Keynes closed and opened his fist. Differences between Level 1 and Level 2 were obvious. He could feel each attribute more distinctively. That alone was a huge improvement. The extent of his current strength was unknown to him though. It was difficult to translate the attributes without seeing the stats and have the comparison against others. He’d have to do it the hard way. But first things first.

“Can you do me a favour?” Keynes asked Kaito Ren who stood next to him nearby the exit of the rift. All other people in the rift kept a distance from Keynes that satisfied him.

“Another one?”

Yeah, this wasn’t the first time Kaito Ren had helped him.

“The last one.”

“The last one?” Kaito Ren repeated quietly. “Are you planning..." He didn’t finish the sentence. They both knew what he meant.

“The next outbreak is imminent,” Keynes said.

“I thought you’d trained to not let it happen.”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exac—” Kaito Ren caught himself mid-sentence and fell silent but Keynes knew he wouldn’t stay quiet for long. “Billions have died during the first one.”

Keynes nodded, soberly. Without the emotional affliction, he couldn’t void his emotions. Who could have guessed that a debuff could be useful? It was worth remembering. Not that I will forget it. Ever.

So, without voiding his emotions, he needed to put a mask on and act tough. His mind was more resilient at Level 2 but it wasn’t anywhere near the level he needed.

“I haven’t only trained since I’d come to this city. I’ve spent my free time learning about the wider world. It’s changed. Walls are being raised around most cities, people arm themselves up, and though I despise them, the World Government builds a network of fast-response units. I don’t think there will be many casualties this time.”

As he said these words, his insides twisted. He truly believed what he just said but the anxiety wasn’t something he could ignore, even though he tried.

Kaito Ren was stunned, something Keynes hadn’t witnessed often. He grabbed Keynes and led him farther away from the group. This had the opposite effect as they became more curious.

“Why would you do something like this?” he whispered, losing his cool.

Keynes steeled himself to reply. What he was going to say wasn’t easy. It weighed on him, the weight he feared could crush him down. He had to face his demons and move beyond this.

“Waxilium Earl raped my mind. Literally. Despite the kidnapping, which scared the crap out of me, I was relieved when they turned out to be a secret government’s agency. Their offer wasn’t bad either. I could earn enough money in ten years to retire. But then they pushed me beyond my limits, my fears, my desires.” He stopped speaking, needing to catch a breath. “Do you realize that I remember every moment I spent in Jamaica? At Level 1, I learned to void my emotions and keep these demons at bay but now? My affliction is gone. I have nothing to shield me from it. And what is my greatest fear now? That Freeman will use me again and again and again. And when I am not needed? I’d be locked in the safest and most secure place he can build. I’d rather die than be his slave.”

There was an emotional charge in the air that felt tangible. Even though Keynes didn’t shout, his silent scream was loud. So loud that an echo of a call came back.

It was very distant and very faint. Whatever it was, Keynes didn’t pay it any mind. Others in the rift didn’t seem to notice it.

“Hatred is not the way.”

“I don’t hate them, Kaito Ren. I just want to be free.”

“Keynes, what you’re proposing is—” Kaito Ren said with quiet force but Keynes interrupted him.

“Is the only way to defeat Freeman. Without another outbreak, the resistance won’t be able to stand up to him. The World Government will win.”

“But the cities, they are not ready.”

“They are.”

“That’s propaganda.”

“You don’t know that.”

Both men stared at each other, intensively, without uttering a word until someone approached them.

“Officer McJames expects you.” He meant Keynes.

“Please, find and get my family to safety, Ren,” Keynes whispered before he followed the messenger.

He didn’t look back fearing that his mask might crack, that hesitation could once more wiggle its way into his heart and he wouldn’t be able to carry out his plan. His affliction might be gone but things weren’t right with his mind.

He wondered if they’d know that he lost his tracker. Hopefully not. The tracker diminished his chances substantially.

As he finally reached the exit, he asked himself.

Did I make the right call? Is Kaito Ren someone I can trust? But if not him, then who? With Fen and Tulli gone, Keynes had no one. The weight of loneliness came down on him like a boulder. He MISSED his family. Since the kidnapping, he’d felt like it was nothing and he might see them any day, but it had been a lie. Now, he truly understood how badly he needed them.

If I fail to start another outbreak, I may never see them again, he realized with terror.

“Please, go first,” the messenger said.

A single step took him back to the compound. He immediately noticed differences he hadn’t seen earlier. The air inside the large hall was heavy and unpleasant.

McJames waited for him. She was a source of a different kind of displeasure. After how she’d treated Tulli, Keynes had only harsh words for her.

And he felt a bile rise in his throat as the things he’d said to Kaito Ren started to dawn on him, now that he saw his enemies faces.

McJames wasn’t alone, which didn’t surprise Keynes. She was Level 4 but the woman liked projecting her power and nothing worked better than several squads of troopers standing at ready behind her.

Keynes realized one thing when he watched the fight between Kaito Ren and Samuel King, attributes were the foundation but fighting skills and techniques were the next step. His duels with Kaito Ren here and in Jamaica hadn’t been very fruitful. He’d learned very little and it was another mistake he had to rectify going forward.

