Prologue Part 2

Time Line of Events so far:

2055: Virtual Reality is perfected

2056: Jay Silversmith is born

2061: Jay Silversmith (age 5) starts playing Flow

2068: Jay (age 12) is attacked by bullies and sent to the hospital for 10 months

2069: Jay (age 13) is released from the hospital

2070: Jay (age 14) reaches the max lv on Flow and starts his preparations for Royal Road (2 years from completion)

P.S. Please ignore all dates stated previously as these are the final dates

The First Day at the Dojo

‘Maybe this wasn’t the best idea’ Jay thought. He had signed up for a kendo dojo who’s philosophy was “Padding will only slow you down!” so all around the place were practitioners covered in massive welts, bruises, and no small number of black eyes.

“Hello! You must be the new trainee, Jay Silversmith, I presume?” bellowed a tall man who looked like he was raised on steroids from birth.

“Ah…” Jay couldn’t speak! He was horrified by the aura of sheer terror from which the other trainees were the source of!

“Speechless from excitement I see! Well come on then, I’ll get you started on your very own training dummy. By the way, the name’s Mitch, I’m the head of the assistant instructors, and you can ask me about anything you need to know. For now though, just watch what everyone else is doing and repeat it on Mr. Oak here, and I’ll come back and check on you in about thirty minutes.” Mitch roared as he introduced me to Mr. Oak, a life size statue made entirely out of oak, handed me a wooden training sword, and briskly walked away. I stood there for a moment speechless and then turned to watch what the guy next to me was doing.

I memorized his movements as he dashed to his left side then quickly changed direction to the right, sword pointed at the statue in front of him when he suddenly tripped, falling straight into the statue, knocking it and himself down. I made some quick mathematical calculations (I read a few physics books online and remembered them perfectly) and made the necessary corrections creating my own personal step by step instruction manual for the technique.

So, of course I then tried it on the wooden statue in front of me. I was a little off balance, but most of my weight got focused into the tip of the blade as it stabbed into the statue’s abdomen. However the second that the blade made contact massive recoil ran up the blade into my arm. I could literally feel my bones straining not to crack and shatter. It was then that I realized that I couldn’t make contact with the statue or else I could receive some serious injuries. From then on I repeated the technique over and over again as I made small adjustments to increase my balance and damage output, never once connecting with the statue, simply using it as a target to perfect my accuracy. About thirty minutes passed as I revised my technique, gaining speed gradually and flawlessly adding all of my weight to the attack. On top of that my blade never faltered, always stopping on centimeter away from my predicted point of impact. I flinched as I heard clapping behind me, spinning on my heel the mountain of muscle that is Mitch was revealed to have been standing behind me.

“Well done! Well done indeed! From what I just saw, I would have never expected that you were a beginner! That was one seriously top notch move you just pulled! If I may, why didn’t you strike Mr. Oak here, he likes it, I swear!” Mitch laughed hysterically.

“Ah… you see, I have this bone condition, so if I hit Mr. ah… Oak then the recoil bouncing off my arm could make it very likely to snap.” I explained in a shaky voice, not quite used to the instructor’s loud voice.

“Huh, that’s a pity, you sure as hell do have potential, but for now just keep doing what you’re doing and you might be able to build up enough muscle to absorb the impact.” Mitch smiled hopefully, patted my shoulder and walked off. Then an old man whose muscle mass made him look suspiciously like Sylvester Stallone grabbed my arm pulling me towards a square box marked in tape in the middle of the dojo that was about sixteen by sixteen feet.

“Your new here right? M’name’s Luke and I’m the master of this here dojo. Since your new here ya’ll be fightin Danny, one of our middle ranked members to test ya skill with blade. Don’t get all frightened and spar to ya heart’s content.” Ordered the old man in a raspy voice with a heavy western accent.

