Eldrian continued to travel with the players for a few days. During the day's travel he would cast Anthizo and his other spells to practice a bit. While also racking up his total Tier 1 spells cast.

Eldrian enjoyed watching the numbers grown, feeling the nostalgia of other game through this.This is what gaming is about, seeing your progress and looking forward to the next upgrade!

While at it Eldiran also did experiments some with the spell modules, trying to see the effect if he varied the mana input. Mostly this resulted in a weaker cast spell or a complete failure. These results did not discourage him since it was one of the most interesting things he could actually do while they were traveling.

During the nights he would spar against those from Flaming Heart, getting more and more used the skills the different players had. While they in turn grew better and better at hiding the activation of their skills, making the fights closer and closer as time passed.

Soon most of Flaming Heart were sparring against each other at night, the NPCs seemingly able to produce training weapons en mass even when they were traveling.

"Let's have a spell fight!" Ilmadia shouted after Eldrian had just defeated Therdul. Therdul was the one Eldrian had the most trouble defeating. He would always play defensive and try to counterattack instead of initiating. This would place Eldrian in a weakened position since he was using a training spear and nothing else.

When Therdul was hiding behind his shield Eldrian wished he had Grace or could simply use Floga. While he technically could do the last, Eldrian felt it would be cheating.

Due to this Eldrian fought against Therdul for almost a full 5 minutes or longer. Most other fights only taking one at most. Eldrian normally won by either baiting Therdul into making a bad attack or using the gap when Therdul tried to activate a skill. The latter becoming far harder with each fight.

This sparring was extremely beneficial for all the melee fighters as they were slowly grinding down the delay in their skill activation. They hadn't really sparred against each other much due to the risk of dying. Having not wanted to use different weapons since they had felt it would not really benefit them then.

Yet they learned through these sessions that the practice was far more important than the weapon. Simply getting used to a cunning opponent helped their battle awareness grow far more than when they fought monsters. Especially since they almost never fought against a monster alone.

This large growth that Ilmadia had been seeing was why she also wanted to join in. With how weak healing currently was she had learned some offensive skills to help her out at the start. This was not really a problem since she simply borrowed the spell modules from friends until she learned it herself.

"Alright," Eldrian replied to Ilmadia's question as he helped Therdul up. "Do we fight only with magic or weapons too?" Eldrian asked, not too worried either way.

He did not think he would win in a spell fight, especially since he had not learned the spell Frost Needle yet. As such his only offensive spell would be Floga. The other Tier 0 spells could not really be turned into offensive spells even when he control them.

Gi, the earth spell, was mostly useless as a spell. It allowed Eldrian to form any soft eath substance into a certain form. But this worked slowly and on a small scale, it would be nice for making small sculptures, not much more.

The light and darkness spells both would do little in a fight. Light would just summon a golfball-sized light ball which glowed brightly, but it did not really light a large area. Eldrian felt that the light given off by Floga might be almost the same, only slightly less.

The darkness spell simply made an area dark. The largest area Eldrian managed to darken was the size of his hand, meaning it would not be useful for much. At least not until he figured out how it could be useful.

Eldrian also knew the air spell, but it simply caused a wind to flow. It was really nice when warm and wanting to cool down, but did not do much more than that.

I can probably try and force Nidia into her nose. Mmm... Eldrian contemplated how that would work, it was not a feature which the system had made visible to him. Thus he had no idea if it would do damage. Ultimately he did not really want to use that against players, especially in a friendly match.

"Do you even know any offensive spells?" Ilmadia asked, knowing that Eldrian had never cast any such type of spell during the time they had been traveling together. When he practiced it would always be rejuvenating spells or Tier 0 spells. All of which would do almost no damage if any to her.

They had actually managed to learn how armor worked, at least a little. This was mostly due to Therdul's efforts.

After having shared their base stats with Eldrian, who still had not learned Observe, they actually realized for the first time the difference in the growth of the different races in their group. Never having really realized this until they spoke it aloud.

Therdul and all other dwarves naturally had more armor and health than everyone. While the human players then had more than all the elves. They had no idea how this worked and would grow, currently, Therdul had 1.5 armor. Human players had 0.5 and elves 0.25.

Using this knowledge and on of Eldrian's failed daggers they managed to learn that if a weapon's damage was less than someone's armor, then they would take no damage. But this did not always hold true, since for some reason training weapons always did their damage. Other times someone would take damage even when having more armor than a weapon.

But this did inform them of the normal situation, allowing Ilmadia to know that if Eldrian was forced to use Floga. Then he would only be able to do 0.25 damage to her at max with each spell. Unless there were some other things she did not know about.

They had limited their tests to non-vital attacks, fearing that vital attacks would kill the other person. Especially with how Eldrian explained he treated the fights like real ones. Mentioning that he only wanted stats to know how fast and strong something would be. He would treat HP more as a secondary factor, something which would just keep him weary even after delivering a vital hit.

"I actually don't know any offensive spells. How do you even want to do this match?" Eldrian answered and asked, wondering just how she wanted to do this fight. Unlike with a spar where they could use training weapons, there was no way to limit their damage by using magic.

"Mmm," Ilmadia thought for a bit, placing her hand onto her chin and tapping her cheek.

She is kinda cute. Eldrian thought as he watched her trying to come up with a solution. He did not really have any ideas since he had no idea how her spells would work. Having never seen her actually fight offensively.

"Why don't you try and reach me from a certain distance. I will try and injure you before you reach me."

"Alright, but no vital attacks," Eldrian replied, worried that he might be one-shot if she aimed for his head. He believed he would be able to dodge her spells, but he had no idea what she knew and how fast the spells would be. Maybe she had a really fast attack or high damage one he might not dodge.

"Certainly. You lose once you lose 60 HP. That way I shouldn't accidentally kill you." Ilmadia decided, feeling it would be good enough for her to bring him down to below half health. Certainly, she would not normally fight someone alone, thus being able to that much should be great.

"Sounds like a plan," Eldrian replied, looking at his 105 HP wondering why the scaling was so small. Therdul had 136 even after having added 18 points to his constitution attribute.

During the previous days they had long left the forest where Eldrian had first joined the army. The area they were now in was a barren land where few plants grew and no villages nor towns existed.

According to the NPCs it would take them a few days to move through the dead zone between the kingdoms. This naturally made most players curious as to why there would be a random large space of land with such low vitality.

It did not make much sense for it to be a normal thing, yet it seemed that all empires had such land between their borders. It was far less common for these to be between kingdoms, but it happened now and then. Naturally there were rumors about why this happened, but the players had yet to hear of these.

This area was perfect for range fighters as there was nothing to block their line of sight between them and their target. Making the place an ideal place for range and mage type players to fight against melee players.

"Far enough?" Eldrian asked once he was thirty meters from Ilmadia, everyone having made space for their fight. They had never had a magic fight against each other and as such everyone made sure to stand extra far to not get hit by some stray spells.

"Isn't that a bit too far?" Ilmadia asked, most of her spells only ranged to around 20 meters. Thus she did not think he needed to be quite that far.

"Nah, this is fine. Oh, I won't use my bow."

This last sentence he spoke sent a cold shiver through everyone's spines. While Eldrian did not know what Ilmadia was capable of, the rest knew. Which meant they knew Eldrian would easily kill her if he decided to go that route and was just half decent with a bow.

They all felt that he was a bit despicable for Eldrian to even think of using it.

"T-Thanks..." Ilmadia stuttered, shocked that she had not even considered that option. She felt grateful that Eldrian was being a good sport.