"Most people think that sentient beings have a massive advantage at lower levels due to our intelligence, this is not the case. While it is true that most animals are incapable of complex strategy, they make up for it with stats, as while it's true that subraces give the same amount of stats as a class of comparable rarity, most animal races give higher stats per level than sentient ones, and since the system awakens only after you reach a certain level of maturity for your species, most animals also start with higher stats than sentient beings, making planning go from merely advantageous to damn near required."

-Taskmaster Beatrice, Former trainer for the Anastas Adventurers Guild

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When I woke up from my nap, and after remembering what decade it was, I looked out the window and saw that it was only a few hours until sunset, and when I left my room I saw my mom was waiting in the main room, grinding something in her pestle. Seeing me coming out of my room, she put down her pestle and rushed over to me, giving me a big hug while checking me for injuries.

"Are you okay? What were you thinking!"(Mason's mom)

Quickly flipping between concerned and angry in her questions, I stayed quiet and returned the hug while she got it out of her system, only responding after she stopped talking.

"I'm fine, made a mistake and got ambushed, but the only thing damaged is my pride."(Mason)

"Good, maybe next time you'll think twice about going alone."(My mom)

After a bit more fussing, and getting me to tell the whole story of what happened, my mother seemed satisfied with my wellness and that I'd learned my lesson, so she let me go and told me to tell the others that I was okay, and to gather them for dinner. Gathering everyone and repeating my story a few times, most people telling me how dumb it was to go into the forest alone, with Leo and Jason telling me that next time I had better not go without them, we all had some nice bear steak for dinner, as they thought it would be funny to specifically buy the meat from the bear I sold, which was surprisingly good, not nearly as tough as I was expecting. With dinner ending, and the sun setting, I wasn't nearly as tired as I normally would've been thanks to my nap, I decided to spend a few hours making an actual training plan for the next few days, rather than just trying out whatever caught my interest as it happened. While I had been practicing regularly, the only thing I systematically trained was making connections, and even that was only in the past few days, with all my other practice just being me flipping between ideas until they were usable, rather than reliable. Plus, with the points from the bear, and the relative safety of the town, I could finally devote the entire day, and my entire mana pool, to just training without having to worry about not leaving enough mana for the next dungeon run, or hunt, or in case there was an ambush.

Outlining the things I wanted to work on, and how I would go about doing so, I quickly came to the conclusion that I would need a practice field, and maybe some dummies or other training equipment. The equipment was easy, as most of what I could think of would be simple enough for even me to make, but I was torn about where to make it. There was a lot of room in the clearing between the city and the forest, but I didn't want to be bothered by others, and I didn't want others to see my training or use whatever I made without my permission, which would be inevitable if I just made it in the open. Meanwhile, I had just had a dangerous encounter in the forest, and while most of what lived in the fringes near the town had long since run away or be hunted, if I built too close it would have the same issue as the clearing, with it inevitably being discovered by the various people who went to the forest to hunt, gather, or train themselves. That just left the city, and while my first thought was to disregard it entirely due to how crowded it was with buildings, that actually would end up working in my favor, as it would make it harder to find whatever I ended up building, plus the fact that it was void of any animals meant that it was safe, so long as I didn't go all the way across town and run into the only other faction of people, who had only shrunk since I'd last heard of them. The more I thought about it the more I liked the idea of a hidden training field in the city, and I drifted off that night thinking about how I would outfit it and what to look for when deciding a location.

The next day I quickly went to Leo and Jason and told them about my idea, since I realized how much work it would be to set it up alone, and they would likely appreciate a dedicated training area themselves. Unsurprisingly, they both liked the idea of making a training area, and while they did have some concerns about making one in the city, a brief debate assuaged them of their concerns and assured them it was the best option. Since they had no real plans for the day, we all set out into the city together to find a good location. It only took a few turns before the town was completely out of sight and we were surrounded by ruined buildings covered in plantlife, making me think of a few apocalypse movies I had seen were it not for the fact that there weren't any skyscrapers or rust.

We had a few guidelines for the location that we were looking for; it had to be within a two hour walk of the town, it had to be outside, and it had to be large enough for all of us to practice at the same time without getting in each other's way. There were a few other preferences we had, but these were the hard rules that we had to satisfy, and we spent the next few hours circling the town looking for a place, finding three locations that we were satisfied with by the time noon rolled around. The first was what was once a park, with a large semi-flat dirt area that had some unnaturally tall trees and shrubs we would either remove or repurpose. The second was a parking lot, with a large and very flat area, though the concrete had some large cracks a divots in it that we'd have to fill before it would be safe, and it would be annoying to dig through the concrete if we wanted to plant training dummies or targets. The last area was a large area with an uneven dirt floor that was hidden behind a large building and was only accessible through that building or a small alley, with tall buildings on all sides, though it was the smallest of our options.

