Waking up below an unfamiliar roof, in an unfamiliar bed, Rune started his new month by making an energy loop inside his body, activating the revitalization spell.
He then returned to the training room and saw Utopia using the moving pillars as well as the active offensive training modules to refine his momentum manipulation technique.
This room didn’t only contain the anti-gravity module, it was covered in virtual projections technology that could make anything appear and had lots of intuitive functions.
When those virtual constructs remained blue, it implied that nothing had touched them, if a blue pillar turned red then it meant you “collided” with it and had failed to properly use the momentum technique to dodge them.
If anyone wanted to know how much optimization they could still possibly reach, they just had to check the monitor screen at the center, where the anti-gravity engine was, and re-watch themselves to personally see how close they were to fail.
Looking at Utopia doing what an original body shouldn’t be able to do, Rune felt more proud than jealous.
He had only just touched upon the second level, the moving pillars level, while Utopia was already flexing his talent for the momentum technique by doing a complex parkour run.
Once he had acquired his adult maturity, Rune had stopped feeling jealous, envy and other bad feelings only came and went as if he was a pure saint, and this time wasn’t an exception.
Instead of being jealous, Rune, Astryde, and Nelo had preferred establishing a hierarchy in momentum manipulation talent with Utopia standing at the very top of it.
Compared to him, Nelo, Rune, and Astryde were only average talents.
Objectively, compared to what they were able to do, Utopia was truly manipulating his momentum, he could effortlessly change his direction and speed intensity without thinking.
He could even turn back and return to the beginning of the virtual complex parkour training untouched if a dead-end was put before him, that was how insane he was.
Sighing internally, Rune just planned to use hard work and time to make up for his less impressive momentum manipulation.
40 minutes later, Nelo and Astryde joined them, and like the past month, their momentum training resumed as they all tried to push their own limit again and again.
It was only 8 hours later that Nelo interrupted everyone's training by announcing something big, “Utopia! Rune! Astryde! There’s big news from Gar and Arik. A first Void Dimension rift has finally been found by the IGS. And they didn’t restrict access to it.”
Stopping their training for only a few seconds, Utopia and Rune eventually just continued like they heard nothing, whereas Astryde took every excuse to stop her momentum training to go and discuss with her little brother.
Nelo and Astryde already knew something about why they didn’t stop.
They actually weren’t just training their momentum manipulation, they were also training their awareness manipulation.
While sending more and more of their awareness to the other side, they continued training with their original to find what limit they had and how every loss of awareness reflected on what they did.
Utopia, for example, had his momentum manipulation become worse and worse. At some point, every turn he did became sluggish, and when it became too stupid to continue, he stopped to write things down on his information board notes.
Then he recalled his awareness and restarted the same experiment once again, noting the changes happening.
Rune was more focused on optimizing every bit of awareness used by his avatar and original body. 4% of his awareness allowed his hearing sense to function properly but not optimally, and an avatar worked in a very different way from an original body.
An avatar wasn’t an exact mirror copy of oneself, that’s why it was called “avatar” and not “clone”. An avatar was only an embodiment created by the Ether Law to help critically defective dimension’s natives, so it fundamentally worked with different mechanics.
An avatar could only work due to having an ether soul connected to it, otherwise, it would only be a mass of ether.
In regards to his current worries though, Rune wasn’t thinking about his awareness experiment more than he was thinking about what was soon to come.
‘We’ll start practical fighting training soon… It’ll be my first time fighting with my own body and not in a game.’
From the start, this get-together wasn’t organized as a simple momentum manipulation technique training.
After getting the basics down, to increase their progress even more swiftly, they would start to compete against each other. That was the plan.
Be it the cat game, straight up fighting in a dynamic environment, or other newly created or repurposed ways of training, the goal was to create situations where they would need more than simple momentum manipulations while still needing to use it.
The reason he was thinking about it was that he wanted to accelerate the schedule a bit. Waiting was for kids, he didn’t want to wait. If it was coming anyway, then just starting now was for the best.
“Utopia,” with resolve, Rune approached the friend he knew should be of the same mind as him, and made his request, “Let’s go and start fighting training. Every second spent grinding alone when there’s a better and more optimized solution just next to me is making me crazy. Don’t you also want to progress faster?”
And to no surprise…
“Yeah! Exactly! I was waiting for this! True training! Let’s go!” Full of motivation, Utopia stood up and walked to the control board of the room where he deactivated the training modules and activated the fighting modules.