“Wait, what?” I asked full of confusion. All the disciples of the dojo gathered around the square, forming an inescapable chamber of hell, muttering to themselves “Poor guy, never stood a chance… He may never walk again… So young…” one guy even offered to call 911! It was as if they were at the funeral of a brutally murdered child, as if they assumed I had already lost! Why the nerve… I had half a mind to walk up to the crowd and start beating them at random. No one and I mean NOONE calls me weak to my face if they know what’s good for them. The last time that happened, seven football players ended up in wheelchairs until their broken legs could mend. I was remember what I had done on that day, when the exact stereotypical marine corps soldier walked into the ring from the other side, his dirty blonde hair up in a military crew cut, he glared at me disapprovingly with his dull blue eyes. Well, of course, who could blame him? He was about to spar against a five foot seven scrawny fourteen year old, that looked as if he could barely hold a wooden sword! I smiled back at him from behind my dark brown hair that was hanging low below my eyes, as if I was simply here to have fun, and had assumed he was going to go easy on me. If only he had seen the sinister aura exuding from my violent hazel eyes he would have ran home to mommy like everyone else did back in preschool and kindergarten.

As I finished the thought, I suddenly heard massive bellows from the master’s direction as he yelled “START!” at the top of his lungs.

Springing into action like a rocket, Danny lunged at me, his sword taking the form of an executioner’s axe as it swooped down from above. My brain unconsciously went into overdrive as it calculated the exact minimum amount of movement required while I calmly observed the descent of the blade as it came down in slow motion. For some reason, whenever I’m in danger, everything seems to slow down, like time itself seems to bend at my will. Of course I knew this wasn’t true, it was just a side effect of adrenalin flowing to my brain, thereby activating my innate ocular ability.

As the blade swung down I sidestepped at the last possible moment, dodging the attack by no more than a millimeter while turning to face the blade. My opponent, having not understood, nor seen what I had done, glanced to his right where I was standing with an agitated expression on his face. He seemed to be thinking, ‘Why aren’t you unconscious?’ maintaining my facial expression I grinned at him, as if I still believed this was a game, and asked seriously, “Done with the warm up, cause I’m ready to play.” After ending the sentence with a smile, I swiftly ducked to avoid the wildly swung diagonal uppercut originating from my lower right. Danny snarled, enraged at my impudence he proceeded to unleash a barrage of slashes coming at me from all directions, hell-bent on tearing me apart. I once again easily calculated the trajectory of the slashes, dodging them all while gradually wearing my attacker down, his attacks slowly becoming less organized, less powerful. His technique began to slip, and I began to notice small holes in his defense, completely unguarded. He swung his blade at me horizontally from his right; overshooting it his entire left flank became open. Stepping to in to my left, I suddenly changed directions as I pivoted on my toe, as my right foot came down in front of me, I bent down low on both feet, preparing the attack that I had nearly perfected over the past half hour. My body lunged forward, focusing all of my weight into the tip of the blade, as it stabbed flawlessly into the center gap of my opponent’s abdominal muscles. Danny fell back due to the force of the blow as my arms fell down to my sides in the form of useless lumps of flesh. After the recoil had run up my blade, I completely lost feeling in both of my arms as they fell numb from the pain. Turning to face the master, sweat pouring down my entire body I managed to pant out, “So, how did I do?”

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Six Months Later

The master had had me under his personal supervision, teaching me all kinds of different sword techniques, and after six months of intense non-stop training my body had been transformed into a harbinger of death and violence. Any stray scrap of fat that had been left on my body before entering the dojo had been completely vaporized, and as I increased my protein intake, eating three chicken breasts for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, my muscles developed into pure steel. With my clothes on, however, one could never tell the difference from my original body. I had decided to focus all of my training on speed and technique, leaving me with a deceptively slender physique, while in actuality I now weighed one hundred and eighty six pounds, an iron fortress of flawless muscle. I had memorized over seven hundred advanced sword techniques, and had defeated four of the top level practitioners. My goal of learning the sword had finally been completed.

