Rune had considered the game of cat as an entertaining game, but he had never played a game of cat with 1 mouse and 6 cats, so his past opinion didn’t reflect his present opinion anymore.
‘Cosmic Ether!’
Rune had the whole room to try and escape, but that wasn’t sufficient.
The fighting camp was celebrating its last day today, at the end of the 14th month.
It had been 2 months since its start, and if regular people were to become part of it now, they would feel they were training together with a group of geniuses.
Rune displaced himself and evaded a hit from Astryde by a hair.
A two-way spell fired by Gar and Adreana forced him to use all his energy in a reinforced jump.
What awaited him after that was Arik, Utopia, and Nelo surrounding him.
Rune rushed for the closest opening, where Nelo was, but Nelo didn’t back down. He was a spellcaster, but so what?
He did a simple body block tactic, not caring about the massive openings he showed.
Rune perceived Astryde approaching like a cannonball from ebhind, so he did all he could to bypass Nelo, but even after taking 4 successive kick combos, he succeeded in creating an energy bomb and used it as a threat for if Rune still tried to pass him by.
His stubbornness had reared its head at the worst time.
Having no more choice after this 5 seconds long exchange, he could only engage with Arik and Utopia, then Astryde, and then the ring disqualified him.
“Someone tickle Nelo to death! I’ll owe you one!” Rune let his frustration take over and pointed an accusatory finger at the culprit of his defeat.
His weakness of being susceptible to tickle had been revealed by his sister when he enraged her so much she tickled him to the tears some weeks into the camp.
Astryde immediately grabbed her brother to prevent him from escaping. Followed by Utopia crashing into Nelo and starting tickling him to death.
“Hahaha! No! Stop! Hahaha! I’ll stop that ok! No! Haha!”
“No excuse for the wicked!” Utopia successfully caught Rune, but only because Nelo literally “died” before his eyes, it was inexcusable, so he used his whole being to tickle the sinner.
With Nelo dying from laughter in the background, Adreana gave the result of Rune’s escape, “You ran for 2 minutes and 42 seconds, very far from your best, but I’ve got no comments. The stubbornness of Nelo is entirely in cause, you could’ve burst his head with a custom reinforced punch at the end.”
3 minutes later, Nelo stood up, he had finally been absolved by the decree of Rune.
“That was the last! I wanted to clearly show that sometimes a lunatic or a mindless monster will be in your way and you’ll not have the choice! I’m the reasonable one here!” Nelo defended himself with a dumb argument.
“I’ve long been ready for this,” Rune countered, “No need to show your will of steel to me! And it’s not because you can follow my moves now that you have to try and block me, you could have just used a few pulses and it would have disturbed me enough.”
“You still had your platform escape move, I only brought you closer so that you couldn’t run away,” he was so sure that what he did was right that Rune stopped trying.
“So it’s over just like that… Go Utopia, do an ending speech, I don’t care anymore,” Rune concluded the conversation by mock-pouting.
“Hu-um!” Clearing his throat, Utopia waited for everyone to tune to his voice, he then reactivated gravity, and even Rune felt strange at this change.
During the monthly sleep period, Arik proposed that they all did a practice of sleeping with no gravity, as if they were sleeping in the Void Dimension or Deep Void Dimension.
Except, one of them stayed awake and launched an inoffensive but painful energy bullet at those who were peacefully sleeping, with of course no cheating allowed as it was the AI overseer who said when someone was truly asleep.
“According to the timeline, we should have reached the forefront of the pioneers. The time for a new announcement by the Ether Law should soon arrive, so I advise everyone to enter the Deep Void Dimension and do the event as fast as possible, then go back to the Void Dimension and finish the 10 000 hours.”
“For our 3 spellcasters, I hope this camp allowed you to diverge from pure scholarly spell research, and for the rest, I hope that like me, you learned that there is no absolute path, only different paths.”
“Even if in my own opinion, when the fundamental masteries window finally appears, I expect that all spell casters will come to learn what we mastered and we’ll do the same for what they mastered, over!”
“Your tickets back to your home have already been sent, the next camp has no precise date, and maybe it’ll never happen, now literally every planet has a branch of the 3 path organizations anyway.”
“I also have some plans for later concerning making some money, but it’s still too early. I’ll post the idea on our group forum, it was my pleasure to train with all of you.”
