Chapter 32 - Skill Progression (Patreon)

Tom stood outside the trial room in something resembling a line. Dimitri had done a pretty good job, truth be told. The yelling and cajoling had been annoying, but now, miraculously, the children were standing almost in a single file.

Tom frowned and looked at the entranceway ahead. In a minute’s time he would be back in the trial.

He was more than a little apprehensive, to put it mildly. Last week had been so emotionally damaging that April had ended the session early. She had done what, to him, seemed almost a crime:  forcing him to prioritise mental health ahead of progress. Since then, he had oscillated between feeling aggrieved and accepting the wisdom of her decision.

He understood where she was coming from. It wasn’t necessarily a misplaced worry. Her executive decision to handle him with kid gloves was probably correct, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t also frustrating.

Yes, the trial sessions were the singular most harrowing period of his life.

Yes, he appreciated her concern, but there was more at stake than his mental wellbeing.

By rote, he moved forward, leaving the sun for the shadows of the building. He was close to going in again.

Tom was confident about his own resilience. In his previous lives, he had literally spent weeks of elapsed time fighting off infections, curse energy and venoms which were consuming him from the inside out. Those inflictions had, because of their potency, necessitated him suffering through it without pain relief. He had lacked the mana regeneration to keep it contained, heal it, and ensure pain relief at the same time. There hadn’t been a choice if the options were to die or suffer.  He hadn’t liked it, but he had survived and grown. Being forced to fight on the edge of oblivion with only his limited healing sustaining his life had often pushed his skills to new levels. Previously, he had thrived through adversity, and her decision to protect him felt like a robbery. There were levels he could have earned.

But she was probably right, he acknowledged. Honestly, he didn’t know what to think.

This, the trials, were something different. In real life, once the battle was joined, once he was infected or injected or contaminated, his only choice was to fight. The trial required significantly more willpower, because every new obstacle required a conscious choice to continue.

A simple sentence would end the pain. It would also slow down his progress, yes, but he could go from agony to safety in seconds. He just needed to ask, and that was the most insidious of thoughts. It seduced him and played on his weakness. A few words, and he didn’t have to do this. The temptation was almost overwhelming.

Dimitri broke his introspection when he seized him firmly by the upper arm. A spark of static crackled momentarily between them. The older man grimaced, studied him more closely, and then guided him forward.

When directed, he touched the sphere’s surface, and the world changed.

He was sitting in a café with a buzz of undecipherable conversation around him.

April was perched on her stool across from him, studying him carefully.

A tentative smile, like she was about to ask for forgiveness or permission, played fluidly over her face. She reached out and grabbed his hand and squeezed.

He studied the plastic table, not understanding all of his own emotions and not wanting words to break open the floodgates.

“One more day, Tom. Get through today, push your boundaries, and afterwards, I promise, it’ll get better.”

“The combat won’t.”

“It will,” she disagreed. There was another hesitation, and she smirked. “All you need to do is stop getting hurt.”

His head snapped up, and he glared at her:

“How’s that possible when you keep sending stronger and stronger enemies against me?” He was not blaming her as such, or at least that wasn’t his intention. All he was trying to express were the facts. If the challenge grew stronger every time you won a fight, then eventually you would lose.

“That’s not what I’m doing.” She raised an angry finger when he went on to argue, and the words died in his throat. “No, I’m not sending waves of stronger and stronger enemies until you fail. It’s not the point of the scenarios. They’re for training. Tom, this isn’t a game. I’m not trying to break you. My only agenda is to push your limits and make you better.”

“I die almost every session.”

“And is that on me or you?”

“Neither, it’s the monsters you send against me.”

“Is it, Tom?” She met his eyes. “You’re the one who knows he’s under a GOD shield and fights like a berserker because of it. I’m not willing to send weak opponents against you and reward that shit. Your style is problematic.”

“Two octolegs.”

“And what’s so hard about that?!” she yelled back, exasperated. “Put me in your body and I’d crush them. You struggle because you disregard your health and trade damage like you’re immortal. It’s not sustainable.”

Tom sighed, seeing straight to the heart of the accusation. “I can see why it looks like that to you. But, April, I’m not relying on the GOD shield, I’m not throwing away defence. It’s just… it’s just that I’ve always had high-levelled healing skills to patch myself up mid-battle. I’m using the fighting style that’s consistently worked for me.”

