Several weeks later, Leon was finally taking his first steps into a Bureau managed Gate, one of the ones they used to train their in-house Walkers. Singular among others, this Gate was special in that it seemingly fixated on large swarms of various kinds of creatures. It was allowed as a reward for those who did well in one of the other training programs, several of which Leon had passed with flying colors.
Despite the strangeness with his System screen, which was still updating, he had proved himself immensely capable in all areas except for magic.
One of the projects Gala had gotten patched up and running was a device designed to read a person's System data, something that had been sorely needed for quite some time. Up till now, System data could be hidden or even outright faked when one desired. It was the reason that the Bureau had gone to such an expense to try and create an identification skill rather than relying on the existing spells that all functioned differently and with varying levels of success.
Sending these devices around the world, once functioning, would reach up to an overall cost somewhere in the billions, but for once most of the Directors had agreed to the decision. This was an extreme outlier and if the Bureau were a democracy, they would simply never get anything done.
A message to Marcus assured that by the time Leon was done in this Gate, it would likely be ready for use.
Turning his attention to the young man, decked out in all black cloth armor, he struggled with the idea of him even entering Gates. He was eminently capable, of that he was positive, but capability and performance weren't always directly correlated.
Despite his misgivings, Marcus acknowledged that the decision wasn't his to make and simply made sure Leon had whatever he believed he needed. To avoid being accused of favoritism, he let Leon pull from the level one armories he'd earned the right to access.
He favored black gear and a strangely heavy sword, all enchanted with an aim toward offense. The only defensive item he had was a hairband that he'd spent his limited funds to have enchanted with a mind protection array. It was a strange choice, but one he'd insisted on without budging despite the extremely low chance of ever coming into contact with such a threat.
Leon entered the Gate with his sword already drawn and at the ready. Standard Gate procedure, for the Bureau at least, recommended entering ready but sheathed and Leon loathed that idea.
Why would he enter a hostile Gate without the ability to fight back immediately, particularly since his Inventory wasn't functioning correctly yet. Even if it were, entering with your eyes peeled and no defenses seemed like a way for the guy in front to get stabbed in the eyes.
The survival percentages, broken down and explained in ways that seemed to dance around the issue of you know…not dying, slowly began making sense if this was how the Bureau trained its people.
After handing him off to Terrance to get him slotted into the various courses and training regimens, Marcus had disappeared to wherever he went for work. While Leon wasn't exactly sure why, that had made him sad until the training began in earnest and he hadn't even had a moment to think straight.
The courses were for a group Terrance called the Uplifters, and were shockingly difficult. Throughout the weeks he'd been with them, Leon had seen several students at varying ages die as they failed the training. Surprisingly brutal and ruthless to the extreme, multiple students died a week, even while Leon seemed to breeze through the courses…except for magic, which remained his most natural inclination while his most impossible courses.
Several steps into the Gate, a wolf with reptilian claws leapt from the woods directly at him, proving his instincts correct.
Without skipping a beat, he sidestepped the beast and bisected it in the span of a single breath.
The forest bore down on him, chilling cold emanating from the shadow and burning heat pressing down on him from the sun. The Gate had been registered as a location in a place called as the Frostfire Woods and, clearly not of Earth, was notable for the various kinds of mana and materials you could gather.
Leon wasn't interested in gathering or crafting, at the moment at least, and while several members of the team alongside him began spreading out to search for materials, he continued onward to find more of the lupine creatures.
Despite constant education in addition to his personal research, Leon had yet to find any kind of reliable information as to how large a Gate could actually be, or if they were even enclosed spaces to begin with.
There were countless examples of anecdotal evidence where Walkers had found 'world boundaries' and couldn't progress, but there were even more examples of people saying the world beyond the Gate simply went on forever. The Gate he was currently in was well documented within the Bureau and even appeared to be instanced with a reliable timer between new instances to allow staggered exploration.
That was video game logic, and if all the Gates in the world operated this way, it would be pretty obvious that they were artificial.
Truth, however, is often far more complicated than it seemed.
