Chapter 6 - Training Time
“So, got some skill increases?” I heard Val ask. I looked up confused, still with a mouth full of fruit, to which she responded: “There is a certain look people get, when they look at System messages. Sort of half-Cross Eyed.” That made some sense. I told her of my Skill growth and my thoughts about them. She seemed to think about that for a few seconds before she responded: “Don’t underestimate the Anatomy Skills. Your lack of knowledge in that Area is what prevents you from truly unlocking your Potential.” At my quizzical look she continued: “You already have the ability to completely change your body. Now you just need to know what you’re changing, what you want to change into, and for safety reasons how to change back. Eyes like an eagle, Claws of a Tiger, Skin like a Rhino, Venom like a Cobra. And that’s just the mundane animals. In your case Knowledge is Power, quite literally.” I was somewhat stunned by that, my head started to fill up with Ideas, but Val carried on: “In fact I am going to include Anatomy into your education.” She pulled out some paper and a piece of charcoal to write with. After a few scribbles she said: “Here is the plan for the next few days:
Wake up around 6am.
1 hour of Breakfast until 7am
2 hours of sparring until 9 am
2 hours of theoretical Anatomy until 11 am
1 hour of rest until noon
1 hour of Lunch until 1pm
1 hours practical Anatomy until 2 pm
4 hours hunting until 6 pm
1 hour of Dinner until 7 pm
2 hours of specialised training until 9 pm
2 hours of general education until 11 pm
Rest until morning”
“So I get one whole hour of free time a day?”
“No, you get up to five. It is on you, how much you hunt. But Lunch today will be the last time I feed you. All you get from me, from then on, is Bread and Water. If you want to eat properly, you will have to hunt, scavenge or gather.”
“Allright, so what is ‘specialised training’?”
“Oh, stuff like what we did yesterday. Something to specifically train your unique style/ work with your unique abilities.”
“OK, and what is ‘practical Anatomy’?”
“That’s easy. Cutting into stuff and really seeing what is where.”
That seemed somewhat gruesome, but I guess you can’t really learn about Anatomy without seeing inside of a body. Besides, if I have to hunt my own meals, I might as well learn some butchery.
Now I don’t want you to think too badly of my younger self. I was naive and way too trusting, that is true, but I wasn’t an idiot. I believed Val that she was not a sadist, and that she wanted me to grow as fast as possible. But I could also recognise patterns, such as in Val’s teaching style. That is why I had already formed my claws with stingers inside my pant-pockets, when I asked her: “So when is the sparring going to start?” She barely got out the ‘N’ of the word ‘Now’ before I was rushing at her with claws raised.
The smugness on her face didn’t inspire confidence in me, but I had a plan set out for a two pronged attack. I raised my right hand higher as if to strike, while really trying to get her with my left. Additionally I shot blood out of my feinting hand and aimed it right at her eyes. She blocked the blood with one arm, but that was enough of a distraction to get her in the flank with my left. I injected my blood, but before that I told the blood on her Arm to burn. The blood in her flank I used to tell everything around it to stop. I had no real knowledge on anatomy, but I figured that blood needed to flow, so stopping it from doing that seemed effective. The last part of my masterplan was the retreat by jumping backwards and out of her range with all the strength in my legs. This sort of worked. Don’t get me wrong, the jump was well enough executed, however my claws were still in Val’s side. And curved claws don’t really want to let go that easily. Compounding the Issue is the fact that Vals skin was more like leather in its toughness. So on the bright side I did some real damage to Val, on the other hand I landed flat on my face because I got spun around by my stuck claws during the jump. And also said claws weren’t stuck anymore, they broke off in Valerias skin.
That hurt.
Like a motherfucker.
So after my brilliant manoeuvre I lay flat on the forest floor cradling my left hand, which bled profusely. Success?
White hot pain is quite disorientating. So much so that I automatically dropped all of the magical effects I was maintaining before. However I still managed to hear Val say: “Don’t numb yourself!”
I managed to scream out a “WHY?” in response.
“Because you need to endure it. Body modification always hurts. And on the path you are headed down, you need to be able to shrug off any pain. The earlier you start the better. When you fight with just your body, Pain needs to be an ally.”
