Chapter 6 Underwater Training

(Note: I love those moments in a story that we see the protagonist growing in strength. That’s why in this story I want to write in detail just how my character grows. I apologize if it seems a little tedious. I promise there will be some serious action in the next chapter.

Also, I apologize for not responding that often to the comments. I did at first but now I’m afraid that I’ll give spoilers if I respond to some of them. I do read them though.

Finally, I’m really new to the site, and I would appreciate it if someone could tell me how to do a simple table or textbox. It would make it easier for me to display information about skills or proficiencies.)

For several weeks, Kiro trained in the woods outside of Astelam. From Master Roderick he obtained several lengths of rope, a big backpack and several bags.

He filled the backpack and bags with stones and used the ropes to secure them to his body. Dressed in this fashion he ran through the woods, jumped over logs and climbed over rocks like he did the on the first day.

Every day he pushed himself to run faster and farther than the day before.

He also never took the same path twice, because this way he had to force himself to constantly pay attention to his surroundings to avoid tripping and falling or hitting an obstacle, as every time he did he’d lose a lot of health because of the weight of the stones he carried. Falling too many times could also reduce the durability of his clothes and bags.

He would run, jump and climb as fast as he could until his stamina was completely exhausted, then eat a piece of bread and resume running when he recovered his stamina.

By doing this for several hours every day, he easily raised his running, climbing, obstacle clearing and even falling proficiencies. He also increased his strength, agility, dexterity, vitality and balance stats. And by stretching during breaks he also raised his flexibility.

Of course, every day he added more stones, or at least changed the stones he had for heavier ones, in order to make his training more difficult. Because of that his strength stat soared.

He even once tried to run with a log trailing behind him. It went okay until he mistakenly ran into a pack of plant-looking monsters who started chasing him. They were some of the slowest monsters in the game but they were still fast enough to keep up with him as he had that huge log tied to his waist. He spent a desperate half-hour trying to untie it as he felt them slowly creep closer and closer to his rear.

After that he kept clear of logs for a while.

Later in the day, he did another type of training, to learn to successfully dodge, block and take hits.

He had carefully picked his opponents beforehand. He choose to spar with the plant type monsters (those that were chasing him as he ran with a log tied to his back), because under normal circumstances, they were actually very easy to run away from. In addition to this, they’re only weapon were weak vines that only stung a bit. Truly, the only dangerous situation that could occur while confronting such monsters was if they attacked in great numbers.

Thus, as long as Kiro remained conscious of his surroundings, he could train to his heart’s content.

At first he carefully selected a plant monster that looked isolated, then let it attack him once. The vine that it flung at him were full of leaves that gave Kiro the feeling he was being attacked by a rope made of several rags tied together.

He let the monster attack him, carefully assessing the different attacks it used and the time interval there was between each attack.

Then, after his health had depleted to about half, he started running around the plant monster, dodging its strikes. They were slow and very predictable, so they were easy to dodge.

After doing that for a while, his stamina was low, so he simply stood in one place and blocked the strikes with his wooden sword or daggers. That was harder than dodging because the vines would curl around his weapons, forcing him to push them off with his hands frequently.

There were two reasons he was using the wooden weapons instead of the iron sword he had gotten from Master Roderick. One of them was that because the wooden weapons were invulnerable, he could parry as much as he wanted without ever worrying about the condition of his weapons. The other was because they did no damage, so there was no risk of him killing the monster which would have forced him to search the forest for another isolated one.

It allowed him to counter-attack after every hit without worry, making his blade proficiencies rise without him having to pause to search for other prey.

Also, every time hit the monster at the exact same spot several times in a row, his Consecutive Single Point Strike skill would rise, and it grew more every time he hit the same target consecutively. As his wooden weapons did no damage, he could do 10, 20, 40 strikes consecutively like this, which would have been impossible with a normal sword, as the monster would die right away.

As a result, his skill leveled up insanely fast.

After dealing with a single plant monster became too easy, Kiro started taking on two at the time. Then three, four, five…

By the end of a week he could spend hours in a field full of plant monsters without getting hit once or while parrying every attack. But that wasn’t surprising considering their low movement speed and attack rate.

One thing these monsters were useful for is that because of them Kiro was able to obtain three new proficiencies and a new special stat:

Dodging

You have learned to dodge blows. Leveling up this proficiency makes it harder to hit you.

Current level: Beginner lvl 2 – 6.70%

Attacks aimed in your direction have a 8% chance to miss.

Blocking

You have learned how to parry blows. Leveling up this proficiency gives a bonus to armor, your chance to block, and reduces the damage that blocking a powerful strike gives you.