Harter would laugh his head off if he heard me speak about learning martial arts.

In the hindsight, Keynes didn’t seem as smart as he’d liked to pretend. He failed to predict the importance of an individual strength... yeah, I also failed to predict the rift outbreak, he thought bitterly, knowing well that it’d been impossible to know these things.

He shook the thought off his head and focused on the crowd waiting for him. He noticed Christopher Wolf lurking in the back. The silence was deafening. They had the most of the workers moved out of the hall. It seemed that McJames didn’t want to take chances.

“It was reported that you have advanced.”

He nodded.

“You will go with me then.”

“Can I, at least, change into clean clothes?”

McJames’s gaze took the state of his clothes in and she grimaced, then turned to one of her aides and asked him to bring the clothes to the plane. Keynes creased his brows as he realized that his hearing was better – sharper – clearer. He totally needed to find out what the Purified Body meant and what the Orb of Perfection was. But these things would have to wait.

“You’ll change on board the plane. Delays aren’t permitted.”

Kaito Ren stepped out of the rift a moment later. His usual, cool expression was nowhere to be seen. Keynes’s words got to him as well. Kaito Ren immediately looked at the ex-director ignoring Keynes and McJames.

Maybe there is something between them? He hadn’t considered it before because he didn’t care about the heart matters. Except for her but she was the past to him. If I only could remove the memories of her. It made him jealous of people with normal memories. They could forget and it had to be a blessing not to remember hurtful things.

Keynes let McJames lead him out of the rift compound with the escort of over a hundred troopers. She wasn’t playing this very smart. None of the previous trainees had received this level of attention. Clearly, she feared he could try to escape like Fen. Thinking of her…

“Have you caught Fen?”

McJames started as she walked two steps ahead of him but uttered no words. He didn’t need to be a genius to know what that meant. Somehow, Fen had pulled this off and had escaped the clutches of the government. Good for her.

Their procession was witnessed by thousands of people in the city. Keynes had been given a hooded coat that allowed him to hide his identity. This is better than nothing. He didn’t want notoriety.

“Isn’t this a bit too much?” he asked as they reached the same black plane that had brought him here, surrounded by hundreds of troopers. What he found curious was that no one inquired him about his advancement. How many people had advanced with all attributes maxed out? None? A handful? No matter the answer, the lack of questioning could mean that McJames had been told by the top brass to keep her mouth shut.

“Watch your tongue, trainee, or I’ll recommend a thorough punishment at the place you’re going to.” She was more frustrated than angry and Keynes suspected why that was.

“You don’t even know where I am going, officer, so what are the chances your betters will listen to you?” He made sure to say the words aloud so the troopers could hear them. A small way of paying her back for Tulli. He didn’t know much about the Monolithic faith but Tulli had deserved respect.

To their credit, the troopers showed no reaction. But they didn’t need to. McJames started spewing warnings and insults under Keynes’s address. He ignored her and set off toward the plane, leaving her red-faced and outraged.

In all this mess, he only hoped for two things: that Kaito Ren wouldn’t betray him and the absence of the tracker wouldn’t be noticed until Keynes was free.

The plane took off while Keynes refreshed and changed his clothes. He held the pouch in his hand, while his mind reached inside to pick up the Orb of Perfection.

Orb of Perfection

System Item

Uses: 1

Bound to Keynes Kid

Great. This was what he needed, a system item. What the hell was a system item anyway? He tried to access its description but received the same old message about low Spirit.

I should’ve been more forceful with compacting the essence. It seems like the only way to increase Spirit and it is what I need right now, well, this and a hundred other things.

Knowing the same would happen with the Purified Body buff, he pulled the scroll out of his pouch. He was careful to keep it hidden from the prying eyes of the five troopers who came with him. Strangely, besides the pilots, no one arrived to pick him up. Almost as if they dared him to try escape. Or maybe they underestimated him? Either way, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to jump out of the plane.

Scroll of Random Teaching (Uncommon)

“Knowledge is the cornerstone of progress.”

-

Imbues a random piece of knowledge upon the user (single use).

-

[Scroll, Knowledge]

Level 1

Would you like to use it?

Yes/No

There was no point keeping it in his inventory. He mentally picked ‘Yes’ and felt a cold trickle enter his spiritual core. For a split second, he felt the strong presence of the core. It made him wonder what exactly was Spirit…

Then knowledge bloomed inside his head.

The Technique of Lesser Cultivation learned.

He stared for a moment at the system message. Cultivation? His suspicions started to multiply uncontrollably. The system message from the unknown being had told the Humans to cultivate the essence or they’d not be able to get strong and now on his first try, he received a cultivation technique… Is someone helping me?

There was no answer and he focused on the technique.

The Technique of Lesser Cultivation

The first step of learning the art of essence movement throughout the body.

Using this technique decreases the essence absorption rate by 1%.

Oh, great. Another penalty. The system really liked to throw obstacles under his feet but there had to be an important reason for this. Nonetheless, while learning the basics of cultivation sounded like a good idea, he’d hoped to learn something combat-oriented.

The moment of his escape was approaching quickly and he’d need every advantage he could find because failure was no longer an option.

