Fighting was an art form that I wasn't quite used to yet. Since the start of the tutorial, I had been in plenty of fights but not enough to get truly comfortable.

Two months could do a lot to change a person and I only realized how much after experiencing it myself. My survival instincts always in overdrive, the constant pressure applied to live to see another day. It was hard not to change.

It reached the height of its crescendo during the waves. The pressure ebbed and flowed from day to day but the waves were its peaks. The time when it all came together to force you to become more. Become better.

It was an ever-increasing training regimen that was designed to kill you. I had no misguided thoughts about that now. For whatever reason, this tutorial was designed to kill us.

Out of the thousand-plus participants pulled in here, over half were most likely dead. Without Austin and me, my family would surely be dead. We held the bulk of the waves off previously and were just now receiving help.

Better late than never.

I knew more would die. I knew that five graves wouldn't be where it ended and it took a long time for me to come to terms with that. Life wasn't fair and we were getting the short end of the stick right now.

There were benefits to the harsh treatment we were receiving. If we were in a safer tutorial, I didn't think I would be as strong as I was now. I wouldn't have the Law that I did and I wouldn't have a Rare class.

Most likely, I wouldn't be in the F-Rank. Necessity was the great motivator after all. Necessity drove every living thing forward and without it, I wouldn't be the same person I was.

Fate, destiny, whatever you wish to call it was a cruel bitch. It didn't care about feelings nor wants. It did what it wanted whether you wanted it to or not.

I spent a long time angry after Granddad's death. I cycled through emotions and anger was the one I frequented the most. It was easy to be angry, to hate the things that you couldn't control, but it also did nothing to change them.

Hate and anger were emotions that were only helpful in moderation. If a mind was filled with hate, it left little room for anything else. It took me a while to understand that.

Some of the waves, I let [Barbarian's Rage] take over to let it out, to grieve in my own way. Crushing monsters with my hammer helped, but it wasn't perfect. At the height of my anger, I even upgraded my skill.

That had been when I was the most restless and had gone a few days without sleep. I thought sleep was wasted time and used all of it to train. It led to mistakes while fighting and a self-deprecating spiral of more anger.

At the end of the tunnel, my skill upgraded.

You have upgraded a skill:

Barbarian's Rage(Common) -> Barbarian's Fury(Uncommon)

Barbarian's Fury(Uncommon) – Channel your fury into your body to break your limits. Temporarily increase the effect of all stats by 15% at the cost of increased stamina consumption. Once the effect wears off, your body enters a state of weakness based on the duration of the boost.

Having the skill upgrade into [Fury] felt right. It made the skill harder to control but that was of little consequence now. I wrangled the skill just the same as I did last time.

I wouldn't have a skill control me.

The boost it gave increased to 15% rather than the 10% it was before and my ever-increasing stats just increased it further.

With the new skill I picked up, my stats would soar to unknown heights. [Momentum of the Avalanche] would double my stats after two hours of fighting and [Fury] would increase them further.

I doubted that the boosts stacked on top of each other but it was still a great skill. It made me reconsider how to sustain the fighting. To get the biggest boost from [Momentum of the Avalanche] I would have to fight for two hours.

I could do it, and I had done it before, but it was difficult. I couldn't go all out from the start or I wouldn't last the full two hours. I had to start small and sustain it throughout the battle.

[Fury] would make it even worse. Similar to [Rage], it drained stamina at a tremendous rate and after fighting for two hours, I had little more to give. It would only be used in emergencies outside of using it on the boss.

This being my first wave with my new skill, I felt it building up while I was fighting.

The wave started the same as all the others, and by this point, it was repetitive. The monsters were spiders of some kind and I didn't care to use [Identify].

They would die all the same.

They were hideous things that I didn't care to look at. They were the size of a small horse and had chitin covering them for protection. It did little to stop my hammer. Blunt damage was perfect for these foes and the cold was even better.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

My ice froze joints and the blows with [Frostbite] were debilitating. If I didn't take off the limb from the force of my swing, it froze through from the skill. I couldn't use it every swing, as I didn't have infinite mana, but enough to use it sparingly.

[Momentum of the Avalanche] activated as soon as I swung at the first spider and it started small. As the battle continued and the bodies built up, it built up as well. It felt like the pressure building up behind a dam and it only went up.

The feeling was odd but not painful. My body was tough and could handle the amount of boost it was currently getting but it was something to look into. We were only 20 minutes in and the boost still had a long way to go.

Any way you looked at it, 100% was a lot to handle. A doubling of every one of my physical skills. It would take some getting used to and I didn't know what it would feel like when it reached the peak.

The sounds of battle drowned out everything in my vicinity and my focus narrowed to the space around me. It was always overwhelming to be surrounded by foes.

Sound wouldn't reach me and any shouting was futile. It made it so I didn't have a clue what was going on behind me. When Jack died, I didn't find out until after the wave was over.

There was a constant worry that someone was already dead while I fought and that feeling only pushed me further. Any attention not on my enemies was a distraction I couldn't afford.

My dance of death was getting better with experience. The more I mastered [Ice Manipulation], the better I got. As my mastery of the skill increased, it cost less mana to maintain and took less stress on the mind.

