The morning air was cool and calm as a refreshing humidity brought about by the morning dew flowed across the room, carried in the gentle embrace of a light breeze.

On this beautiful morning, a lone boy stood in a room that held a giant tree at its center focusing every fiber of his being on his current task.

I slashed downward with my glave causing an audible bang. My body was leaning a bit too far forward causing me to hit the ground with extreme force.

A hint of frustration hit me but I let it go with an audible sigh taking a couple of steps back and restarting the weapon drill that I was performing without delay.

I grasped the wooden glave I was using to practice tightly then got into my stance once again.

I took a couple of deep breaths trying to reorient my mind while adjusting my position all the muscles in my body began to tense as I prepared to move.

I then took a step, thrusting my weapon forward in as straight of a line as I could manage to maximize the reach and force of my attack.

My melee instructor who would come twice a week to check my progress and give me tips had repeatedly hammered that point home.

He had a very loose teaching style focusing not on helping me master a specific aspect of combat or a specific weapon but simply giving me some basic principles to hammer into my very soul that would help me in the future.

According to him, I was far too young to do anything else than build a good foundation so he would build the absolute best foundation possible.

Every strike should be as straight and precise as possible, if you couldn’t get it right in practice there was no way that you would be able to do it in actual combat.

Even with my full effort put into following my teacher's advice, my stab was anything but straight, and my movements were anything but precise no matter how hard I tried to place them perfectly.

It honestly felt embarrassing to be this garbage at something even though I was the only one currently in the room to see my mistakes.

Especially since my only frame of reference for how good or bad I was supposed to be were Kent and my melee instructor who were both amazing.

Kent and my two sisters were currently on the second floor in a room with high mana density to practice manipulating mana which would help them summon creatures more efficiently.

I almost restarted the drill right there but I took another long deep breath and reminded myself that perfect was the enemy of progress. I need to take this one step and a time.

Twisting my body while moving my back leg forward I tried to do as straight of a swipe as I possibly could, using the momentum from the slash. I switched back to my main leg while bringing the glave over my head swiping my weapon downwards with all the force my body could muster.

My weapon still hit the ground but the sound it made this time was a lot softer than the last one.

I took a couple of steps back and restarted the drill again from the beginning repeating the exact same motion I just finished performing trying to iron out any mistakes.

Using my entire body to perform a movement was much more difficult than I expected.

The moment my body started to fail, preventing me from completing the drill properly I sat on the floor to catch my breath.

I didn’t let the time pass ideally though while my body was at rest my mind was destroying itself trying to figure out the flaws in my technique, coming up with plans to defeat Kent, and planning out my next couple of exercises and days to maximize my efficiency.

Then once my concentration began to wane and my mind began to wander I got up again grasped my wooden weapon and began repeating the drills over and over again slowly perfecting my technique more and more with each swing.

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Stamina pumped through my muscles allowing me to move with unnatural force compared to my small size and my trait Endure allowed me to keep up with the intense training for long periods of time.

I was handicapped in my recovery speed due to my Polluted Soul but the food at the mansion was made specifically to help with both physical and mental recovery.

Eventually, it didn't feel like I was pushing through fatigue anymore, in fact, I felt a strange sense of happiness filling my body.

Stab Slash Strike

Stab Slash Strike

Stab Slash Strike

The unending flow of these motions sent me into a trance. I was falling in love with not just fighting but the mere act of swinging the glave.

At that moment the drill I was doing filled my entire being.

Everything I thought felt and wanted disappeared being replaced by one all-consuming desire.

To release all of the pent-up energy I had been building up till now.

Suddenly while being lost in the drill I slashed downwards causing a massive bang but I didn’t hit the floor.

I had performed the strike as close to perfect as my current self could have.

I felt as if a rush of power filled my muscles as they had the most intense contraction I had ever felt in both of my lives.

A beam of gray light shot out from the blade of why glave which flashed forward cutting the ground open until it ran out of steam and disappeared.

The ground slowly started to stitch itself back together as if growing into itself until it looked exactly as it had before.

The only difference was the strange carpet that was apparently inches deep was slightly lighter where the cut was made than the carpet surrounding it.

My pupils dilated as I felt a rush of clarity hit my mind.

I had never felt anything like that in my life nor had I ever performed an attack like that before.

It was as if I had obtained some daring secret of the universe, my mind, body, and soul all feeling one step closer to each other.

A couple of maids ran into the room trying to figure out what went wrong and called my name but I just stood there motionless trying to process all the information which was flooding into me.

[Congratulations you have learned the skills Basic Slash, Basic Stab, and Basic Swipe Level 1 Designation (Pole-Arm, Glave)]

I froze as a previously unfamiliar presence once again filled my mind, images and information flashed across my brain as phantom sensations filled my body engraving an alien technique into very bones.

That was another one down with thirty-seven more to go.

I was getting so close and the more melee skills I learned the easier it became to learn new ones.

A rush of excitement filled my body so much so that I almost jumped around the room.

Seeing that I was ok, the maids who entered the room to cheek on me simply left me alone while continuing on with their day.

I learned how to do these drills from my secret weapon book “Basic Weapon Training” by anonymous which gave basic attack patterns for 200 hundred different melee weapons.

All with the purpose of giving you the simplest exercise you can perform to get your first skill related to said weapon.

Using these drills I had already learned basic skills for twelve different melee weapons including the one I used against Kent during our first sparing match but I still need to learn a lot more if I was going to make my long-term strategy work.

I only had about seventy-two more days to get this right which was when I scheduled my fight with Kent to be.

While I practiced the drill I made sure to think about how useful they would be against Kent's move.

I gripped my hand, when my injuries from my first fight with Kent were done healing I thought the speed at which I could train would massively increase but now I was dealing with a new problem which was fatigue.

Muscle soreness ravaged my body due to a mixture of my daily workouts, my low Constitution, and the classes I still had to do regularly.

Eating well along with the wonders of this house which filled me with Vitality simply wasn’t enough to keep up with the constant strain.

I was constantly feeling the push of my Endure trait which was the only thing keeping me sane and functioning on a day-to-day basis.

I knew that I wouldn't be able to complete my normal workout today so I would have to restart my advancement from the very beginning once I had a week or two to recover.

I was hoping that I could complete it before my second fight with Kent but it looked like that wouldn't be in the cards.

I didn't know what the Athletic trait would do but the extra stats would have been a humongous help to me in the fight.

Something else which I found fascinating was that I would periodically get increases in my physical stats while I was training however about two weeks ago I completely stopped getting them

For right now my stats looked like this;

Attributes:

Strength: 4 - > 7

Dexterity: 5 - > 8

Constitution: 4 - > 6

Intelligence: 35 - > 38

Wisdom: 2 - > 3

Willpower: 6 - > 10

Charisma: 3 - > 3

Awareness: 2 - > 2

Poise: 3 - > 5

Seeing that my stats were no longer increasing from working out and that I had failed to complete the [Super Human Training] the only option left to me to defeat Kent was the training that I was currently doing.

I picked up the book I left on the floor which gave me the drills I picked up a wooden pocket knife from the corner of the room which I brought to practice.

And I began my training in a completely different weapon than the one I was just training with.

***

Just like that the seventy-two days I had to train flew by almost without me noticing.

I stood in the middle of a small crowd as I braced myself for the inevitable confrontation.

I looked my opponent in the eyes he looked back unflinchingly as though he was just doing some mundane chore.

He didn’t know how far I had come in the past couple of days.

I held my sword firm in my hand and got into my stance.

What I learned from this encounter would determine if I will be able to beat Kent on my final attempt.