Holographic terrain borders instantly started forming to delimit areas, additionally, flying drones came from the ceiling and used special foam to build a series of obstacles in 2 minutes.
While they were preparing the terrain, he explained the first fighting training after calling Nelo and Astryde over.
“The first interactive fighting training will be the cat game, one cat and 3 mice. The cat has to touch any of the other 3, then the role changes, if the cat can’t touch anyone in 3 minutes, he’s eliminated for this round. Touch of course includes kicking and any other manner imaginable except energy attacks, that’s all!”
Happy with the explanation he had just given, Utopia smiled foolishly in expectation.
“Simple and efficient, let’s hope someone didn’t slack in his training,” Astryde commented after the end of the short explanation, averting her eyes from the others.
“Who’ll be the first cat? I really want to try,” Rune wanted to show his prowess, and eagerness was radiating from his eyes.
“Then you can begin. The three mices will enter first and you can just rush in after a few seconds,” Utopia was like Rune, he appeared totally over eager to start and show off.
Everyone here had never participated in a fight before, but their farming and training life of 7 months had trained their spirit, and now they all wanted to start the next step of their dimensional explorer’s journey.
Utopia immediately entered the 50 by 50 by 50 meters delimited area, and following his entry, the artificial gravity soon deactivated while slow bpm music started playing.
High on epicness, Rune was ready to use everything he had learned till now, not just momentum.
And he wasn’t the only one with this mindset, Nelo and Astryde had already deployed their energy wings, a spell that allowed them to transform energy into acceleration. What they were starting was a real fighting simulation.
The “cat game” name was only there for fun, it didn’t represent what was going to happen soon.
‘I can first cannonball to Astryde. She puts fewer efforts in than everyone else. Once I reach her I’ll decelerate to 1 meter per second to allow my momentum to be perfectly controlled, then touch her and rush to Nelo to shift her target.’
Making a simple plan was the only thing he could do, no one here had true fighting experiences, so he concluded that the newbie rush strategy should work.
Using his strength stat, Rune propelled himself at a speed of 10 meters per second, largely above what his current momentum stat allowed him to control, even beyond what his avatar's 500 momentum stat would be able to control.
But as his perception had increased his reaction speed, he naturally adjusted his after-impulsion speed to decrease when, surprisingly, Astryde rushed to Nelo’s side.
Rune remained focused on his main target, Astryde, and 2 seconds after launching himself, he ended up entering close range.
With his initial speed having been reduced to 4 meters per second, he was now in half control of his movement. 4 meters per second was close to the perfect speed if he wanted to balance speed and control.
After nearing Astryde from above, he plunged in the direction of her shoulder.
As an answer, she used her momentum to disappear from his human eyesight by circumventing him, but she could not escape his perception sphere.
Adjusting his momentum to turn right immediately and extend his arm, his hand was centimeters away from touching her back.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Suddenly, before he could touch her, she used her energy wings spell to try and accelerate. But as this spell was still in its infancy, only allowing for straight acceleration, Rune saw the obvious sign of her energy wings activating through his perception and decided to just go and appear before her in case of the acceleration being too fast and escaping his range.
As he focused on blocking her position and appearing on the other side, Astryde’s perception informed her of what he was doing, and she urgently canceled her wings’ burst, instead changing her momentum to reverse her direction, going backward without turning her body.
But she had underestimated Rune’s reaction speed.
Suddenly, she saw him extend his leg and kick right where she was, and having just modified her momentum, she didn’t have the required training to adjust it again in the next millisecond.
Upon feeling the sensation of contact, Rune saw her fly from the impact of his kick, probably taking 1 point of health with it, and he immediately used his sphere to know where Nelo was as he rushed to his position.
‘So intense and satisfying!’
Grinning from what he just did, he arrived at Nelo’s position and observed Astryde already rushing in their direction, ignoring Utopia that was on the other side and carefully observing everything.
3 minutes later, she got disqualified and Rune randomly became the cat again. He tried going for Utopia who was coincidentally near him, but during the chase, they moved over to Nelo and he shifted target.
Nelo, behind his simple and casual smile, was a ruthless and stubborn person. Once he was touched, he didn’t stop and touched Rune again after a 1-minute fight by a punch to his right leg.
“I reserved a trump card for Utopia, but I’ll just use it now,” Rune looked in Utopia’s direction and started to rush after him once he said out loud.