With the recent announcement that all Gates would become True Gates, the Bureau had decided to start revealing more information among the Uplifters, letting them know that there were initially ONLY True Gates and upon the System revealing itself, they had created a near countless quantity of Gates that simulated those conditions, and even managed to establish a mechanism that would allow for their artificial Gates to automatically spawn with the right conditions.
Supposedly that was one of the Founder's grand contributions and little was done with it in the thousands of years since the Bureau's inception, but Director Gala had managed to analyze an artificial Gate and a True one, only to reach a shocking conclusion.
There were no 'artificial' Gates.
Gates created by the Bureau actually hijacked the energy of a Gate about to naturally spawn and connect Earth to a world somewhere and direct the newly formed Gate to a vastly condensed pocket dimension.
Looking around at the woods he was currently exploring, Leon muttered, "So in short, it doesn't matter."
A light, almost feminine voice rang out from behind him, "Thinking about those lessons about the Gates again, Leon?"
Nodding an assent, Leon asked, "I guess I don't understand something. If all Gates are True Gates…why did the System announce that it would be spawning True Gates in the place of artificial Gates?"
The man came in at around 5'7 to Leon's 6ft, and spun a great sword by an attached tassel like it was a paperweight. The thing was as long as Leon was tall, and frankly terrifying to see at work during spars.
Chris shrugged and said, "That's kind of the thing, isn't it? The only people who knew there was even a difference are all somewhere up in the brains of the Bureau, and even they don't seem to know what the changes will be. I'm fairly certain that's why the training has ramped up so much, things are easily three times harder than they were a few months ago."
Gesturing to the world around them, Chris continued, "Like take a look at this place. If what we're learning now is true, this artificial Gate actually does link to a real place, but the space is replicated inside a pocket dimension as a perfect copy of that place. Regardless of the 'how', I'm honestly more interested in the why."
Cocking his head in confusion, Leon took a slight step back and let a snake fly past him, noting with a chuckle that the thing actually had little wings like a sparrow.
The pair had continued on like this since Chris started the conversation, since the creatures thus far were far weaker than the wolf from the start of the Gate. Lack of danger did little to inspire anyone to improve and most of the Uplifters, Leon semi-included, had decided to treat the little excursion like a vacation.
"Well look at what we do know.
A True Gate forms when some kind of condition is met both at the origin point of the Gate, where we are, and at the target location, where the Gate is going. Our 'artificial' ones interject at some point in that interchange and redirect the process to a pocket dimension that is somehow identical to the original target location."
Leon sighed and said, "What, are you learning Dimensional magic or something?"
Chris blushed and said, "Director Gala is really hot, plus the technical aspects of it really are fascinating."
"Well its all way over my head, so why don't you just tell me what you're trying to figure out?"
Chris rolled his eyes and said, "Already did. Why?"
Spinning his hand in the air, Leon made a gesture for his friend to move on.
"Why do that at all? I can't even begin to fathom the sheer amount of power that kind of thing must require, let alone figuring out the mechanisms and spell work to make it happen once, let alone ad infinitum. You don't do something like that by mistake, especially not considering how incredibly precise those measurements have to be to completely shift a teleport like that, or whatever the Gates are actually doing when we go through them."
Leon put a finger up for a pause and stepped forward, swinging his sword at a wolf that was standing on both legs and charging up a spell of some kind. It tried to duck and misjudged, taking what was the equivalent of a fifty pound sharpened slab of metal to the head, which promptly smashed open.
"You're always so messy man," Chris muttered.
"I guess what I'm driving at is if the Founder did all this, the sheer amount of time and energy that would have gone into figuring it out would be beyond calculation, let alone the actual effort of making it happen," he finished as he ignored Leon glaring at a bear as hard as he could.
He wanted magic and decided he would try everything until he got it.
Near as Chris could tell, the brute force your way into manipulating the fabric of reality with your mind method wasn't paying very high dividends. It was a lucky thing he'd taken to greatswords as a kid, it meant not having to fight through these kinds of delusions later on.
Leon didn't have that opportunity, which pretty much the whole current class knew, despite the fact that it was a huge Director Level secret as to where he had even come from.