The Range

“Hey mom, my friend George from the dojo decided to take up archery, so can I come with him to the range?” I asked.

“Hmm… you have your cell phone on you right? And it’s fully charged?” my mom quizzed. She had gotten a ton better about letting me out of the house after I had introduced her to my friends and realized that I’m not entirely socially inept.

“Of course.” I answered quickly, not wanting to give her time to think it over.

“Then I see no reason why you shouldn’t go, now, have a nice time with your friends and don’t forget to call me when you’re ready to get picked up ok?” my mom replied, not wanting to rob me of spending time with my friend, mostly because neither of us could remember the last time that I had one.

“Thanks!” I faked a large smile and ran off to my buddy George’s car. ‘Sword, check, next up, the bow,’ I thought as I climbed into the blue Honda minivan. Sitting next to George in the front seat, I remembered how all the disciples loved me, because now Luke was solely focused on me instead of torturing them, thereby making it easy to befriend the others.

Once we got to the range we received a quick thirty minute lesson in which we learned the proper way to hold a bow, and fire an arrow using our right index and middle fingers, we also put on arm protectors to prevent the string of the bow from slapping against our bare forearms. After that we proceeded to the bow rack where I picked up a long bow from the shelf with a pull weight (the amount of force required to pull back the string) of eighty pounds and that was about five feet long, a little more than half a foot shorter than me. George chose a re-curve bow (where the ends curve against the grain to increase the pull weight) that was three feet long. From there we traveled to the beginner’s firing area, where we each stood about twenty five meters away from a target on the wall.

I shot my first arrow thoughtlessly, and watched as it hit the ground to the far left of the target. ‘Crap, can’t do that in game or I’ll get my head impaled with an arrow, or set my hair aflame from a mage’s fire bolt,” concluding my gruesome and considerably disturbed mental images, I held the bow at full draw, arrow notched on the middle of the bow string, I calculated the pull weight in relation to the current angle and direction, factoring my height at the end. Carefully aiming my bow to equal my mathematic equation, I let the arrow loose and watched intently as the tip stuck about two inches from the bull’s eye. Wondering why the shot wasn’t perfect, I realized that my hands were shaking slightly. Annoyed at this fact, I held my breath and willed my hands to still, as I listened to my heart beat, my arms solidified, attaining inner peace as I fired my third arrow, this one landing in the direct center of the bull’s eye that had previously seemed to be taunting me from its perch twenty five meters away. So I kept shooting, memorizing and perfecting the physical motion behind my math, and after about a minute I had managed to gather exactly seven arrows directly on the bull’s eye mark.

I took the arrows out of the target after the allotted shooting time was over, placed them back into the tray to the right of the shooting range, walked over to one of the personal trainers and asked them where the fifty meter range was. I repeated this process two more times during the next three months, gradually mastering all four shooting ranges that were offered by the place, the twenty five meter, fifty meter, one hundred meter, and finally the most difficult, the two hundred and fifty meter range. After I could shoot accurately at all of them, I began to practice on speed. And after another three months had passed, I could shoot seven arrows directly into the bull’s eye mark at each and every range in exactly seven seconds flat, well, of course that isn’t including the time that it takes for the arrows to actually hit the target, but still, the arrows left my bow in seven seconds, which was an incredible feat that all archers dreamed of being able to do.

One Year until Royal Road’s Release

For the remaining year before the release day, my daily schedule was something like this.

6:00AM – 7:00AM completing online homework, tests, quizzes, and projects

7:01AM – 7:30AM breakfast

7:45AM – 2:00PM sword training to keep up fitness and not forget the skills that I had learned

2:01PM - 2:30PM lunch

2:45PM – 5:00PM archery to not let my shooting dull

5:10PM – 5:45PM Dinner

5:55PM – 10:00 library, reading and memorizing everything from sword forging manuals to survival skills how to books, to cookbooks