The Sixth School.

Chapter Sixty Eight: Ascension…

Greg managed to lean to the side fast enough for the fist that was flying at his face to narrowly miss. Despite evading the attack, Greg couldn’t help the cold sweat that soaked his back as he felt the sharp wind that brushed against his face as a result of the speed and force behind the punch. Had those knuckles connected, he would have been out cold. Taking a step forward to gather momentum, Greg sent his right hand looping around the outstretched hand in a counter-hook that held nothing back. But, rather than a satisfying crunch of knuckles against flesh, his punch sailed harmlessly through the air as his target danced out of his reach with annoying ease. Greg, however, only let himself feel the disappointment for a split second before focusing on the fight once more. He had overextended himself a bit with his attack but not by too much. His opponent was the kind to mercilessly punish even such small mistakes, so he needed to correct his stance before…

It took every ounce of will that Greg could call on to keep his body from locking up when he felt the punch land like a sledgehammer on his exposed ribs. Greg knew from experience that his opponent wouldn’t care for his pain. If he curled up from the it, he’d just be opening himself to further punishment. Gritting his teeth from a mix of pain and rage, Greg took another step forward and lowering his center of gravity a bit, snapped upward with a vicious uppercut. There was a space of less than a second between the punch to his ribs and his answer. His opponent, who’d been expecting him to curl up in pain, was thus caught flat-footed by the response. A feral growl left Greg as he felt his knuckles slam into his opponent’s chin.

Looking at the beefy man with bulging muscles, a thick mustache that covered his upper lip, and the feral look of someone who enjoyed watching others bleed, ‘the dancer' is the last thing you’d think to call him. And yet, somehow, that’s the moniker that this man had earned himself within the fighting pit. The reason for this was that, despite looking like a Juggernaut that you expect to just tank everything and deal out twice the damage received in return, he was actually a very hard man to land a blow on during a fight. His footwork was incredible. It turned him into something of a ghost within the small, four-sided arena they were in. He seemed to have a preternatural sense of the flow of combat. When to step into fighting range, and when to back out. How to step into your opponent’s blind spot and how to keep them out of yours. How to move so that your opponent feels pressured even without you having to throw any attacks. This man seemed to have it all down to a t, hence the name.

It was for this reason that Greg showed no mercy.

Back in his old world, such a clean uppercut would have laid out most men flat. That, however, was not the case with the dancer. Greg didn’t know if the people in this world were just more resilient or if this man was just a tough son of a bitch. But over the several weeks that he’d been coming to this fighting pit, he’d never once seen anyone knock him out. As such, Greg didn’t count on the uppercut being a coup de grace. With murder in his eyes, Greg pursued the man who was staggered two steps back by his uppercut. Aiming at his nose, Greg's left hand shot forward in a lightning-fast jab. It spoke to the man’s toughness that he still had enough presence of mind to bring his hands together in front of his face to block the attack.

Unfortunately for him, it was a feint. With his vision obstructed by his arms, Greg put everything he could into a right straight into the man’s solar plexus. The man bent forward as the air was knocked from his lungs and his chest locked up. While his head presented a tempting target with him bent over, Greg didn’t give in to the temptation. Greg had seen this man take headshots from other fighters stronger than him and still go on fighting. That, for him, was a guaranteed loss. If he didn’t press this hard-won advantage to the extreme, the man was sure to come back with a vengeance. As such, without wasting time, Greg slammed two powerful left hooks directly into the man’s liver!

More than once during his previous fights, Greg had had the misfortune of suffering a blow to the liver himself. As such, he was intimately familiar with the sharp agony that drove the man down to one knee despite being in the middle of a high-stakes fight. But while Greg understood the man’s pain, it didn’t elicit even a hint of sympathy from him. Instead, Greg jumped forward and without holding anything back, drove his knee into the man’s face. What his hands weren’t powerful enough to achieve, his legs proved to be up to the task. Tenacious as the man was, there was only so much punishment he could take. With him still trying to force air into his lungs, and the pain from his liver, the satisfactory crunch of his nose breaking was probably the last thing the man heard before he passed out cold on the floor of the fighting arena.

Greg didn’t stop. Straddling the dancer’s chest, Greg sent blow after blow into the unconscious man’s face reducing it to a bloody mess. This wasn’t some sport where there were notions of honor and sportsmanship. They were in an illegal fighting ring where the losers rarely ever got to see the next day. Greg had lost the number of times their positions were switched and the last thing he saw in a dungeon run was this man’s bloody fists as he slammed them over and over again into his face. For the first time, he was the one winning and he had no intention of showing mercy…

YOU DIED!