Like a real one this time.
Normally Uplifters got more leeway with information than the rest of the Bureau did, since they were 'the next generation' as Director Marcus put it. Apparently it was better to get them used to handling classified information in small doses before they began taking clandestine missions to places to do things nobody should be doing.
Pulling up his System window as Leon brutally smashed that club he called a sword into another wolfman, he noted that he was still only level 45. The Uplifters were kept relatively low level while they trained their actual skill so they wouldn't fall into the trap of using stats and abilities to overwhelm opposition and fail because they met someone, or something, that was an equal match for them.
Most of the family, as they called each other, focused their stats into their areas of expertise and Chris was no different. He'd put most of his stats into his strength and vitality with the full intention of using his greatsword to overpower everything. The idea of one shotting a boss practically made him salivate, but he knew not everyone had that kind of ambition.
In the outside world, keeping your stats, spells, abilities, everything pretty much, was a basic necessity and it was the height of impropriety to ask someone about them. They'd even heard stories of married couples who had no clue what their partner was truly capable of because of this nonsensical standard.
Within the program, however, it was basic procedure to keep each other up to date on your stats, at the very least.
For a moment, Chris looked at Leon as he stabbed something and used his sword as a springboard to drop kick a more normal wolf.
He was covered in blood.
Vitality: 50
Endurance: 35
Stamina: 40
Strength: 60
Dexterity: 30
Magic: 20
There were intense breakdowns you could access within the System to fine tune your stats to focus on specific things, but Chris found it was too easy to get lost in the weeds doing that and simply let the system allocate the micromanagement automatically.
A quick glance at his 'resources', as Marcus called them, showed:
Health: 4,000
Mana: 1,600
A decent spread for a Great Swordsman, as far as he was concerned at least.
So why all of this, particularly inside a Gate?
Leon.
It was an open secret that heading into this Gate was mostly for Leon, as well as an excuse to reward the high achievers.
Leon, to everyone's shock, was only level 1.
All of his stats were 1.
His health was 1.
His mana was 0.
The man was an impossibility, and sitting at level 1, he managed to overpower nearly everyone he sparred with. He was, at this literal exact moment, pulling the arms off of a sub-boss and beating it with them.
It was astounding to watch him fight, wreaking havoc across the training rooms, fighting alone against a dozen other people, whistling the whole time.
He wasn't cocky about it either, which was almost worse.
To see his behavior, you'd think that it was the most natural thing in the world to fight the strongest among them and almost never so much as get hit once.
Combat spoke to him, told him where to go and where to move as though he had been born on the battlefield and raised among the bodies of enemies too skilled to measure.
It was inspiring and infuriating at the same time.
Yes, they were all family, but nobody wanted to be overshadowed by such a wide margin, and of course they all wanted to be the next Lilac.
She was the metric they'd all been measured by, incredibly strong and a gifted leader who had not only been one of the first successful graduates, but also a glowing star for the entire Bureau to look toward.
Going from graduation to Team Lead, she'd taken a dissonant group of Walkers and turned them into an A rank force, heralding the way into the most dangerous Gates with a flawless record.
Thinking about his older sister made him sigh with pride.
"Hey, what are ya doin? Thinking about dinner!?"
Leon was smart, but rarely seemed to worry about much of anything, even when things got hard.
From time to time he'd get this far off look in his eyes, those black eyes glistening wet with the memory of something he'd say he could almost remember. He'd adopt a somber expression and slow down long enough that it felt as though he was like the rest of them, with the weight of the world on their shoulders.
Then, after a moment, it would disappear and he'd be his happy go lucky self once more, forging ahead like nothing could stop him.
Maybe nothing could.
It had already been the topic of discussion more than once, that Leon almost seemed to be too strong for the Uplifter Initiative, but whoever was in charge insisted that he needed to be there.
Honestly, if he didn't know the man, Chris would demand he be put somewhere else, specifically because he was too strong. If they wanted to send someone strong to watch and judge them, he felt like they'd earned the right to a little honesty in the matter.
