Naked push-ups were miserable. I tried exactly one before a blade of grass ended up somewhere it never should have. After that, I discovered that squats weren’t much better. Sadly, god hadn’t been kind enough to provide me with a gym in this boring world, so I could only work with what I did have.

I found a tree that wasn’t painted on a wall and used its most stout branch for pull-ups in between sprinting. Jogging was just too time inefficient, and I really didn’t want to accidentally run into a wall again.

To top it all off, the large sun-like object in the sky also appeared to be fake. Not only had the god who made this little test server been too lazy to properly program in anything besides grass and exactly four trees, he’d failed to even make a day night cycle.

This was my life now. I sprinted back and forth until I had to stop and then went for a round of pull-ups until I dropped. With survival mode off, working out was different than it had been before. Once upon a time, I spent all my evenings in the gym, back before work began to completely drain me. So I was very familiar with the comfortable burn post workout, the feeling of satisfaction that came from a job demonstrably well done as your body improved itself, one muscle fiber at a time. Running into the wall had given me my first taste of pain in this world and my exercise had been the second, but both had something in common: pain wasn't as sharp and faded fast.

As such, after collapsing from my first round of pull-ups, my legs had already fully recovered. The same went with my sprinting. Pretty soon, the post exercise burn was a thing of the past, my muscles recovering faster than I could even burn them out. With no ability to add weight, I was quickly hitting the limits of what I could accomplish. At least, without getting creative.

I don’t know how long I’d been training by the time I decided to try something obviously stupid. The sun didn’t move and my body had no needs that would serve to track the days. Yes, I had evolved past the disgusting base needs of the flesh to fill itself with food and flush itself of feces, and all it cost me was my sanity.

I stood before my workout tree, bouncing back and forth on the balls of my feet. I’d grown faster. Probably. Time and distance were hard to measure here, so it was mostly a guess. I was stronger for sure, though, and hadn’t been able to burn out on my exercises no matter what I did. Not that I was willing to tempt fate by kissing the grass with my groin; I wasn’t that crazy. Yet. Though if this went terribly enough, I just might start reconsidering.

Solemnly, I stared down my opponent, called him a son of a birch, and kissed my fist. I then whispered the ancient prayer to them, “Make me like Mike,” as I imagined myself as the face-tattooed legend. I’d been in plenty of fights in my life, but proper boxing wasn’t something I’d ever trained in. Time to see if watching those matches could do me any good.

Pulling back my fist, I imagined it going straight through my target. That’s what he’d talked about in interviews, right? What an absolutely batshit insane and terrifying concept. Just rotate my hips, extend my shoulder, and let my fist fly through the tree trunk like some superhuman.

My body followed the mind, striking out with the greatest and most explosive strength I could muster. The leaves rustled in time with a loud thunk, the tree shaking slightly from the impact as the feeling of skin splitting against bark was drowned out by the shooting pain of my fingers breaking.

“Fuck that hurts!”

Pain being duller here was mostly relative. It faded quickly enough, usually, though the broken bone feeling stuck around for a bit longer. It would fade in time. Probably. It did when I ran into the wall at least, and that definitely broke my nose. There was just no way that I ran straight into a wall without slowing down and didn’t break something. And yet, here I was some indeterminate amount of time later, breathing just fine despite having no need to. Old habits and all that.

“Stats.”

Lawrence Schlager

Classes

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

None

Ability Scores

Health: 88/120

Strength: 36

Agility: 34

Resilience: 12

???: ???

Passive Skills

Infinite Scaling

Active Skills

None

I checked my health, and saw that my brilliant display had tanked it quite a bit. So breaking a couple fingers did over thirty damage, good to know.

“Wait, what?”

I hadn’t been checking my numbers all that often, but those strength and agility numbers grew like crazy! I tripled them in no time flat! Probably. Einstein was right, this shit is relative.

“Health.”

If a single punch, painful as it was, could increase my resilience by two points, then I needed to get back into it. I should probably figure out how much of a beating I can take first, but that was easy enough.

Health: Derived from resilience. This measures how much abuse your body can take before death. Recovery rate is also determined by resilience but isn’t displayed.

That made resilience crazy important but also dangerous. I didn’t know whether strength gains in this world worked the same as Earth, but you couldn’t put on new muscle without tearing the old ones. Well, this was obviously different since I was on a zero calorie diet and still gaining mass, but that just left me with more questions than answers. So nothing new there.

I had to settle for just sprints while my hand slowly repaired itself. Were I slightly crazier, I may have just swung with my left while waiting on my right, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it so soon after the pain came in.

It didn’t take long for the bones to snap back into place with shockingly little pain. Following that, I was back to doing more sets of sprint-ups while keeping a closer eye on my stats. It took a while but I finally noticed something.

“Even though I’m not getting sore anymore, like at all, my stat growth rate hasn’t changed. Man, this skill really is strong!”

It didn’t take long for my health to top off either. All in all, it seemed like my exercises kept bearing fruit no matter how easy they got. With my hand fully recovered and my resilience not improving, there was only one thing to do.

I really didn’t want to, though.

“Fuck! I’ll never not feel like an idiot for punching a tree. Maybe kicks would be smarter.”

There were a bunch of rules I had for myself as a kid, despite being the kind of person who hated rules. The first of them was to never fight someone who knew how to kick. I never really learned how to do it myself, but I’d seen how much more damaging that shit was when compared to a punch. No way in hell was I going to be on the receiving end of that.

But what if I was the one who kicked? That would be pretty good. Images flashed through my mind of me flying through the air, one leg extended as I blasted through walls while screaming my lungs out. It was more achievable than nunchucks right now, and I really didn’t have many options.

It didn’t take long for me to convince myself of this brilliant idea, but actually getting the form right was something else entirely. After a couple dozen attempts at the empty air, I finally felt like I could kick halfway competently. It was way faster than I expected, all things considered. Probably my agility at work. Not falling over at any point was also probably thanks to my stats. With numbers this good, my plan had to be foolproof.

I stood in front of my old nemesis, arms raised to my shoulders as I took a praying mantis stance. My right leg pulled up until my knee was level with my hip as I prepared for what I named “The Tree Felling Strike.” In a flash, my leg lashed out, my shin striking the trunk at blazing speed as the force caused groans to fill the clearing. My groans, of course.

“Fucking hell! Stupid piece of shit, Law! What were you thinking?”

I cursed myself out while sitting on the ground, clutching my leg in agony. As I sat there, complaining, I saw a sentence float up in front of me.

Skill unlocked: Unarmed Combat

“Oh? Well don’t mind if I do. Let's give that a look.”

Rather deliberately, I moved right past my dangerously low health as I inspected my brand new ability.

Unarmed Combat: Improves your coordination and power when fighting without a weapon.

“The kicking was worth it after all. Sorry about the insults, buddy. You’re doing great.”

I gave myself some encouraging words while lying on the grass, blades going wherever they pleased. The pain was still incredible, as if my shin was split in half. I decided against looking down, just in case it actually was.

“I still think we should cut kicks. Just for the time being.”

Without knowing how much time I had left for my training, I needed to make the best of it that I could.