“Wait- Wait just a moment!” I held my hand up.

“My training dummy is quitting already?” Versai’s voice was deceptively calm.

“No, I just need to get my head right.” I breathed slowly, in and out. This wasn’t damaging me. Even if it was, Pammy is right here to heal me. Even if I don’t pick up anything in terms of knife fighting, it’s worth it to teach my body that it can endure pain.

I had spent my entire life avoiding pain of all sorts. Time to toughen up. I don’t have stats… or at least I can’t see my stats… but one way or another, it was time to grind pain resistance. It wasn’t doing me any real damage. Nobody was trying to be mean. Toughening up was absolutely necessary to survive.

Besides, if you only have one weapon, you damn well learn how to use it. No whiney “It’s Not Fair!” protag-kun. Time to be the American the Japanese think you are. I squared up and nodded at her. “Bring it.”

She made me scream again. I held out longer for this time. Then I reset. We repeated that… I think half a dozen more times. It felt like we had been practicing a long time, but that was the point of training in the Tower- time wasn’t passing.

“It occurs to me that you are probably a better swordswoman now than you were in the Queen’s guard.” I said during a break.

“I don’t WANT to talk about it.”

Inflection on the “want” meant yes. I grunted, nibbling on the edge of an idea.

“A lot better?”

“I don’t WANT to talk about it.”

Though she sounded a bit iffy on that. Hmm. How to probe deeper?

“That is because you haven’t pushed yourself to improve.”

“I DON’T want to talk about it.” So that wasn’t it.

“Hard to practice your sword and shield play against clawed monsters.”

“I don’t WANT to talk about it.” Though this time she kind of looked like she wanted to wiggle her hand a bit.

I picked at it some more, but at the end of the day, I was a weeb. Anime was plainly not a reliable source for accurate fighting advice, and really, with a very few honorable mentions, sword and shield mains were just not a popular trope. Swords- sure. Too many to count. Shields? Just the one guy with his… questionable commitment to consent. And the age of consent.

Moving along.

Ah, Vinland Saga, some of them, some of the time. What else? Oh hell, I know there is more than that. Sophia in Soul Calibur? Gonna go ahead and say Versai would unscrew my head if she ever saw that art. Sophia was definitely designed for aesthetics.

And where you have attractive women in games, you have special moves for them. Versai… had never shown me her Ult.

“Hey, Versai? Sometimes, in the heat of battle, have you ever felt like there was a power welling up inside of you, and you managed to do something you would never have imagined was possible?”

She gave me a thousand yard stare. Things got very chilly. I hurriedly waved my hands. “I mean like what happened with the Mikas when a bunch of them were grouped together! A special effect, or special attack or something.”

“Oh. No.”

Still a lot of chill in the air there. Frost forming on my eyelashes level of chill. Better explain more!

“My thinking is, a lot of what I think you are actually capable of is gated behind systems that you haven’t actually encountered yet. Like the rooms in the Tower- you have to clear so many waves to get access to them.”

I tried to force a smile and continue, but… I had used up all my social confidence. Versai was freezing me out. I had screwed up. I sighed and stood up. She didn’t. Why would she? I hadn’t, couldn’t, order her to keep going.

I sighed again and walked to the records room. There was enough room there to swing a stick. I’d practice on my shadow what she had practiced on me. Eventually, either she or I would feel better.

I bent my knees slightly, and brought the knife up across my body to my left shoulder. Then I whipped it across, and repeated in the other direction. Back and forth, back and forth. Not really putting much weight into it, I noticed, nor muscle. It was a pure speed move.

I wedged a stick between the desk and the chair, and whipped the dagger at it, using the motions Versai had literally beaten into me. I knocked the stick out of place and onto the floor. When I looked at it, the cut was only part way through. After my experiments earlier, I knew that the knife could slice through the stick almost effortlessly. So what was going on there?

I quickly needed a new stick. I could hear the music box playing again, so I gambled on a quick dash out of the Tower. I might not be able to move far from it, but after four waves, we had nothing but small sticks lying around. I could have all the test pieces I wanted.

I saw my workers and troops idling around. I firmly ignored them. Not like we were losing time, and I had a feeling I was on to something important here.

I kept at it. I didn’t get tired. I did get bored, but I tried to fixate. Tried to push through it. I discovered an amazing thing. It turns out, that once you reach a certain level of boredom, like, the walls are closing in and you swear you hear whispers coming from the shadows levels of bored- you break through. A cool feeling washes over your brain, and it’s like you were never bored in the first place! Refreshed, I would keep right on swinging, until the cycle repeated again.

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Don’t know why it never worked that way in school. Maybe I just hadn’t been bored enough.

The room looked decently mulched before I figured out where I was screwing up. The edge. The edge had to be held exactly in line with the direction of the swing. If it was tilted out of line, it would stick or even bounce off the branch. The secret to a good cut was edge alignment.

The much was nearly ankle deep before I felt like I was making those cuts reliably. I have no idea how many thousands of times I swung my arm. Cutting was easier than thinking, and my doll body didn’t get tired. It became almost addictive. That cool wave of refreshment just hits so, so good.

I’ve heard it called a flow state. I think fugue state would be more accurate. I dissolved myself into the endless, almost effortless, motion. Livened with the occasional all natural high.

