New World Day 4

  I woke up the next morning feeling like someone was using my head as an anvil. I had thought that it would go away by morning, but I guess the cumulative stress had gotten to me even more than I had realized. I rolled out of bed slowly and got dressed as best I could in the darkness of my bedroom. I walked into the garage slowly testing my ankle along the way. I bent it every which way, stomped on it, and even jumped a couple of times. There were a couple of twinges of pain, but it was basically healed. My regen skill must have worked hard overnight. Once I was satisfied with my ankle, I headed to the garage door windows and took a careful look outside.

  The sky was filled with large fluffy grey clouds. It seemed like the sky would open up and pour down rain at any time. More worrisome was that the shadow demon trees were nowhere to be seen. They had disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. Their disappearance caused me to feel very leery about going outside. What if they had moved to the side of the house just outside of view? Without sunlight to restrain those strange shadows, my chances of surviving an attack from them were quite low. I didn’t want to take too large of a risk, but I really needed to use the restroom. I quietly slipped outside and did my business against the side of the house while keeping a careful watch for anything that might try to rip me to shreds. Thankfully, the shadow demon trees really seemed to have moved on, and I didn’t run into any problems. I would need to do something about where I was going to the bathroom soon. The smell was really starting to build up, but I had too many other problems to deal with at the moment to worry too much about it. As I made my way back to the garage door, I came to a abrupt stop when I noticed a series of footprints in the mud.

  I was no tracker, but to my amateur eye it looked like three beings with small four-toed feet had walked side by side around the back side of the house. The prints were definitely not human, but what were they? Goblins? Or is there some other two legged creature around here? Following the footprints with my eyes, I saw that they had come from the direction of the grassy lawn in front of the house. I would need to keep any eye out for whatever had made them. I started turning my head back towards the garage when a glint of light from the front field caught my eye. The light was a reflection from my car’s windshield. Hmmmm. Should I move my car down here and use it to block the garage? It could provide me with a bit of extra protection, but I was worried about what may be attracted by the engine noise if I started it up. Shaking my head, I kept the idea in the back of my mind but headed back into the garage. I needed to continue exploring the area before I could make a plan to return home. I wanted to see how thoroughly the area had really changed, and if I could get to the main road that would lead to Falmouth. If I could get to Falmouth I could then hopefully take the roads north to Cincinnati, but I didn’t want to do anything today. Not when it looked like it would rain all day. Instead, I would take the time to train and grow stronger. Pushups, sit-ups, axe training, and mana training were the only things I would do today. I would push myself to my limits and then rely on my regen skill to break through them.

  I started my training with some simple strengthening exercises. I did sit-ups and pushups until my arms and belly throbbed with pain. I couldn't remember the last time I had pushed my body this hard, but there was more to come. Next, I started swinging my axe in the back of the garage, but after a few hours I ran into a problem. My axe mastery level wasn’t increasing at all. While I sat down for a short rest and drink, I mulled over the problem. The rain started pouring down outside as I sat there pondering the problem. The rhythmic fall of rain drops helped me clear my mind and concentrate on the problem at hand. It didn’t take me too long to think of something that wasn’t really a solution, but it might point me in the direction of a solution. The tutorial for the System had said that by watching to see what increased the experience for a skill, users could find hints to getting stronger. Since I wasn’t getting experience just blindly swinging the axe around anymore, I would set the System to show my experience bar for whatever skill I was practicing to appear in the corner of my eye. Then I would practice various ways of using the skill until I saw the bar increase. Once I found something that would increase the experience bar, I could then practice that part of the skill until it stopped giving me experience after which I would return to experimenting until I found something new that worked.

  Nodding to myself, I stood back up and started experimenting with the axe. My hands were sore and looked ready to blister at any moment, but now wasn’t the time to be weak. If I couldn’t get through a single day of training then how would I ever make my way back to my family? Grimacing in pain, I held the axe firmly in hand and started back up. I began by swinging at odd angles instead of my normal downward and side to side swings. The odd angles increased the bar a little for awhile, but those increases quickly came to halt. Next, I tried changing where I was holding the axe at. I started to hold the axe handle at different places and varied the strength of my grip at each different placement. That change gave me a bevy of experience though it did lead to an unfortunate mishap. Blisters formed and popped all over my hands causing the handle to become slick with blood, and when I gripped the axe too lightly, I accidentally flung it across the garage. The loud clang of the axe smashing into the concrete wall caused me to cringe and duck down behind the overturned Ranger. My breath came hard and quick as I waited to see if anything outside was close enough to hear the noise over the deluge of rain.

