Sixteen days until the duel with Edbert

The next four and a half days passed with me under Alec's tutelage, working on the basics of both blunt weapons and analysis. Over that time, I was expected to keep doing drills with the youngest shepherds and actual shifts helping the shepherds. While we moved from the Million Potato Marsh to the Tidewarren and back again the practice continued – with only tips being given to me about analysis and the real practice being that with the staff.

Cerbearus and Ossicarn enjoyed the few battles we had with the Jackanacks during the days when the herds were grazing on the Tidewarren side, but I got more training on the other days. Bonking a rabbit monster on the head did not in fact earn me a fairy visit to explain why I can’t hit the jackanacks with a a stick.

The experience points that we got from defending the herds from the jackalope like large dog-sized hares with stag horns was helpful but the actual experience towards increasing my skills was better. As Analysis grew into level 8, I found out that it was not increased just from active use, but hours of passive use and being extremely cautious and observant could help contribute to its expansion.

The majority of the growth came from the spars and by the end of my fourth staff fight, I was almost ready to invest experience in grabbing another few levels in Outsider so I could increase my health point pool and toughness in general. I was not sure it was worth the trade-off of all the pain for the increase in my blunt weapons skill. So as I looked over at my current rating of six points in the blunt weapon skill I considered just trying to force my way to the rating of ten by spending points.

Instead, as we stood on the meandering slope leading from the western gate of Strongbridge, overlooking the Million Potato March? I faced Alec.

“So I’ll give you about twenty minutes to prepare, Wade, but I’m your next sparring partner. The others think you’ve done well but at the same time pushing you hard has had great results. It is pretty unheard of for someone to get six points of the blunt weapon skill in less than five days.”

I had to spar with Alec, and he was I was learning, actually very good with his staff fighting skills. Good enough that the adults considered him a peer, and I don’t mean with the ranking of his blunt weapons skill itself.

How exactly did I plan to make up for the skill ranking gap, the age gap, or the experience fighting gap? I was not initially sure, but I had twenty minutes to prepare. And it was then that I remembered something I had initially been waiting for with bated breath since before the dungeon began.

As an outworlder, after I hit twenty points of the wisdom stat, I would be able to meditate on my memories to be able to gain skill point rankings I would have had if the system brought me into the world with a direct translation of my skills to its systems. Twenty minutes was not much time to work on it, so I did not waste any extra time.

Instead, I dropped to the ground and took a meditative posture. Without any real experience in how to do that I went with what it appeared in my mind. Firstly, I moved my body to be sitting cross-legged. Then I put my hands together and rested them on my lap, forcing my breathing to come out as slowly and controlled as I could muster.

I closed my mind to my surroundings, and I instead tried to think of my history, my memories. Like I had vividly imagined my family before, I heard their voices and saw their faces. They were phantoms, a torrent of memories that flew by me as if pushed by a tropical storm’s building winds. As my breathing continued and I felt my body tense from the focus I was trying to force, I heard Osbert’s voice and felt the warmth spending time with my oldest son had always filled me with.

With a force of will, focus, and emotional pain that tore open things that had been scabbed over before, I reached out for that feeling. Within moments the feeling pulled back towards me and I suddenly found myself in the sunshine of Earth, on an all-american summer day. Children from my extended family ran about on this day, as cousins talked about mundane things as they drank beer and grilled hotdogs and hamburgers. Melody chatted with a few of them herself and Gwendolyn played some complex game involving dragons, princesses, and laserbeams shot from rayguns and wands.

Osbert pulled on my shirt, and I looked down at the boy. “Come on! If you don’t teach me how to play baseball, how are we ever going to beat Uncle Arthur?”

I smiled, as I had then, and looked to Arthur. A face I had not expected to see in this memory, but my best friend had been important in my children’s lives before so of course he’d be there. In the memory, I knew that Arthur would throw the match for Osbert, he was that kind of guy.

It didn’t matter, so soon I was squatting down to Osbert’s height and adjusting my posture to loom over him and help him. While I helped him bend his knees and his elbows, gripping the baseball bat with both hands I whispered to my bright boy.

“Keep your eye on the ball and remember to swing even if you are scared. Be brave. Be confident. You can do anything you can put your mind to it.”

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The first time Arthur threw the ball, I helped Osbert swing. The second and third time I did as well, but on the fourth I let my then-toddler boy swing at the gentle baseball pitch thrown to him. He hit it dead center.

Again and again, we practiced it, until Osbert was tired and my family all sat down at the trundle tables in the park we were in, eating the food there. At the time, I had felt proud of Osbert and happy. Now, I remembered or felt another feeling.

It felt so good because that was not just teaching my son something. Now I remembered faintly the memory that was behind it. I felt the feeling for a second of my own father teaching me to swing a baseball bat, and telling me how his father had done it.

I didn’t focus on that shadowed memory within a memory, instead trying to soak in my family’s presence and faces, their voices, their laughs. A hurricane of memories, of me practicing baseball and softball with my kids, of me coaching tee ball and then little league games. As I tried to crawl my mind back to the memory of that summer day I felt the pressure build and just as I thought I’d reach for the memory again?