Off in the distance, not sure how he got that far away, Leon had gotten his entire upper body trapped in the mouth of a plant with giant teeth.
Muffled screams radiated out from the thing as Leon, who had forgotten he was holding a sword, tried punching his way out from inside, failing spectacularly. The fool was strong, but bad positioning would counter pure physical strength any time.
Thinking back to what their trainers had said, he remembered them mentioning, "He's strong and smart, but when it comes to Gate Walking, you may as well consider him a child. Things you've experienced and are second nature aren't even in the realm of possibility for him. Just keep an eye out for him."
Shaking his head and smiling, Chris started walking toward the man who, despite shouting something fierce, didn't seem to be in any real danger. The punches increased in speed as the plant remained stoic in its resolve and Chris gave himself a moment to laugh.
It was chewing.
His moment to laugh skipped a few seconds and he burst out laughing so hard tears started to come to his eyes and he fell down, holding his sides.
Leon's muffled voice rang out from inside the plant, "Oh god. Oh no, he came to save me. He came to save me and he's DYING!"
This only made Chris laugh harder as the punching, somehow, got even faster and harder and the plant started shaking as Leon started kicking his legs out at random angles to try and get out.
Gasping for air, Chris couldn't help but keep laughing as his friend struggled inside.
Then there was a distinct smell of ozone as a massive bolt of lightning came streaking out from the sky and struck the plant monster, creating an explosion so strong Chris's armor almost started glowing.
For a few moments the world was silent as a presence descended toward them, its pressure so strong the very air reacted.
He'd met this person before, but her aura always took him by surprise.
Jennifer.
Lilac's second in command floated just above them with brightly glowing eyes, their red boring into him as Leon clawed his way from under the remnants of sizzling plant flesh.
Even knowing he was in trouble, he dared to look at his friend and almost managed to keep himself from laughing again.
Almost.
His friend's entire upper body was blackened with soot and smoking, and as he stood up he let out a breath of ash.
Looking around for the danger, Leon noticed Jennifer and waved happily at her.
The woman took a deep breath and let out an impatient sigh as she said, "What are you doing, Leon?"
The note of annoyance in her voice didn't elude Chris, but her eyes dimming down to their normal brown as Leon slapped his chest so hard the soot bounced off of him and floated down to the ground.
"Its a Gate, Jenn, I'm fighting."
Rolling her eyes, she gestured to the group they'd left far behind.
Teams of threes and fives all fought in tight formation, mages in the back, healer in the middle and frontliners, made up of defensive and offensive warriors all working together to take down groups of monsters with as much caution as possible.
"Where is your team, Leon?"
The man sheepishly rubbed his arm and said, "I uh…I kinda forgot to join one."
Her eyes flicked to Chris as she asked, "And what about him?"
He started to respond and she shook her head so slightly he barely registered the movement.
Leon's reckless behavior had gotten him dressed down before and it seemed like Jennifer intended to put a stop to it now.
"I know this run is for me, Jenn."
Her eyes widened, just a touch, in surprise as he continued.
"You, or someone like you, picked your strongest Uplifters, the best of the best. The people who fought and trained and earned their time in this Gate. Even an idiot could see you guys keep this Gate up and running to power level people."
She slowly brought herself to the ground and watched the man as he got more intense even as he stared at the ground so hard he thought he might start boring a hole into it.
"I don't deserve to be here, Jenn. It hasn't even been three months, and I'm here? It isn't fair to anyone else that I'm here, and even though nobody's said anything about it, its clear I'm receiving some kind of special treatment."
By the time he finished he was shouting at the ground.
Jennifer's brows raised in concern as she raised her hand, cut off as he said, his voice quieter, "I don't know how strong I am in comparison, but I can't…no I won't let anyone get into danger because I'm holding them back."
She walked to him and put her hand on his shoulder and said, "Nobody thinks you're weak Leon."
"It doesn't matter if they don't say it.
I'm weak because I'm inexperienced."
He took on that distant expression as some memory tried to dislodge itself from the swamp that was his past.
