“There are times where it is best to learn something by taking it slow and listening to the instruction of those who have come before, and sometimes the best way to learn something is to jump in the deep end. Not that our Forefathers had a choice. There was nobody that came before them, and they weren’t merely thrown into the deep end – no, they were launched out to sea. The odd thing is, all of them agree that this was necessary. If they had not been introduced to their new world in this fashion, then they would never have gotten the level of control they needed in time to do what they did.”
Excerpt from The Birth of Our World, 1006 A.B.
Christopher Leroy Knightsen
Congratulations on naming your first continent! Reward deferred until after you survive the ambush.
“Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound good,” I said.
“Nope,” Pamela replied.
Naturally, the next thing I did was look around to try and figure out where this ambush was coming from and came up with nothing.
“Do you see anywhere for the ambush to come from?” I asked.
“Nope. I see some kind of pine trees all around us near the horizon, and some sort of crystalline-mountain thing off in that direction, but other than that all I see is snow.”
“Huh. Your eyesight must be quite a bit better than mine because all I see around us is snow and sky with a vague green line between them.”
At this point, I realized that despite looking at everything around us we had yet to move our feet after the door disappeared. Pamela must have realized the same thing as we both took a step at the same time. I don’t think either of us knew where we were going, but we still took a step so we weren’t just standing there twiddling our thumbs.
Then a truck-sized creature burst out of the snow roughly six meters away from us, roaring as it came charging straight at us.
Both of us screamed incoherently and dove out of its way in opposite directions, which wasn’t a surprise. What was surprising is that as I dove I instinctually pulled a longbow from somewhere and shot the polar-gator in the roof of its mouth with an arrow made of light. I’m not sure whether it was my arrow or Pamela’s fireball that exploded and blew its head off, but either way, it was most definitely dead when we rolled back to our feet.
Before we could stop to think about what we’d just done, thousands of much smaller monsters came bursting out of the snow around us, clearly upset at the death of the larger one. These smaller monsters ranged from the size of a football to the size of a large dog, with the footballs outnumbering the dogs by a significant margin.
That was all I really had time to notice before a tidal wave of hunger and rage smashed down upon us.
Still operating on instinct, I shot the incoming horde twice with my longbow with six arrows in each shot for a total of twelve arrows. Each arrow then split into dozens of smaller ones completely decimating the first two ranks of monsters, giving me the moment I needed to switch my bow out for a war hammer.
The fight started to blur together for me at that point, and at first, I thought it was because I was desperately trying to fend off the monsters before they got to me, while also making sure that none of them got past me to hit Pamela from behind. However, it quickly became obvious to me that this fight was staged like the tutorial boss fight in a video game – the monsters would attack in a given manner until I had learned to beat them off with the most appropriate weapon. At each stage of the fight, there was an unknown something inside my head that was guiding me through each step.
What I learned was that I had six different weapons/weapon sets to choose from, and I could switch them out instantly whenever I wanted. These options were bow, longsword & shield, quarterstaff, spear, Warhammer, and the one I was most familiar with, katana & tanto. The tricky thing is that each weapon set was enchanted with elemental magic except for the last pair which was enchanted with pure or arcane magic.
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The other advantage of the tutorial function, once I got used to it and started to relax a bit, is that it gave me time to look at the monsters as individuals rather than a horde of furry mouths. They were a combination of a polar bear and a crocodile, with the head and tail of the croc, the legs of the bear and a torso that was an odd conglomeration of the two, all wrapped up in the fur, and (presumably) fat of the bear. All of them were surprisingly fast for their size, but they were rather predictable in their movements, making them much easier to fight.
Once the tutorial was satisfied that I knew everything that I needed to know, it paused and let me fight the remaining monsters of my own accord while we waited for Pamela to finish her Tutorial.
*****
Pamela Josephine Daniels
It took me a while to get used to the way that the Tutorial fight worked, but eventually, I was able to calm down and learn what it was trying to teach me. I may not have paid much attention to any sort of fictional setting back on Earth, but I knew enough to recognize that I now had elemental magic, namely fire and air. The early stages of the Tutorial forced me to separate the two magics and use them individually, flipping back and forth between the two faster and faster as the fight progressed. Only when I had sufficiently mastered them individually did it let me use them together.
The thing that scared me is that I could feel how much power I was wasting with each spell due to my lack of skill, yet the well of power at my center barely flickered, unmoved by my feeble efforts to drain it. Even when I finally got to combine the fire and air together, more than doubling the drain on my core, I was unable to put a significant dent in it. To make matters worse, once I finished with the combined section, the Tutorial informed me that it hadn’t done anything to increase the amount of power available to me.
Before I could panic, the Tutorial commanded me to take my core and wrap it around my body like a cloak. After being subjected to its drill sergeant esque behavior for an indeterminable amount of time, I obeyed without thinking. Unlike any of the other spells it had taught me, all of which involved pulling threads or beads of power from my core, this one wasn’t aimed at the world around me - it was aimed at me.
I was expecting a massive amount of pain, but it never came. While it did hurt briefly, it was completely overwhelmed by a feeling of freedom. When my vision cleared, my head was at least fifteen feet off of the ground, and my field of view was much broader than I was used to. I didn’t need to look down at myself to know that I had transformed into a bird of living flame.
Congratulations! Both of you have finished the first stage of the Tutorial: Individual Instruction! Prepare yourselves for the final stage of the Tutorial: Teamwork & Communication!
Before we could continue, one final polar-gator erupted from the snow, except this one was the size of an aircraft carrier, begging the question of how exactly it managed to hide under the snow. Like the ones that came before it, Papa polar-gator charged straight at us roaring his head off. Unlike all of the others, he was too big to move very fast, so his charge had a definite lumbering quality to it.
We both exploded into action as some facet of the connection between us, combined with the lingering influence of the Tutorial, allowed us to formulate a plan that should work in a single heartbeat. Given the size disparity, melee combat with Papa seemed like a bad idea, so we decided to try and stay out of his reach. I took to the sky, circling around Papa lobbing fireballs and wind blades at him from twice what I judged his actual range to be while Chris backed off and began charging a light arrow.
Sure enough, Papa quickly became enraged and tried to chase me around in circles, and I could feel the power building inside Papa, who was presumably charging up some sort of ability. Fortunately, Chris fired his supercharged arrow into Papa’s eye on the second half of the first lap, killing him instantly before he managed to get his ability off.
Congratulations! Both of you completed the Tutorial without a scratch! Normally I would reward you for completing a Quest without taking any damage, but, sadly, this option was disabled for the Tutorial. Instead, have this deferred reward from earlier:
Congratulations! You just named your first Continent!
Reward 01 (Necessary/Custom, Rare): Custom Fireproof (2,200° F) Camping Gear Set
Reward 02 (Rare): 250,000 exp. (Saved until the Global Leveling System Unlocks, requires Level 10)
Reward 03 (Necessary/Custom, Divine Providence): Civilization Founder’s Set
“Wat.”
“Understatement of the millennium.”