What he saw in front of him was a small forest, the size of a football field, there were also five wooden dolls waiting motionless on a clearing near the elevator. Lucas stepped outside and went straight to the trees. The dolls wouldn’t move unless he said “start” so he wasn’t worried of being attacked with his guard down.
He was very surprised by the size of the training room. The place was quite big from the outside, but how could it fit multiple rooms from the same size as this? Even if they were smaller, it would be quite a lot.
His eyes landed on his ring. So that’s how they do it, he thought. Even if they were using a dimensional space, they probably needed that huge structure to fit them all. But the trees were another mystery.
Lucas got close to one of them and touched it. They felt like the real ones, but he knew they weren’t, it was something about the way they smelled that seemed off. He wasn’t sure what they were made out of, only that it wasn’t plastic. It was all very fascinating, but Lucas had paid for only two hours there, so he went straight to business.
He had some idea of what to do, so he closed his hands and fixed his eyes on his fists. Slowly, he could feel something moving in his arms, and soon. With a good dose of pain, something bluish and transparent split open his skin and came out of his fist.
Lucas’ eyes were open wide as he watched the weird phenomenon happen in his body. The blades reached 8 inches before they stopped; they probably could grow a little more if he wanted to, but Lucas thought it would be better not to make them too long.
He was mesmerized by that thing and couldn’t take his eyes out of it. One thought kept recurring in his head: That was what his bone was like now. It seemed like a precious crystal, not pure glass; it was beautiful.
He analyzed the base of the new blade and saw that it came out of the back of his hand just above the knuckles. The sides seemed pretty sharp and it ended in a pointy glass that he could use to stab people with his punches.
He already had some information about how the skill worked before he utilized it, but it was different from seeing first hand. That allowed him to see the ways that he could fight with it. It was, as the name said, a blade and it was shaped almost like a sword.
Made from a substance pretty close to glass. It could come out not only from his fists but from his feet, elbows, and knees, probably ripping his clothes to shreds in the process too.
Lucas tried to retract the blade from his left hand and was successful. He was still fascinated by the process of having a blade come in and out from his arm, but he couldn’t waste time dwelling on it, so the next thing he did was place a finger on the side of the blade that was coming out of his right hand.
It bled immediately, confirming the sharpness. It seemed to be much sharper than his last axe, which was a nice surprise, but it was also very light, and that concerned him a little. He moved closer to the tree and sliced at one of the branches. The branch was cut clean, no problem on that front. More confident, he slashed at the trunk next and regretted it immediately. The blade barely penetrated the trunk when it shattered.
The pain he felt from having his “bone-blade” shattered was great. It wasn’t the same as having his actual bone broken, but it was still a part of him, and that pain could be his doom if he was in actual fight. He waited five minutes for the pain to mostly go away and collected his thoughts.
The first thing he thought about was how it would feel if the bone he had broken was inside of his body, would the shards hit some nerves or cut his flesh from within? Would it be harder to heal afterwards? He realized having a bone made of glass had its advantages and disadvantages, and he had to figure out exactly what were the limitations of his new body and technique before he got into any serious fights.
He looked at the tree he had slashed at before. His blade had cut it to some degree, no doubt about it, but then it faced some resistance and shattered. The problem was probably his lack of ability using any type of thin blade. He hadn’t been properly instructed on the matter. With his axe, he didn’t need much technique; his only concern was finding an opening in his enemy’s defense and slashing at it with his full strength.
A sword-like blade, however, was a different matter. His glass blade, due to how frail it was, seemed to require even more technique than a regular sword. He could try to train on his own, but every time he failed, it would send acute waves of pain throughout his body.
Despite how strong he had become, it seemed to be his fate to experience pain in all sorts of ways. Resigned, he watched his glass blade grow again from both his arms and threw himself into the most painful training he has ever done.
It took an hour and a half for him to be slightly decent with it. He could only guarantee that seven times out of ten his bone wouldn’t break when he used it. That was a big margin of error considering that he had practiced on an immobile target; it would probably increase when he was fighting a moving opponent, but he had no choice but to stop his training. He had only half an hour left with his training room, and he still wanted to test his new skill in a fight.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Lucas went to where the wood dolls were standing. He had chosen them due to the way he had lost in the tutorial. That would give him a good comparison to know how much he had improved. Of course, even if his bone-blade sucked resistance-wise, it was still better than the daggers against these things. Now it would be more of a fair fight.
Thirty minutes later, he was beat up on the ground when the alarm sounded, signaling that his time was up. There were two wooden dolls slashed to pieces by his side and three others surrounding him. All of them stopped immediately when the alarm sounded, and Lucas managed to stand up.
He had managed to avoid breaking any bones, by slowing down their attacks until the last minute, when an especially heavy attack made him fall and they surrounded him, ready to give him a beating when the alarm sounded.
