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Ascension VR
Chapter 4: More Training?

Chapter 4: More Training?

Author’s Message: For any readers who are confused by the extremely fast stat growth, don’t worry this won’t be a case of an extremely OP Gary Stu character. Stat gains will gradually decrease following the law of diminishing returns and there are some other factors involved which will be revealed later in the story (and has been foreshadowed already).

Also, I would greatly appreciate any feedback! Thank you everyone for your comments and support, it really helps motivate me to write more 

Special thanks goes to Donthebest22 for feeding the troll in me, more cliff-hangers will be coming your way!

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While congratulating himself on the gains from the training, Feng suddenly fell over on to the floor clutching his stomach in pain.

“Aahhh… it hurts…”

Roth who was sitting quietly at the side watching Feng’s progress simply couldn’t help but roar with laughter.

“HA HA HA! Feng. Only you lad can impress me with your training one moment and cause me to laugh at your idiocy the next. You spent the last four hours concentrating so deeply and clearly pushing your untrained body to its limits what did you expect coming from not eating or drinking at all to replenish your body’s reserves!”

Strolling over to a somewhat concealed barrel at the corner, Roth fished something out and tossed it at Feng.

*Bonk*

“OW! Ma nowse!” Feng rolled around comically, grabbing his nose in pain, surprised by the sudden assault in his weakened state.

“Eat that bread lad. It’ll get you perked up, we keep a supply here for fools like you.”

Devouring the bread as though it was manna from heaven, Feng sighed as he felt his protesting stomach and body relax and even start to properly recover from the stress he forced his body to endure.

“Well lad, you definitely exceeded my expectations. So tell me when you are ready and I’ll get started on teaching you some nifty tricks.”

Roth chuckled at the satisfied face Feng had from eating the cheap hard-bread and offered to continue Feng’s training.

“Actually Roth, could you wait for a bit more? I still have some skills I would like to try training.”

“Oh? Go ahead lad; I’m learning quite a bit from your interesting training methods too. Plus I got Brock to cover the testing and training of other young ones anyway.”

Roth moved to a corner and sat down again to begin his observation of Feng’s training as Feng shook out his shoulders and raised himself from his resting position.

‘Alright then... time to work on some ranged skills.’

Moving over to the rack full of daggers, Feng took a bunch and stuffed into in random slots in his clothes for easy drawing.

‘Damn it, I forgot something, it’ll be easier to grab more and keep them in my inventory then running back and forth. Open Inventory’

A blue box filled with nine slots appeared in the corner of his eyes and Feng sighed…

‘Only nine slots, I’m guessing we’ll need some bags or magic equipment to expand the inventory slots… Well better than nothing. Here we go.’

Grabbing a couple of the copper daggers and dumping into his inventory, Feng found out that they stacked as sets of five and he currently has nine slots in his inventory…  so he maximized the number of daggers with forty-five  stowed in his inventory and another six stashed in his clothing and holding two in his hands.

Moving over to the target range, Feng let loose with a barrage of daggers thrown with fast and fluid motions, quickly drawing the stashed daggers and tossing them too.

Roth watched him with an expectant look… only to sweat-drop as only two out of the eight daggers thrown in swift succession hit the target at a ten meter range.

‘Wow. This sure is a lot harder than it looks in films given what I experienced with skill EXP gain with melee skills, it shouldn’t matter much.’

Drawing out another set of blades from his inventory as he prepared to stash his clothing with daggers before throwing again, Feng suddenly face-palmed in realization…

‘There is nearly no lag time to draw items from my inventory, meaning… I CAN JUST THROW THEM STRAIGHT FROM MY INVENTORY! WHOOHOO! Time to fake an Unlimited Blade Wor**’

Throwing his blades as quickly as they materialize; the target or more accurately the area around the target was soon littered with copper daggers…

*DING*

Ignoring the notification he expects to be Throwing Weapons Mastery, Feng headed down the target range to retrieve all the daggers before repeating his insane practice method as Roth was once again left gaping at this ridiculous practice.

