Eric was brought out of the tower safely, and recognized his rescuers as a group of people he had once attacked on a plain earlier. Seeing the power they possessed, power enough to rescue him from a human city, he was impressed. This tower they had built removed the capacity of magic use within its walls, which meant that only those who didn’t use magic at all were unaffected by this place. Eric relied heavily on magic, and without it was little better than the average person guarding him individually despite his high racial tier. Of course, being a part elf he assumed that all races had some kind of draw-back like his had. The people he had fought were many, originally to find out who was the first to advance so high and later to try and prevent the war seeing humanity in its current state here.

Despite his original beliefs, Eric eventually came to the conclusion that it wasn’t explicitly right or wrong to forego full humanity and take on the racial traits of another race. He had come to think this way after he had become an Elder True Elvish Human, and then spending substantial time with other races aside from humans. Due in part to elves being similar in appearance to humans, and partly because he had become a true elvish human, Eric had taken on the full outward appearance of an Elf. His skin was much fairer, ears were incredibly long, body suffused with magic from its core, and his eyes and hair turned into a dark purplish color. Aside from a similar facial structure and the same mana signature, it would have been nearly impossible to recognize him as the same person.

Eric had only been imprisoned for about a week now, but he had already learned a fair amount about the current state of humanity. For example, he now knew that very few humans from Earth actually believed themselves far superior like the rest of humanity here did over other races. Even the current leader, a person from Earth from what he had learned, only had fear and loathing for other races from the inability to control them with his ability. It turned out that without a very substantial power difference, other races, or those unfriendly with the person, would have a very high threshold for resistance. He had noticed it took a person being within the range where he could strengthen them to initiate control over them, and even then, those who were especially strong willed could still resist his influence to a degree and break it.

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Even though he recognized Eric as the one who had attacked their party a while back, he did not immediately decide to attack back. In this place, it was possible to change quite a bit in a short time-frame, and Eric it looked like had also taken the plunge to grow stronger. In fact, he was almost unrecognizable from an actual Elf, something that surprised even the natives of this planet about Eric. It was like his affinities lined up perfectly to those of an elf, and that is why he had transformed so completely.

“I thought you had attacked us previously because you were against non-humans. Why is it that you’ve become mostly elf?”

Eric looked mildly distraught at the question. He was half-expecting it once he knew who had saved him, but he hadn’t really thought about why he had changed his beliefs. He knew that part of it involved having become a different race, it was also that he couldn’t justify the blatant racism once he realized that the only real differences involved a racism very similar to the one found on Earth.

“You are right, I had attacked previously because I believed as I had been told that humans were the superior race on this planet. I found out later, that such ideology was flawed and was only spouted to provide us a reason to unite against the non-humans. I realized the error of what I believed, and used logic to realize the fallacy. As for why I am so far transformed into an elf, I have reached the level of Legendary 97.”

Greogry looked at Eric with some surprise, wondering he had managed to reach that level on his own, despite having been locked up for at least some time. Even Gregory and his group had not reached those levels, and they had been through what was considered insane leveling speeds as a group in the area of the planet hardest to survive in. For Eric to have caught up with and surpassed that, he had no idea what he had been through. Although he could very well have obtained higher level powers with his unique class, and that is something that would have given him greater capability to level faster if he had a way to travel faster than Gregory could with it.

Gregory talked with Elise, and the rest of their party about bringing Eric into the fold. It would only help to have somebody with his skills, and he was probably one of the most capable mages on the planet, aside from Gregory himself in total magical capability. In fact, his reserves of mana were far larger than Gregory’s own. It gave him a capacity to perform magic to an untold degree, especially considering he was of a magical race, and one that gave massive bonuses to the capacity of magic through a higher intelligence. While Gregory did not know for certain, he had assumed that Eric likely had the King of Intelligence feat, granting him an even higher intelligence than he thought it likely he could attain.

Overall, the entire group decided to bring Eric along, although he would need to work with them until such time that whomever had taken control of the planet was defeated and the planet was saved from the risk of it once again falling into ruin because of an imbalance of the races. Gregory walked over to Eric, placed his hands on him, and used a healing light to restore him to a perfect state of physical health. Eric was impressed that Gregory had such skills, but decided not to speak, and would listen to the requirements they gave him to travel with them.

The requirements they gave were few, they only asked that he assist them in the defeat of the current king of humanity, and that he do his best not to kill any humans except the person who proclaimed himself king. If such a thing were to pass, it seemed at least possible that humanity could begin talks of peace among other races, and finally hope to abolish the cycle of constantly needing to have the planet merged with another to prevent the destruction of it. Using the help of Eric, the god-like beings, and their entire current party, they believed it would be possible to unite together and destroy the current king of humanity, and use the confusion to bring peace across the area. Of course, peace was meaningless without the ability to maintain it. While Gregory could have been the one to do so, he knew that his gifts did not lie with leading people. He had met a few new people, and knew that the best leader for humanity would actually be a non-human right now. He did not know who to pick for the new leader, and figured that a vote would be best, but one that was free of human options. It had to be somebody that would make people realize that diluting their race was not weakness, but something to embrace.

There would still be some time left on their trek, and they knew that Eric needed practice as well if he was to not hold back the group. While he may have been able to perform some very impressive shows of strength, he was useless in close-quarters combat if he couldn’t teleport. He was also relatively useless in a situation where the person he hoped to attack had better skills with close-range weapons and were able to deflect or even parry his attacks. A successful parry at his speed of strike, meant that he was much more likely to wind up killed in an actual combat. Here, the worst of the blows was on the emotional level of saying that he still needed practice if he hoped to compete and be powerful enough to actually fight alongside the group.

They knew that Eric’s power was great, but they also realized that he was a person almost overly confident in his own abilities. This was very similar to Gregory, but Gregory had taken strides to improve himself to the point that he could compete in a close-range scuffle, and even surpassed that by becoming able to perform magic in the middle of a close-range combat. He could better yet control his magic to the point now that he could destroy 3 targets in an area, and ignore all the others. This even held true with other people and his allies. Gregory could obliterate targets while leaving allies untouched, or heal allies while leaving enemies untouched by the healing. This extra training made for slower travel, but with Eric here, they knew they could get to the capital the next day if they so desired. Eric’s power had gotten to the point that he was capable of getting to any place or person he knew the rough location of, and could bring an entire small party with him.