tip he’d seen at the edge of her staff when she unearthed it was definitely not there for fancy.

“You lot really never cease to amaze me,” he muttered.

At this, Evan wrapped his arms around Eliza’s waist with a proud smile. “Isn’t my Liz just the best?”

Eliza silently rolled her eyes but made no move to remove his arms. “You can brag about me later, but how are you going to explain this to the Pirate Queen’s subordinates? You don’t want them to know you have Sovereign Level power, do you?”

“Not yet, at the very least,” Evan replied. “By tomorrow, it’ll be fine if they knew, but right now, no.”

“So what are you going to do about this?” Eliza asked, gesturing to the devastation around them. “Did you use that isolation barrier?”

Evan nodded. “You know me so well.”

He held out his hand and summoned the Akashic page, and at the sight of the grimoire radiating a terrifying degree of power, Leoniel’s eyes widened.

“You use grimoires as well?” he asked.

“Just this one. It’s a bit special,” Evan said.

He looked up at the sky and commanded, “World Isolation Barrier, Deactivate.”

Magic power flowed into the grimoire, and cracks appeared in the sky above and the land around them, running through the air like glass before shattering.

The invisible barrier that had concealed the island, isolating it from the rest of the world, crumbled, its fragments merging into the ambient energies.

“So that’s why you were in the sky earlier,” Leoniel said, realising the reason Evan had attacked from above at the beginning of the fight was that he’d flown up above the clouds to cast the World Isolation Barrier.

The fact that he hadn’t noticed it meant either Evan’s spellcasting was extraordinary or the barrier’s range was so wide that he hadn’t come close enough to its edges to detect its magic.

Evan snapped the Akashic page shut and returned it to his inventory.

“That was a little test run.”

Turning to Leoniel, he continued. “Now then, Leoniel, I’m going to need your help with something tomorrow.

I don’t know the exact time, so it may be in the afternoon, maybe at night, I’m not sure. But if anything arises that could cause unrest among the people on the island, I’d like for you to use your reputation, your fame, and your mere presence to calm them so people don’t take any rash actions and create even bigger problems.

The downside is that you would have to stay at a certain location or move around a few of the islands, unable to assist with any problems that might crop up.”

“Problems that might crop up or that will crop up?” Leoniel asked with narrowed eyes, and Evan just chuckled.

“It’s only a possibility,” he said. “If Miss Zara agrees to my proposition, there will be no problems. If she doesn’t, then unfortunately, there is a non-zero chance that the Zeraxes Archipelago might not exist anymore by this time on the 30th.”