“I have to admit, Exalted One, that the Honored Ones are truly blessed by the Deities themselves,” noted the old matron as she shook her head while looking at Tiesya before her. She had a somewhat exasperated look on her old, wrinkled features, and for good reason, too.
Tiesya was seated cross-legged within one of the practice chambers, the orb before her not even giving off the slightest light. It had only been a week after the group had stayed in Zikeal, so their progress with learning how to disguise their aura was beyond rapid. Every member of the group had learned some sort of general skill to do it by this point, while a few found ways to use some of their present skills to achieve the effect instead.
It was much, much faster than the speed at which even the tribe’s greatest prodigies – like Tiara, the matron’s own granddaughter – had ever managed in their history. The three scouts were the ones who grasped it the soonest due to already having skills that did similar things and thus easily adapted for this new purpose, but the others caught up pretty fast as well.
At the present moment, even the worst of the group managed to control their aura to a point that matched the performance of the tribe’s inherited skill in its first evolution already. Some of the best ones at controlling their aura had already taken it even further, to applications that the tribe had never managed in their long history.
Like how Tiesya stood up and knocked on the door of Val-Kas’j’s chamber next to hers. When he opened the door, he seemed to understand her intention with just a look. The two left the door to their chambers wide open as they stood facing each other a few feet away and started to spar – empty-handed because they didn’t want to accidentally damage the room – with each other.
All while they kept their auras concealed to the point that neither orb brightened even the slightest bit.
“They are doing it differently to your tribe, from what I could see,” explained Esperanza to the matron while she watched exasperatedly at the pair squaring off with each other, exchanging blows so fast that the matron’s old eyes were unable to follow. “The way your tribe does it seems to be closer to compressing your everything to avoid detection, which is one reason why you grow weaker while suppressing yourself.”
“I’m not completely certain why this is so, maybe doing it that way makes it harder for your soul to interact with the rest of you, or maybe it weakens your connection to the system… Those would be what I consider the more likely causes,” she continued. “What we did is more like… pulling a shroud over the soul to keep it hidden. No, wait, that’s actually not a wrong analogy, but it’s the soul itself that acts like the shroud in this case.”
“May I request some… elaboration, Exalted One?” asked the matron with a strong hint of interest in her voice. The way their method of disguising their souls weakened them was something that had remained an unsolved problem for the tribe, and that weakness was also the reason why many of their people had perished while out on a mission. They were simply far too weak to defend themselves from anything that tried to prey on them while hiding themselves.
“Hmm, right, according to the priests skills like [Soul Sight] just aren’t a thing other than people like me, isn’t it? Do you have something to draw on? It’s a bit hard to explain just by words,” noted Esperanza. She hadn’t thought that much of the passive skill she got quite some time ago, but after conferring with the local priests, she realized just how rare that sort of skill was.
It made sense, she guessed, as otherwise it would have been far too easy to notice people who were aligned with Oldies, if more people had the ability to directly see their souls like her. Apparently, skills that directly touch the soul was something that only the Deities or Gods themselves were supposed to have, though there had been stories of [Heroes] and [Champions] with skills that involve the soul as well.
Few probably had a path that was as focused on the soul as Esperanza was, however.
“Here you go, Exalted One,” said the matron as she proffered several sheets of what looked like dried leaves and a thin stick inside a narrow container that had some sort of ink-like liquid inside to Esperanza with both hands. The matron had asked her granddaughter to fetch the writing implements and Tiara had done just that within minutes.
“Gracias,” said Esperanza as she received the ‘paper’ and writing implements. “Anyway, this is generally how I see a soul, just take it as an image representation if you like, for all I know different people see them differently,” she continued as she drew a circle on the dried leaf using the stick. The wooden stick was rather porous and seemed to act much like a quill or a fountain pen would.
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“Those who worship the new gods have different markings on their soul, some of which I’ve seen, while others I haven’t, but for those who worship Ol- The Deities of Yore, it manifests like purple threads that wrap around the soul in my eyes,” continued Esperanza, barely managing to catch her words in time to avoid accidentally calling the Deities of Yore ‘Oldies’ like she usually called them. “Like this, is the image clear enough? Drawing isn’t exactly something I’m good at.”
“It is more than adequate to help us picture it in our minds, Exalted One,” said the old matron. At this point Tiara had also called the other four agents who would be going with Esperanza to come and listen to her explanation, since it involves something closely related to their skill. Val-Kas’j and Tiesya also stopped their sparring to listen in as well.