Chris's heart wrenched as he watched his friend struggle with something nobody could help with.
For all his antics, he knew Leon was deeply worried for the people around him, to the point of discarding his own safety.
He'd seen the man take hits in training that would incapacitate anyone else, just to protect people he barely knew.
What drove him, Chris doubted he'd ever know for sure, but the man was sincerely trying his best. A bright smile worn as both comfort and shield, with strength to match, he was trying to save a world that didn't need saving, one powerful Uplifter at a time.
Knowing all of this, more from watching his actions than any conversation they'd had, Chris looked at Leon with the same respect he'd always had.
Was the man getting special treatment?
Of course.
Was it undeserved?
Of course not.
He was no hero, but as a person trying to be the best he could, to try his hardest to keep up with everyone else, Leon was better than Chris hoped to be.
Before Jennifer could say anything else, Leon picked up his sword from where it had fallen and took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
He did this twice.
Three times.
Then, he turned and looked at them, his normal smile warm as it ever was.
It looked so natural that Chris almost forgot the expression prior, serious and full of self doubt.
Self loathing.
What could have happened to make this man so certain of his lack of self worth.
How could he himself have forgotten?
"I'm gonna keep pushing guys. Be safe."
The implied request to be left alone sat between the three of them, and mostly respected.
Jennifer looked down and said, "Check your messages at some point. If there's an emergency, we'll need to leave."
Nodding, Leon walked away without responding and disappeared into the woods within minutes.
As soon as he was out of sight, a dozen wolves appeared and Jennifer snapped her fingers, engulfing them in black and purple fire.
She looked at her hand and softly cursed under her breath.
"Where the hell did they come from," Chris asked, more so shocked at the sudden appearance of the wolves than the almost immediate attack.
"The Frostfire Woods Gate is listed as a wave style combat Gate. The groups have always been here, Chris," Jennifer responded, catching him off guard.
She knew his name?
"Were you keeping them away from us?"
Exhaustion clear in her expression, Jennifer turned to look at him fully.
"Like any training or Gate excursion for the Uplifter Initiative, I don't interfere in any way beyond personal curiosity. No. I wasn't protecting you in any way."
Despite not knowing her, beyond the stories, Chris was inclined to believe her and asked, "So what happened with the wolves?"
Looking in the direction that Leon had walked away, she raised an eyebrow and waited for the young man to figure something, though he wasn't sure what, out.
He looked where she had, expecting to find some kind of device or magical energy, but figured it must be invisible or something.
"I can't see whatever you're trying to show me," he said, opting for a direct admission of ignorance over whatever game she was playing with him.
She rolled her eyes and tapped at the air for a few seconds when the hologram of a map appeared between them. The three dimensional construct glowed with its perfect structure showing what he realized was the Gate they were in. As he watched it update in real time, expanding as Uplifters explored, he noticed little green dots, presumably the aforementioned Uplifters, moving rapidly through the world, whether they be fighting or exploring. There was a singular dot moving away from where Chris realized he and Jennifer were, at a quick pace despite moving slower than the rest of the groups.
Noting that he had figured out the map, she tapped at her System screen again and thousands of red dots appeared, all in varying sizes, presumably to indicate monster strength.
While there were very few in their immediate vicinity, the other groups were killing monsters by the dozens every few seconds and it took a little bit to realize there was something odd.
There was one green dot that had no monsters around it.
No…
The red dots were actively avoiding that dot, where even a significantly larger monster, a boss most likely, seemed to be sprinting away from it.
It should come as no surprise that the isolated dot was Leon, his casual jog apparently causing some kind of panic response in all the monsters around him.
"What? We were fighting monsters."
"Therein lies my curiosity interference. I was forcing monsters in your paths because nothing would approach the two of you. The map is subjective when it comes to portraying the monsters in the Gate, so their size is relative to how strong they are in this Gate, but its telling that even bosses are avoiding him," she responded, rubbing her temple with her free hand as she spoke.
"Isn't that a good thing for us, then? We're in less danger."
She shot him a look like he was stupid and he just shrugged.
"Why are you all here," she asked.