I didn’t quite get the philosophy behind that, but I found a different kind of wisdom in that. If I fix it it will also stop hurting, so don’t just ignore it. I know that wasn’t exactly her reasoning, but it worked for me, so I got to it. I couldn’t just hand the problem over to my class given intuition. There were no wolf-parts to undo, so I couldn’t get back to normal that way. After trying and failing to manually reconstruct my fingertips I got an Idea. My class couldn’t help with undoing something that wasn’t there anymore, but surely it could help with making something new. So instead of healing my human hand, I regrew my wolf-claws. Sure they didn’t have the stinger, but I didn’t care about that right now. After regrowing the claws I undid them and was swiftly back to normal, albeit with some phantom pain lingering.
After I was finished and stopped shaking from the pain, Valeria sat down next to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “You know, ending aside, that was an excellent attack. Two pronged, you seized the initiative, used a faint, a distraction and the abilities we worked on yesterday. I really am proud.”
“Thanks!” I said, but I didn’t feel it. I failed, even with all the advantages I ended up wounded and on my face.
“If you can continue being that creative in combat, you would be a terrifying opponent. For example: If you had made your claws detachable or with an intended breaking point, you would have had me at a real disadvantage. If they had been heated as well I would have to concede right there to prevent serious injury.”
“Maybe we could try that for ‘specialised practice’ this evening?” I asked with more confidence, but still not at a hundred percent.
“That’s the spirit!” Val cheered while giving me a side-hug. Skadi also came to cuddle, which I gladly obliged. “Now then, I’ll give you 5 more minutes, then it’s back at it.” Val ordered. “Yes Ma’am!” I answered, mood thoroughly restored.
The rest of sparring was less eventful. Val explained some things about combat, and then we drilled them until I had them internalised. It wasn’t dull by any means, but it was repetitive, so I’ll skip it for now.
Actually I’ll do the same for the rest of the week. Save you the repetitive stuff with one sentence and only talk about the interesting bits.
Next on the agenda was ‘theoretical anatomy’. Not much to say about that honestly, she just taught me which organs exist where in the human body, and what they do. I felt I had a good-ish grasp on the basics by the end. Skadi was also listening in, but I don’t know how much she understood.
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The rest period I chose to spend with Skadi. I taught her how to fetch inside 5 minutes (that Intelligence is really noticeable), then we spent the rest of the time playing.
Lunch was next. I noticed half way through, that I didn’t feel nearly as hungry as all the other meals I had over the last days. I said as much to Val, to which she responded: “When you shapeshift you use the resources of your body. The material for those claws, and the blood you use, needs to come from somewhere. You are not conjuring keratin out of mana. You are instructing, and helping your body to build it. Since you only made two sets of claws since your last meal, your not as hungry, as the other times.” She starred in the distance for a moment and continued: “Actually, in the middle- to long-term we should look into shapeshifting into and out of nonorganic material. If you could use metals, that would be awesome.” That did indeed sound awesome. I daydreamed about having blades for arms, at a moment's notice, until lunch was over.
‘Practical Anatomy’ was a bit disgusting, but extremely educational. We cut up rabbit carcasses and looked inside them. Not only because I got to see how a lot of organs actually looked like, but because I made all the incisions myself, so Val also taught me a bit about butchery. Skadi was also very interested in this subject, but I think she just wanted the carcasses to eat.
Hunting was next. Val told me that I was on my own for this one. I tried to do my hunting ambush predator style. I made my skin brown like the local trees, and hung around on a tree, looking for prey. When I saw something in range I climbed down with sticky hands as quietly as I could, then I jumped from the tree onto the animal with claws at the ready. After 3,5 hours I managed to catch something while falling on my face. That is, I fell onto a rabbit and killed it that way. I still thought my Idea was sound, but the execution was going to need a lot more practice. Rolling out of a fall for one thing.
Dinner was some roasted rabbit, with bread and water. Not the worst, but it wasn’t a feast either.
‘Specialised training’ was as I suggested in the morning. I managed to get the break-off claws right by the end, however break-off-claws with stingers were still beyond me. My attempts were just too fragile right now.
Lastly ‘General education’ was just that. She taught me about stuff that the village wise man neglected to mention. In fact a lot of the information in the sidenotes are from those sessions. Speaking of:
Sidenote - On Stats:
So… the Stats. Strength, Agility, Constitution, Endurance, Intelligence, Willpower, Wisdom, Charisma.
