I soon arrived at the temple I spawned in, this time actually looking at it rather than just passing through. It was tall, probably three stories, with grand stained glass windows, grand arches pointed at the top, and an altar in front of a statue of a woman. Regardless of it being a temple, there seemed to be nobody inside, which I thought a bit odd, but just continued through over to the melee training room. When I got in, I saw quite a few players standing around, practicing with their swords, spears, and the occasional other weapon. I looked around, looking for the instructor, not seeing anyone like the giant Olaf had been as the mage instructor. I was still looking around when a wiry man came up to me.

“I see you’re new here, looking to get some training? I’m one of the warrior instructors, Syl is the name.”

“Wait, so the magic training only had one instructor, but there’s multiple for the melee trainees?”

“Well magic can be taught to a group pretty easily, you just need to explain the rune and let them view it in their grimoire, then they can self study relatively easily”

“Wait, so the people here have grimoires as well?”

“Of course, the stat screen has been here since time immemorial, as a boon granted to us to help survive against the monsters. It’s only lately that our lands have started to fall, and so we commenced the summoning ritual to bring the travelers here”

Wondering about the lore of this world, if they believed they had summoned us rather than us simply starting the game, it started to seem even more likely that these AIs were truly aware, and there was clearly a lot of lore that the devs had put into the game.

“If that’s so, then why did you have to summon us, can’t your own people grow just as strong as we can?”

“While we may be able to grow strong, we can’t put ourselves at risk the way you can. With you being able to resurrect through the power of the goddess, you can take far more risks, growing far stronger in a fraction of the time. When we hunt we need to be careful, hunting in large groups, minimizing the risk wherever possible. Challenging a large beast will often cost us a great deal of experienced soldiers, while you can simply come back, ready to war again.”

“Well thanks. I was indeed looking for some training on how to use this spear of mine, preferably with one hand.”

“Not two? Most people would use it with two hands or use a shield in addition to the spear”

“Yes, I’m looking to be a spellsword. I need to keep my other hand free for casting my spells, but monsters seem to be chewing on me a lot more than I’d like, so I figured the best thing to do would be to learn a few fighting techniques.”

“Well if you’re going to be hunting alone, that’s going to happen a lot. Good to see more mages trying to learn a little of how to fight, it’s always a sad things to lose a mage when a monster gets behind the battle lines, and the mage is clueless on how to defend themselves.”

He then guided me over to one of the training dummies, and showed me the proper grip for the spear, holding it much closer to the back of the spear than I had been expecting, and started training me on how to properly stabbed, making sure I was in a balanced state, lightly crouching, so that I could move around quickly and to keep a lower center of balance, standing on the balls of my feet rather than flat footed. He then showed me how to stab, making sure I never fully extended my arm, adding a slight twist of my body to put a bit more weight behind it. He explained to me that the spear head would do most the work so long as I kept it sharpened, I didn’t need the full weight of my body behind every stab, just enough to dig in. He then set me at a practice dummy and made me practice my stabs, correcting my form every so often. Telling me to come get him when I could reliably hit the point I was aiming at, piercing my spear in far enough to get a good 5 or so inches in, but not far enough for the blade to become stuck.

I repeated this stabbing practice for a few hours, taking regular breaks to replenish my stamina, which regularly drained to empty, but replenished very quickly as I was out of combat. Other times I would snack on my crappy bread, drink some water, or take care of the call of nature.

A short way through, I started noticing that I was actually sweating quite a bit, another bit of ridiculous realism the devs seemed to obsess over. I kept stabbing the vaguely human shaped doll, made of some mysterious material that would repair itself after every stab. Once I had finally gotten to the point where I thought I could hit the target reliably, I headed over to the instructor, only to be laughed off, him telling me he means much more accurate than that. Fuming in a bit of rage, I returned to my target and started to take my anger out on it, this time stabbing much harder than needed, losing the little accuracy I had gained in the process.

After my stamina ran out this time, I took a break, starting to have calmed down. I figured that the instructor was pretty right, while it seemed to me that I was mostly hitting the same spot, the same spot was about the size of my open hand, and that actually wasn’t particularly good. It’s not like I was going to be some prodigy of spearmanship, so I was going to have to do something that I loathed, hard work. For the rest of the day, I practiced, my body, particularly my arm holding the spear, and my thighs from the constant crouching posture bothe were burning from the workout, so I decided it was time for a break. I went on a walk to get some food as I’d almost run out, getting some more of the bread that I hated due to the low price of a copper for three, and also picked up some jerky and hard cheese, food that will be good for traveling or long hunting expeditions. On the way back, I picked up some of those skewers I’d enjoyed before to eat. This time, I asked what the meat was, and turns out that orbs, while looking vaguely creepy, are quite delicious.

On the way back I decided to go into one of the stores whose signboards were marked with a rune. Entering the store, I saw books everywhere, with random objects ranging from orb stones to feathers from some mysterious bird standing on shelves behind glass. I went around the shelves, looking for a rune book on the basic spells. I found plenty of books with titles like basics of inscription, inscription theory, and even an inscription for dummies, however, not a single book about runes themselves or even anything about spells at all. Not finding what I was looking for, I went up to the counter up front and asked.

“Hey, I was wondering if you had any books on runes.”

With a bored look, the man replied in a monotone voice. “Sorry, this is an inscription store, if you’re looking to learn any sort of new runes you should go to the mages college.”

