Despite all the noise and commotion that had resulted from the battle, nothing really happened. The holy city did not retaliate. There were no shining knights or fearsome soldiers demanding for their heads on a pike. The archway that led into the city remained silent and destitute.

For all intents and purposes, the holy city really was just a relic of a bygone era.

****

After the battle, the group decided to rest for a while.

Mainly, they wanted to wait for Ellis’s body to recover. The battle had practically left him crippled. Grisella’s potions and Ena’s healing magic worked to alleviate most of his physical injuries, but the feeling of weakness still persisted.

By Ellis’s own estimates, his current strength was less than a third of what he could usually muster.

All in all, it took nearly five days for him to recover.

It was a surprisingly long amount of time, especially in exchange for such a temporary burst of strength. Still, Ellis was fine with that.

This new ability of his was different. It wasn’t some shoddy spearmanship that he decided to learn on a whim, nor was it his typical garden-variety super strength (although it was still super strength). It was different. It was the type of thing that could be activated, the sort of trump card you save until the very last minute. Ellis wanted to properly train and develop it.

Thus, spurred on by his own selfish desires, their five-day vacation was indefinitely extended.

****

The group set up camp just outside of the Holy City, a mere twenty meters away from the archway.

Within these past few days, Ellis became somewhat obsessed.

Developing his new ability was a long and arduous process.

The first step mainly involved research. As such, he asked Grisella to inspect his body. Primarily, he wanted to know whether this new found ability of his was magic-related or something purely physical.

Unfortunately, even after she brought out a whole slew of various magical measurement devices, her final answer left him disappointed. More precisely, she had no final answer. According to Grisella, the mana within his body experienced no significant change.

Grisella was rather sensitive to fluctuations in mana. It came with being a witch. Even when he first activated the ability during his battle with the Golems, she still did not notice anything out of the ordinary. Subsequent testing only further solidified this conclusion. Whether it was the mana in the area or the mana within his body, nothing had changed.

In her eyes, Ellis remained the same bloated, black-hole-like concentration of mana that he had been in the past.

After hearing her analysis, Ellis came to two possibilities. Either the change in mana had been at such a level that Grisella did not notice, or his ability really was just purely physical.

To be honest, he leaned towards the latter. Even after he used the ability, Ellis still couldn’t feel the flow of mana that Grisella often talked about. To him, nothing had changed.

Despite that somewhat disappointing ending, the rest of his days passed fairly positively.

On the fourth day of his vacation extension, Ellis made a breakthrough. After several failed attempts, he finally managed to learn how to activate this new ability of his.

It was really just a matter of mindset.

In order to activate his ability, Ellis needed his mind to be overwhelmed by strong emotion. In the case with his fight against the Golems, that emotion had been desperation. Essentially, it boiled down to getting really angry or getting really frustrated; anything that could make his insides boil and his mind fog up with restless simulation.

Of course, forcibly making yourself ‘desperate’ was a tad bit difficult to do, especially on command. There were probably other factors in play aside from just emotion, but Ellis did not know what those factors were. As a result, even though it was possibly more than just emotion, his ability became something dictated only by emotion.

Ellis obviously did not want that sort of ability. After all, emotions were a fickle beast. Humans could get angry or sad at the mere drop of the hat. What’s more, they were not a voluntary process. He needed something better than that.

That’s why he wanted to train. Ellis wanted his body to memorize the ‘process’ of activation. He would much rather put his faith in muscle memory than on something uncertain and capricious like emotion.

It took him a while, but by the time the third week rolled around, he had gotten fairly adept at using his new ability. Naturally, Ellis then moved on to the next stage in his training; the testing phase.

He now wanted to know just how much stronger his new ability made him.

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Ellis’s strength was a bit difficult to quantify, as there wasn’t really anything here that could properly capture the scale of his power. Still, he did his best with the available materials around him.

First, he designated the Holy city’s giant white wall as his ‘testing ground’ (punching bag). The wall possessed a similar durability to the trees within this forest, so it acted as a good benchmark for his strength.

Normal testing of his ability went rather smoothly.

He compared the damage caused by his regular punch to the damage caused by his ability-powered punch.

Unfortunately, using the ability forced him into a weakened state that lasted for three days (he had managed to cut down on the time through repeated usage), so testing became somewhat of a tedious process.

Ellis also tested his strength while in his weakened state. In total, he repeated the process of normal punch, strengthened punch, and weakened punch three times. Added all up, the testing phase lasted for nine days.

The end results showed that while in his strengthened state, Ellis’s strength increased by an average of five times. When weakened, his strength fell to around a third of his normal power. These results were in-line with Ellis’s original impressions of the ability.

After the testing phase came to an end, Ellis finally decided on a name for his new ability. The naming process was important, if not the most important. After all, who did not want to yell out something cool and flashy during the final climax of a great battle?