Strength and Agility are self explanatory I think. Although it should be said that both Strength and Agility are based on size. A bear with 50 Strength is stronger than a bunny with 50 Strength. A bunny with 50 Agility however is way faster than a bear with the same stats. Constitution is your general hardiness. How easily you fight off diseases, how resistant you are to most poisons, how easily you deal with physical damage. At really high levels it can get to the point where bones become harder than steel and your skin becomes impossible to pierce with mundane weapons. That was why Vals skin was so difficult to cut this morning.
Endurance measures your stamina. How long and how much you can exert yourself before going tired.
Onto the Mental ones. Intelligence can be understood as the processing power of the brain. High Intelligence doesn’t make you smarter, but you can solve complex equations in your head, or figure out logic puzzles quickly. It is an important stat for mages, as getting mana to produce a specific effect means that you have to give it very specific, and often context sensitive, instructions. Intelligence probably has the least physical combat potential, although at higher levels Intelligence lets you calculate trajectories to dodge more efficiently. Although that is a function of Agility and [Perception] as well
Willpower measures your resistance foreign mana manipulation. When I use [Infectious Mana Manipulation], my target uses their Willpower to resist me. The same is true for Mental magic and the like. Willpower also determines how easily you handle pain. That is not to say how much pain you feel. Willpower increases your ability to grit your teeth through stuff, mostly pain. It also improves your defences against magic and your ability to not be distracted and to focus. The only thing that can make you last longer in a torture setting, for example, is experience and personality. Willpower makes you able to function with pain, it doesn’t make it easier to bear.
Wisdom improves your senses and memory. Not that flashy, but universally useful.
Lastly, Charisma. It is a measure of your ‘Force of personality’. How willing others are to listen to you just based on the ‘Vibe’ you give off. For example, the [Negotiation] Skill determines how good you are at haggling someone down/up. Charisma measures how good you need to be to get the price you want. Charisma is relevant for combat in terms of intimidation and taunting and stuff. There are also ways of casting spells through charisma. It’s an oversimplification, but essentially it is convincing mana rather than commanding it. Although at this point in the story Val didn’t talk a lot about this style of casting so neither did I know much about it. End of Sidenote.
The last part of the teaching segment was spent discussing my Class and Stats. My Class gave me good physical stats and no mental ones. So to make sure I didn’t develop unbalanced, Val decided that I should put two free points into Willpower and Wisdom, and one each into Intelligence, and Charisma. So my stats ended up like this:
Statistics:
Strength
16
Agility
18
Constitution
26
Endurance
27
Intelligence+2=>
14
Willpower+4=>
24
Wisdom+4=>
16
Charisma+2=>
12
Free Points-12=>
0
That was pretty much how the next five days went by. It was gruelling training for me. But It did pay off in some regards.
[Athletics]+3=>
24
[Forest Movement]+2=>
6
[Gymnastics]+5=>
21
[Human Anatomy]+4=>
4
[Infectious Mana Manipulation]+10=>
15
[Internal Mana Manipulation]+3=>
55
[Leporine Anatomy]+10=>
13
[Lupine Anatomy]+6=>
7
[Perception]+4=>
16
[Shapeshifting]+8=>
10
[Stealth]+5=>
14
[Tracking]+6=>
11
[Unarmed Combat]+15=>
22
Not to forget the levels.
Congratulations! For hunting on your own to feed yourself in the forest, you have gained three levels in [Wolfman](lvl 5). At level five you have gained the class Perk [Prepared Form]
Strength+2+2+2=>
22
Agility+4+4+4=>
30
Constitution+5+5+5=>
41
Endurance+3+3+3=>
36
Intelligence+1+1+1=>
17
Willpower+2+2+2=>
30
Wisdom+2+2+2=>
22
Charisma+1+1+1=>
15
Free points+6-6+6-6+6-6=>
0
I didn’t bother changing the stat distribution I agreed on with Val.
[Prepared Form]
You may have a Form you currently inhabit saved. At any time you can shapeshift into a saved Form without active concentration. Mental strain still occurs. Wounds are not affected by this skill. You may have one Form saved for every ten points in Wisdom you have. (Currently 0/2 Forms)
I immediately knew what forms I was going to save. First is my normal body. Just in case I mess something up. The other would be me, with sharp claws with a stinger, and that can be saveley and consciously detached. I managed those after five days of training. They were a bitch to get working, however they were also the crowning achievement of my shapeshifting training.