With a smile showing all his teeth, Utopia waited for him to come and use his trump card. He was confident in his own ability.
Seeing the wordless provocation from Utopia, Rune activated his trump card.
He cut off his senses of hearing, taste, and smell and let his awareness focus on his sight.
It was still a very primitive awareness manipulation trick that primarily relied on the on-off manipulation, but thanks to his training, he could now shift a few percents of awareness from still activated senses like touch and equilibrioception that were too important to the situation to be turned off.
Utopia landing on the ground was unexpected, but it was probably one of his strategies, his young appearance would be the death of anyone believing him to be pure and naive.
This trump card was simple, his sight and perception sphere allowed him to not only know what his target was doing, but to some measure, he would now also be able to sort of react immediately to what his target was planning on doing!
It was only guesswork by his amateur fighting instinct, but if this awareness trick was used against a fellow amateur? It could and would work!
The slight flinching of his right leg, and the ground below indicated only forward, right, top, and behind possible evasion movement.
Preparing a feint of going for the left and reacting immediately after that, Rune proceeded to arrive slightly to the left of Utopia and did as he planned.
After a feint of rushing to his left, Utopia used the ground as support to his momentum manipulation to launch himself to the right. But after his impulsion, he saw that Rune had followed him with only a 30 centimeters distance.
Reacting a little too much, he did a stupid mistake and tried to turn once again, transforming his true evading movement into another feint, yet, activating his momentum while above the controlled speed just slowed him down, and Rune crashed into him.
He got cat-ched.
With a damaged pride, Utopia then rushed to Nelo to release his frustration, Rune having evacuated like a scared rabbit after catching him.
And 3 minutes later Nelo got eliminated with a very strained smile as he was chasing Rune.
Rune once again became the cat randomly.
“Is your system broken?” he asked.
“No, you’re just lucky, or unlucky it depends,” excited to be at the last battle, Utopia appeared ready to destroy Rune’s pride.
“I already caught you one time, I’ll do it a second and a third time if need be,” with calm eyes, Rune stared into those of Utopia.
“Can you change the music to Genesis of Aquarion, common IGS rearranged version?”
(Genesis of Aquarion - Akino - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcBR53LYDj8)
“Yes,” and immediately once he agreed, the music changed.
‘Is an AI overseeing the training room? Anyway!’
Hearing a true legendary motivating music, Rune felt hyped and ready.
Even with Utopia being above him in momentum training, it meant nothing, he had already proved it.
Rushing at him, he did a rough swirl to try and confuse Utopia, but he reacted in the best way and stopped moving to confuse him even more.
He tried rushing, feints, double feints, pure momentum, and everything else, yet, Utopia acted like he was in the zone and was completely imperious.
Rune concluded that he was too far behind to try it the technical way, it was too difficult with Utopia facing him.
He had even used his awareness trick trump card again, only, it didn’t have the expected effect, probably the rululu’s supreme intellectual capabilities in effect.
A fighting instinct in the simplest terms was just accumulating experience and from it deriving the best moves. So while Utopia should still be far from having gained one and scientific research having proved that in the end, they didn’t have that much of an advantage in the sports department…
If it was between two complete amateurs such as the two of them…
Approaching again, Rune had planned to play dirty. Even if he didn’t win in the end, he wouldn’t go down without a fight.
First launching a kick that Utopia easily evaded, he tried to approach closer again. The brute approach was his only serviceable one.
Making a combo of 30 amateurish punches and kicks, he reduced the distance a little with every mistake of Utopia like evading too soon or taking bad evading trajectories.
He also lost distance with bad combo choices or bad fluidity of chaining, but he didn’t have any other answer.
With only 1 and a half minute remaining, the music, that was probably the short version, played the logical next music, and it happened to be Kimi no shinwa, common IGS rearranged version.
(Kimi no shinwa - AKINO & AIKI - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb8UCym1Uhg)
Motivation coming back in droves, Rune kept focusing on how to trap the brat before him and kept on insisting, Utopia knew he couldn’t become used to the situation and remained alert all along, also becoming fired up from the epic music playing.
In such high-speed combat, one second could mean the end.
After preparing the big one, Rune set in motion his all or nothing plan.
For a moment in Utopia’s vision, he saw Rune executing a simple kick, so he let the flow of the fight take over and prepared to back away to the right, but this kick that he was preparing to evade by launching to the right… Suddenly appeared 10 centimeters away from his face.
After he had backed away.
