Once gathered James quickly ran through what was clearly a prepared speech.
You have been summoned at some cost, at this time to help The city of Taal, Our city is being attacked by great forces of evil. They are attempting to end the great families of Taal. We, the servants of the city, have drawn you from across the great all to assist us.
Each group of you has been drawn from different realities. How each universe or reality works is different in many of the fine details. For some things everything will work just the same yet for others things will be different enough that you will be surprised.
But while the journey has granted you all some potential, most of you will need to learn new skills. This is the reason that you have been summoned in this way. The ritual has granted you the ability to learn new skills at a rate that we native-born cannot master.
To this end,
you must learn to fight.
You must learn how to use the skills granted to you
You must survive.
To this end, first, we will teach you how to survive combat. How to grow.
Once you have strengthened your bodies those that have survived will receive the understanding of the mind. Skills that defy belief, that can only be called magic.
For the few that reach the third level, the level of the spirit, You may be able to learn the powers that allow the few to alter reality.
He then split us into 3 groups. Two groups of four and one of three. I was separated from both the others from what must be my home universe if what he announced was to be believed. For some reason, he had separated all three of us into different groups. I suspected that the reason was to weaken us, but he was not forthcoming.
“These will be your training groups“
Pointing to my group of 3,
“You are team red 1.”
He looked at us with some level of expectation. His presence grew, and the other two started to shake and my knees felt weak.
“You will respond when I give a command with the response ‘Yes Captain’.”
At that, we all responded
“Yes Captain”
“Louder”
“YES CAPTAIN” we shouted in response.
Quickly the other teams were formed, unimaginably named Red 2 and Red 3. Each of these teams did not need additional prompting. Standing there in our small clusters, I wondered. Why was enforcing this form of training so important given the curse that was part of the ring that gave us the ability to understand the spoken word? All I could come up with is that the curse was weak so that we did not notice it being applied, or if re-enforced it would only become stronger. Of course, either idea could be true or both of them. I just did not have enough evidence.
I also wonder why I and the others from Christchurch were more resistant to the force of James’s presence. The universe that we came from, The numbers that were summoned, those were the first ideas that came to mind. But I tried to remember two things. Correlation does not mean Causation. And the Dunning-Kruger effect.
It is important that I remember that at this point I know nothing for sure. And just because there appears to be a linkage between events, this does not mean that the direction of the causality is known, nor if there is even a causal link.
Science is unforgiving about this stuff. You can waste a lot of time and effort if you over-commit to a bad hypothesis. Let alone commit to a weak set of assumptions.
All this rapidly flooded my mind. James then announced after allowing us to come to grips with our new circumstances.
“Red 1 Steven will be in charge of your training. Follow his commands as if they were mine”
My team all said “Yes Captain” with me lagging a fraction of a second behind. Which earned me a hard look from James.
Steven said with a bored voice “Follow” it had some of the same sense of command that James had but not to the same degree. With James, it caught my attention and I felt that I should follow the command even without the curse being active. With Steven, It did not catch my mind, but it still had a strong sense that it needed to be obeyed.
This time I was ready for it and moved at the same speed as the rest of Red 1. We moved out of the mess hall, into the courtyard, from there we followed him down a passage then via a number of alleyways emptied of people but not their traces, until we reached a great hall. It was certain that we were either not being exposed to the general population, or they (the nobility) were concealing us. There existed in my thoughts that there were other reasons, possibly even that this was the quickest way to the location but after two trips I could not believe that the powers that I experienced in that room would ever willingly move through those narrow alleyways.
The hall was massive, the more I looked around it was more of a stadium. Tiered seating surrounded a large sand-covered arena there was a shimmering effect that enclosed the arena and separated it from the seating. Even though I tried I was not really able to see back into the seating very far. In the arena, colored circles had been marked out. There were 4 Green, 3 Red, 1 yellow and 5 blue. There were 3 figures already in one of the green circles like the effect that masked the seating I was unable to determine much of the individuals in the yellow circle that was now covered but by induction since one was clearly a native, the other two looked like the Overpowered pair that arrived in the circle across from us. I did note that they had not been separated as I had from the others from home.
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As a group, we moved into one of the red circles as we entered a hemisphere appeared over the circle and everything outside the circle became heavily clouded.
Steven told us to introduce ourselves and what Skill set we had learned from crossing into this universe.
One of the others piped up and said “I am Robert, I selected the skills to cast fire”
Other words almost overlapped with Robert, such as her enthusiasm “I am Fanny, I am about healing”.
As they finished I responded, “I am Fonial, I defend as a tank”.
Both of them looked confused, Robert asked “What is a tank?’.
At that point, I realized two things, that the names were being translated as there was no way that they could have such mundane and Earth-centric names. And each group had something of differing experiences during the summoning.
