Chapter 339: The Truth About Gifts
Gina kept her focus sharp as she watched the Legion fighting against the Imperial Guards. After Jason resurrected some of the Rogues that she had killed before, Gina now had just over fifty subordinates with her! A lot of them were pawns, but there were many in the Rook Rank I or II region, and this allowed Gina and her subordinates to put up one hell of a fight against the Imperial Guards! There had been fifty Imperial Guards when they first came, but now that number had reduced to less than thirty and there were still more than forty subordinates from Jason’s Legion in the fight! Gina spotted a Legion dragon that was being attacked by two Imperial Guards, and she quickly told her Skyking to head in that direction! The Imperial Guards were tag-teaming the dragon, so it didn’t have any way to fight back without giving one of them a chance to attack! But once Gina appeared, the Imperial Guards both cursed!
Gina and the Skyking had been the focal point of the battle for a long time now, and they had been going around and taking care of any Imperial Guard that was too difficult for the other members of the Legion to handle properly! The Imperial Guards were certain that Gina was the most dangerous person there, so they quickly changed their focus from the dragon, and they began heading straight for Gina! Gina told the Skyking to prepare to dodge, and she created fifty wind arrows and shot it towards the dragons once she saw them open their mouths to shoot fire! The wind arrows slammed into the dragons like bullets, and their concentration was broken, and this gave Gina enough time to turn with the Skyking so that they were heading in a different direction! But Gina was shocked when she noticed even more Imperial Guards coming towards her! It appeared that even the other Imperial Guards had seen her as a threat, and they had all decided that it would be best to get rid of her and Skyking before they did anything else!
The Imperial Guards started to chase Gina down from every direction! Gina unleashed Wind Arrow after Wind Arrow upon them and she tried her best to create space for the Skyking so he could get them out of there! The Skyking was an expert flyer, and when it came down to raw skill in the air, there wasn’t another beast with as much skill as him, but even the Skyking couldn’t outrun these many dragons at the same time! The dragons unleashed waves of fire towards Gina, and Gina created more than a hundred wind arrows around her! But instead of shooting them towards, she decided to do something different, and she began to rotate them in the air around the Skyking like a tornado! The wind arrows served as a barrier that blocked the worst of the fire from the dragons, and this gave the Skyking more room to quickly dive downwards!
As the Skyking was diving, Gina’s face was set into a frown! Gina knew that she could do more than this. Ever since Gina woke up from the dead as a member of Jason’s Legion, there had always been this itch at the back of her head that told her that she was not using her full potential. It was like a voice that warns you about wasting your abilities, but Gina didn’t understand it because she hadn’t heard anything like that when she first got her powers!
The concept of magic in superhumans was something that a lot of scientists had been researching for a long time. When superhuman powers were first discovered, many people wondered why each superhuman only got the ability to use one Gift rather than the ability to use mana to create anything that they wanted. And for a long time, people simply thought that it was the natural way of the world. But they were wrong. Superhuman ability had not developed the way it did because it was the natural way of the world. Instead, it had developed that way because of how weak humanity was!
When a creature is born with mana, it typically gains the ability to control and use mana right from when they are a baby. This allows the creature to grow up with mana already ingrained in their body and their organs, so they do not feel any significant strain during the use of their powers. But for humans, things are very different. No human has ever gained their power before the age of thirteen. So for the first thirteen years of a human’s life, they live just like any regular human, and their body grows in the same way that regular humans do! If a regular human were to be suddenly infused with all the powers that mana allowed them to possess after living for so long without those powers, the best-case scenario was that their entire body would implode and they would die a gruesome death!
So, nature decided that it needed to figure out a way to ensure humanity’s survival. And the best way it could think of was by creating a Gift that was engineered to your specific magic affinity and encoding that Gift into the DNA of every human so that they would be able to awaken the Gift the moment they gained their mana. A Gift was nothing more than a singular skill that every human was most suited for! The ability to use Wind Arrow. The ability to summon a beast, or the ability to augment your strength using your mana. Every person had at least one skill that their body was capable of performing very well, and it was that skill that had been ingrained into their DNA! So now, rather than gaining the volatile mana that could kill you the moment it enters your body, a human already had a pathway for the mana to move through, and they wouldn’t have to worry about taming their mana because it would move in the perfect way to complement the Gift that had already been ingrained into the human DNA! The skill that would normally take you years to learn as a regular mage could now be performed the moment you gain your mana, and as you grow stronger, you would be capable of improving on that skill!
But there were a very small number of humans who were different from the norm. After gaining their mana, all humans would only be able to use one Gift till the day they died, but there were some whose genetic makeup allowed them to bypass this limitation and unlock the full capabilities of their mana! These superhumans were able to either add or learn new Gifts to their own in order to make them stronger! A perfect example of this was the strongest member of the Five Rulers. The SS Rank superhuman that lived in Russia and had the ability to control all forms of fire to do whatever he wanted. He had started off as someone who could only create regular fireballs. But as time passed, he had grown past that Genetic limitation, and he slowly gained the ability to adapt his Gift!
Normally, Gina didn’t have the ability to move away from the limitations placed on her by the world. The ability to use Wind Arrow was what she should have retained throughout her life, and she should have only been able to increase the power her arrows had as she got stronger, but something had changed in Gina the moment she died and woke up again! The part of her genetic makeup that had been limited by the world in order to keep her alive at birth had been taken over by the system since she was now one of Jason’s subordinates, and with the system’s help, Gina became capable of so much more!