"For Gate training," he answered, rolling his hand in the air to get her to continue since obviously he was missing something.
Sighing like he had just hit her with the idiot stick, she said, "No. You're all experts at Gate Walking, as far as the Bureau is concerned. You're here to level up. The thing that makes this Gate so special that it justifies the frankly insane price to keep it active is that monsters in this Gate provide up to ten times as much experience as any Gate currently available. Most of your peers have leveled at least 9 times just fighting for the couple of hours we've been here, which is unheard of. Its only profitable for the first twenty levels you get while you're here, but even for a failed project, that's extremely useful."
Sparing a glance at his stat screen, a confused look popped onto Chris's face as he said, "We've killed a few dozen monsters already, and I've only leveled up twice."
Moving to allocate his stats, Jennifer slapped his hand before he got too distracted, even though it would only take a second since he already knew where to put the points.
"Do you know what leveling up even is," she asked incredulously.
He wasn't sure why she sounded that way since the actual mechanics of leveling up weren't exactly a well known science and said, "Not a clue."
She shook her head and started, "I guess it hasn't made its way into the Initiative's curriculum, but we do know what's happening when you level up. When you level up, your body is acclimating to the accumulation of external power entering it. Using the System allows us to make deliberate choices as to how that happens, but in places without a System, they have to spend time meditating and purposely doing what we do with the tap of a finger.
As your body reaches a critical point, you level up and its capacity for power increases, which is why it costs more and more experience to reach the next level; your body is just that much stronger.
So, the reason you haven't leveled up is, oddly enough, the same reason why you and Leon get along when he hasn't been able to spend much time with the other Uplifters."
Following the train of logic, he asked, "So people who are naturally stronger have to get more exp to level up?"
She nodded and said, "That's why Gates like this are so special. Even people with that higher capacity should still level up at a decent clip, but that only happens if there are enough monsters to pull in that external energy. Something about Leon is pushing them away and its making it difficult for you to level up, and on some instinctual level your peers recognize how strong he is and its pushing them away in the same way."
The revelation confused more than impressed Chris, prompting him to ask, "But nobody treats him bad or avoids him."
"Pushing them away doesn't necessarily mean they dislike him. They just know they won't reach those next levels of power if they're with him, and they act accordingly, joining teams with each other instead of him. Honestly, I was surprised when you chose to work with him, but seeing you closer up, its clear you are stronger than the rest of them."
Cutting to the point, Chris asked, "How strong is he?"
A deafening crash from deeper in the woods interrupted Jennifer's next answer as a body came rocketing toward them, fast enough that even with his advanced senses, he couldn't track it properly.
It landed and created a massive crater just a few feet away from them as a massive pair of hands pulled themselves out of the ground almost a mile away, visible even from this distance.
Dropping to a ready stance, Chris spared a look at the map only to see a massive black dot appear…in the direction Leon had gone.
Leon's dot was gone.
Almost as if summoned by the realization, the man stood from the crater and cracked his neck, an entertained smile growing on his face as he jumped from side to side and said, "Oh, hey Chris. Jenn. Chris, mind if I borrow that for a sec?"
He gestured at Chris's great sword and an increasing look of excitement grew in his eyes until they were practically glowing. Figuring it was a trick of the light, he threw the sword over to his friend, who caught the hundred pound weapon as though it were a stick.
That little surprise, as the sword was reasonably heavy even for Chris, was instantly eclipsed as Leon studied the sword for a second and then threw it up a few feet, the sword spinning like a saw blade before he caught it by the hilt and slammed it into the ground behind him.
Eyes narrowing at the boss that had just tossed him like a rag doll, Leon said, "Can I get a yee haw?"
Before either of them could respond, he disappeared, sprinting so fast the dirt shot up in a jet wake behind him.
Within the time it took for Chris to breath in, explosions began to send shockwaves from the direction Leon had gone and he heard a quiet voice.
Looking over at her, he saw that Jennifer had a small smile on her face, warm and happy at the man's quip.
She'd muttered, "yee haw".
Her eyes glowed bright red as she watched the fight.