“Saved by the bell,” he muttered, checking his bruises and seeing multiple purple patches on his body. Additionally, his blade had broken twice, which was followed by two heavy thwacks after flinching from the pain.
“That was pretty good!” Lucas smiled and entered the elevator.
He had only begun to use his new skill but he could already tell that he much preferred it to his old axe. It required more effort to learn how to do the proper movements and such, but he liked that; he enjoyed the fact that he had to train to be good at it. It meant that there were levels of proficiency, it wasn’t like an axe that anybody could wave around. So if he had to train, train he would.
Pretty tired after the long day, he walked like a zombie back to the hotel where he would be staying, and went to sleep right after taking a shower.
The next day he found Aysha waiting for him outside of his hotel.
“How did it go?” Lucas asked.
“Pretty well,” she replied. “It wasn’t so hard, and I earned enough to find some place to sleep and pay you back.”
Lucas tried to refuse but she wouldn’t take no for an answer, so he ended up accepting it.
“So what have you been up to? Did you find your cat?” She had a mocking smile on her face, but Lucas didn’t mind.
“Yes, actually. And I received a pretty nice reward too.”
“Really? What?” she asked, apparently curious. She had thought that Lucas had taken that quest as a joke, and she never imagined it would give anything good as a reward, but he seemed pretty satisfied with it.
“Alchemy classes,” he answered, and she remained quiet for a while with a puzzled expression on her face, before she replied.
“What is that?”
Lucas explained to her how alchemy worked and the end product that were potions, venoms, etc. She seemed pretty surprised by it.
“That sounds like witchcraft,” was her verdict.
“Yes, a little. But I think it pays well, after I learn to make some potions, that is,” Lucas said, shrugging, but he immediately remembered the conditions Hilda was living in.
“I should probably follow your example and pay a visit to the library, there is so much I don’t know about this world.”
“Do that, and talk with the librarian if there’s anything you don’t know. She’s pretty helpful,” Lucas said, and then he remembered the carriage he had seen the day before when he was walking towards the library and what the man had said to him, and he told it all to Aysha.
“He must be pretty good if he’s already close to level twenty.” Aysha said, sounding impressed. She didn’t seem too bothered by the fact that he was boasting his carriage around, but Lucas remembered she was a princess; she must have done plenty of that back on her planet. “Have you seen any elves around here?” she asked suddenly.
“Only you. Why?”
“Isn’t it weird that I’m the only elf here? Even the NPCs are all humans, where are the elves?”
Lucas thought about it for a second before answering. “I read in one of the books from the library that this continent that we are on has multiple cities; maybe there’s a city out there with only elves, you probably just had bad luck,” Lucas shrugged. Aysha nodded upon hearing that.
“More like good luck. I’m not on good terms with the others.”
“Why, did you make fun of their ears?” Lucas said, smiling, but she barely acknowledge his bad joke.
“Do you remember what I told you about the spaceships on my planet and how they wouldn’t be ready on time?”
Lucas nodded. He remembered the story she had told him and that she seemed pretty guilty about the whole affair. He even remembered thinking that there was something she wasn’t telling him.
“Well, the royal family hates me because I told the commoners that the spaceships wouldn’t work, and the commoners hate me because I waited so long to tell them,” she sighed.
“What matters is that you did the right thing in the end,” Lucas comforted her. “You probably saved a lot of them, and besides, it wasn’t your fault that the planet was about to implode…”
The expression on her face told a different story, however, so Lucas interrupted himself.
“Was it?” Lucas asked, surprised, and she sighed again.
“The reason the core was damaged was because the royals have been draining it for decades. It is a great source of energy, but it’s also very delicate and finite. At some point, the scientists involved with it intervened, saying that we should stop immediately or things might take a turn for the worse. Some of us didn’t believe the scientists and continued to drain the core until it was too late.”
Lucas took some time to process what she told him and then replied, “Look, I know you royals don’t agree with this, but you are not your family. You are your one person. There’s a reason this thing is called Second Chance program, here you can make the decisions you wish you had on your old planet. It’s a clean start; there’s no use feeling guilty.”
She stayed silent for a while, but after a few seconds, she nodded, a new passion burning in her eyes.
“You are right. Thank you,” she sounded really grateful, which made Lucas feel a little embarrassed, but the awkward moment didn’t last long as she said: “I think I will check upon this merit points thing after I go to the library. Want to come with me?”
“No, I have alchemy class to attend to, but I’ll see you around,” he replied.
The truth was that after he did his alchemy class, he planned on going back to the training rooms. He wasn’t worried about getting levels for now, because he believed it was more important to improve his fighting abilities for the time being. Once he decided that it was time for him to level up, he could probably do it pretty quickly hunting higher-leveled beasts.
After saying goodbye to Aysha, Lucas went straight to old Hilda’s house; he had a pretty busy week ahead of him.