Current level: Beginner lvl 1 – 97.08%

+2 armor

4% chance to parry an attack.

1% less damage from parrying a strong strike.

Though Body

Through taking several hits your body gets stronger. A stronger body can withstand more powerful blows.

Current level: Beginner lvl 2 – 11.22%

+ 3% Physical Resistance

Endurance

Endurance is the ability and determination to withstand hardship. It increases physical and mental resistance.

Current Endurance: 10

He was pleased with them but decided it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t satisfied with his progress so far.

He moved on to rabbits.

He would use his Intense Pace skill to aggro large amounts of them and used them to polish himself even more.

Back in the real world, his martial arts instructor had also taught him Judo. The principal of Judo is to use the enemy’s own strength against him.

One of the most important lesson Kiro had retained from his instructor was that you should never directly resist and attack.

When you are pushed, slide to the side and pull. If you are pulled, go beside him and push him off balance.

He tried to apply these principals in this world.

He didn’t just block the rabbits, he used his sword, or his dagger, or his bare hands to deflect their attacks and in the same breath, counter attack.

He didn’t just take their blows, he moved back at the same speed he was hit to nullify their effect.

He didn’t just blindly dodge blows that came at him, but took care to evade in a way that he would find himself in a good position to strike back or evade the next one.

With this training, he gained the passive skill Counter, which added to the damage he dealt while making a counter attack, the proficiency Deflect, which was a sub-proficiency of Block, the proficiency Footwork, which increased movement speed in battle as well as reduced the chance of being stunned or knocked down.

He also got a proficiency called The Art of Taking a Blow:

The Art of Taking a Blow

You know most ways of taking an attack, and have learned how to select the best method to use for every blow. This proficiency helps level up proficiencies and skills that help you deal with blows.

Current level: Beginner lvl 1 – 52.44%

Proficiencies and skills affected by this one level up 0.1% faster.

Proficiencies and skills affected: Dodging, Blocking, Tough Body, Deflect and Counter.

On a side note, after Kiro’s Intense Pace skill leveled up to Beginner lvl 4, each blow gave a small chance to stun, which made him very happy.

After dealing with rabbits became too easy, he moved on to foxes, then to other faster and stronger creatures. Every day he took on harder and harder challenges, fought more and more enemies at once, for the sake of levelling up his proficiencies faster.

He spent around 4 or 5 hours every day doing that.

After, he did some underwater training.

The lake was the Mad Carp’s natural habitat. Challenging it in such a place without preparations would be suicidal. That’s why he carefully selected a pool in the forest to use for his training.

It was beside a small river, which supplied it with fresh water and little fish. It was about two to three meters deep and had a diameter of about 10m.

He chose it after verifying that there was nothing in it but small fish and that they weren’t some long lost cousins to piranhas.

He decided to jump into the pool to start practicing. For this training, he equipped his iron sword, despite the risk of lowering its durability, because he wanted a sense of how it felt to swing it under water.

Several problems presented themselves right away.

The human body floats. Iron swords, not so much. For this reason Kiro was being dragged by his sword towards the bottom and it was a struggle to remain in a somewhat upright position. Moreover, as soon as he tried swinging his sword, his body was pulled with it, making him spin uncontrolledly the more he tried to swing it.

To counteract this problem, he decided to weight himself down. He tried equipping a backpack filled with stones, but that caused another problem: if he ever leaned back to much, the weight would drag him towards the bottom. As the backpack was extremely difficult to take of in this situation, he nearly drowned.

So instead, he used a rope as a makeshift belt, to which he tied many bags filled with stones or sand. The belt was secured with a simple knot and could be taken off in a second if there was any need.

This allowed him to swing his sword without risk of tumbling around.

But then another problem presented himself.

Simply put, moving underwater was difficult. The footing was slippery and treacherous, and the extra weight made his feet sink a bit in the soft bottom of the pool. Also, the pressure of the water itself made it difficult to move as it pushed against him.

Not only that, every time he tried to swing his sword to try and hit the numerous tiny fish in the pool, his strike created a tiny turbulence around the sword, which would sweep the fish he was about to hit and make the tumble away from his swing unharmed.

Trying to hit harder only increased the size of the turbulence.

It took him hours to figure out how to move, days to actually succeed at moving in the way he envisioned and weeks before it became natural.

He must not struggle to move against the current, but move with it. The trick was to never hurry, never push, never use any extra force, and never put any extra strength into his movements until the very instant of the strike. He had to let his every movement flow into the next one gracefully as if his limbs were being pulled by strings from a master puppeteer.