He understood in a moment what had happened, Rune had did the stupid choice of going spiritually all-in with all his momentum focused on his leg.
If he could evade this kick, Rune would have lost all his momentum for 1 or 2 seconds.
There was a problem however… How was he evading it… In his current position?
It was impossible, he couldn’t do the same as Rune did with his head, it couldn’t rotate and evade by itself, he needed his whole body to rotate to bring his head along to safety.
And so he received a kick in his face.
“Worth it!” Rune exclaimed before immediately running, as Utopia never dawdled long before acting in hot revenge.
And so 3 minutes of chasing began, with a dirty kick technique from Rune.
“Stop running!” Utopia was trying to reach him but Rune was using the ground and his momentum to somewhat replace the absent gravity to just run.
“Next game you can just change the rule! Hahaha! You lost this one!” Feeling safe, Rune laughed as he just ran and circled around his enraged friend's blue face.
And that’s how Rune won the first game of cat.
But even after the game ended, Utopia was still chasing after him, “Come here, my revenge has to be taken now!”
Finally, Nelo and Astryde helped Utopia catch Rune and he received respectively nothing, a kick, and a tackle.
Miserable, Rune concluded, “Still… Worth it…”
…
“My theory is being proved right at a pace so frightening that even I didn’t expect,” Utopia was explaining the recent event of the Deep Void Dimension.
“Monsters, another term used to describe all the ether life forms that attack on sight for no other reason than detecting you, are blowing the recent challengers like they are simple civilians fighting against a hovering tank.”
He had become used to transmitting what he read to his 3 friends by now.
“Also, coming back to the Void Dimension’s map, it’s pretty much confirmed now that every avatar from our dimensional sector has spawned in one place the size of a minor dwarf galaxy. Big difficulties are being encountered in automated resource gathering by means of ship drones, scanners with usually kilometers of range become useless, and engine propulsion breaks in minutes after their activation…”
Breathing a little he continued.
“It's probably linked to the fact that the matter of our Universe Dimension is not transformed by the Ether Law yet due to the low ether density… There’s still a minor success though in very experimental ether engines, so they are recruiting lots of people to baptize their spaceship in energy...”
“Stop! Stop! Stop talking!” Astryde interrupted his monologue forcefully, “Be concise! To the point!”
A little annoyed but ultimately understanding, Utopia continued, “The Void Dimension map center is being filled very quickly by wasting away non-etherized drones that break quickly once sent.”
“Ether resources are being used as high-value currency, exchangeable for lots of money.”
“The physical branch had a breakthrough and is currently atomizing other paths in every way in fighting simulation.”
“Vegetation can be found in the Deep Void Dimension, but the few samples found have no particular effects.”
“A complete solar system has been found in the Void Dimension, named the misty system due to the unique planet orbiting it being covered in mist.”
“Sivan, the successor to the Catastrophia Corporation, reached 5 000 total stats and is not able to fight the monster nests in the Deep Void dimension. Once he started to train in the fundamentals however, his progress became terrifying…”
And on and on.
Now at the end of the 8th month of the Ether Law awakening, historians would have to write everything Utopia said to really transmit how much every news was important at the moment.
After 1 month of real fighting training practice, where they grandly diverged 3 weeks in as they started to farm again at full power, the group of 4 became a lot more familiar with each other.
Adjusting their path and clearly expressing when their opinion changed or evolved, such was a true mark of friendship.
As a rululu, Utopia received their special education program about social interactions, so even though he was 16 years old, 5 years younger than Rune, he easily became the social core of their group.
His great observation skill and considerate mind made it so that he identified the preferences of his 3 friends and could adapt and understand what passed through their minds.
Rune had influenced everyone present and even the other 3 missing members, Adreana, Arik, and Gar, to take the time to try everything and have an impression of their own talent in different fundamentals.
Utopia had an above-average talent for momentum manipulation, and that was certain.
After only a week of fighting, he had dominated all the three versus one fights, only new dirty strategies sometimes getting a point out of him.
3 weeks later however, he was without opponents even when he held himself back, so he had to start doing absurd high-level training alone. It was at that time that they then all stopped fighting all day and restarted their farming schedule.
Soon, after they had their monthly sleep, unfortunately without contest of will, they were going to plan their next step with criticism from a rululu’s point of view.
They didn’t look forward to it, but it was inevitable that they were going to be spiritually abused by a 16 years old boy if they hadn’t very carefully thought about what they had planned to do.