After feeling a sharp pain in the back of his head, Greg found himself on the clouds above Torrin. Greg could feel a molten fury bubbling up within him at the dirty cheating by the spider gang. But with only clouds around him, his rage, bloodlust, and desire for rampage were largely impotent. It took a long while for him to calm down but eventually, he did, and a sigh left him. “Guess I should have seen that coming,” He muttered to himself when the rage was no longer clouding his judgment. The dancer was one of the gang’s best fighters and top earners in the fighting ring. They were never going to so easily let Greg kill the man even though they would never have intervened if the shoe was on the other foot.

A short while later, Greg opened his eyes back inside his bedroom. For a second, he didn’t move, paying attention to his body and how he felt. It was almost surreal to realize that, other than some mild discomfort, Greg felt perfectly okay. After assimilating seven beast-cores, the dungeons no longer strained his soul as much. A few months back, a dungeon run would leave him sick and weakened, damn nearly passing out as a result. Now, however, if he was inclined to do so, Greg could get up and move around, perhaps do a few exercises. Something that would have been unimaginable just a few months back. The beast cores may have only contained fragments of souls and not the whole thing, but these were tier-three beasts they were talking about. He may not have been extraordinary in other areas such as affinity or direct combat. Greg, however, had fortified his soul by a good margin beyond what may have been expected of a half-step first-tier mage.

Just today, he’d assimilated the last beast-core he would be able to before crossing the threshold into tier one. It belonged to a certain mole-like creature that could grow to the size of a dog. Much like wild dogs, the things lived in packs and had a voracious appetite for meat. Watching them eat, however, one would be reminded of piranhas, not dogs. But unlike piranhas which stopped at stripping meat off bone, these creatures' strong jaws could make short work of the bones of any creature they killed. The things had such a high affinity for the earth element that, rather than dig through it like the moles Greg was familiar with, they just swam through it like it was some sort of liquid. Be it soil or stone, so long as it was made of earth, they could move through it like it was water. And they didn’t swim at a slow pace either, at their maximum speed, Greg had watched the things race past a galloping horse like it was trotting instead of in a full-on sprint.

According to his teacher, tomorrow was the day. His mana pathways were on the cusp of completion and a small nudge was all they’d need before they formed a complete cycle. Greg had suggested that they just push for it today. His teacher, however, wouldn’t hear anything of it. According to her, they were in uncharted territory, seeing as this was a completely new system of awakening. She wasn’t about to rush through anything lest a serious mistake be made in the process, or they miss something crucial in their haste. Much as he was dying to become a fully-fledged mage, Greg could see her point, so in the end, he’d given in.

‘How was that?’ Greg mentally asked his familiar.

‘You forgot my warning to you,’ Came Olivia’s mental reply. ‘The most dangerous time in a battle…”

“…is right after you think you’ve won!” Greg muttered the words to himself, remembering the words that his familiar had uttered right before Greg killed his uncle.

‘Precisely,’ Came Olivia’s reply.

After his first time beating the Mayor’s dinner party dungeon, Olivia explained to him that every path he took would increase in difficulty the more times he failed them. While the increase in challenge was still manageable in the easier dungeons, Olivia had made it clear that in the harder dungeons, an increase in difficulty could have disastrous implications for him. It wasn’t just an issue of the run getting harder, there was a chance that the dungeon would become impossible to complete unless he got a significant power-up out in the real world. Because of this, Greg had been forced to rethink his approach to the dungeons. While going in blind did heighten the sense of adventure, it was also a habit that would come to bite him in the ass when he attempted the harder dungeons. He needed to be more strategic in the way he went about his dives and try to do everything he could to maximize his chances of success.

After three days of thinking, three days in which he didn’t delve into the dungeons, he concluded that it all came down to information. First was information about the target area. In this first dungeon, it was the city of Torrin. In other dungeons, the area of interest would be different. Greg had thus spent a whole two weeks just walking around the different districts, familiarizing himself with the various roads, pathways, and alleys. Where the significant landmarks and buildings were. What roads the city guard patrolled and so on. Once he had the lay of the land and could move about without losing his way regardless of which part of the city he was in, Greg moved on to the second step, which was gathering information about his targets. Their, schedules, their mannerisms, their allies, their foes, and so on.

Depending on who his target was, this step could either be easy or incredibly hard. For example, getting information about the potion-maker, Lady Andreya, wasn’t that hard. She wasn’t that secretive an individual and was well-known throughout the city. Greg wasn’t the first person to be curious and ask around about her so he doubted that it even came across her radar that he was asking around about her. When it came to someone like the spider queen, however, every step had to be taken with extreme caution, lest Greg find himself the target of the spider gang’s ire. In fact, it was in the process of trying to gather information about the elusive woman that Greg had discovered the illegal fighting den. This had in turn led to the discovery of what Greg was now calling the dynamic areas within the dungeons.