Unfortunately, Ellis was not a very creative person. Still, he did his best. He stuck with something simple, yet reliable.

[Overdraft]

It was named after the fact that the usage of his ability essentially boiled down to simply over-drafting his body. Ellis thought it was a cool name. At the very least, it was somewhat more original than simply naming it ‘limit break’ or something.

With that all out of the way, Ellis then spent the rest of his indefinite break on training.

Not only did he want to further familiarize himself with the process of using Overdraft, but he also wanted to strengthen his own body.

In his mind, the repeated usage of Overdraft was a good thing.

It was a similar concept to muscle training.

Muscles grow stronger after they undergo a sufficient amount of stress. Of course, the real process was a lot more complicated than that, but the main principle was basically the same. Due to the nature of his peerless strength, it was a bit difficult for Ellis’s body to feel sufficiently stressed. Overdraft circumvented that issue.

It was an ability that thoroughly ran his body dry and ragged.

Every use of his ability would leave him feeling weak and exhausted. Pain was one thing, but fatigue was something that he rarely experienced as a homunculus.

In some strange way, it reminded him of Earth. Specifically, it reminded him of the time he tried to participate in a city-wide marathon. Ellis was not an athlete. The only reason why he participated in the first place was because of the prize money. Back then, he had severely underestimated the very concept of long-distance running. He got about half-way through the race before his body collapsed from exhaustion.

Such bitter memories from his past life came flooding back in as he continued his training. Still, he did not stop.

In addition, he also hoped to accomplish a few other things with this training. He wanted to increase the multiplier of his ability as well as improve his control in regards to the intensity of the ability.

Ellis’s greatest desire though was to mitigate the after effects of Overdraft. He knew this was possible. After all, he had managed to turn his original five-day ‘cooldown’ period into three, but unfortunately, his progress stopped there. No matter how much he tried, the minimum amount of time required for him to recover was three days. It was almost like he had hit a bottleneck.

Naturally, Ellis wanted to break through this bottleneck. Thus, he could only rely on training.

Because of his zealousness, the group spent more than three months camped out in front of the Holy city. Even though they were so close to their goal, less than a few dozen meters away from the archway, they still did not dare to go in. For a few certain individuals, it was quite literally torture.

Still, it couldn’t be helped. After all, who knows what sort of dangers existed within the holy city? It was only normal for Ellis to prepare for the worst.

It was painful, but it was a necessary pain.

***

It was on the eve of his seventh birthday.

Ellis stood in front of a giant white-wall. He breathed out a light sigh as he craned his neck up.

“…”

After a few seconds of silence, a satisfied chuckle filled the air.

Ellis had officially finished his training three days ago.

To be honest, he wanted to commemorate the event with another round of Overdraft. Unfortunately, if he delayed any longer, then the rest of the group might just stage a revolt.

It was regrettable, but as the leader, he needed to show some restraint.

“Besides, I don’t think I should punch this thing anymore…”

A somewhat bitter smile floated to his lips.

Looking up, he could now fully appreciate just how much everything had changed within these last three months. More specifically, the giant white wall in front of him. It was littered with all sorts of holes.

Some were small, barely a dent, while others were large and compromised the overall structure of the wall.

His hypothesis had been proven correct; throughout the training period, his body naturally grew stronger from the constant use of Overdraft. At first, his regular attacks barely even scratched the surface of the wall, but by the end of the first month, he had gained enough strength to the point where, even without overdraft, he could now make a sizable dent on the extra-durable white wall.

Of course, the larger holes were created under the influence of Overdraft, the largest of which was carved out a mere three days.

It was a giant hole that spanned nearly fifty meters in diameter. There were also long, hair-line cracks that stretched out to another one hundred meters or so. Looking past the hole, one could see straight into the Holy city. The debris from the hole also littered the streets within. Some were on rooftops, while others had crashed into walls and damaged buildings.

“…”

Such a hole had been the result of a single punch.

Looking at his handiwork, Ellis felt somewhat satisfied with his current progress.

To be honest, it was a bit difficult to tell exactly just how strong he had gotten. After the second month of training, his strengthened punches pretty much ended up with the same results: giant holes that completely broke through to the other side of the wall. It was somewhat inappropriate to quantify strength based purely on how large the resulting hole was.

At the same time, he also felt a bit worried.

If he kept punching at the wall like this, won’t it eventually collapse?

He had basically carved a straight line near the base of the giant wall. It was like a poorly managed game of Jenga. Right now, there was only a single block near the bottom of an already shaky tower.

Without its foundation to properly support it, there was a high likelihood that this part of the wall would eventually just collapse in on its weight. If that were to happen, then the holy city might really turn to ruins.

This concern kept him up at night. It was also the main driving force behind his decision to cut his training short and move on to the next step in their journey.

After three months, it was time for them to finally explore the Holy City of a Lost God.