‘Hmm… But only training my throwing skill is extremely inefficient, since my accuracy has improved with the skill, I should train movement skills and throwing while moving.’

Beginning with simple sprints up and down the unoccupied target range while hurling his daggers at the various targets, Feng soon progressed to jumping around, diving and rolling to scoop up daggers with even some somersaults tossed into the mix as he trained ignoring all the alerts intent on his task at hand.

Staring open-mouthed at Feng’s action, Roth shook his head as he thought.

‘Monster. The lad is a monster in training, we’ll definitely hear about his exploits in the future… Hey, since I’m his first teacher here, I’ll probably gain lots of fame… Maybe I should teach him something special.”

Finally winding to a stop due to his loss in stamina, Feng took a seat to regain stamina and idly threw daggers, which apparently hardly cost any stamina as compared to resting recovery rate, and thought of his next steps.

He has already spent approximately five plus hours in-game training up his fighting skills and stats which equates to roughly two and a half hour in real life given the 2x time compression rate. While he could simply continue at it, he realized there was an exponential drop in training speed after the skills evolved to Basic Tier and with each level it was more evident.

Checking the progress of his throwing mastery, Feng found an anomaly and cackled evilly as he read the skills he had picked up unknowingly due to him ignoring the alerts.

New Skill Obtained: Throwing Mastery

Congratulations! You have learnt how to toss stuff around. Keep at it and you might even hit something one day. Preferably before that something hits you.

(Passive)

+10% Throwing Accuracy

+5% Throwing Damage

+3 Dexterity

New Skill Obtained: Quick Draw

Congratulations! You have learnt how to quickly whip out your stuff, let’s hope you aren’t equally as quick a shot in the bedroom…

Sub-skill: You discovered your inventory can act as a container from which you draw weapons from.

(Passive)

+10% Draw Speed

+2 Dexterity

New Skill Obtained: Acrobatics

Congratulations! You have learnt how to jump around, roll and in general act like a monkey.

(Passive)

+10% Success rate with acrobatic movements

+5% Reduction in fall damage

+2 Agility

New Skill Obtained: Evade

Congratulations! By jumping around a lot, you have learnt the invaluable skills of getting out of the way of dangerous things. Hopefully this will prolong your life.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

PS. The betting pool disagrees with the hope, the odds we are currently running on you surviving past the first three days is approximate ten to one odds AGAINST your favor. Have a nice day!

(Passive)

+1% Dodge Rate

+2 Agility

Congratulations! Your training has earned you:

+6 Dexterity

+8 Agility

Throwing Mastery have leveled up to Basic 1

Quick Draw has leveled up to Novice 7

Running has leveled up to Novice 5

Balance has leveled up to Novice 4

Acrobatics has leveled up to Novice 3

Evade has leveled up to Novice 2

‘Hmm… this should be enough for now; my gains are clearly slowing down anyway. It seems that the higher the stats are, the harder it is to gain them from training. Makes sense to prevent everyone from spamming training and becoming insanely overpowered compared to their levels… Well… Unless they learn to game the system that is.. Heh.’

Smirking evilly as he thought of all the game-breaking possibilities, Feng snapped out of it when he noticed Roth looking at him oddly and backing away slightly.

“Hey Roth, I think I’m done for today. Think you can teach me some of those tricks you promised?”

“Right… well first of all, my evaluation of your training is that you are clearly… insane and that’s considering the idiots that pass through our doors regularly. Your little training stunt here probably ranks amongst the top ten dumbest thing I seen so far in this guild… But the results clearly speak for themselves and you exceeded my expectations so…”

Roth paused dramatically and looked at Feng, expecting him to be hanging on his every word only to see Feng calmly picking his nose and flicking something green on the floor.

‘Aaahh… that felt good. Darn thing been blocking my breathing for the last hour now. Wait I thought Roth was busy with his grand speech… Damn it I think he saw me… Can’t be helped, I’ll just act innocent.’

Wiping his hand on the nearby straw dummy casually, Feng looked at Roth with big glowing eyes and replied with great enthusiasm... which was clearly faked.