The constant strain helped increase my mental power as well and it only made me that much better. All the different resources I had to manage were annoying. Stamina while fighting, mana for skills, mental strain for manipulation and laws.

It made me think about the three paths of power we were told about. Body, Mind, and Spirit. Body referred to stamina and mana for some reason. It was something I couldn't explain, but both were under the Body umbrella.

Mind was a mental strain. The amount my Mind could handle while using certain skills and Laws. Just the same as [Heavy Blow] took stamina to use, [Ice Manipulation] stressed the mind.

Spirit was the only one left out. It was said to be the most powerful and I had no clue about how to use it. I had experimented to no avail and we were told that it was something personal.

We did get some clues about what to do from the different information we bought. It was supposed to be the most powerful of the three and the hardest to train. Everything I did resulted in nothing.

Funnily enough, it was Jonathan who had the most experience with it. I had lectured everyone about how I gained my Law and what it felt like and everyone knew what to expect.

Jonathan said he had these...feelings during battle that were hard to explain but he knew they weren't laws. He said it was more fundamental than that and was targeted at who he was.

How he knew that and what the feelings were, he couldn't explain. All he said was you'd know when you felt it.

It was frustrating, to say the least.

There were only four of us who had Laws. Austin and I got them before the F-Rank evolution while Jonathan and Rachel got them after. Them getting their Laws after the evolution to F-rank made them miss out from the rarity upgrade that I had received. They still got powerful Uncommon classes from how strong they were, just not the Rare ones Austin and I had. Hal was getting close with his but there wasn't a good spot to help him with it.

I had the mountains I could go to for Ice mana. We built Austin a small conservatory of glass lenses for light laws. Rachel hung out near the fires in the forge for Fire Laws and Jonathan dug a little hole for his Earth laws. Wind was hard to produce and hard to find sustainably.

Body was something that we couldn't do. It was the easiest to find information on and we got it from other factions. The System was adamant about not giving up information so we turned to fellow humans for help.

Anyone we met we questioned them on what they knew. Most knew less than us, but there was the occasional surprise. Somewhere down south, a man figured out how to do it.

It was hard to pierce through the rumors and get to the heart of the story but we did our best. It was said that he fought a scorpion beast way above his level and nearly died in the fight. The man's entire party died and he was the only survivor.

Venom from the stinger raged through his body and no healing potion would work. He dragged himself back to his camp where healers worked through the night to save him.

It was a constant battle where he nearly died multiple times due to the venom. After pulling through and a week of recovery, he woke up. A new section was added to his sheet and he told everyone he now had a Body of Wood.

I assumed that it was the Body Refining that the alien referred to.

The reason that we couldn't do it was because I couldn't afford to be laid up for a week. There were only 9 waves left, 8 after this one, and I couldn't miss 3 of them to do it. If I timed it right it would only be 2 but it didn't change that fact.

I couldn't afford to not be there. Plus, durability was my strong suit anyway. Increasing my already high durability wasn't worth missing the waves. At least in my opinion.

Some of my family wanted to try it though, and Connor was working on a poison to do it. The risk of finding a monster venomous enough for it to work was too high and a poison would work best.

A controlled environment to mitigate as much risk as possible.

I wasn't sure if I was comfortable with them risking death like that, but I kept my thoughts to myself. It would be hypocritical to throw myself into battle and deny them the chance to improve.

The feeling of the momentum building made me focus on the battle again.

It was really building up now. It was an hour into the wave and I felt amazing. My strength was enough to pulverize the spiders and I feared my hammer breaking.

With the boost, my strength was over 300. Even with my Law and skills, my hammer cracked from the strain. The handle was not handling it well. Ha. The hammerhead was fine, it was not the one to give out during the fight. The spider's shell cracked before my hammer would, but the speed I was swinging it stressed the handle.

I needed to control it better than what I was doing currently. The monsters couldn't get any deader and breaking my weapon was stupid.

Limiting my strength was difficult. I never had to regulate how much force I used before and it was proving difficult. It was always the opposite, needing to give it everything I had. I couldn't help but grin at that, it was a good problem to have.

An [Ice Fortress] blocking the gate was enough to give me a breather while I reinforced my hammer again. I worked through and refroze all of the cracks. As soon as I was ready, I exploded the wall with [Shatter].

I watched as the wall exploded outward into the monsters, easily killing the ones nearest. [Shatter] was quickly becoming one of my favorite skills and its use was quite fun as well.

The force combined with the amount of projectiles launched was dependent on the strength and size of the ice. Ice pulled together with [Ice Manipulation] without any Law exploded with less force than an [Ice Fortress] empowered with my Law.

Even though it wasn't named [Ice Wall] anymore, that was how I used it most often. A wall was the most useful with how I was fighting and it was a waste to use more. I could surround myself with it like before but when the monsters were only coming in one direction it was overkill.

Sustain was the name of the game and I did everything possible to make my fighting more efficient.

Explosions rocked somewhere behind me but I couldn't look.

My place was here.

My job was to hold the gate and I wouldn't fail in my duty.