***

Kaito Ren didn’t watch Keynes Kid and Officer McJames leave, he didn’t trust himself enough to hide his emotions.

Christoper Wolf approached him.

“Now that the boy’s gone,” Christopher said softly. Since he’d lost the position of the academy’s director he seemed more at peace. Kaito Ren hadn’t mentioned it to him because it stung Christopher to be removed from the post for simply giving his best. “I don’t expect High Lord Earl to ever put his foot in here. What kind of secret does Keynes Kid carry that the World Government allowed him to stretch the boundaries so far it almost looked as if they were afraid of him.”

“It is a kind of a secret you wish to run from, not the other way around.” And with things he told me… it is even harder. Another outbreak. He’s changed beyond my wildest expectations.

“It’s that bad?”

Kaito Ren had never considered telling anyone else the truth as it would put them in grave danger. He wasn’t an idiot to believe that the government forgot about him. There were agents hiding in plain sight, watching his every move, his every word. This made Keynes Kid’s request this much harder.

“It’s best to leave his Talent in the hands of the World Government. They know what they are doing,” he said, even though he didn’t believe in it himself. But Keynes Kid had misunderstood one thing about Ren, he wished the best for humankind but he’d not rebel against the World Government. Being a rebel wasn’t in Kaito Ren’s nature. When Ventura had killed the scientist, Kaito Ren woke up from that silly conviction that they somehow were heroes in a story, fighters of great power. They were not.

Kaito Ren would do all he could to help people and the world but in his own way.

“Yes, careless of me to bring this up after the High Lord warned me twice to stay out of it… anyway, I appealed against the decision to transfer me out of the Scottish cluster city. Regardless of whether the appeal will be successful or not, I wondered if you’d like to join me. Your training methods are formidable and I have to say, I am impressed with everything you have achieved here. All these teens maxing their attributes out. How often before the outbreak did we see a maxed out attribute?”

Very rarely. Even in the Oriental League, there was a hard stance against maxing out more than one attribute.

But Kaito Ren didn’t answer this question as both men knew the answer. Especially someone like the ex-director. Christopher Wolf was Level 5. He’d been a commander before the new chain of command was introduced. Even amongst commanders Level 5 wasn’t something one saw often. That, of course, raised even more questions. Jolie McJames was Level 4 but Kaito Ren had a hard time imagining her as important enough to warrant her ascension to Level 4. Unless she has a strong Talent. But he didn’t know anything about her Talent.

Anyway, it was easy to discard Level 5s and 6s in the presence of Level 7s because there was only a handful of them, less than fifty in the entire solar system, and hence they stood out of the rest. So, yes. Level 5s and even 4s were a big deal. Am I rambling?

“I’ll have to think about it but I’m leaning more toward yes than no. Nonetheless, I need to do something first. Have you ever been inside a rift?”

Christopher Wolf looked at him without understanding then it slowly dawned on him what Kaito Ren was implying and decided to play along.

“Actually, I haven't.”

After they entered the same rift in which Keynes had levelled up, Kaito Ren expected they had only a minute at best before people would show up to eavesdrop on their conversation.

“Will you help me find Keynes Kid’s family?”

“Why?”

Kaito Ren sighed, not being able to explain the bluntness of Keynes’s request. He couldn’t tell Christopher the truth, that was for sure. Out of them both, the ex-director was a loyalist.

“It’s complicated.”

***

“How sure are you?” Windsor Freeman asked.

“Specialized units confirmed that the attack had been carried out by Columbus Curt and his sidekicks,” Esopp replied without a shred of emotions.

Windsor had been in a different video conference when the ground-breaking news dropped on him. The covert base in Jamaica was breached, personnel kidnapped or killed and hard drives wiped out. Because he had their access to the external Web blocked, all the data had to move through Wax’s terminal. They didn’t possess a live feed from the base. At this point, they didn’t have any records either.

If not for the special operatives with very specific and rare Talents, they wouldn’t even know who had stood behind this attack. Columbus Curt was such an easy pick but the rebellious chief-in-command knew better than anyone in the world why making Windsor angry was a very bad idea. Windsor believed that after the attack on the Insitute, Curt would lay low. It looked like he underestimated the man’s lunacy.

Windsor gave the High Lord a concerned look. Esopp’s son had gone missing. Would it compromise Esopp’s judgement and clarity of thought?

A message appeared on Windsor’s personal tablet.

“Keynes Kid ascended to Level 2 and is en route to the selected location.”

Good. Finally. That brat took his time. If I didn’t need him in a good shape… Windsor let the thoughts go. His frustration with that boy had reached new heights but Windsor didn’t wish to repeat the mistake from Jamaica. Keynes Kid had to be strong enough to open the rift without causing an outbreak. The first one had given too much ammunition to the rebels. And now they know the truth. He willed his body to stillness lest he destroy the conference room.

Once he had Keynes Kid open the newly discovered rifts in Europe, he’d keep the boy close. He was too important to risk losing him.

If only Ventura hasn’t killed Polloc… yes, I may as well pay him a visit.

“Find them, Esopp, and kill them all.”