On these words, they all started to say goodbye before leaving for their room.
In the end, Rune also wanted to go home. For so many months he had prepared like his life depended on it, so he couldn’t be frustrated if he was too weak for something anymore.
‘My twin brothers and twin sisters are in the new interdimensional curriculum of the IGS too… I wonder if they still have time to play hehehe!’
As a big adult brother, he couldn’t help but rejoice in their misery.
An entire month had passed since the IGS reformed the whole education system, but he had been too occupied with the situation of fighting for his life, so he was in complete ignorance of how the world had changed apart from the Ether Law having not done a major announcement.
Another thing he had missed was relaxing music sessions. The more he had thought about it during the camp, the more he had realized that music as entertainment was something he didn’t need to focus on to enjoy.
It was a universal entertainment for any situation.
‘Is it because I’m human that I’m so attached to music? Is it in my genes?’
The trip he had to take was the same one he used to come here, an intergalactic trip.
Time passed quickly after that.
The only major surprise being Arik taking the same spaceship as him. The two ended up discussing how abusively-good these companies were with all the amenities they had aboard.
The whole trip, they passed it at the bar and restaurant, enjoying the food made with always progressing energy infusion cooking and cocktail-making processes.
Rune was the first to descend, and 25 minutes later, he arrived back at his home planet, X125, its orbital space station to be precise.
Taking a shuttle to the nearest deposit point to his home, he walked the rest of the way back effortlessly.
Seeing his home again was a fine feeling, he entered and went up the stairs to put down his minimal travel gear, his bedroom had remained unchanged.
‘Why would it change?’
Rune then used his sphere to find his mom and dad, the two were in their room, but after so long he did something he didn’t realize.
He simply waved his hand in the direction they were in, thinking of a certain possibility. Most impressive was that his mom also waved her hand to welcome him back.
‘So penguinly awesome!’
The use of the perception sphere and resources was becoming mainstream all over the IGS, and it had changed the world.
Now, your old neighbor who had two feet in the grave was doing martial arts in his garden. If he had a rich retirement pension, he could train the fundamentals with his original body, and if he had no money, well… Maybe he’d still be able to explode your home by mistake with an energy bullet.
Today should have been a school day as he didn’t see his brothers and sisters in the home anywhere.
Thinking about his plan, he could think of few reasons worth enough for him to stay in the Void Dimension, he’d be able to max his stats very soon, and special resources last tier would come naturally as he maxed his stats too.
In contrast, the Deep Void event seemed a lot more activity-demanding.
Event
Deep Void Initiation
Gather a total of 10 000 monster cores: 1 000 000 EP
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Clean 10 monster nests: 1 000 000 EP
Reach the dimension’s boundaries: 1 000 000 EP
Find 10 rare resources: 1 000 000 EP
Successfully interact with a peaceful ether life form: 1 000 000 EP
Find living ether vegetation life: 1 000 000 EP
Completion Bonus: 10 000 000 EP
Fortunately, he could just search onboard and acquire intel able to greatly reduce the time he needed to understand each objective.
‘Deep Void Dimension’s boundaries… Too obvious to miss… Perception sphere will detect fluctuations… Waves of ether seemingly kilometers in length… If the event objective isn’t completed, go deeper, when your sphere stops sending any more information on what’s before you, just check the event and it should be claimable…’
And it was the same for all the other event objectives, rare resources were in monster nests, same for vegetation life.
‘It looks like only encountering a peaceful ether life form is pretty random. The optimized plan for reaching the 10 000 monster cores is to kill things and absorb the monster cores if you’ve not reached maximum tier 1 stats, otherwise, just touch the cores and they will still be counted for the millstone of the event.’
‘The most time-consuming one is cleaning 10 monster nests as finding them implies a long period of following where the most monsters are going.’
Everything seemed logical as he kept reading about the different event guides, so he approved of everything he read and was ready to begin.
Though before that, he still had something remaining to do.
‘I didn’t lose the good habits.’
Rune instinctively turned on his computer upon arriving, so it was ready to use now.
And so he looked for what he had missed, he wasn’t in a hurry to go, he still hadn’t seen Miro, Miri, Victoria, and Floria after all.
So he spent the next 4 hours catching up, 3 and a half watching entertainment and the rest watching condensed information summary.
