The Rise Of Calamity

"Lilith? Are you coming or did the guild master's hit let a few screws loose in your mind?" Laila chuckled while Croleo looked at me like I was an idiot since I was just standing there not doing anything while the others were getting ready to do a mission.

With another sigh, I looked back at them and simply shrugged while saying "Let's go" before finally blasting into the direction the Dimensional crack was.

After seeing me shoot off into the sky, they could not help but look at each other before Laila finally asked

"Since when did she know the directions? I am the only person holding the compass, right?"

"Maybe Guildmaster told her?" The tall man with shining platinum hair shrugged, causing his ponytail to wing from right to left as he moved forwards.

In the same instance, he pushed his hand forwards and closed his eyes before creating a large magic circle in front of me that was at least the size of an apartment you could rent out whenever you went to other cities on missions or something of those sorts.

Out of the magic circle ascended a large lion that stood at about 2.5 meters tall and with a body large enough to be ridden by multiple adults without having too many problems.

"Your lion doesn't have any wings?" Laila pointed out

"Don't worry about my lion. He can move just as fast as the two of you even though he is on land. Even if there is a mountain in front of us, we can scale it in no time and we will catch pretty quickly, right you big bastard" Croloer grinned while ruffling the mane of the lion he had brought out.

The lion looked quite normal, being mostly yellow with a white stomach while also having a brown mane that exuded a faint feeling of pride that even Laila could feel as if it was some kind of magic attribute rather than a feeling the Lion possessed to its highest property.

"You Lion had the Pride affinity?!" She asked, seemingly shocked by the discovery, yet Croloer only glanced at her for a second as he remarked-

"He isn't just a Lion. His name is Scar"

"Oh sorry then. Does Scar have the Pride affinity?" She asked, this time in a much politer way compared to before due to seeing the visible annoyance in Croloer's voice and eyes when he heard her call his 'best friend' just a Lion and not by his name.

To him, the Lion was more human than any human he had met so far, and therefore he would get angry whenever someone else would call Scar anything that would undermine him to just a pet.

"Yes, he knows the Pride affinity but you shouldn't tell anyone about that. If you do, some might want to hunt him down and try to make him their pets..." Suddenly, a strong killing intent came out of Croloer when he began to remember something that happened in the past, yet when he closed his eyes and took a deep breath in, the killing intent had dispersed into thin air as if it had never been released in the first place.

"You okay," Laila asked, yet she still took a step back in fear of what he would do to he2r if she had gotten too close to him.

"It's okay... Let's get a move on though, we are already way behind Lilith and the mission just started." Croloer quickly jumped atop Scar before rubbing his mane and asking him to take him towards where I had gone.

After taking one last look at the compass before deciding to take all of Laila's contact information, he disappeared into one of the nearby forests at a lightning speed, making Laila finally sigh before also dashing towards the same direction and jumping into the air to recreate the closest thing to flying she could do.

***

"Holy fuck!" Laila gasped as she descended to the ground. From the map that Rose had given us, she could accurately tell where each of us was and she was not liking the fact that I was still so far away from them.

In fact, I was ahead of them by such a long distance that when I had finally got to the teleportation hub, I was able to wait 15 minutes in the line to get teleported while on top of that, I was able to get a few hundred kilometers away from where I had gotten teleported before they were finally capable of getting to the first teleportation hub and get themselves teleported.

What made the gap even worse was the fact that both of them eventually needed some rest, and since the whole journey would have taken several days, they expected me to rest too.

Right now we were all moving from the Mid eastern region of the continent towards the mid-northwestern region of the continent. This not only strengthened the reason to rest every now and then, but it also created obstacles due to having to move over several borders without a carriage, something that would have usually taken over a month to travel on even with the teleportation hubs present.

While teleportation hubs seem very helpful at the start, they can only send you to places that aren't too far away.

An example of this can be put into preceptive like this...

If Kingdom A is 2 Kingdoms away from Kingdom B, teleportation is possible due to the already existing connection network between all the kingdoms, therefore making it possible to travel through several Kingdoms without having to land on each one.

On the other hand, if Kingdom A was 3 Kingdoms away from Kingdom B, if not 4 kingdoms away depending on the kingdom, one would not be capable of moving towards that kingdom without taking a stop at the 3rd Kingdom before moving to the 4th one by foot or by teleportation once again.

And while this problem might seem insignificant in hindsight, the city lords very well know of this problem and had chosen to take full advantage of it since it would allow them to earn more money from it. Therefore, they chose to exorbitantly increase both tax and the price of using the teleportation hubs, making it hard for anyone other than the high nobles, the big families, the city lords, and the emperor himself to move around the continent while using teleportation hubs since not everyone had the money to move around where ever they want whenever they want.

Finally, the last problem to arise is usually mana forests in the way of the kingdoms, breaking the connection between both kingdoms and not allowing people to teleport between them unless they wanted to take a huge detour.

In the end, mana forests or not, I should have not been so far ahead of them, yet with the mixture of sleep deprivation, hatred of oneself, the determination to finish this mission as fast as possible alongside the booming and motivational music I was listening to, I was capable of completely forgetting about the journey and instead, just find myself going in a specific direction while contemplating like with music that would have been considered 'Cold' back on earth.

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If you liked this novel, check out my other novel!

Immortality System: The Rise Of The Last Human

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