I explained “A tank is a warrior that specializes in focusing attackers on themselves while mitigating the damage that they receive. There are many forms that this may take. I will need to develop skills that allow this to be effective.”
“That is stupid. Here is the first lesson. Deliver damage. If you cannot kill your opponent, what use are you?” exclaims Steven.
This shocked me as my gaming experience suggested that the most important members of any group were the HEALERS
Steven continued, “Each of you will destroy one of the dummies. You must continue until this has been achieved. If one of you is unable to do so. Then the rest of you must take the appropriate actions.”
We each moved to one of the dummies. I took a stand in front of mine and readied my hammer. I took a light swing at it. The dummy took little or no damage. Clearly, it was going to take a lot of damage to destroy it. While I could understand how the Fire Mage could achieve this, since I had not actually received any powers when I selected my Archetype I wonder how this was going to work. And as for the healer, clearly, if I had selected this type of Archetype I would have selected a healing spell.
I build a rhythm to my strikes without going all out, I want to be aware of how the other two members of the team are working out. Robert did have a spell, some sort of fire dart. The problem was that while he was causing more damage than I was it was clear the effort was considerable. He had a dagger that he soon had to draw which allowed him to chip away at his damage once his ability to cast had reached his limits. Fanny on the other hand looked shell-shocked and took a mace from her belt and was whacking at her dummy with even less effect than my light workout was achieving.
It looked like Robert might succeed but Fanny was doomed to failure.
Thinking about what my experiments had suggested from last night. I focused on my weapon and mentally repeated ‘Enhance Damage Enhance Damage Enhance Damage’ The stress of the situation seemed to help as rather than taking many repetitions after only 3 cycles I felt an extra drain on my mental strength and my Hammer was now taking significant chunks out of the dummy. Steven looked shocked as this as I had not seemingly changed the amount of effort that I was using. Since I was in between Robert and Fanny it was possible to focus on Fanny’s Mace and repeat the enchantment. This time it only took one cycle which was just as well, once I completed the chant it was clear to me that I had exhausted my available power. Casting on Fanny’s weapon had sucked more resources from me than both my two failed casts and the successful one.
Taking a deep breath and pausing briefly, I was assaulted with three messages in quick succession.
New Skill - Basic Damage Enhancement I. - 1/10
New Skill - Basic Remote casting - 1/10.
Skill improvement - Basic Damage Enhancement I - 2/10
At this point I increased my swing rate. While this was rapidly destroying the dummy I could not accept in my mind how this could be considered combat training. I was receiving no instruction, no feedback, and the team was under threat of having to take unspecified action against a team member if they were unable to complete a difficult if not impossible task for an untrained student who did not have the correct skillset.
A healer is not someone that should ever be expected to individually defeat an opponent. But without a healer, it was imaginable that the whole team would not be able to survive.I soon crushed my dummy, after all this is about the easiest type of target for a large hammer. As I destroyed the chest of the dummy, I thought that there is no way that a live opponent would just stand there and allow themselves to be hit. It just did not make sense.
Soon after I finished, Fanny’s mace connected with the dummy's head in a very final way. It spun off and crashed into the shield wall. Moments later Robert fired off yet another fiery dart into the chest cavity of the dummy which promptly set it on fire.
New Skill - Basic War Hammer - 1/10.
Steven should have looked pleased that all three of us had completed the task that he had set. But it did seem that he really wanted to get rid of Fanny and he wanted us to do the deed. It seemed rather unlikely. It was a really weird feeling. It was not as clear as the announcements in the blue boxes but it did have the same feeling, of external knowledge.
Steven then told us that “You should have received your first skill. Skills are important and they will enhance your ability to take action. There are passive skills and active skills. When you gain a skill there will be some form of an announcement that the system makes. Most often this will be in the form of a set of words that appear in vision, At your level, you will not be able to share those announcements. We will work on that but in the meantime Inform me of the skill that you have gained.”
I stated “Basic War Hammer.”
Fanny said “Basic Mace.”
Robert said, “I received two, Fire Dart and Basic Dagger.”
“Did anyone gain an upgrade or enhancement?”
We all indicated the negative. It was interesting I could feel a strain against my will each time that Steven used what I was coming to recognize as the command voice. Yet in comparison to James, his commands were a lot weaker and I did not really feel any stress in not volunteering that I had just gained a number of skills and one skill enhancement.
“For now you will continue to train with your weapons. Robert, You will only use your dagger If I see you cast a fire dart I will beat you to a pulp.”
The rest of the day was a hard grind. By the end of the day, I had improved my Basic War hammer skill by 1 level. Hours later we were escorted back to the barracks. The trip back passed in a blur, and I remember nothing of the trip. We were so exhausted that I was nearly unable to eat. Several of the people from the other world had fallen asleep while eating.
We staggered to our rooms and as our heads hit the pillows of the cots we were asleep.