“Yes? You have some special training for me?”

His eyes twitching at the sight of Feng’s nonchalance, Roth smiled viciously and replied with great joy in his voice.

“Why yes indeed. I have some very special training catered JUST for students like you. Here take this cloth and put it over your eyes. The first skill is a special sensory skill… Hmm but since you like to combine trainings and make things more efficient, I suppose I can teach you the other two skills at the same time…”

Genuinely excited this time, Feng grabbed the cloth and wrapped it around his eyes hurriedly, anticipating a great training session ahead… and completely missed out on the dangerous under-tones in Roth’s voice.

“Indeed, the very first skill is to sense hostile intent… the second is to learn to anticipate and evade based on that sensing… As for the last skill...”

“OOMMPPHH!!”

Doubled over in pain having been hit straight in the stomach, Feng took a moment to recover before shouting out.

“Hey what’s the big id- OWWW!“

Roth grinned happily as he wields a padded staff with great proficiency swinging and jabbing at Feng.

“Well. This is a special tor- I mean training session to toughen you up, since you are used to hitting the dummies now. You got to learn how to respond to hostile attacks and even take some blows. I’m just helping you out now! So hang in there and better get started on learning to dodge!”

“AUUGGHHH! THIS IS JUST OUCH! PLAIN ABU- OWWW! -USSSEEE!”

*DING*

As if to mock him, the absurdly happy-sounding ding sounded terribly like laughter…

*1 Hour of Whack-The-Feng Later*

“Haha you did well kid, you managed to learn all three skills in record time! Too bad it was over so soon, it was fun screwing with you… training you.”

Desperately wolfing down the hard-breads to regenerate his lost health and stamina, Feng took the time to screech an angry retort before returning to his life-saving breads.

“I NEARLY DIED ROTH!”

“Oh come on, it wasn’t that bad. I’m sure you’ll have been fine. Anyway kid, come find me back at the main building when you are done resting. I got something for you for doing so well.”

After Roth left, Feng finally got some peace to check his notification and literally hard-earned skills…

New Skill Obtained: Sense Hostile Intent

Congratulations! Through Roth’s special training, you have learnt how to detect when people want to hit you.

(Passive Sensory Skill)

+5% Detection Chance of Hostile Intent

+3 Wisdom

New Skill Obtained: Combat Instinct

Congratulations! Through Roth’s special training, you have developed an instinct to predict enemies’ attacks based on sixth sense.

(Passive)

+10% Dodge Rate

+10% Block Rate

+3 Agility

New Skill Obtained: Toughness

Congratulations! Through Roth’s special training, you have learnt how to take a blow, you masochist.

(Passive)

+1% Physical Damage Reduction

+3 Constitution

Congratulations! Your training has earned you:

+9 Constitution

+3 Agility

+3 Endurance

Sense Hostile Intent has leveled up to Novice 5

Evade has leveled up to Novice 4

Toughness has leveled up to Novice 3

Combat Instinct has leveled up to Novice 2

Quest completed: Combat Training for Dummies… Advanced [Adventurers’ Guild]

Trying to not suck at one weapon not good enough for you? You have now taken on a harder quest to be less of a noob at multiple weapons… Good luck!

Objective Cleared: Learn [Sword Mastery], [Dagger Mastery] & [Unarmed Mastery]

Bonus Objective Cleared: Impress the instructor by gaining more skills. (+10 Relationship)

Rewards: Roth’s Special Training

Training Completed: Roth’s Special Training [Adventurers’ Guild]

Congratulations, you have managed to enroll yourself into Roth’s *EXTRA* Special Training and survived the torture disguised as training.

Requirements:

1) Complete Quest: Combat Training for Dummies… Advanced [Adventurers’ Guild]

2) Gain Roth’s Respect (More than 10 Relationship)

3) *Optional* Annoy Roth (Unlocked *EXTRA* Special Training)

Objective Cleared: Survive and Learn [Sense Hostile Intent], [Combat Instinct] & [Toughness]

Rewards: Follow Roth to find out more