  After waiting for a few minutes, nothing came to investigate the noise, and I walked over to the wall to pick up the blood stained axe. Perhaps that was enough experimenting with grip strength for today. Instead, I starting stepping forward, backward, and side to side while swinging the axe. I found the coordination between the step and swing to be awkward at first and fell on my ass multiple times while experimenting, but to my great delight, the experience bar was growing far more rapidly than ever before. Pushing the pain in my hands aside, I threw myself into the training. A dozen tumbles and four embarrassing leg cuts later I found myself in a rhythm where everything else in the world fell away. There were no stray thoughts. No worries. Just the training. Step, swing. Step, swing. Step, swing. Step, swing. Blood began to flow freely from my hands. Each swing sent droplets of blood flying across the room, but even the pain couldn’t penetrate my mind at this point. I didn’t stop until hours later when my body finally collapsed from exhaustion and dehydration. I staggered into the wall and was just barely able to use it to keep standing.

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  As my thoughts slowly returned to me, I found I was panting heavily and the acrid smell of sweat mixed with the odd tang of blood hit my nose. Sighing, I dragged myself into the workshop to grab some water and towels my muscles twitching and seizing all of the way. I had to drain 4 full bottles of water before my muscles finally stopped cramping up. After which, I mopped up the blood in the garage with a couple of towels. I didn’t want to take the chance of fresh blood attracting any beasts to my hideout. Finished with that task, I took the towels into the workshop and threw them in the sink before taking a look at my remaining water supply. At this rate, my water supply wouldn’t last me more than a week. I would need to test my resistance skills quicker than I had expected.

  For now, it was time to shift to training my mana. I walked over to an open wall in the garage and sat against it folding my legs underneath me and letting the coldness from the concrete wall sink into my back and relieve some of my aches and pains before I closed my eyes and once more turned inward to train my mana. The training was monotonous, but there was something absolutely thrilling about it. I mean it was MANA! If I could learn to really control it then I could use MAGIC! I don’t care who you talk to. If they don’t admit that being able to use magic was one of their childhood dreams then they are damn liars. I was determined to fulfill this dream and since it was likely to be the key to my survival that was a win win situation. Right? I kept training hard forcing the mana to contract and expand, and as usual the headache returned. Only this time, I pushed through it and kept training and training until it grew so intense that I nearly passed. It felt like a group of elephants were using my head as a drum set, but I couldn’t help a dumb grin from spreading across my face. The System had sent me a message that I had been hoping to see ever since I realized I had gained mana.

Strength increased by 2!

Endurance increased by 3!

Basic Axe Mastery (B) * leveled up!

Basic Axe Mastery (B) * leveled up!

Basic Regen (Passive) (B) * leveled up!

Risk Taker (B) * leveled up!

Skill awarded! Basic Mana Control (B) *

Basic Mana Control (B) * LVL 1 0%: A skill that every potential magic user must learn. It is the most essential and most basic magic skill. Higher ranks and higher rarity increases the amount of mana the user can control and how minutely the user can control the mana. The skill increases in rarity depending on how delicate of control the user is capable of exerting. The rank of the skill will increase after every ten levels.

Maybe now I could learn magic!

Name: Jason Silver

Job Name: N/A

LVL: 3 2%

Job LVL: N/A 0%

Job Points:

N/A

N/A

Titles:

Survivor (B) LVL 3 66%

Fool (B) LVL 4 50%

Pack Killer (B) LVL 3 50%

Beast Killer (B) LVL 3 50%

Risk Taker (B) LVL 3 42%

Repeated Risk Taker ( C ) LVL 2 89%

Compassionate Fool ( C ) LVL 1 78%

Title Points:

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

1

Stats:

HP:

MP:

Mana Regen:

Endurance:

Strength:

Speed:

Bonus Points:

90/120

10/10

2 per min (-1.5)

10

8

7

9

Status Effects:

Regen, Disease Resist, Parasite Resist

Skills:

Basic Axe Mastery (B) LVL 6 28%

Basic Gun Mastery (B) LVL 4 51%

Basic Regen (Passive) (B) LVL 6 90%

Basic Disease Resist (Passive) (B) LVL 1 34%

Basic Parasite Resist (Passive) (B) LVL 1 10%

Basic Mana Control (B) LVL 1 0%

*

*

*

*

*

*