“And where would that be?” I inquired

“Just head east from here, it’s at the edge of the business district.”

Thanking him, I left and headed off opposite the direction of the slowly setting sun, hoping that the sun here would match up with the one on earth. Right before a row of houses, stood a two story stone building, inscribed over the entire thing with runes, and a symbol of a staff over a book hanging above the front entrance. Deciding that this had to be the place, I headed inside and saw a man standing at the counter, with what had to be other gamers in their beginner gear and clothing, a simple off white tunic and pants, all of them wielding a staff. I looked over myself, noticing the bloodstains and tears from where I’d been scratched and bitten, I would soon have to go shopping for clothing, and preferably some leather armor as well. Regardless, nobody had commented, so I figured it was fine, and got in line behind the other mages, most of whom seemed to have still pristine clothing, likely from hunting in a party. After waiting a while until I reached the front of the line, I got up and greeted the man at the counter.

“Hello, I was looking to learn some new spell patterns and I heard that this was the right place to go.”

“Well you’re definitely at the right place, we sell spell patterns for as little as five silver, what were you looking for?”

“Five silver? You can’t just have a teacher sit down with groups of us for a while and teach us all in a group or something? That’s what we did for learning force bolt.”

The man gave a strained smile before replying, likely to have heard this same question from many of the travelers before me. “Well we’re not sure why, but the force bolt can be learned from simply looking at it, for all other spell patterns, you need to be able to create it perfectly once before it is inscribed in your grimoire, and having to go over every individual student and correct their mistakes would be far more expensive than simply selling the spell patterns. They’re inscribed with a special ink, because otherwise the rune slowly absorbs the ambient mana and sets off, destroying the paper and often part of the room they’re in. So were you still looking to buy?”

I sighed. “Yes please, I was hoping to get something that would stop an enemy from moving for a while.”

“Well, the best bet for that is frostbite, when it impacts an enemy it freezes around them. It doesn’t have any impact force, but it will keep the monsters off of you.”

“I’ll take that then, please”

I handed over 5 silver from my backpack, and the man went back into a door I hadn’t noticed when I came in, pulling out a scroll and then coming back to hand it to me. I thanked him, then headed back to the practice field, deciding to work on mastering my new spell before night came. I shouldn’t have to sleep in game due to the 4 times time dilation, but I was feeling tired regardless, maybe from my brain running at 4 times the speed, though dreams always seemed to have an even greater time dilation, and they seemed to keep me well rested.

Either way, I decided to head over to the magic training field to try and learn my new spell before going to bed. I was definitely going to sleep in game if I was going to sleep, eight hours in here would only be two outside, so it was clearly the better option. Arriving at the field for spellcasters, and seeing olaf standing at the back, watching the travelers now trying out their new spells, from lances of fire, to lightning bolts, to what seemed like a blob of acid which would cause the target to melt, only to regenerate back up.

Now that I was more aware that the targets would regenerate, I was even more impressed with the force bolt that the trainer had showed off, which had just completely erased the target. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed the regenerating targets before, but after looking back, I’d been attacking the same target the entire time and it hadn’t been broken. I guess I just assumed they were largely immune to the small damage my force bolt did. I had been focused on not blowing myself up, so that probably didn’t help matters. I sighed at how far away the instructors seemed to be, then decided to try out my new spell.

The spell pattern this time looked like a slightly ovoid circle with a an upside down v in the middle, so I looked at it, then prepared to get myself blown up a lot. I first tried to draw the pattern right over the spell pattern, but the visible mana seemed to just bleed into the ink, likely from its special properties, so I had to do this the hard way. I had just prepared myself to start my drawing attempts when an explosion startled me, almost making me rip my spell paper. I glared at the offending person, a small guy coughing after having messed up his spell pattern, then sighed. That would be me for a while, and indeed it was. It wasn’t until my 20th attempt that I managed to get it right, and I carefully sent it flying down to one of the targets, encasing the front half of it in ice with a crackling sound. This was going to be exactly what I needed. I then checked my grimoire to see the mana cost and get a guide on drawing it until I was more comfortable with it.

Grimoire

Stores all spell patterns you have learned

Spell Name

Mana cost

Force Bolt+

2+0.5*wis

Frostbite

5

At 5 mana, I would be able to get off 6 shots with my current mana pool, and that was only until it upgraded to frostbite+, which I expected to happen when I’d used it enough. I then set about practicing the same way I had with force bolt.

Once I had gotten comfortable with my new spell, and with the sky turning slowly dark, I decided to go see if I could find some place to stay, I walked over to Olaf, looking around the now empty training grounds as I went.

“Um, Olaf sir? I was wondering if there was any place I could stay pretty cheaply. Around here”

“We’ve set up a barracks hall for all of you to stay, just head left out of the temple, it’ll be three buildings down on the right. If you want a better place to stay, you could head to the north end of the business district and you’ll find some inns, but even the cheapest will run you around 5 silver to stay at.”

As I went off, I looked up at the sky and sighed with exhaustion. Up above me, there were two moons, one much smaller than the one we had on earth, and the other a little bit bigger. While meandering my way over to the barracks, I wondered if the devs had even implemented tidal patterns from the two moons. When I arrived, the soldiers at the front greeted me, then one guided me to an empty bed, most of them having been filled with the other players. I lay down, and instantly fell asleep.

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