I must say, thank you all for being honest in your reviews, and thank you for your comments, albeit angry comments, which have informed me how I can amend the situation. I was planning on doing this later on, but with the influx of unhappy readers, I feel obligated to make this change sooner. I do apologize for any unnecessary resentment I may have generated from the last chapter. I also apologize for the unhappiness I generated. I guess the catching up chapter can wait till next time. Thus, I present to you this chapter

You can take my stats, but you can’t take my experience!

(Side Note: Arkane put up a review on my other fiction, The Mad Hatter asking when it will continue. I do not have a definitive date. I actually am taking a sociology class in the near future to augment the quality of the story and the depth of the society in that story. So I do not know when I will continue. I can honestly say, I have that one much better planned than this one. Thanks for that nice review by the way.)

Abrum was in the middle of the clearing he had fallen asleep in. In his hands, he held a long slender stick around the size of his forced primary weapon, the katana. After his stamina had regenerated, he had scoured the surrounding trees for a suitable branch for his training. Once he had found one, he had taken it to the middle of the clearing and begun on the long, grueling journey to achieve his previous strength, and surpass his previous self.

His training progressed at a slow rate in the beginning. He was unsure how to wield a double handed weapon efficiently, and also, the branch with which he was training with was inadequate. After about an hour of swinging the branch around aimlessly, he finally dropped the branch in frustration and resignation.

‘I’m not getting anywhere with this. The branch isn’t balanced like that katana, and thus isn’t effective…’ thought Abrum to himself.

Unwilling to pick up the katana, he decided to focus upon strength building exercises. He took himself to a tree that had a suitably high branch and began doing pull-ups. In his mind, he kept that horrific image of Lilith dying right before his eyes, and that spurred him on. For a straight 45 minutes, he did those pull-ups at a frightening pace, never slowing, only increasing in speed as he cursed himself for his powerlessness. One might say that this is impossible, even with the pain reduction being on 25%, the dolor would be too much.

However, he had gained many things from Aleqe’s hell training besides stats. His upper body had stretched its pain toleration to the very human limits! This was further pushed past human reason during his time in the forest, where his body had been massacred twice with extreme prejudice. The pain toleration was stretched ever further with his experience of his whole body tearing during his transformation into the Blood Wolf. Thus, this was nearly nothing to him. The stats had no effect except to further augment the potential of the body. While this was valuable, the experience that Abrum had obtained through his pain, his hardships, and his struggles made the value of the stats insignificant. He had been accustomed to his previous power, now all that was required was to restore it. His high pain toleration would increase his rate of training by almost 25%.

With his high pain toleration gained through experience, the breaks that he would require would be minimal, and thus cut out the time consuming breaks.

He let go of the branch and sat at the base of the tree, lightly panting.

There were numerous tiny boxes in Abrum’s view, heralding his increase in strength, but he brushed them away.

He smiled and muttered under his breath

“You can take my stats, but you can’t take my experience, painstakingly cumulated through the hell training and travels…” at this, he slightly chuckled.

The stat gain was insignificant in his eyes. His goal was to overcome this challenge, and be triumphant in the end. One might wonder how in the world he was not giving up. His journey in the forest and finally have all his hard work taken away because of the flippant order of the “god.”

One of course was his drive to right his wrong. His powerlessness allowed Lilith to die, and he refused to let that happen again.

The second can be summarized quaintly in the following quote: “One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity.”

Abrum saw all these setbacks, all these struggles, as trials to make him stronger. They were merely lessons that would benefit him in the end. Thus, with that mindset, he continued the cycle of pushing his body to its current limits, tearing apart his digital muscles, and then resting to allow the muscles to regenerate even stronger.

After about an hour, he had a rough training regime in place. He would spend about 45 minutes out of an hour doing his training, and spend the rest regenerating. He continued to do those exercises until his hands bled. Ripping muscles, waiting for them to regenerate over those agonizing 15 minutes. He sat contemplating, heavily panting. He looked at his bleeding and noticed the something very different about his blood. He raised his hand and watched his now silver blood trickle down his hands.

As he watched the silvery blood mesmerized, he came across an idea that would cut the regeneration time in half, if not in quarter. Apprehensively, he lifted his hand to his lips and licked a portion of his blood off. He felt his fatigue fading at a rapid pace, and in a mere minute, his fatigue had faded. He smiled at the new discovery that would cut his increase his available training time from 75% (45 minutes out of an hour) to a full 98.33% (59 minutes out of an hour). With this in mind, it wouldn’t even take him 4 days to achieve his previous strength.

‘…But this is going to be a painful next four days and what about sleep!?… eh… Who needs sleep?’

Thus, Abrum continued to train, putting his heart into it while the guardians slept, exhausted from their madness.  

*Training Center*

While Abrum was doing his hell training, Aleqe was putting the fox twins through his own… special variation.

It had only been two days since the twins had been left with Aleqe, or rather, Abrum had been teleported away from them. Since then, Aleqe had put them to work, and began their training.

In his centuries of battling experience, and the preceding century of his blindness, Aleqe was adept at judging what weapon would best suit a person. From their aura, Aleqe had a very specific weapon in mind.