“If that’s your excuse, then you’re an idiot, because you sure as hell don’t have a high-level skill right now. I’m not new to this role, and do you know what I think? I see a person who fights using instincts honed over decades. I see a flawed fighter needing guidance. Right now, in this trial, your instincts are wrong, because you have neither the healing proficiency nor the mana to be so wasteful with your health. And I know you’re about to argue that those issues are only temporary, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to adapt.”

“I wasn’t,” he muttered surlily.

“Yes, you were, and yes, you’ll earn them again. When you go out to earn ranking points, they’ll be in your arsenal. But tell me, Tom, is this the best way for you to fight? Do you always want to be on the edge of death? Will accepting a hit to strike back be mana-effective even when you get all your upgraded skills? Is that fighting style complimentary to your development plans?”

Tom thought about pushing back, then realised she was right. He was so used to trading off a wound to get a kill that he did it instinctively. Sometimes the willingness to sacrifice had let him kill monsters that would otherwise have been impossible for him to defeat. But for every time that had occurred, there was probably a dozen significant wounds he had taken for no benefit, or possibly only to finish a fight a handful of seconds earlier.

Across from him, April smiled as she observed the realisation sinking into him:

“Good. Meditate on that epiphany before your next fight.”

The café dissolved, and he was thrown into the void. Needles assaulted him immediately, and caused sharp pricks of pain when they struck. He was too overwhelmed by the barrage to do anything like meditation. The best he could do was concentrate on the fundamentals to reduce the impact of each needle when it hit him.

After the usual twenty minutes, he was teleported to a grassy field.

While he had been too busy to focus on the issue consciously, it had nevertheless sunk in. He knew he needed to change. With the sun above him, he limbered up and ran through the basic spear forms to get the blood flowing. Two octolegs appeared the moment he finished.

Two of them were dangerous, and represented a battle he usually lost. But, aware of the mistakes he had made previously, he shifted his mindset. He was not going to make it a battle of attrition. If he could retreat to avoid suffering an injury, he would. For the first ten seconds, he pushed his legs to the limit as he fought to prevent the creatures from flanking him. His spear poked and prodded as he corralled them together.

Finally, their monstrous nature overwhelmed their pack instincts. They abandoned strategy and charged. With both of them now being in front of him, he retreated backwards with measured steps. His spear never stopped moving as it intercepted the flailing tentacles, both cutting and repelling them with every clash. The grassy field might as well have extended to infinity for the purposes of the fight. He could back away safely until he fell from exhaustion or cramping muscles.

That is exactly what he did. For every ten metres conceded, he left them riddled with dozens of cuts cris-crossing their front tentacles. They would twist to present fresh tentacles to him, and then they would repeat the sequence, as though it was a dance. After ten minutes of frantic clashes that left his legs feeling like rubber, they noticeably slowed as their blood loss hit a tipping point.

One stopped altogether, and the other, with its single-minded focus, kept coming. Tom wasn’t even sure it realised that its companion was no longer next to it, and it fought with the same method. But now Tom only had to deflect the blows from one of them, not two. An opening presented itself almost immediately, so he lunged forward and put his weapon through the creature’s brain stem. Before the other got close, he kicked the limp body to extract his spear and then repeated the sequence against the other.

His right thigh took the opportunity to cramp, and he collapsed on the ground.

Elation flooded through him.

The last few times he had fought this combination, he had died. Usually, he had taken one with him, but death was death, and he wouldn’t always have a GOD’s shield protecting him.

He appeared in the café. Across from him April clapped with a massive smile on her face:

“Masterful, terrific, perfectly executed.”

“Stupid octolegs,” he grumbled, mostly frustrated at himself in regard to his previous failures. April didn’t take offence. He suspected she knew what he was going through, and the barbs of self-recrimination were going to be sharper than anything she could throw at him.

The next twenty hours blurred together. The skill training remained painful, but, despite completing over a hundred battles, he was only seriously injured a dozen times, of which three resulted in his death. If he was going to be technical, only one of those three countered, as a loss because in the other two the attacking monster had perished before he had. The one death had not been great. A wolf gnawing on your leg while you were still alive was not a fun experience.

