Kapitel 15: Theo (2)
"Come here, take a look." Theo smiled and broke the silence while motioning for Neo to approach.
Neo hesitated for a second, but still walked forward.
His curiosity has spiked ever since the middle-aged man claimed to be the infamous Prometheus.
Despite not completely sure if he was telling the truth or not, Neo decided to trust his own instincts that were telling him that the man hasn't any animosity toward him... for now.
Soon enough, there he was, side by side with Theo at the fence that was on the edge of the building.
"Not afraid?" Theo's eyebrow rose when he saw that Neo actually walked toward him and even had the guts to stay by his side.
Theo saw and realized how careful and cautious Neo was before. Always looking around, searching for dangers and escape routes that could be used. Even when casually speaking, Neo carefully chose his words, and examined Theo's emotions and movements.
"I don't trust you." Neo said with a straight face and cold tone without meeting with Theo's questioning eyes, "I trust my own instincts and my judgment of people. For now, you are save. That means I'm willing to have a conversation with you."
"There's a difference? I mean, between trusting me, and trusting your instincts that tell you that you can trust me?"
"Yes."
"Really?"
"You're not completely trustworthy. I don't know you. I barely have an understanding of your personality and yourself in general. It would be foolishness to trust you. I had been wrong once. I trusted someone even though my instincts told me that he wasn't trustworthy. Guess what happened next, he stabbed me in the back. My instincts have been honed throughout the years, they are rarely wrong." Neo calmly explained before concluding, "My instinct are telling me that you don't have any kind of ill intent towards myself."
"Hmmmm..." Theo curiously glance at Neo before turning his head to look at the streets below them. "Take a look, Neo, and tell me, what do you see?" Theo pointed at the streets beneath them.
Neo frowned when he heard Theo's question, but still followed Theo's line of sight and focused his eyes at the situation below.
There was a crossroad just at the front of the building Neo and Theo were standing.
The streets and sidewalks were slowly filling up with cars and pedestrians as the sun climbed towards the middle the of the sky.
It was almost 12 PM,not was time in which people would star to leave their works and schools to have launch.
The people below were all different from each other. While some were wearing formal attire and carrying briefcases, others were wearing casual clothing and walking around.
Neo closed his eyes.
The unending sound of voices coming from people talking to each other and through the phones. The lound and annoying noise coming from the angry drivers smashing their cars's horns.
The busy life of a cosmopolitan city with almost 8 million inhabitants.
Once Neo opened his eyes, they flashed with complicated and unknown emotions. This city, this situation... it remained him of his city.
Old memories resurfaced in his conscience.
Memories that he thought had already been buried in the deepest part of his mind.
Memories that he rather never remember again and this locked away, hidden from the world and even from himself."
"Humans" Neo spoke with a soft voice that looked more like a whisper than a proper answer. "I see humans."
"Oh?" Theo glance at his side, at Neo's deep and complicated expression, and exclaimed when he heard Neo's response to his philosophical question. "An unexpected answer, that's for sure."
"Unexpected?" Neo turned to look at Theo, "Why would you say that?"
"Simply because I was expecting your answer to be different, something along the lines of, 'They are just Atlarian', like any other Ancardian would respond." Theo explained to Neo, "A true pure blood Ancardian would do everything possible to separate themselves from Atlarians, they can't be associated even as by the same race. They can't accept the fact that both Ancardians and Atlarians are humans with minute differences between them. It's their deep-rooted pride, ingrained in almost every Ancardian." Once he spoke until there he sneered. He clearly didn't like Ancardians.
"You really dislike Ancardians..."
"Why the surprise? Don't you know about my past?"
"A little. I wasn't that interested in you back then, and even if I was interested they would only tell me a biased version about your story. So, it is off no use."
The few pieces of memory that Neo had access only told that Prometheus was a originally an orphan Atlarian, but after being found out that he had high affinity with Lightning Magic, he was adopted by the Donner family.
In the ceremony of the Family, it was found out that his affinity was way higher than predicted and that he was a Divine Child that was born only once in an undeterminable period of time. And this he became the Divine Child of the Donner family.
A Divine Child was someone that wasn't a Demigod, so they weren't born with an understanding of a Law, but their growth and strength could rival Demigods.
They grow stronger extremely fast, that's why the families of Ancardia value these people and treasure them to a ridicule level.
But something happened that led to him being expelled from the family and even hunted down.
Neo didn't have the rest of the story available. The previous host know about the story, but he was unable to access it, like so many other important memories and knowledge.