Greg had assumed that all of the dungeon was a constant repeat of the same events, over and over again. As such, one could imagine his shock when he came back to the fighting den a second time and found a different set of fighters from the ones he saw the first time, duking it out in the ring. Greg had thus kept coming back to see if it was a fluke or if he’d stumbled onto something significant. And true enough, the fighters kept on changing every time he came back. It wasn’t until his eleventh time returning that he saw the very first set of combatants that he’d found in the ring the very first time he visited the den. In other words, the fighting den had a ten-day cycle in which the fighters kept changing. The changes, however, weren’t just limited to who was fighting. Even the outcome of each fight would change from one match to the next. An attack that was used in one match wasn’t in the next. A defense that failed in one match, averted disaster in the next, and so on. In other words, this small part of the dungeon wasn’t just a static repetition of the same events ad infinitum.

Once Greg discovered one dynamic area, it wasn’t long before he discovered others. They varied widely in both range and scope, from insignificant details like who was standing behind him when he walked into the city at the start of the dungeon run, to more important details like which guards were in patrol in which district. The one thing that all the dynamic areas had in common was that, while the length may vary from one to the next, they all eventually looped back around to the start. Greg had found loops that kept changing back and forth every two days to one that lasted a whole seventeen days.

These dynamic areas made his attempt at collecting information about his targets a bit more challenging as there was no telling what would change to influence them one way or the other. Greg, however, didn’t mind all that much, this was after all more realistic and would be more applicable out in the real world. Some people would maintain the same routine every day whereas others would be unpredictable day to day. If Greg could adapt to the dungeon, he’d be better suited to adapt to the real world.

The third and final target of Greg’s information collection was also the hardest and most elusive. That was the dungeon itself. The first time Greg had beat the dungeon, his actual rating had been just PASSABLE. But because of hidden rules that he hadn’t even been aware of, that score had climbed to a PERFECT rating. Things like hidden missions and path difficulty adjustment were the things that the rating revealed. Greg, however, doubted that this was the end of the list. If he could discover the underlying logic of the dungeon, he’d be better able to operate within it and leverage it to his own benefit. But digging out the dungeon’s secrets, however, was far more difficult than any of his other targets. It was akin to trying to figure out how a TV worked by watching a movie on it.

The city of Torrin and the people in it were one instance of the dungeon but not the actual dungeon itself. He’d need to somehow pierce the veil of each dungeon instance to figure out the secrets that cut across every dungeon. So far, apart from the dynamic areas, Greg had discovered that so long as he didn’t directly pick a path to try and achieve the main objective of the dungeon, the run didn’t get any harder. In other words, so long as he was in information-collecting mode and not actually pursuing any path, then he didn’t have to worry about the dungeon getting harder. But other than these two relatively small discoveries, he’d thus far been unable to pry any other truths from the dungeons. Greg suspected that he'd have to attempt other dungeon instances aside from the Mayor’s dinner party before he discovered more.

‘You did well by pushing through the pain, and you even managed to avoid the temptation to go for your opponent’s head despite him so obviously baiting you,’ Olivia’s continued evaluation of his fight broke Greg out of his thoughts. ‘Unfortunately, you are still too lost in the moment. Like I’ve told you countless times before, the ability to think just two or three steps ahead will enable you to beat opponents that would have otherwise overcome you,’ she stated.

After a while of visiting the fighting den, Greg decided to try and learn how to fight. Part of him had been unsure whether it would be necessary given that he would soon be able to sling spells. His familiar, however, had disabused him of the notion that he could always call on his magic to save the day. Not only were there several instances where mages fought until they were out of mana but it was even more common among lower-tier mages. The higher one’s tier the more mana they had and thus, the harder it was for them to run out. Still, it did happen from time to time, even among the mid-tiers and sometimes even higher! Sure, his awakening method meant that he would have the mana capacity of a third-tier mage as a first-tier mage, but that didn’t change the need to know how to go on fighting even after he was wrung dry of mana. Getting arrogant because of his one advantage was almost certain to land him in hot water and so he put everything into the effort.