It had to be said that passionate entertainers with 24 hours per day for 1 straight month at their maximum capacity were true monsters, they couldn’t help but keep pumping out masterpiece after masterpiece.
On the side, he quickly learned that the new education curriculum was an obligation for those below 18 years old without special intellectual capabilities dispensing them.
The new education system was designed to bring just enough competition to be healthy. Everyone had even started wondering how the old advisors from the IGS could be so innovative on this subject.
‘Their entire file is followed by a newly created AI core, this AI will still work even when the defective physics laws cease to exist, it's all new education tech designed specifically for them… They’re really going for it…’
Rune only realized now how much the IGS had invested in their education reforms. Every inhabited planet now had at least ten genius schools, and depending on population, up to thousands of subsidiary schools to those ten.
Of course not everything had changed. Universal education still started at 6 years old with the basic IGS principles and morality course, followed by all the normal schooling, from mathematics, science, language, all the way to history.
Those subjects would still be useful in the new Interdimensional Era, and going all-in on something wasn't the IGS-way.
As soon as the students passed a test to prove that they didn’t have psychological pathologies or deficiencies, they were ushered into a new additional Ether Law curriculum, with courses consisting of fundamentals training and information board manipulation.
And that was for everyone, there was for example an absorption course, where the students had to absorb ether resources as fast as possible.
It was only possible to change their curriculum at 12 years old. After passing another psychological test, the student could then choose to continue on pure Ether Law education, or they could go to more specialized and harder ones like patroller curriculum, adventurer curriculum, or even ether professions curriculum.
‘For the ether professions, also called energy professions, it depends on planet availability. If you have an energy cook ready to teach, then he’ll offer his service to the planet’s education system and teach a batch…’
The IGS thought of everything for their entire society to continue and smoothly transition to an interdimensional society it seemed, which was more than impressive from the point of view of Rune, a common average citizen.
‘Planet evacuation will start in short order once the planetary situation fully stabilized…’
Rune of course learned about this subtle subject, gravity was supposedly fatal, so the IGS was preparing to evacuate planets for them to migrate to newly created stations with full stable experimental ether techs.
The only reason no one had called for the end of the world and chaos didn’t spread everywhere was that as long as everyone had an avatar, they were fundamentally impossible to kill.
So, if suddenly a planet’s gravity killed all its inhabitants, the IGS would just have to send an order to accelerate the migration process.
The additional ether density needed to reach tier 1 was also astronomically more than what their Universe Dimension could reach in years, so overall, the transition was happening very smoothly.
As he continued to read, he perceived familiar people entering his perception sphere, and it seemed they perceived him too a few meters later. His twin little brothers Miri and Miro, as well as his twin little sisters Victoria and Floria, had come back home together.
He simply waved at them and smiled, nothing had really changed, he was back home, no matter if the era changed.
After waving at him, surprisingly, they rushed to his bedroom.
‘Do they need help with their homework?’
That was the only reason they would have dared knock on his door before.
He was a silent big brother, he had also proved multiple times that he would never refuse to help them, so in the end, he was a pushover big brother who loved his cute little brothers and sisters.
“Rune, come spar with us!” Miro shouted as soon as he opened his door.
Even with big dreams and ambitions, it seemed that his indecisive and shy side still existed, and the result of this was Miri and Miro waiting for his answer while Rune’s brain blacked out and answered in the best way possible.
“Ok.”
…
So here he was, with Miro preparing to rush him while he could see with his perception sphere that all the family was watching.
‘I told you Ether, I don’t need fame, so leave me alone and just open your dimensions to me.’
Self-derision was his go-to mentality in such an atypical situation.
It wasn’t overconfidence that he was feeling, but unless his little brother had learned for 24 hours each day and had masters teach them tricks on how to battle superior opponents, then he had no chance against him.
Even his stats were nearly maxed out, so sparring with him was literally a defective physics laws version of adult versus children.
‘Restrain yourself, you are at competent level body control, maybe even proficient, wait… I’m the big brother here, so I can just ask, right?’
“Want me to beat you as fast as I can or do you want to try and breach my defense?” Rune asked as amably as he could manage.
Maybe he had succeeded in correctly transmitting his confidence as Miro answered, “Let me try your defense!”
“Then you can go whenever you like,” Rune’s placid tone signaled the beginning of the battle. Or show-match at this level.