Once more, he was plucked from where he floated in the void, absorbing needles of energy, straight to the café:

“Is it time?” he asked immediately.

She was grinning like a cheshire cat:

“No, but were you able to sense the shift?”

Tom stared at her blankly, not understanding what she was saying. Nothing had changed when it came to the precognition absorption effectiveness for hours.

“Did you feel it? The energy absorption. You got it. A hundred percent efficiency.”

“I did? I did what?”

She nodded furiously.

“Are you sure? That last needle hurt as much as it did every other time.”

She waved the observation aside:

“You’ve been close for a few sessions, but it just tipped over. You finally got it right.”

“Are you positive? I didn’t feel any improvement. Almost the same amount of energy is getting through as last week.”

“Oh that,” she seemed unconcerned. “Yeah, it’d be hard for you to tell. I’ve been ramping up the power as you’ve improved since day one. To be honest, I’m surprised you were oblivious to the changes. I wasn’t trying to hide it, and the ones I was firing today had a bite to them. If you had of let one of them hit unweakened, it would have gone straight through you.”

“You’ve been doing what? And you didn’t tell me!”

“Don’t look so pissed off. My job’s to train you. What I did was no more extreme than adding extra weights in the gym.”

“But I get to see the progress there. I know I’m improving. Here, I had no idea.”

“You should have noticed, but - who cares, Tom! You’re not listening. You did it!”

“But…”

“Tom, stop! Stop questioning the process. You know the oath I swore. This approach was for the best. You were in the zone. I didn’t want to risk breaking that. After all, I promised you that you’d finish today, and warning you would have put that at risk.”

He forced himself to reassess what was happening. Why did it matter if the training method had been hidden? Ultimately, success and progress were the only currency that counted.

“So, I’m done with being a target?”

“Yep.” She clapped her hands. “Yes, now we get to the fun stuff.”

He was suddenly next to the lake with the lazy goldfish. The sun was bright, the shadows deep, and butterflies fluttered everywhere.

It was idyllic.

April was with him. Her refined angelic form looked awkward in the rustic surroundings.

“Your job,” she told him. “Is to kill butterflies. The white ones die when you absorb precognition energy, and the orange and black patterned type are the opposite. For them you need to infuse precognition energy into them.”

“You want me to kill butterflies?”

“They’re not butterflies.” She opened her hand, and one of them sat in the middle of it. Two white wings and then, instead of a body, the creature had a spheric button of energy the size of a pea. “They’re constructs. Here,” she held it out so he could touch it. “Absorb it like you did with the needles.”

From where he stood, he could feel the energy just like the one the needles had. Carefully, he reached across and tapped it, and the moment he made contact he sucked the power into him. The ball imploded, then vanished. The wing puffed to ash and then to nothing.

April beamed:

“Easy.” She waved her hand. “Now get to it. Remember, you need to kill the orange ones as well.”

This exercise, Tom was excited to see, had a component of physical training to it, because he had to catch the elusive butterflies. In the first ten minutes of effort, he caught a grand total of one, and then April teleported him to the next fight.

After killing the wolf-like creature and octoleg pairing, he found himself back next to the lake rather than the café. He didn’t complain, and chatted with April as he hunted butterflies.

“Catch one of each,” she told him. “And then use your ability to transfer the energy between them to eliminate both in one step.”

Tom’s agility failed. He was unable to grab one of the orange ones to follow her instructions. They were a fraction faster than the white ones, but that was enough.

The battles, café breaks and lake sessions blended together, and then he was suddenly pulled from a fight with three octolegs.

“What?” he asked in surprise. “I was winning.” He wasn’t convinced that was strictly true: while he hadn’t taken any damage, nor had he dealt any out. He had been in a holding pattern, and he was pretty sure the monsters were going to outlast him. Nope, there had been no winning built into the equation. All he had been doing was delaying the moment until he was overwhelmed.

April only grinned at that. She knew exactly how badly that fight had been progressing:

“Well, I sent you against three as a joke, but if you were finding them that easy I’ll start you off against them next time. For now, you’re out of time and have to return to the real world.”

“Wait, don’t make me fight three. I wasn't winning, I was losing!”

She laughed, and the world blinked, and then Dimitri was guiding him away from the trial.