"Looks like you are a lot more rational than those guys in Ancardia. I never thought people could change as much as you." Theo commented in a soft tone that awakened Neo from his train of thoughts, "When we met, you easily submitted and admitted defeat. You followed me until here despite being careful and overly cautious. If it was a prideful Ancardian, like you were, you would have fought to death after that little encounter in the school. Pride is something very important to Ancardians, something that they often value more than their own lives. Of course, I'm talking more about the aristocratic Ancardians, the ones from the big magical families, not the normal Ancardians, but even the commoners there look down on Atlarians, not at the same level the aristocratic one do, but they still have their own pride."
Neo just stayed silent and listened to Theo. He could hear from the tone in Theo's voice how much he despise and hate Ancardians.
"Say, Neo." Theo turned to his side and asked Neo, "Do you know our objective? Do you why we fight?"
"Not very sure. I have an inkling about from Elana's mouth, but not too much. She told me the overall objective, but not how you will achieve it." Neo answered, "From what I understood, you want to make Ancardians and Atlarians equal. The only glaring differences between both of them is the fact that Ancardians monopolize the method to absorb mana, cultivate the soul, creation of a Mana Pool, and ultimately how to learn magic, and there's also the problem which almost every Ancardian can learn magic, but this isn't the case for Atlarians. The number of Atlarians that have the talent, body and soul appropriate to learn magic isn't a lot. This isn't all, there's also the difference between both planes, Atlas and Ancardia. The fact is that Atlas has a lot less mana on thus plane the cultivation would be too slow and thus Atlarians won't be able to compete with Ancardians. So, even if you spread the knowledge of how to cultivate soul to all Atlarians, there would not have too much effect in the overall situation."
Theo smiled at Neo's answer he was highly satisfied with that. He still didn't spoke because he knew that Neo wasn't over yet.
"With that being said, I wonder..." Neo's eyes flashed as he glared at Theo, "If you are really Prometheus, I'm curious at how you plan to deal with this glaring issue. The difference between both planes... isn't something easy to fix, if it is possible to be fixed, on the first place."
"It is possible." Theo said with certainty, "I already know about a method to do it." His face had a smile, but Neo could see that there was something wrong with it.
From his facial expression, Neo could predict that even though Theo had a plan, he couldn't accomplish yet, or there was a price too heavy to pay, or something else.
"There's a problem..." Theo sighed and switched his sight to the people below, "My plan... isn't something I wish I had to do, but..." Theo glared at Neo again, "You gave me hope. You recovering from your grim situation gave me hope to try something else beside the plan that I was going with."
Neo kept silent for a moment before he speaking, "I was also able to recover my crippled soul... you want to use this knowledge to find a way to give all Atlarians a way to learn magic despite most of them being unable, am I right?" Neo pointed at the people below him.
Even though he quite understood a little of what Theo was planning, he couldn't guess what all this had to do with him.
If Neo really had a method to restore a crippled soul, Theo could use the knowledge and develop a way to make someone without an appropriate soul to learn magic, be able to learn. A technique to restructure a person's soul.
Yes, it would resolve one of the problems, but Neo didn't have any knowledge of how to do restore a crippled soul.
There was also the other problem which was the most difficult to resolve. Atlas was extremely poor in mana, which slow down significantly the time in which it takes to absorb the necessary amount to grow stronger.
Of course the overall population of Atlas was way bigger than in Ancardia, but throwing tens of thousands of Atlarians mages just to kill a few hundreds of Ancardians, wasn't a wise choice that Neo was sure that Prometheus wouldn't chose.
He was smarter and more compassionate than that.
From the fragmented memories in his mind, Neo could tell that Promethean wasn't the type of person that would do everything for the sake of his plans.
Prometheus was indeed someone that could sacrifice something to earn something else, but he would always make a balance and see if it's worth the trade.
This could be seen with the clashes between Equalists and Ancardians, and Demons.
Sometimes it was worthy to press forward and lose a few to earn more, but more often than not, Prometheus would chose to retreat and evade costly fights.
"Yes, it's one of my plans. Don't worry I won't do anything to you." Theo could see that Neo was still being cautious at him so he reassured the young man, "I'm not in hurry to go forward with my plans, I still have a lot to do before I can start with everything. Of course I don't actually need the knowledge you have, but it would greatly help me, and a lot of other people."
"I'm sorry, but no." Neo wasn't actually sorry by directly rejecting Theo, but he still had to say so that his rejection wouldn't come as way too rude.
Wöchentlicher Energiestatus
-- Power-
Rangliste 
-- Power-
Stein