Greg had asked his familiar to help him in his task of training. He wasn’t sure if she was any good at martial arts but saw no harm in asking. He’d been expecting some sort of militaristic training where he was put through grueling exercises first to condition his body. He, however, had still been stuck in his old-world kind of thinking. All the familiar had had him do was buy a tacky-looking, bronze bracelet from the Magic shop and put it on. Over the next few weeks, that bracelet had become the bane of his existence. Simply called a CONDITIONING BRACELET in the magic shop, the thing had only one function. It made it harder to move any of his muscles. The thing didn’t weaken any of his muscles, it just made it so that he needed to use twice the strength to move any part of himself. Even the very act of smiling actually required him to expend conscious effort to achieve. And just to ensure that Greg didn’t lie down like a log after his lessons with his teacher and his work as a healer to avoid the strain, his familiar would take him through a set of stretches that worked every muscle in his body and lasted about an hour every day.

The first one that Greg bought was a low-grade tier-one bracelet that could only double the load on his muscles. After two weeks of using this, when Greg had grown relatively used to it, Olivia had him buy the mid-grade tier one. This one could increase the load up to five times. Which is what Greg was now building up to. After four weeks of using it on three times the load, Olivia had adjusted it to four times the load, which is where he was still on. The strain from the bracelet wasn’t something that was immediately noticeable. The first few minutes that one had it on would leave one with the illusion that it was trivially easy to bear. However, over the following hours and days, the strain of having to expend twice the effort to do anything would creep up on you. Before you know it, even just getting up from a seated position became an endurance exercise.

This, however, wasn’t the extent of his training with the familiar. The other, half was something that Greg had chosen to call the theory of combat. Rather than show him how to throw punches and kicks, Olivia had set out to first ensure that Greg had a theoretical understanding of what he was trying to do whenever he entered combat. According to her, he was free to fight as much as he wanted within the dungeons, but it wasn’t until he was able to move comfortably under five times the load of the bangle and he also understood the core lessons of her combat philosophy that she’d start sparring with him out in the real world. There were three lessons that Olivia wanted Greg to internalize whenever he found himself in any fight.

The first lesson was that efficiency was the backbone of combat. In her words, it was a cardinal sin to do in two moves what you could do in one. In essence, whoever needed the least number of moves to win a fight had a deadly advantage over whoever their opponent was. To this end, Greg had been given an in-depth analysis of all the weak points in the human body and how best to aim for them. Much like demolishing a building, if you used enough strength and force, you could bring it down. Anyone who knew anything about demolition, however, knew that this was an unnecessary waste of energy. So long as you hit a few critical points, you could easily bring a massive building down. The same was true of the body. With enough power behind the blow, any part of the body could be turned into a weak point. For a fraction of that power, however, you could cause the same amount of damage if you hit the right spot. Efficiency, that was the name of the game as far as his familiar was concerned.

The second lesson he got from Olivia was about observation and misdirection. According to her, the body was always advertising what it was about to do next. Be it movement of the eyes, tightening of certain muscles, the adjustment of one’s body position, or even the direction in which one’s feet were pointing. To a veteran of combat, all these things would be shouting what you are planning to do next. In this aspect, Greg’s task was twofold. First, he needed to learn to read his opponent’s body language and based on split-second observations, judge what the best response would be. Secondly, he would need to learn to suppress and eventually hide the cues his own body would be inclined to give out in the middle of a fight. If he could misdirect his opponent by giving off the wrong cues, it would be even better. According to Olivia, however, he still wasn’t anywhere near that level of body mastery as yet. For now, his task was just to avoid telegraphing his every move.

The final lesson, and by far the one that Greg struggled with the most, was all about the flow of combat. According to her, only muscle-brained idiots fought with muscles alone. Fighting, for her, was as much an intellectual exercise as it was a physical one. You and your opponents were matching wits even before the fight began. How will you deal with your enemy’s strengths? How will you exploit their weaknesses? When will you advance? When will you withdraw? Can I bait them into moving how I want them to? How will they react to this attack? Are there any flaws in that reaction? If so, how can I best exploit them? And so on. In short, fighting was like a strategy game where you needed to always remain a few moves ahead of your opponents if you wished to maximize your chances of victory.

‘Right up until you were able to push through the pain of that punch to your ribs, all you were doing was reacting to your opponent. There was no planning or forethought in the way you were fighting. You were pulled into his rhythm without even noticing!’ His familiar continued to point out all his mistakes in the fight.

‘You know, all these lessons would be easier to internalize if you and I sparred,’ Greg replied. There was no anger or frustration in his voice. It wasn’t like the familiar was halfhearted in her teachings. She was always committed to explaining all that she could and guiding him in all that he needed to know about combat. The best opening moves, what signals to look for in your opponents to judge what their next move would be. Some basic strategies that he could build upon when facing different kinds of enemies and so on. They just never moved to the next step of sparring.

