Suchi's Tutorial Grounds, a forested region bathed in the red glow of the setting sun.
A rider in a monkey mask and his donkey were passing along a row of training stations, where players aspiring to various Classes were undergoing their first instruction in Saana's combat.
Henry supposed most players in his situation, with half a decade having passed since doing the tutorial in Saana II, would be struck by a sense of nostalgia.
All around him, the latest batch of kids were beginning their own stories, their first days in the fantastical romance of adventure. The air resounded with the grunts of their exerted muscles and the sharp clatter of their clashing practise sticks. His nostrils filled with mingling odours of new beginnings, of grass unearthed by excitable feet and freshly-carved wood, of metal and leather, of sweat and blood. Peering into one station, he saw a Bowman trainer pointing out vulnerability points on an anatomical diagram. In another, a Crusader was guiding two players entwined like pretzels in how to distribute a wounded comrade's weight across the shoulders.
If one focused on just this, ignoring the unpleasantries like the Village recruiters stalking about aggressively harassing trainees, it made for a joyful scene.
With a bored look, Henry searched for his new trainer.
After the administrator'd informed him that private mentors had been banned, he'd attempted to bribe her. That would have fixed the problem in the past, everyone in Suchi being corrupt. However, the woman and her colleagues took great offence, the lot of them being members of a teacher's union and zealous loyalists to The 'Empire' and 'King' Ramiro. In the end, Henry, considering the inescapable delay for solving the curse anyway, relented and chose a public option, selecting the shortest level 0-5 session on the list, which should take about two hours in-game.
Stopping at a ‘Training Station J’, he hopped off the donkey and tied it to a fence post.
Forty or so students had arrived before him, waiting for the lesson to begin. About half of the group consisted of shirtless meatheads surrounding a single, frightened girl.
One of the meatheads swept another meathead up into a princess hold. “Hey, Polina, check this out!”
“Bro, let me down!”
"Polina! Polina! Watch this!” The carrier meathead grunted as he thrust the other meathead into the air above his head like a powerlifter.
The girl looked away from a five-meathead pyramid to give a thumbs up. She'd been to trying to maintain a poker face. All she’d done was ask these guys five minutes ago if this was Station J, and now they were putting on a circus act.
Henry, watching the scene, cringed, not only at the blatant Suchi-style idiocy but also because these meatheads each had New Zealand accents.
Based on the time of day, and the fact that their voices were somewhat high-pitched, Henry guessed that they were highschoolers on holiday in real-life. Although he himself didn't alter his default avatar, most players beautified their characters, bulking out their biceps, realigning their wonky eyes. These meatheads seemed to have over-done their muscles in order to pick up chicks - typical teenage nonsense.
In general, even around his more level-headed countrymen, he had to be cautious. Most were extreme social gamers, who’d use the loosest connection to add you to their Friends List. God forbid they found out you were from the same country or same city; within half an hour, you’d be getting pressured into spending a miserable weekend at their real-life beach house.
Disgusting.
Luckily, a history of dodging spies had conditioned Henry to speak in fake accents. For the tutorial, he would play an American, from San Francisco.
Seated on an upturned crate, also watching the meatheads, was a bald NPC with an unreadable, taciturn expression. The man was a Tier 3-2 Fighter, his Class identifiable at a glance from shiny, milky-purple flecks suffusing his skin, the colour matching a Tier 3-2 metal, Arimole.
Henry judged the guy to be an immigrant from Aion Laisije, a northern region renowned for its never-ending wars. Like most of his people, he was quite short, about five-feet tall, and hairless from head to toes. Ex-military.
He approached this figure and showed him his lesson admission token.
“What Class?” the trainer asked.
“Earthfriend."
The bald trainer raised a meticulously-drawn eyebrow.
Sizing up this Offworlder back—the shirt stained with someone's blood, the lifeless gaze—he couldn't picture him taking up the gentle, nature-loving role of an Earthfriend. A Cutthroat seemed more appropriate; maybe a Bloodmancer.
The trainer clicked his tongue with indifference, none of that being his business. “If you change your mind, I have to warn you, that raucous lot over there," he tilted his chin in the direction of the meatheads, "they all signed up as Fighters. All of them. Competition for apprentice slots will be fierce.”
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The listing for the lesson had mentioned that five trainees would be selected for further training.
“That’s fine." Henry looked with disgust at the meatheads, who, by choosing identical Classes, were ruining their ability to group together in the future.
"Did warn them," said the trainer.
Henry shrugged. "If they'd been smart, they wouldn't have picked Suchi in the first place."
"You're here."
"Sometimes, you don't pick where you end up."
The trainer nodded.
Next to the bald trainer, a blanket had been laid out with a variety of weapons and armour. The listing had also noted that trainees would be provided with a weapon of their choice, a helmet, and simple torso armour. In exchange, they were to hand over the corpses of any monsters killed during the session.
Henry gestured towards a shortbow. “While we’re waiting, I’d like to practice. Got any spare arrows? I’ll pay triple.”