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As for his feet, the trick was to not move by stepping, but by gliding. His feet never completely left the ground, and his weight was always evenly distributed, except, again, for the moment at which he strikes.

Even his sword, instead of the awkward slices it used to do, would instead move with the current, as if it were guiding it towards its target.

At first he could only move slowly, and would frequently make mistakes which would cause many ripples. But as he got better and better at moving in this way, he started going faster and faster, until he reached a speed comparable to the one he had on the ground.

He could move underwater without disturbing it in the slightest and his sword would cut through schools of fish extremely fast. Of course, as the fish were too weak to even have a level, they gave no experience, but they were still awesome practice targets that wouldn’t run out because the river kept supplying the pool with more.

Training with the sword underwater apparently also caused the Sword Mastery proficiency to rise faster than normal, for which Kiro was overjoyed over. As it reached beginner lvl 6, it gave him a skill called Critical Strike which increased the damage from said critical strikes.

Kiro took this opportunity to also train with his daggers and unarmed underwater.

The way he trained himself to move gave him two additional proficiencies: Moving in a Difficult Environment, which reduced stamina consumption and increased movement speed in difficult environments, and the Parkour skill, which englobed the Running, Climbing, Obstacle Clearing, Falling and Moving in a Difficult Environment proficiencies in the same manner that The Art of Taking a blow did with its and also provided a bonus to movement speed and reduced stamina consumption.

As moving underwater in the way he did became more natural, he started subconsciously moving the same way on the surface, in every action be it walking, running, jumping, climbing, falling or fighting.

The effects were obvious at first glance.

Before, his movements in combat were fast, but sometimes lacked coordination. But after, they became much more fluid, precise and deadly (or at least they would be if he wasn’t still using wooden weapons). Each movement flowed into the next as if he were dancing. It was still very rough and lacked a little grace, but it was much improved from when he started.

He also tried to limit useless movements as much as possible both above and underwater, for a very obvious reason.

Underwater he had to hold his breath. That meant that the time he spent underwater was limited by his supply of oxygen.

Every movement he did depleted that supply of oxygen even faster, so he couldn’t move carelessly.

At first, he could only stay underwater for half a minute. Then, after he acquired the Holding your Breath proficiency, which increased his lung capacity and maximum stamina, that time increased, but very slowly. He still had to swim to the surface every few minutes to ease his burning lungs.

So he had to be careful about not moving for nothing.

On the bright side, holding his breath also apparently raised endurance, while moving underwater gave a bonus to balance.

So it was a very useful training for numerous things.

***

After about three weeks of training, Kiro was looking at his stats.

His strength, vitality, agility, dexterity, balance, endurance and flexibility stats were rising at a rapid pace, but he was unsatisfied about his wisdom and intelligence stats.

They had risen by 3 points each as he had though up his various training methods, but since then, they hadn’t risen at all.

Even though he didn’t think he would become a mage or a priest, he thought it would be a good idea to raise them in the same way he did his other stats, simply for the sake of keeping all his options open.

So, after thinking about it for a bit, he came up with several ideas that could help him raise these stats.

First, he briefly logged out of New World. After enduring several minutes of black nothingness, he reconnected automatically to the antechamber.

(*Note: I think I didn’t explain this clearly in previous chapters. The way Kiro’s VR pod works is a bit different from normal. When he logs out or dies in New World, Kiro is logged out of his pod. Then, after a few minutes, he is logged back in to the antechamber. The reason why there is a time interval is in the case of an emergency. For example, if there is a fire in the hospital, someone from the medical staff would force him to log out, then would be able to move him out, which would be dangerous to do if his mind was still linked to a virtual reality.

What happened in chapter 2-3 was that he had died so frequently in such a short time span that the system decided it would be dangerous to allow him to remain in the virtual reality. Thus he was forcefully logged out and his access to his pod was blocked for eight hours, and only after that time had passed he was allowed to log back in. But that wasn’t a normal occurrence.)

In the antechamber, Kiro quickly accessed several books he had read before. The books on memorisation. He quickly read through them again. He then accessed a small booklet that gave tricks on how to read faster, before finally starting to read a book that gave a detailed explanation on how to meditate.

Whenever you think of priests or mages, meditation always comes to mind. It was one of those preconceptions that Kiro though could actually have a grain of truth.

In any case, he’d try it out.

He logged back in to New World.

His next idea required that he visited the library, so he ran back to town and asked a guard where it was situated.

It was an old, two-story tall building that looked more like an elegant mansion from the outside than like a library.

