Ning applied for the job. He named himself Terran Forn, just a random name he asked his system to come up with.
Terran Forn was born in the Kingdom of Shalor and had moved to the Freelands about a dozen years ago. He was 48 years old at the moment and had reached Aether Magister in rank as an Enchanter.
Being in the Freelands, he didn't have any identity on himself to prove his identity, and for some reason, the Tower didn't seem to care if you put in the wrong information.
Once done, Ning left the valley and went back up the mountain. He had a week before he had to go to the tower to see if he was even chosen for the first test that would narrow the number of people even further.
'Surely Aether Magister isn't so easily come by amongst these people, right?' he thought. 48 years was beyond the range of someone that could enter the tower normally, but Aether Magister was strong enough so that he could make them feel they had missed someone.
Also, since Enchanters were so highly sought after in any battle-related job, Ning had decided to go with it, even though his skills as an Invoker wouldn't pale in comparison during an actual battle.
Ning could only hope that Terran got chosen by the next week.
There was more to this, however. He couldn't just be chosen. He needed to be the best amongst the people who joined.
After all, his primary target was to enter the headquarters of the tower and make his way up in ranks to fight the president.
However, he could do that by showing off the skills he had come to learn in the last half a year.
'I should tell Alexis that our plans will have to be moved forward by a couple of years,' he thought. However, he suspected she knew it already.
That only made him wonder more about who she was, or rather what she was.
God… was a weird concept he couldn't understand. Normally, he would expect it to be a normal person or beast that was so powerful and wise, that everyone else took them to be something better than themselves.
However, Alexis wasn't that. She wasn't human for sure given that she existed for such a long time when humans could only exist for about 500 years in this world.
Also, the fact that she seemed to be omniscient about almost everything made it impossible for her to be anything more than a system.
"But she doesn't have a system," he thought. This was starting to get confusing.
What was a system even?
There were way too many things that he didn't know about that the system wouldn't help him learn about.
He didn't mind. After all, he had eternity to learn about it all.
Ning went back home and found Alexis sitting on a small wooden chair in the front yard. He was surprised she stayed around, doing nothing during the day when she would disappear each night to go someplace else.
'Why doesn't she simply do what she needs to do at night right now? Surely she is just wasting her time here, right?' he thought.
Alexis smiled towards him. She had heard his thought and chose to not say anything.
Ning walked up to her and asked, "What do we do now?"
He somehow knew the answer that would come out of Alexis' mouth before she even spoke.
"You train."
* * * * *
A week passed in the blink of an eye. Ning was in the middle of his morning training, which included shooting a gun at something behind Alexis while she stood in front of it.
At first, Ning wasn't sure how he could do that. After all, a bullet moved way beyond the speed of a normal human's comprehension to change its direction mid-air.
Also, if he wanted to change the direction, it had to be mid-flight of the bullet. His Aether couldn't move fast enough to reach a bullet that was on its way to the target.
So, changing the direction of a bullet by directly changing the kinetic energy in the bullet was not a choice.
He started thinking about what other possible routes he could go through. That was when he thought of using gravity to direct the bullet away.
Ning aimed towards Alexis but obviously at an angle that was aiming just outside her shoulders.
He would have to shoot that area while simultaneously flaring the gravity on the wooden post behind her to pull the bullet towards it.
That was exactly what he did.
It all happened in an instant. Alexis stood still with no movement to her, while he heard the post behind her get destroyed.
'It worked,' he thought.
The moment he had shot, he created a massive gravitational pull at the center of the wooden post that had pulled at the bullet.
He happily moved to the wooden post to see the result. When Alexis moved aside to show the result, his happiness dwindled like to almost nothing.
It had indeed worked. But it had done more than just work. Using gravity, he had pulled the bullet towards the wooden post, but at the same time, he had pulled everything around the post, including the post itself.
That couldn't be counted as success at all. If this was a true situation with a woman as a hostage and a criminal behind her, he would have not only shot the criminal but destroyed him from the inside.
At the same time, he would have pulled the woman onto the criminal, killing her with the massive gravitational pull.
Alexis had only survived because… she was Alexis.
'Given the wooden post magnetic energy wouldn't work either, would it?' he thought. While Magnetism worked on far fewer objects than gravity, it would still be strong enough to destroy the wooden post, while pulling at the iron in a human body around them.
"You seem to understand that simply using Aether arts won't help you," Alexis said.
"Now, you need to start focusing your Aether onto a single direction, rather than all."