Miro rushed to him, he didn’t use any momentum manipulation and engaged him in close combat, a simple punch, a combo with a kick, a momentum manipulation on his second leg, a rotation, and another kick.
Rune didn’t evade, he blocked.
He wasn’t of a mind to flee, his little brother wanted to try himself at him, and he was here to help.
He blocked with his hands, sometimes he even had to use momentum to correctly block a jumped kick or a sweeping kick.
Miro was really into it, as Rune couldn’t retaliate, he could just combo his moves and focus on creating opportunities. But as much as he wanted, he had only started the new Ether Law curriculum for a month, so he was still a beginner.
“Take this, super punch!” And his super punch was the proper form of a punch. His feet were correctly placed, his torso rotation was good, he even mixed in momentum at the start to accelerate the whole.
Rune estimated the punch to have around 8 strength behind it, and that was the multiplied effect, Miro himself appeared to have 10 strength, so the power of this fist should primarily come from the acceleration.
To test his expertise, Rune aligned his body to execute a perfect block, he even used artificial gravity momentum to increase his weight.
The result was the punch stopping after pushing him for a few centimeters, which was a witness to the power behind this punch.
‘I didn’t take any health damage, I blocked it so easily?’
“My turn!” Miri exclaimed from the spectators' side and rushed at Rune
Without saying anything, Miro retreated and got back to the spectator’s zone.
‘In a way, that’s one of those legendary family activities, isn’t it?’
Thinking of the situation as a weird sort of new era family activity, he then began to spar with Miri.
What surprised him was Victoria and Floria wanting to spar too, but as the big brother and having already sparred with Miro and Miri, how could he say no?
So he later sparred with his two little sisters. And they packed as much of a punch as their two big brothers.
…
‘So he really went to a training camp…’
Florence Tudor was the name of Rune’s mother, her maiden name was Florence Atuvia, she was 39 years old and had lived a fulfilling life for nearly the entirety of it.
Her firstborn son was one of the seven mysteries of their household. He had developed a very peculiar mentality and personality through watching different entertainment that he received from his father during his childhood.
Her husband was the silent type, explaining from where her son got his silent mentality, children take after their parents after all.
She could still remember when Rune had only been 5 years old and “secretly” intruded into his father's room every day to watch him play video games, when her husband had ultimately conceded and allowed him to play, it was her first lifelike experience of seeing an angel.
They didn’t have experience raising children, and Rune had turned out to be a marvelous first-child, preparing them for the future double twins trouble in short succession.
The endless nights spent with the impossible-to-calm-down double twins marked them as fundamentally different from their already independent teenage big brother.
And in the end, he subtly became a model for his sisters and brothers.
While they were scolded for their nonsense, he spent as much time as he wanted on his own computer.
While they were limited on the number of candy they could take, he could take as much as he wanted.
‘He always managed himself so that we never had anything to say.’
The best example she could remember was when he chose by himself the college and diploma he wanted, he then did the automatic registration by himself and only asked for some documents…
After he tried to obtain them himself, of course. Pity him that everything was digital in that era and he didn’t have hacker capabilities or he wouldn’t even have asked.
‘And now he went to a training camp for 7 months, coming back stronger than his brothers and sisters who just started the new curriculum.’
She wasn’t only feeling a little weird, but also proud. Rune remained her son after all.
At the end of the spar, he showed his little brother and sisters a little bit of his personal energy training.
Floating energy shapes and intricate colored spheres rotated slowly, some bands of light appeared here and there, and in no time, dozens of spheres were rotating around his figure.
Colors that mixed and little explosions like miniature fireworks illuminated their perception sphere around the house’s backyard.
‘Didn’t he have a dream of becoming a fireworks maker when he was young?’
Rune probably didn’t remember, but for him to have gone that way in his energy training, his mind and habits still existed.
When he had been young and assisted at fireworks, a little dream was engraved in his heart, but the only thing remaining after all those years was him going to the yearly civilization festival to feel the shockwaves of fireworks and the colorful explosion in the sky.
After he finished his demonstration and expended all his energy, he announced that he was going to enter the Deep Void Dimension, hence sparring regularly would be difficult, but he always had his ears open so they could call him back if they wanted.
With this, he was gone again, to follow his own path.
‘He’s old enough, he doesn't need advice.’
And internally, his mother was supporting him.