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With that weapon in mind, he using his best wise person voice, he asked them, right after Abrum had disappeared:

“Do you want strength? You’d be able to see Abrum faster this way.”

Bella was cautious in her choice of answer, trying to search Aleqe’s face for any ulterior motives. It is said that eyes are the windows to the soul. Since Aleqe’s eyes were scarred shut, one could call his soul windowless, unreadable. This was the case for Bella in particular who could not sense the calm, flowing aura around Aleqe. Seeing no ill intent in his face, Bella slowly nodded.

Tella, being Tella, immediately answered “Yes!” in an enthusiastic voice. She felt extremely sad whenever Abrum wasn’t around. If getting stronger was her ticket to seeing Abrum again, then she’d put her heart into it. Clumsily of course, because that was her personality, but she would put her heart into it.

With the consent of the two, he had immediately put them to work. Aleqe was sitting in the middle of the training hall, watching the two fox twins work. Using long poles, they were currently painting one of the inside walls.

“Thrust!” Aleqe yelled suddenly. Bella tried to comply with the best of her ability. Gripping the base of the pole with her right hand, she thrust quickly forward. Tella did the same, but with more rapidity.

“Tella’s win again. Bella, that means you have to paint the back wall, and no slacking on the hand positions.” Aleqe said with a friendly chuckle. “Good job Tella. Continue painting this wall. No slacking on the hand positions either.”

Bella pouted and trudged over to the back wall while Aleqe followed. Bella was lost in thought as she walked. She was puzzled by the way this “great teacher” was teaching. Originally, she thought he was just obtaining cheap labor out of the two of them; however, she dismissed this thought after he meticulously positioned their hands on the paint poles. Bella wasn’t dim, and she could see from the meticulous way that Aleqe taught them about their hand positions that he was preparing them for something. She just didn’t know what.

Thus she painted the back wall with Aleqe meticulously, and affably correcting her hand positions. He pointed out that one should keep their hands wide apart, this allowed for more maneuverability for the pole. He also taught where the center of gravity on the pole was and how to harness this, allowing one to spin the pole in a propeller motion.

When Aleqe was demonstrating the propeller motion, he did it with such force that it splattered paint everywhere.

Bella meticulously brushed off the still wet paint off. Tella just had a huge smile on her face and she painted HER wall with more vigor, complying efficiently whenever Aleqe randomly called out “THRUST!”

At the end of that day, while Abrum was still on his first day of the painting regime Aleqe off-handedly proposed a little match.

“Why don’t we have a little paint match? You and your sister have been tediously painting these walls for the past three days. Why not show me the results of your training?” Aleqe suggested slyly.

“Sure thing Mister Al!” Tella answered excitedly. Aleqe’s eyebrow twitched at the casual shortening of his name, but Tella didn’t see this, she was already in the center of the training hall, dipping her pole brush into a bucket of blue paint. Honestly, even if she had seen it, she wouldn’t have known what it meant.

Bella was reluctant, complaining about the paint getting in her ears and on her fluffy tail, but acquiesced after Aleqe’s sly mention of Abrum.

Thus, the two twins stood at opposite ends of the training halls, Tella, with her brush dipped in blue, and Bella’s dipped in red.

Aleqe lazily called out “Begin.” The laziness in his voice was to mask his interest in the match.

Immediately, Tella rushed forward, holding the pole in front of her while Bella waited for her. After Tella was within reach, she executed a flurry of thrusts, the rapidity of which was startling. The muscle memory gained from the past two days allowed Tella to not think about the technique, but only of the speed.  

Bella, while not as fast as Tella, had a different way of wielding the pole. With her hands widely spread across the pole, she was able to maneuver the pole easily. With her left hand at the pole’s center of gravity, she was able to flip the pole at fast speeds, blocking most of the strikes.

However, even with the impressive blocking maneuvers, occasionally, the tip of Tella’s brush would touch Bella’s body, leaving blue marks. These marks were congregated around the head, heart, and groin. Aleqe was impressed that Tella would go for these areas purely on instinct, attributing it to the foxes hunting instincts.

Bella became wily with her attacks, throwing in feints to confuse Tella, making her move the pole to block the incoming feints. Usually after a succession of three feints, Bella would make a serious attack, which were nearly always successful. There were long red streaks on the ankles, forearms, and wrists. Aleqe smiled while he watched the exchange. Tella and Bella started to combine the other’s style with their own. They continued to have their paint fight, until they were all coated. Bella was not happy with the outcome, having paint all over her tail. She lowered her guard for a second.

“Wait! It’s so messy! We should sto-.” She was cut off mid-sentence as she got a paint brush right to the face as Tella took advantage of the opportunity.

Bella grabbed the paintbrush and slowly removed it from her face. She looked coldly into the eyes of Tella.

“Why you…” and then the paint began to fly again as Bella grabbed the red paint bucket and dumped it on Tella’s head.

“This is fun!” Tella said and dumped the blue bucket on Tella’s head. Thus the paint continued to fly.

Aleqe sensed all of this, amused.

‘These two… born naturals in the naginata techniques… I probably should break up the pain fight about now… But it is so funny to watch!’ So Aleqe resigned himself to watch them a bit longer.

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