Chapter 146: Then I’ll learn
He tried dimming it next, more out of curiosity than any real plan, picturing the aura thinner, quieter.
The green light responded immediately, fading down to something barely visible, a faint shimmer you’d only catch if you were looking directly for it.
’Didn’t know I could do that,’ he admitted.
’You didn’t ask,’ Medusa said.
Leon let the aura fade back to full strength, then canceled it entirely, the glow disappearing as quickly as it had come.
He flexed his fingers again, already moving on to the next thing he wanted to try.
"Aegis Manifestation," he said.
The shield projected out of the ring in front of him, solidifying into its familiar round shape, translucent at the edges, solid at the center.
The design hadn’t changed.
A woman’s face stared back at him from the shield’s surface, surrounded by a halo of coiled serpents frozen mid-strike.
Leon stared at it for a long moment.
The first time he’d seen this shield, he hadn’t known who the face belonged to. Just some angry woman with snakes for hair, carved into his shield, intimidating in a way he hadn’t bothered questioning.
Now he knew exactly who he was looking at.
"To think that..." he said, tilting the shield slightly, studying the expression frozen into the metal. "That this was you."
The angry face looked exactly like the face Medusa had when she was trying to keep him trapped in the ring.
It as weird how much it contrasted to the sweet face she normally showed me, and the peaceful one she had when sleeping.
’Would it have changed anything?’ Medusa asked.
"Maybe," Leon said. "Would’ve been less confusing, at least."
’I rather liked watching you figure it out on your own,’ she said, something smug creeping into her tone.
Leon huffed, turning the shield over in his hands.
The craftsmanship was finer than he remembered noticing before, every scale on the carved snakes distinct, the woman’s expression caught somewhere between fury and something harder to name.
Grief, maybe. He hadn’t looked closely enough the first time to catch that.
Leon studied the shield a bit more, to the point it caught Medusa’s attention.
’Are you done staring?’ Medusa asked. ’It won’t get prettier.’
"I wasn’t judging it," Leon said.
’Then what were you doing?’
He didn’t answer. He let the shield fade back into the ring and sat down on the edge of the bed.
Medusa went quiet after that. Either she’d lost interest, or she could tell he was thinking.
He was.
Everything he owned right now had come from one place. Excalibur. The mask. Hermes’ Boots. Different legends, different gods, all pulled out of ordinary things by the same power.
His talent.
And he barely understood it.
He had never really stopped to look at it. Every time it triggered, something dangerous was happening, and he’d just been glad it worked. He never asked why.
Now nothing was trying to kill him. For the first time, he could ask.
’Status window,’ he thought.
The blue panel appeared in front of him. He skipped past the stats and focused on the line near the top.
[Talent: Legendary Draw (SSS)]
He selected it with his mind, and a smaller window opened.
[Talent Details: Legendary Draw (SSS)] [Effect: Legendary Extraction — You can extract legendary treasures or items from anything you wish.]
That was it.
Leon read it twice. Then he scrolled down, in case there was more underneath.
There wasn’t. Two lines, and half of the second was just the name repeated.
He frowned.
It wasn’t the first time he’d seen this description. But it was the first time he’d really looked at it.
Back at the academy, every talent came with a long entry. He remembered his classmates comparing theirs, reading them out loud to each other.
They had things like mana cost, cooldowns or even conditions in some cases. Some talent details were so long you had to scroll for a full minute just to reach the bottom.
Even weak talents came with details.
His talent was SSS-rank, and it came with two lines.
He had brushed it off before. He’d told himself the description was short because the talent was simple. Extract legendary items. What more was there to say?
Now it didn’t feel simple. It felt wrong.
’Why is it this vague?’ he thought. ’Every other talent has pages of information. Why not mine?’
Iris’s voice came back to him, uninvited.
’Where does all the information generated by the system go?’
He pushed the thought away. He wasn’t about to start believing in her conspiracies. But what she’d said had loosened something in his head, and now he couldn’t stop picking at it.
He went back to what the academy had taught him instead.
The system was linked like a cloud. Every player’s data went into it. When something new was discovered, the system recorded it, and its entries grew over time.
That was why skill descriptions got more detailed as players learned more about them. The system updated itself.
It only showed what it knew.
Leon went still.
If that was true, then a two-line description meant the system didn’t know much about his talent. Not because there was little to know, but because nobody had ever recorded anything.
No other player had ever had this talent, so there was no data or history for the system to pull information from.
Which meant the system couldn’t teach him how to use it. No hidden guide was waiting for him. If he wanted to know what this talent was really capable of, he would have to find out himself.
He leaned back, staring at the ceiling.
Extract legendary items from anything you wish.
Anything. The word sat in his mind like a splinter.
Every successful extraction so far had come from a drop. The mask came off a monster. The boots came out of a dungeon treasure.
He had never once chosen something and made it work.
There had been one attempt when he tried to extract from a club, but it only drained his mana so bad that he collapsed.
He had only woken up on the floor with a pounding headache and nothing in his hands.
He had assumed that meant the talent couldn’t be forced. But the description didn’t say that. It said anything. The system might not know the details, but it wouldn’t write that word if it were false.
More likely, the problem was him. He didn’t understand how to use it yet.
"Then I’ll learn," Leon muttered.
He sat up. If he wanted to understand it, he needed to test it.
His eyes swept the room, before landing on the desk.
On it sat a plain glass cup, the kind hotels left out for guests, clear and cheap and completely ordinary.
Perfect.
He picked it up and turned it over in his hand. It was lighter than he expected. There was nothing special about it at all, which was exactly the point. If the talent really worked on anything, it should work on this.
He sat back down and held the cup in both hands.
’You’re really going to do this?’ Medusa asked.
"Yes."
’Last time it put you on the floor.’
"I know," Leon said. "I’m stronger now."
She didn’t argue.
He closed his eyes and focused, the same way he did when checking his status window, but pointing his intent at the cup instead. He didn’t know what words to use, so he didn’t use any. He just pushed.
Nothing happened.
He pushed harder.
Two lines of text flickered into view in front of him.
[Talent Activated!]
[Extracting Legendary Draw...]
His eyes snapped open.
The cup trembled in his hands.
Then something yanked at him.
It felt like a cord hooked inside his chest being pulled out all at once.
Mana poured out of him and into the glass, a thick, heavy stream of it, far more than he’d expected.
Thin cracks of golden light split across the surface of the cup, spreading outward in jagged lines, the same way they had on the mask and the boots.
"It’s working," Leon breathed.
The light grew brighter. The cup began to glow, warm and gold, and the pull on his mana didn’t stop. It kept draining, steady and hungry, until he could feel a real dent opening up inside his reserves.
He gritted his teeth and held on.
For one second, he was sure it would work.
Then the light flickered.
The gold cracks spread too fast, running across the whole cup at once. The glow collapsed inward, and the cup crumbled apart in his hands.
It turned to dust.
Fine, grey powder spilled through his fingers and fell onto the blanket in a small, sad pile. The golden light was gone, and the pull on his mana stopped as suddenly as it had started.
[Extraction Failed!]
A notification appeared before him, and Leon hissed in annoyance.
He could only look down at his palms, which were empty, except from the small particles of dust from the cup.
"Damn it," he grunted, brushing the dust off his hands in annoyance.
He opened his status window and checked. A huge chunk of his mana was gone, burned away on a failed attempt that had left him with nothing but a mess on the bed.
But he was still sitting upright.
His head wasn’t spinning. His vision wasn’t fading. His legs weren’t shaking.
Last time, the same attempt had knocked him flat on the floor.
This time, he was just annoyed, staring at a pile of dust.