It was gone in a blink. I woke once more to the world of Hekatondrona with my heart beating in my young chest so quickly for a second it felt like it might fly out of my chest. Sweat dripped over my body.

Several of the shepherds muttered to each other as they watched me and wondered what was going on. Glowing in front of me was a system prompt.

[[ Congratulations on retrieving your first skill from the previous life, and the memories involved!

You have received an increase to your blunt weapons skill by five points. You have received a bonus of five percent to the increase of your blunt weapons skill. Additionally, you have retrieved a pair of artifacts from your world.

]]

As I looked around I noticed nothing. Where were these artifacts they were speaking of? I looked everywhere, even up – and then I noticed the distinctive duckbill-like horizon of a baseball cap.

As I took it off, seeing the black colored hat with its bright orange W and orange accents, I cried. As I looked to my shoulders I saw a matching letterman jacket. My sons’ little league team, and Gwendolyn’s softball team, had been the Wildcats. I had helped coach them.

I must have cried so for long enough that Alec and the others were looking at me with expressions that seemed to say they thought I might have had a breakdown. Their concern was clear on their face.

I was silent for a moment as I saw them, and then I wiped the tears from my face and put the baseball cap back on, tightening it as I did. When I was done, I got up and in the same movement I grabbed my fighting staff. Standing upright once again, I gave a bow that of the head in acknowledgement of the others and apology for making them wait.

“Sorry about that. I was thinking about something, trying to use the meditation feature of being an outworlder, and it was something I am not sure I was ready to think about.” I sputtered forth, then took a deep breath. “I’m ready for our match, Alec.”

He did not respond for a moment, simply looking at me and from the way his eyes narrowed and flicked over me, and his lips were held tight I could tell he was checking to see if he thought I was actually okay to do this.

It was a long moment before he gave a nod.

“Okay, I think we will begin.”

I was quickly convinced that Alec had made the best of his experience gains during the Tidewarren Dungeon; and that he might have always been the stronger combatant out of him and Craytipult. Because he came at me so quickly that I barely caught sight of his movement and it was instinct that had been hammered in over days that allowed me to block and parry with my own staff.

When he swung low to hit me in the knee the same way I had hit Alfric on my first day of training, I barely hopped in the air and out of the way. When he reversed the swipe to instead clip me when in the air I moved on instinct. Rather than a staff I swung it like a bat and my strike came towards his face fast enough that he rolled his staff and blocked it.

As I came to the ground with a roll there were some murmurs from the shepherds assembled. I could pick up “Wade”, “Are you seeing” and “Eleven skill points.”

I didn’t have time for a breather before Alec came at me again even with me striking out at a charge. With the movements that had been drilled into me over the last few days it might have been possible to stop his charge with a few slaps but the size difference couldn’t be ignored. So I did what instinct demanded I do in the face of a larger enemy.

I charged as well, readying the staff and then shoving its point forward to hit him. When he stopped his movement to bat the strike away I held my staff at its end point and swung it like a baseball bat at his staff. He was bigger and presumably better with the staff, so the only way I was going to win this spar was if I got it out of his hands.

But as it did so, with the shepherd letting out a curse at my strike on his knuckles? He brought up his leg and caught it with the crook of his foot - throwing it into his arm in the same movement.

With a movement that quick his staff was back in his hand and as Alec let out a grin I felt my chances of actually winning coming to a close. Disarming him was the only way of evening the playing field on the spar, and while it wasn’t necessary to win in this spar if I couldn’t even get close? Then that said I had unperceivable distances still to go before I could stand a chance of fighting and winning without the help of gimmicks and my monster partners.

So I couldn’t give anything less than my all in this spar. As Alec charged at me again, I could see the way his head was moving, his eyes flickering, and his pace slowing after starting the charge. Without realizing it I could almost feel it when he threw himself into a slide and while it was no premonition, his immense speed, size and stat difference didn’t stop me from having a chance to get out of the way of his slide.

Even as the hard wood of his staff made a crack which heralded pain radiating from my shins, and I had to fight the urge to flop to the ground, I remembered my training. For a split second, I could almost feel my family and the training I had done with the staff and the training I had done with baseball back on Earth meshed together.

Even as he stayed on his behind where he had come to the end of his crouch hitting my shins, I swung the staff with my left hand. With a thunk, I scored a hit upside of his head, and while it didn’t knock him out it did end the spar. Alec grimaced and very clearly was fighting the urge to say something or shout, but instead, he forced himself to his feet and gave me a pat on the shoulder.

He sat there for a moment and collected himself.

“I think you’ve got real potential with this. We’ll call the spar a draw; because I think you’re ready to grab Guard and unlock the Shepherd class. When you do, I think we can get to the real training I think you should have done before the duel you have with Edbert.”

That was right! I had the requirements met, and I had not even spent a point of experience on skill advancement yet.