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After some debating between ourselves, mostly between the park and the hidden alley, we decided to go with the latter, as while the park was a bit bigger and easier to get to, it would take a lot of work to make it usable, whereas the alley only needed us to actually put up training dummies or whatever we needed. Location decided, the next step was to add some training equipment, namely some dummies and targets, starting with getting some wood. The park was closer to us than the forest, and we had brought one of the permanent axes I made a few days prior, so we set off to cut down one of the trees to haul back, since they were quite large, with a 2-2.5 foot diameter and taller than the surrounding buildings, all of their mutation due to mana seemingly going to their height rather than width. The actual cutting was pretty fast, but the tree was far too heavy for us to haul, so after spending three or four hours cutting off all of the branches and cutting the trunk into five sections about 6' tall, we started hauling them back, the hour long walk turning into two or three with the added weights, even after I made crystal sleds to help us. By the time we finally got all of them to the alley, there was only an hour or two until sunset, and Jason and I were exhausted, Leo being fine due to the fact that he had almost exclusively raised his END with his stat points, so we just headed back to town to eat and relax until we went to sleep, with me too tired to even practice connections.

Waking up the next morning and meeting with Leo and Jason, we headed back to the alley, taking a bit more than two hours to get there since we weren't very familiar with the location yet and took a few wrong turns. Once there, we started making plans for how to use the wood, deciding right off the bat that three of them would be used as-is for weapon practice. One of the other one was to be cut into discs to use as targets while the last one was stored in the attached building for later use. Thankfully, it only took us an hour or so to set up the trunks, each being buried about a foot in the ground, and another three to cut out the discs and placing them in various locations, though there were many left over since they were only two to three inches wide. Looking over the alley after we finished, while not quite as fancy as I dreamed about, I was still very happy with the training area, and since there was still plenty of daylight left, none of us hesitated to use it.

Going over to my area, I thought about the training plans I had made. The bear had shown in no uncertain terms that melee fights were far out of my wheelhouse, and I doubted that either of my classes would give me anything to change that, as they both gave exclusively mental stats, so I needed to find out how to keep enemies away from me, or to get them away if I get ambushed. When considering this, the first thing that had come to mind was the bear, or more specifically how it was able to easily tank my crystal spike, and since it was a beast by all definitions, I saw no reason why my skill wouldn't be able to create a construct of it, and I was even slightly surprised with myself that I hadn't tried a bear or any other large predators with my initial practices. Activating my skill with the standard 50 mana, using Crystal to make it as defensive as possible, I was surprised when I felt the mana run out before the shell of the bear was constructed. Not wanting to lose the mana for nothing, I fed more mana into the skill, only stopping once the shell was fully formed and a large crystalline bear stood in front of me, taking double the mana I had originally intended to spend.

Considering this increase in cost as I examined the bear, and spending another hundred to create a hawk out of Crystal to compare their physical abilities, I was unsurprised to find that the bear was much tougher and stronger, if slower and less agile, than the hawk. My first thought was that the difference was due to size, which did make sense, as the hawk had a minimum of 20, five times less than the bear, which while not one to one when compared to their size and mass, was my best bet since the bear still leaked energy at the same rate as the hawk and didn't seem to be any stronger overall when taking the agility and flight of the hawk into account. I also noticed that there was a slight pressure in my skill after making them, still less than when I made three at once, but slightly more than when I made two that had 50 mana. Creating the bear also made Leo and Jason's jaws drop, as while they knew about my class the only thing they had seen me make so far was a base mana Sir Lora, and when I ordered the bear to lift the extra log to test its strength, which it was able to do with far more ease than any of us, their awe quickly turned to annoyance as they asked why I hadn't summoned the bear to help us yesterday, complaining about how frequently I get tunnel vision when I embarrassedly told them it hadn't occurred to me.

Physicality tests aside, the main thing I wanted to practice today was multitasking, as while my constructs didn't absolutely need my instructions, they weren't particularly smart themselves, dumber than their real life counterparts at least. So I spent the day having a gorilla construct, which also had a 100 mana minimum, throw the wooden discs while I had the hawk try to knock out of the air while the bear chased and tried to catch it, all the while giving them orders and shooting out lightning bolts and crystal spikes to hit the disc without landing any friendly fire. The three constructs put a noticeable but still minor strain on my head, so I knew that my poor performance was due to my lack of ability rather than anything else, with me hitting the hawk more than the target and causing the bear to run into the wall multiple times, leaving it with a few cracks. Were it not for the fact that I was using minimal amounts of mana in my attacks, I doubted that the hawk would've lasted longer than an hour or two, but it still ran out of energy and dissipated before the bear, which still had an hour or two's worth of energy despite it's collisions with the wall, the gorilla being the only one who hadn't been hit by anything and as such still having a good amount of energy left. Since I was running low on mana, I didn't recreate the hawk and instead focused on quickly giving orders by having the gorilla throw rocks at the bear, making it so that the bear would only respond if I ordered it to, which led to the bear dissipate after another hour of concentrated fire, where I only managed to get it to block two thirds of the rocks. Left with only the gorilla, I decided to have it throw rocks at me to improve my dodging, though I had it throw much gentler than at the bear. Unfortunately, I didn't dissipate, having to endure for the three hours until the gorilla naturally ran out of mana, covered in bruises and less than a hundred mana left from when I instinctually blocked a rock that was coming towards my head with a crystal wall. Bruises aside, there was still a few hours before sundown, which I spent practicing my aim shooting small crystal needles for 5-10 mana each, barely managing to stick into the target when I did hit, but allowing me to stretch my mana for a much longer practice session.