“Spellcasting practise?” asked the trainer.
"Mhm."
Aiming spells, aiming arrows, the fundamentals were similar. Plus, the incident with the wagon-driver had made him cognisant of his accuracy problems.
In addition to the usual 20 arrows, Henry bought another 180. The extras were to avoid running back and forth picking them up; item summoning/unsummoning only had a range of 10 metres.
After picking up the shortbow and testing its string, finding it satisfactory, Henry made his way over to a row of archery targets and positioned himself 40 metres downrange.
He glanced briefly at a hole in the centre of a bullseye, spaced his feet about shoulder-width apart, and aligned his body to be parallel with the target.
Along with the arrow about to be shot, he kept four reserves in the unused fingers of his drawing hand. Quivers were rare in Saana - arrows could be replenished by summoning more from one's inventory.
As he nocked the first arrow, his muscles seemed to recall the movement, and a nagging voice from his memories rang in his ears.
'You fucking half-brained ostrich!'
Henry turned sharply, half-expecting to see a rock flying at his face.
That action had some history.
Back when he’d been lured into the Digital Justice Club, Alex had snuck in a rule for all club members that, if they wanted to receive the school's extracurricular credit, they needed to write weekly reports while performing a ‘quest' from a random list. This list included tasks like crafting a Legendary axe or infiltrating certain famous guilds - 'small stuff'.
At the time, Henry had been reading Vagabond, an old manga given to him by his weeb friend Abigail. The story had been about the Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, who'd roamed around Japan challenging martial arts experts to prove himself the strongest in the world, to prove himself ‘Unrivalled Beneath The Heavens’. In light of this, Henry had chosen the quest 'Become a Duelling God', failing to grasp how time-consuming such a task would be, since he'd never played the game.
Ultimately, after learning much humility through defeat, Henry, refusing to lose his school credit, had sought a way to compensate for his weaknesses by hunting down cheat items, cheat abilities, and cheat instructors.
For a couple of weeks back then, he'd undergone special training from a foul-mouthed monk who lived in a secluded village built in the canopy of a rainforest.
The monk, founder of the Twenty Tools Sect, had been a multi-weapon specialist.
After completing a lengthy qualification quest, Henry had been made to demonstrate the techniques taught to him by other instructors during his journey. Most of them, the monk was fine with, but, when Henry had been demonstrating his bow technique, the monk had exploded in rage.
"You fucking half-brained ostrich! Why are you staring so fucking hard at the target?!"
The question had perplexed Henry, who'd answered that it was common sense to keep your eye on the target.
The monk had disagreed. "For a child, perhaps. Are you still a child? When you are eating dinner, all by your-big-boy-self, do you still need to watch each fucking grain of rice entering your little bitch mouth to prevent a mess?" He'd raised three fingers. "Three glances. Once when you're deciding where to fuck the cunt against you, once before you commit and release your fucking, and once to check that it was the right hole you fucked."
Henry had tried aiming again, looking at his bow, his fingers, when a rock smashed into his cheek.
"You fucking piss-soaked toddler! Did I say to watch your fucking chopsticks instead! Listen, the adults around the table are talking; attend the conversation!"
And so Henry had learned how to shoot while being pelted by stones and various other objects.
But, today, there would be no flying rocks.
The current version of Saana was set at least 17,000 years after the previous one in which the monk had lived and ceased to live. Not only was that dude gone, so too was the rainforest, which had turned into a volcanic zone.
Nevertheless, the monk’s principles lived on through some of Henry's duelling idiosyncracies.
He ordered Sanaa's system to queue a song from a playlist.
His ears filled with music. The track opened with the faint plucking of a Japanese koto. Three bars later, a minimalistic snare drum and sub-bass entered the mix, along with a sultry voice singing, 'One...two...'
Playing Hokkaido Winters by Intoxicated Giraffe 22
'Three...four...five...'
There were no other lyrics, just counting.
For a small fee, players could access music created in-game by the Performer Civilian class. Henry had commissioned a few pieces for his training to moderate his tempo. Of course, in actual duels, he wouldn't do this, the rhythm of fights being too chaotic.
Concentrating, Henry plunged his muscles deeper into the past, searching for the fragments of time-eroded knowledge once stored in their fibres. As he dove into his bodily memories, the tiredness of late was purged from his eyes, which bulged from their sockets, and his heart raced and leapt over a hundred beats per minute.
His vision contracted into a circle, focused on the target ahead.
"Whoops." He stopped with a laugh. "Too far..."
Exhaling twice, he dropped his heartrate, his vision growing back to normal.
He then placed an arrow on the outer side of the bow and pushed it forward between his gripping fingers. A moment later, his head and eyes were swivelling along to the music, their movements quick and jerky as the turnings of a cockroach. In one pulse slipped between the rapid twisting, the first arrow went flying.
The bald trainer had been observing from the side. He shuddered at the bizarre technique.