“Right, anyway, what I’ve noticed your tribe do when you use your skill to hide yourselves is like… you’re shrinking your soul as a whole, compressing the whole thing until it’s very small and hard to notice. I assume this hard to notice bit also extends to whatever method the usurping gods’ priests use to detect our presence, since it worked against them,” explained Esperanza while she made a drawing of a tiny circle on the leaf. “So rather than hiding your presence, what you did is to make it very hard to detect instead. It works fine, but that weakness problem you face is the side effect of this method.”
“On the other hand, what Val and Tiesya here did is more like this,” said Esperanza as she crudely drew another circle, but with the threads that used to be outside now inside the circle. “They used the rest of their soul to engulf and cover the parts that signified their allegiance to the Deities of Yore and hid it inside. Apparently this works as well to prevent detection, but doesn’t share the detrimental effects your method has.”
“This… might well prove to be the solution our ancestors had been looking for, the one that we failed to discover even after many generations of trial and error…” muttered the matron with some evident surprise. “This… could change everything. You five! I want all of you to accompany the Honored Ones here in their training and see if you can adapt to their way of using the skill!” she commanded to the five volunteers from her tribe.
“I’m not sure whether it’ll be easy for them to adapt to this method, but given how similar the methods are in purpose, and since your own skill already involves some soul manipulation as well, it shouldn’t be too hard for them to learn it, I think,” said Esperanza with a nod. If the locals could learn the method then they would be able to retain more of their power while they went out spying, which would keep them safer. She definitely didn’t mind sharing the method if it turned out that others could learn it as well.
When she considered how Ani’s people were all also learning how to do the same thing with decent success, she was confident that the locals should be able to grasp the method used by her group before long.
From that day onwards, the matron, along with the five volunteers as well as another dozen or so older locals from the tribe stayed in the training chamber with the rest of Esperanza’s group, attempting to learn how to hide their presence using Esperanza’s method. None of the group minded the larger crowd, as the training room had enough chambers to accommodate them all anyway.
Surprisingly – or maybe, not surprisingly considering the girl’s prodigal nature – Tiara was the first of the locals to have found a way to replicate what Esperanza and her group was doing, after a mere three days of doing so. She was not that skilled yet when using the new method, only managing to achieve what the tribe’s skill could do on its base level for the time being, but she could actually make use of her third-tier stats much more freely compared to when she used the tribe’s own skill.
Esperanza suggested for the girl to try keeping her control over the skill while sparring to hone her mastery over it. Tiesya volunteered to help with that, as she was one of the ones who already gained pretty much full control over the technique, and could both hide her presence and fight at full power at the same time. That way they could spar before an open door and the orb would only detect Tiara’s presence as Tiesya kept hers completely hidden.
Tiara found it a lot harder to keep the skill under control while simultaneously engaged in a fight – even if it was just light sparring – yet at the same time, managed to improve her control rapidly while doing so. Tiara’s class was one that apparently focused heavily on Perception and Agility, as it was a stealth-based infiltration class, and while she lacked combat skills, she still had the stats of a third-tier behind her.
As such, as long as Tiesya took it easy on her, the girl still managed to put up a decent fight. Of course, they quickly noticed that Tiara improved faster when she was hard-pressed to maintain her control and fight at the same time. Since the girl already managed to improve her control, Tiesya decided to step up the fighting part instead and started to press hard on Tiara, though she took care not to actually injure the girl.
By the fifth day of training together, Tiara had managed to improve her skill to the point that she could hide herself as well as the tribe’s hereditary skill on its first evolution. She wasn’t the only one, either. Murad and Kurt had managed to perform the rudimentary level of the skill, with performance equivalent to the tribe’s skill at its base level, as did the matron herself and a couple other members of the tribe.
There was lamentation, cries of why they didn’t stumble upon such a better method for so long, grief over all the lives lost simply because they couldn’t defend themselves at all while hiding. At the same time, there was joy, a celebration at the discovery of a better way, and how their future generations wouldn’t have to suffer the same limitations as they had lived under.
As such, Esperanza and her group weren’t shy about offering what guidance they could. Due to the similarity of the nature of the skills they were using, it proved to be quite simple to achieve the desired effect despite using different skills to do it. By the end of their second week of stay in Zikeal, around a dozen members of the tribe – including all five of the volunteers – had learned how to hide themselves with the new method.
By the end of the third week, Tiara had managed to achieve her previous level of subterfuge using the new method and keep it up even while she was engaged in an actual fight. Similarly, every member of Esperanza’s group had mastered the ability to do the same. It was around then that Esperanza began to broach the topic of continuing their journey.