His familiar just smiled at him before glancing at the bracelet on his wrist. ‘There is a reason why blacksmiths first let’s metal turn red in the furnace before they start hammering. Otherwise, they’ll just be destroying the metal. We can start sparring at any time, but until your body is fast and strong enough to keep up, I’ll just be hurting you. And not just because you’ll be too slow and weak to respond to my attacks. The fighting style I plan to teach you will place certain requirements on your body, for speed in terms of both attack speed and defensive reaction time. Not to mention that you’ll have to put a certain amount of strength into your attacks if you hope to have them do maximum damage. Strength that you don’t currently possess. Rushing to spar with me will not make you a strong fighter sooner. While we are working to ensure that you are first ready, let’s first ensure that you have a strong understanding of combat and its principles,” Olivia laid out. Unable to argue against her logic, Greg could only smile and concede. “Now, you have a big day tomorrow, so I suggest you are well rested for it,” She offered.

***

“Relax.”

His teacher must have noticed how tense from both nerves and excitement Greg was. But while his teacher’s voice was calm and controlled, Greg didn’t miss a similar excitement mirrored in her eyes. If she was more composed than he was, it was borne more from the experience of years as opposed to indifference to what was happening. “To the best of my calculations, not to mention how developed your mana pathways are, I am as close to certain as it is possible to be that you will cross into the first tier today. It, however, remains to be seen whether it will be your morning, midday, or evening infusion of mana that will tip you over the edge. So you need to keep a cool head. Should nothing happen after this or the midday infusion, you still have no reason to worry as yet. Do you understand?” The healer’s voice was both firm and kind. She could understand how he was feeling and was taking charge to keep him from unnecessarily worrying before it was called for.

Letting out a long and slow exhale, Greg collected himself and forced his nerves down. Once he was confident that he had a firm hand on his emotions, he gave the healer a firm nod. “Good,” The healer who was seated cross-legged before him, answered before leaning forward and placing her hand on the same section of the sigil that she’d always used to infuse mana into it. It wasn’t long before the familiar process began same as it had for several months now since they started this journey.

All through the process, Greg had been on the edge expecting to feel something different or extraordinary to signify that he’d crossed over to the first tier. The ten minutes that the process usually took, however, came and went by without anything out of the ordinary happening. While his teacher’s admonition kept him from starting to panic, it didn’t help stave off the disappointment Greg felt when they didn’t hit their target with their first attempt of the day. A reassuring smile crossed the healer’s lips. “It would seem that the first attempt is not it,” She said with clear calm in her voice. It was a conscious effort by his teacher to project calm to keep him from being overcome by the tension. Despite seeing through her, Greg appreciated it all the same as it helped him keep calm. “We still have two more…”

Whatever else the healer was about to say was immediately cut off as she disappeared from before his eyes. In one second, she’d been seated cross-legged before him with a reassuring expression. In the next, she’d crossed the distance to the mouth of the cave at a speed akin to teleportation and was looking at him warily. Greg could understand why she had that expression on her face as he’d felt it at the same moment that she did. The closest explanation for it was that, it felt like the final piece in a puzzle had fallen into place. There was no doubt in Greg that he’d crossed into the first tier. Greg had been able to move his mana around even as a half-step first-tier mage. But this compared to that was a lot like he’d been breathing through a stuffy nose all his life and then suddenly it had been cleared. The two states couldn’t even be compared.

This, however, wasn’t all that happened. In the same instant that this last piece had fallen into place, it felt like a void had opened up within him. An all-consuming hunger like Greg had never felt before, seized every single cell in his body. An expression that if spoken out, one might be tempted to think an exaggeration. This, however, was the plain truth as every part of him felt like it had been starved for ages. Without any planning or forethought, Greg started to take a long and slow inhale of air. It made absolutely no sense given that his method of awakening involved being pumped full of the stuff. But from the way all the ambient mana within the cave started to gather towards him, it was clear what it was that his body was starving for. Mana!

Like a starving beast, his body was voraciously consuming all the mana around him pulling it within himself. It’s a good thing she’d moved away when she did because Greg was almost certain that whatever was going on within him would have tried to rip out mana from within her just to feed itself. If she didn’t have a way of stopping this, then given the damaged state of her mana pathways, her situation would have turned critical if not outright fatal. And given that even now he wasn’t in control of himself, Greg would have been powerless to stop it. As things stood, Greg was quickly draining every last ounce of mana from within the cave. Much to Greg’s growing unease, he would soon run out of mana. And whatever process it is that had started within him, wasn’t even a tenth of the way done…

***