I set myself a small goal- one thousand perfect cuts, forehand and backhand. Naturally, the count reset if there was a miscut!

I found a game I could lose myself in. The cutting game. Like fruit ninja, but IRL. Kind of. You know what I mean. It was amazing to just… feel my body move. To feel myself incrementally getting better at something. For that fugue state to be something good and virtuous.

There was a word I had to look up- anhedonia. It came up when I tried one of those scammy online therapy outfits. They tried to say that I wasn’t really enjoying the anime and the games, I was retreating from the world. Distracting myself from the fact that I no longer took pleasure in life activities.

Sorta fit, sorta didn’t. Well… I was definitely hiding from an awkward social situation, and I was definitely losing myself in a mindless repetitive activity, but you know what? It’s fun. Getting better and better at something is really fun!

A thousand cuts each way. Next would be stabbing. I picked a piece of wood with a knot in it and declared that it would be my new target. I just propped it up against a wall. No need to get creative. Crouch slightly, blade extended slightly in front of my body and… stab.

Eventually I changed to the classic downward stab. Hammer grip, icepick grip, call it what you want, I was stabbing basically straight up and down (or a slight angle, I’m not obsessive,) and repeated the stabbing process until perfection was achieved.

God it was satisfying. I was pulled from my fun when there was a knock on the door. This was unprecedented, and I was violently yanked from my happy place.

“I’m not home!”

A half second later, my brain caught up with my mouth and I groaned.

“Versai, that you?” I yelled through the door.

“Yeah.”

I was going to invite her in, but I remembered she said she couldn’t come to the Records Hall. “One sec. Oh Hell!”

“What?”

“Does the Tower have a self cleaning function? Or, a broom closet or something?”

“Not that I ever noticed, but I can’t say I ever saw the Tower get dirty. Why?”

I waded to the door and pushed it open.

Oh, that’s nice. Now I know what “gobsmacked” looked like.

“Tower Master… just what happened here?”

“I practiced what you showed me.” I smiled. I was feeling much better. Odd, but I was. Well, I guess a lot of time has passed? In a manner of speaking?

“What, the slashing drill? And I guess… stabbing things?” She looked dubious.

“Yep!”

“It looks like a sawmill’s waste pile in here!”

“Yep.” I couldn’t keep the smile down.

She shook her head in bewilderment. “Alright, what am I not understanding?”

“It’s not trash.”

That got me a confused look.

“I cut it and stabbed it and even stomped it on occasion and it broke down into basically glorified mulch. But it’s not trash.”

“Matter of opinion, I guess?”

I shook my head. “No, it isn’t. Watch.”

I picked up a pointy stick and tried to cut a point into it. The stick did its usual party trick of exploding into rot dust. I pointed at a stick by her feet. Versai picked it up. There was a fine point on it.

“There is a system in place that limits what we can think and do. It’s not stupid. It’s had a lot of tweaks over the years. But it’s not perfect. There are all kinds of angles you can find on it. You just have to be a bit unreasonable about things. Creative, and unreasonable. Things like- ‘You have no meaningful skill cap when you can grind something eternally.’

“Skill cap?”

“Yeah. For example, there is nothing stopping you from practicing your sword swings forty thousand times in a row. You don’t get tired. You could have Mika just block with her shield as Pammy and Maria alternated healing her while you rained down cuts.”

Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “I could. Not sure what the benefit would be, though. My skills have been I don’t WANT to talk about it.”

“No? Think about what Jim was doing in the basement. Was Sebastian always that good at being invisible? I bet he wasn’t. They found an edge to push, and practiced, practiced, practiced. Except their practice time is comparatively limited. They only have the time someone survives in their little dungeons to train themselves. We have UNLIMITED time.”

“I… see where you are going with this, I think.”

“Well, you might be missing one useful advantage.” I pointed at the woodchips. “You see lumber yard waste. You know what I see?”

“Go on.”

“Accelerant. I see a huge fire, just waiting to happen. At the moment, I don’t have a way to create a spark. Don’t have a way to start fires. But I bet you we could figure one out. Bet you that Rakim could make a spark-thrower, or even just leave a chunk of iron with a sharp edge lying around. Somewhere near a bit of flint or equally hard stone.”

“And you lost me again. I’m getting that you want a fire trap, but I don’t see how this is something so special. Lots of people have made their own traps over the years, and they were never as good as the looted ones.”

“No, no, that is not the point, the trap isn’t the point. I made a usable resource in the Tower! Don’t you see? The prohibition isn’t absolute. It won’t let me make a useful product, but it doesn’t care about the byproducts of approved activities. And I’m allowed to slice and stab wood with my knife to practice.”

I was speaking a mile a minute.

“We can figure ways around it. This is the proverbial thin end of the wedge. I have finally started finding the edges of the System running this place.”

I started waving my arms, trying to get her as excited as I was.

“We are going to dig into this, and once we think we have pushed it as far as we can, we trigger the Fifth Wave. I will bet you whatever you like that a whole bunch of new things become available on the sixth day. Which gives us more things to exploit. More options. So when we go back to Gradden March and finish that relic site, we can be as safe and powerful as possible. Then on to the next thing, rinse and repeat.”

I took a deep breath. “This is it, Versai. This is the point where we start breaking the game.”