LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 59: The Door.
[Boxing Lv6]
[Focus Lv6]
[Endurance Lv6]
[Mahna Manipulation Lv4]
[Combo Magji Lv2]
All in all, it was a good fight for Zoey, even though she lost. It isn’t often that she could level five skills at once with Mahna Manipulation, even leveling up twice! The mahna within her body didn’t increase or anything, but her mastery over it did for sure. After being raised to Lv4, it took less reliance on her emotions to have it respond to her will.
Zoey reached into her pocket, hoping that her phone wasn’t broken from the fight. A concern that she didn’t think would be important before stepping into the magical world. It only took Zoey a second to realize that her phone wasn’t anywhere on her person. Neither was her journal. Now that she thought about it, where the hell was she!?
She was a little embarrassed that her first concern when waking up in an abandoned room that wasn’t familiar to her was her phone. Cell phones have literally numbed the brains of the current generation. Zoey felt ashamed but didn’t blame herself. She was nothing but a product of her environment! You can’t blame her for doing something she felt was an instinctive action. Teens like her were raised this way.
Zoey got up from the couch and looked around the room she was in. With her phone missing, she was entirely in the dark. The only information she could go off of was that she only remembered losing to that asshole before waking up. As it stands now, he is the most likely cause of why she is inside this room. Understanding that it was possible that it was the dickface’s fault that she was in here just made her want to pound his face in even more the next time she saw him.
Just sitting around waiting for her kidnapper to return didn’t seem like a smart idea to Zoey. Besides, she wasn’t smart enough to play the protagonist in one of those types of thriller or horror movies anyway. The types of movies that require its female protagonist to be clever and survivalist enough to escape their crazed capturer. If Zoey was in a situation like that, she could only get outsmarted and die or kill her capturer with her bare fists.
She got up from the couch and opened up the door to leave only for the door to suddenly sprout big red lips and slap her away with its tongue before loudly laughing.
“No, no, no. You cannot leave until you grasp the basics of mahna control.” It spoke with an annoying high-pitched voice that grated on Zoey’s nerves.
With disgusting sticky drool from some unknown creature dripping from her body, it didn’t take long for Zoey to lose her temper with the weird door. Her fists, shoulders, core, thighs, and feet were enveloped in mahna as Zoey shot towards the door like an enraged bull. Each of her punches was slapped with a lash of its tongue as it repeatedly chanted, “No! No! No! No!”
“You need elegance in the way you control your mahna. What are you, some sort of animal? There are more intricate and complex ways of using mahna. Technique over Power, fool!” It insulted.
“Combo Volume I: Combo Time.” Zoey softly muttered.
Furious blow after blow tried to demolish the door, with each punch getting stronger and stronger. It wasn’t until half a minute passed of trying to break down the door that Zoey realized what the fuck was going on. This was almost exactly like how it was when she was fighting that prick! More and more power wasn’t how she should’ve tried to fight him. Most of the force she was throwing out was simply deflected from the slipperiness of the door’s tongue or with magji as that asshole did. Out of all of her attacks, the only one that did anything was when she twisted his arm. Twisting...
Zoey’s direct and straightforward punches began to change slowly. Her mahna did its best to bring the vague idea of Zoey’s into reality as she worked alongside it. The punches began to slightly turn. This turning of her fist in combination with her mahna is what changed the door’s “No! No! No! No!” into “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”
This support from the disgusting magical door did not make Zoey happy. If anything, regardless if it was on her side or not, its annoyingness, in general, made her want to smash it to pieces. It could’ve acted like her best friend, and she still probably would’ve wanted to break it down. Maybe she’s just upset that she’s being forcefully taught something, and if she wanted to escape, Zoey had no choice but to do so. Zoey couldn’t imagine someone having math shoved down their throat and then expecting them to like it.
It took more than a couple of hours before Zoey eventually mastered the perfect form of the unknown punch she was seeking. Hours of constant failure, hours of non-stop cursing and insults, hours spent contemplating giving up and just waiting for the asshole to come back and get her. If she regained consciousness in the morning, it should be about midnight by now. In all honesty, if it weren’t for the system showing that she was making any progress at all, she would’ve given up after failure two hundred.
Her combo magji was useless against this door. Every normal punch of hers had a majority of its power dispersed through the magji technique it was trying to teach her. For her, the key to this technique was control and twisting. Using her body and mahna together was the most important thing before she could even attempt to learn the technique.
[Twisting Force Lv1]
[Mahna Manipulation Lv5]
The moment of truth came after these two skills popped up from the Box. Knowledge flowed into her body about the basics of Twisting Force and more about mahna control. Zoey would describe herself as quite the patient person in certain cases. Especially before getting the Box, she would say she was one of the most patient people in the world! However, like with all things, they change with time.
Zoey didn’t hold anything back as she gathered up all of her pent-up anger into a single punch. Similar to the quiet before the storm, Zoey’s body was ready to explode with its newly formed power. Throwing this attack had a large wind-up period, making it unusable in a real fight just yet. But a door couldn’t move or avoid an attack like this, making it the perfect testing tool for this technique. Zoey’s entire left arm seemed to twist like a raging cyclone as it tore through the air towards the magji door.
“Amazing! Just perfect! You are an absolute genius...!” Were its last words.
Zoey’s fist held no mercy or hesitation as it landed on the door’s tongue. It couldn’t disperse or redirect the twisting force of Zoey’s punch. A pleasurable moan came from the door as the tip of its tongue all the way to the base of the door itself was twisted up into a spiral before shattering to pieces. Zoey’s chest rose up and down slowly.
She certainly felt satisfaction and joy for freeing herself. However, along with that came a hunger for more techniques that could be gained from mahna control. She disliked that Forehead Flicking Asshole a lot... Could she beat him now with this new fighting style? Probably not, since he can turn punches from 200 damage to 0 damage without even deflecting or redirecting as the door did.
‘Do I have to learn grappling to deal with him since punches don’t work?’ Zoey considered learning another style of martial arts.
Being in the YFTL, Zoey had to be aware of multiple types of martial arts. Those that specialize in grappling were perhaps her biggest enemy. It would make sense if she tried learning it to deal with one critical weakness of hers. Learning some type of grappling would only bring benefits. Zoey had no reason to refuse to learn as many styles of grappling as she could. Once she got back home, she’ll hire private trainers to teach her on the weekends until she learned as much as she could. If the box recognized Grappling as a skill, it could lessen the time she needed to practice it with private trainers.
‘I do love boxing and how it feels to completely crush someone with my fists, but that doesn’t mean I only need to learn boxing... Ultimate Boxing Style could be a martial art that takes knowledge from several other martial arts with boxing as its main focus, not its entire focus.’ Zoey walked through the shattered door with a smile on her face.
She was always hesitant about learning other martial arts in combination with boxing because of her goal with the Ultimate Boxing Style. However, didn’t she have something perfect for this? Like, a completely mysterious box that came from who knows where with some unknown purpose that can help her learn several skills with no known limits? Thinking about it again, she really is fucking stupid! There was no reason for her to have this obsession with boxing. She just liked the feeling of getting stronger and fighting!