Inside, there was an old, motherly-looking women behind a counter. There was also an open space with tables and chairs were people could read their books, while the rest of the space was filled with bookshelves. There was also a staircase leading up to the second floor and presumably more books. There was no one else in the library.

He went up to the counter.

When the lady saw him, she made a kind of gasping sound, and her eyes filled with moisture as if she was about to cry.

“Yes? What can I do for you dear?” She asked, her every fiber expressing her willingness to help.

Ah, that’s right, I forgot about that depressing title I have, thought Kiro.

“Ehem, I was wondering, do you have any books on mathematics, physics, chemistry, as well as some books on grammar, philosophy and perhaps maybe a book of history?”

“Excuse me dear, I’m not quite sure what you mean.”

Kiro explained:

“Textbooks. You know, books that outline the basic theory and then offer a selection of questions to test your knowledge. I’d like to learn more about those topics.”

The librarian’s eyes became moist again.

“Yes, I understand, please wait a sec, dear, I’ll be right back.”

She got up and scurried of between the bookshelves, with great haste. A few minutes later she hurried back, with a pile of books taller than herself.

She put them on the counter with a loud bang and a large smile, and said:

“Here you huff, huff, go, dear, huff!”

“Thank you.”

Kiro looked over the books she had brought. By opening the first one he saw a short introduction:

I am the great sage Melomilantus. For years I have pursued knowledge in the sacred field of Mathematics. Now, with my life nearing its end, I have written this book in the hopes of guiding others down this path…

It was definitely what Kiro was looking for.

After carefully examining every book, he saw that he had three medium sized book which each outlined basic philosophical or moral theories, a book on basic grammar, another on how to write logical essays, a big book of chemistry, two on physics and another three on mathematics.

There was also several about topics he had already covered extensively in school, so he put them aside as he figured he wouldn’t gain anything from them.

Looking at the librarian he asked:

“Can I borrow these?”

“Of course you can, dear! Actually, keep them! They’re a gift.”

“How can that be? Don’t they belong to the library?”

“It’s fine.”

He was about to argue more, but seeing her eyes once again filling with tears, he gave up, thanked her, and left.

Honestly, sometimes, he couldn’t decide how he felt about his title. It was undeniably useful, but at the same time, he had the impression he was conning people out of their belongings.

He went back to the riverside, and sat on a rock to start reading. He chose one of the Math books and started to read the first section.

He tried to apply what he had learned about reading faster and memorizing, but it was a slow process. Reading did allow him to gain the Reading proficiency, which increased reading speed as well as gave a small bonus to intellect and wisdom.

Just as he had hopped, the section he read included exercises at the end, with answers at the back of the book, which he started solving using the sand as a makeshift board and a stick to write on it.

It was a section outlining different types of functions and it wasn’t that hard, so he could solve questions rather quickly.

After about an hour, he was rewarded by an increase in intelligence and wisdom.

He felt elated: his idea had worked!

He had thought that instead of simply reading books to gain intelligence and wisdom, doing it this way would gain more stats, and he was right.

In school, Kiro had always tried his best to be a good student. He had paid attention in class and tried to do all his homework.

But, it was very difficult to find the motivation to do everything the teacher gave, especially when he could get good grades without it.

In a game, however, every good deed was rewarded. Just by knowing his stats rose rapidly while he was solving problems gave him all the motivation he needed to plow through every single exercise, no matter how difficult.

Different exercises helped rise his Intelligence and Wisdom at different rates, but if there was a pattern, he couldn’t see it.

Happy with the success of this idea, he decided to try meditating.

(*Note: I don’t actually know how to meditate, so don’t take what I say here as the truth.)

The book had included details about the posture he should take, and breathing exercises that he should do to put himself in the right frame of mind.

Then came the hard part. He had to clear his mind of all unnecessary though, until he could stop thinking altogether.

It was hard, really hard. Anytime he was about to succeed, a disturbance would distract him and he’d have to start over. But, after a week, he got some results, which were even better than the increasing in wisdom and intelligence that he had hoped for, a new special stat:

Concentration

Concentration is the ability to focus your thoughts despite any disturbance. It sharpens the mind, making you think faster, and with better results. Every point in Concentration raises Wisdom and Intelligence. With high Concentration, there is less chance that someone can interrupt you as you are casting a spell.

Current Concentration: 11

Because of this, Kiro redoubled his efforts at meditating.

Every night, after training, he would do exercises for several hours and then meditate until he was too tired and went to sleep.

In this manner, the remaining weeks of the beta test flew by.

Chapter 7