Jonathan and Edgar were flagging now, their stamina bars starting to give out. The city just kept on going, and after almost an hour of non stop running, they still had not reached the end. The only upside of all this was that the soldiers chasing them had run out of stamina as well, and the mages flying up above had run out of mana to propel their flight. In addition, the guards stationed in these parts of the city were far weaker than the ones stationed in the center, meaning that they were trivial to evade.
Eventually, after another ten minutes of running, the two men finally saw the end of the city. It was surrounded by a vast wall, made to keep the monsters out, and that wall was summited by hundreds of various artillery pieces that were thankfully pointed outwards. They would still have to deal with those when they escaped however.
The two men made a beeline for the nearest gate, a giant construction of ebony wood, and sped past the nearby guards, shocking them with their speed. Jonathan cocked back his fist and gathered his remaining power to it, relying more on his mana and elemental energy than his physical strength, as he was tapped out, and drove it into the gate, sending his mana straight through the fibers of the wood. With his new mastery over his mana, such a feat was possible, and the wood ruptured beneath his fist, exploding outwards in a spray of splinters.
The resulting hole was large enough for him to get through, and he quickly vaulted through it , allowing Edgar to follow. They were finally out of the city. Jonathan set foot onto black ash for the first time in days, and started running for it, wanting to get out of the range of the siege engines before they could fire. Edgar quickly caught up to him, and the two men raced off into the distance as the ballistas and catapults began to discharge their loads. They were free.
Over the next two weeks, the two men got to know one another far better than before, and they both shared their life stories as they ran, with only Jonathan excluding a few bits about his brushes with the System and the runes. They had kept to the ash heaps, staying away from population centers, and relying on monsters for essence. It was a lonely existence, but it was leagues better than Jonathan’s first few weeks in this world, now that he had a companion.
The simple comfort of just having someone to talk to had been painfully absent for Jonathan. It was hard to be hunted down by an entire world without any sort of company. Edgar had only elaborated a bit on his life as a prince of a System integrated world a bit, but it was still quite intriguing, and Jonathan had found out more about the politics of a world where power determined the hierarchy of life. People like Edgar were like filth on the bottom of a higher power’s shoe, and they were treated as such, left to live their own miserable existence in tiny allotments of land set apart for them. There was a common saying among the denizens of Telvaria which went something like this. ‘Better to be a Tier 10 slave than to be a Tier 1 king.’ It was a phrase that was highly indicative of the way that the world worked, and Edgar had assured him that a Tier 10 slave would actually be better treated than a Tier 1 king in reality.
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The two men did a lot more than talk however and most of their time was spent fighting with the various monsters of the ash, and a few guard patrols as well. Jonathan reached level 75 by the end of the two week period, as well as improving his elemental mastery to 7%, and Edgar had reached level 72, both men reaching ever closer to Tier 2. Neither of them knew what exactly breaking through to the next Tier meant, but Edgar assured Jonathan that it wasn't as simple as simply gaining another level. There was an intricate process to it, one that Edgar had only heard stories about. It was a process that he had never expected to go through.
At the peak of Tier 1, one had a lifespan of around two hundred years, which was barely enough in Telvaria to get anywhere, unless you were very lucky indeed. Jonathan had gotten a better picture of his companion’s abilities as well, finding out the man's class and specialization. Edgar was a class variant of an Air Mage who specialized in utility spells. He lacked heavy hitting attacks, but he had invested heavily in his physical stats to avoid that. As a result of his noble upbringing, he had been able to raise his class to a higher level, meaning that he gained more stat points per level up than the basic Mage class. Apparently, such things were perfectly possible, and one only had to seek out rare reagents or defeat sufficiently powerful monsters to upgrade their basic class.
A class was apparently a milestone of where your path was going, and as a result, there was quite a bit of free rein within the first tier to pick your specialization. If you wanted to become a spellsword, using mana and weapons in equal measure, then good for you. If you wanted to ply the depths of elemental power, well you could also do that.
In any case, Jonathan had missed all of that as a result of his Outsider class, which was already unreasonably powerful. However, it was not as powerful as he had thought. He still gained more stat points per level than most, but a few classes existed that were even more powerful than his own. However, he possessed a myriad of other bonuses as well, such as his Divinity, his runes and his titles, all of which were far more powerful than they should have been. Of course, Edgar did not know about the first two ones, thinking that they were mere skills.
In addition, Jonathan had focused on raising his pathway skills as well, trying to upgrade his mana manipulation to the next rank. He had only managed to raise it by two tiers in the time, bringing it up to 7, but all of the progress that he could make was welcome. He sensed that the next tier of mastery would come if he managed to increase his control over external mana manipulation, as he had been able to do earlier. He had forcefed concentrated insight into his skill through the compression of his core, and surviving the onslaught of mana from his rune, but he sensed that he had skipped a few steps, which was why he had gained so much experience out of it. In trying to control his external mana, he was able to increase his power in a much safer way. He had not tried to use his rune again in the last few weeks, fearful of its dangers.