Sen weaves through the rock gardens, which give off a different feel when lit by the two moons overhead, and goes through his little booklet to see when the next free class on movement abilities will be. It seems, that like the weight of the mountain ability, there is a short class every two hours on it. Checking the system time, he has another hour to go, so he decides to practice his bones like air skill for a while. He rents one of the cheapest arrays with his contribution points, and opens up the stupidly large book.

This time, he decides to focus on his ribs. As his senses fade into the sensation of the energy flowing within him, he notes again the flow of energy going through his spine, then starts to match up the energy pathways in his ribs with that in the book step by step. By the time the alarm goes off, he’s made a decent amount of progress, but he’ll have to wait until another time to get it done.

As he arrives at the class, he sees it is as packed as the one on weight of the mountain had been, and he squeezes through the seats until he arrives at the back, where there are just a couple of chairs left. Sitting down, everyone quiets down as the middle aged woman at the front starts to speak.

“The skill we are going to go over today is called Earth Step. It’s a simple movement ability that causes the ground to push back when you push down, accelerating you to speeds beyond what would normally be possible. While it may not look impressive, it is a very stable and reliable skill.”

She then shows a few examples, and as she said, it isn’t flashy, but it seems very practical. She seems to be using no force to step off, but she speeds to the direction she steps towards faster than should be possible. Sen instantly starts thinking of fun ways to use the momentum from it to add a bunch of force to his swings.

After the woman is done demonstrating, she hands out a bunch of papers that have the energy diagram for the skill. Sen looks over it as he goes to the practice area along with the multitudes of other students. It’s similar to weight of the mountain in that it has a very stable, slow flow of energy, but is lacking the peaks and valleys. It’s basically a simple stream that spreads out as it reaches the ground, and extends roots into the earth.

As Sen arrives at the practice ground, he isn’t able to get it on his first try, even with all the practice from his two other skills, but he manages to succeed on his seventeenth attempt, though his speed of executing it is currently too slow to use in combat. He spends the next half hour practicing, getting it to the point where, while not instinctual, he can easily use it.

Once he feels he has a solid grasp on it, he turns in his left over crystals for contribution points, and logs off for sustenance. He doesn’t run into his sister this time, and is soon checking the wiki. There are a lot of warnings about the difficulty of the body enhancement skill on their respective pages, though a few people claim they’ve had some success with them.

Annoyingly, there’s almost no data on skills other than the ones you can learn for free at a school, and all of them seem to be relatively similar, an attack that makes you hit harder or faster, and a skill that lets you move around quickly or in different directions more easily. What he does learn is that schools are also elementally aligned, with each one having two elements, and Sen curses, he doesn’t know which two elements his school aligns with. It obviously has earth, considering it’s called “Mountain’s Peak”, but if the other element isn’t air, he’s going to have trouble getting skills to match his body enhancement method.

He doesn’t actually know if that will be an issue. For all the information on the wiki knows, there’s no downside to using skills of one element along with a different element body enhancement skill, but he’s not willing to risk it. He remembers seeing on the booklets for the two active skills he’s learned that they aren’t technically of an element yet, as they aren’t high enough rank.

Once he gets back in game, he heads over to the trading area of his school, checking out the skills that you have to pay contribution points for. He finds that skills aren’t elementally aligned until E rank, and he doesn’t have enough contribution points to buy any of them, as the cheapest option costs eighty thousand, the equivalent of forty E ranked cores. The most expensive E ranked skill costs a hundred twenty thousand, and Sen wonders what the difference is.

He looks through all of the skills, each having a short video to showcase them, and settles his eyes on one called Gale Steps. It has an odd footwork associated with it, but it seems to make it so that you can move in any direction at the speed of a full out sprint. While it doesn’t have the burst acceleration that Earth step does, it’s able to be used in conjunction with certain other movement abilities, earth step being one of the many in the list of compatible options.

While using both will burn out his energy in a rapid fashion, it will give him ridiculous acceleration in any direction. He looks through the different attack skills, but nothing really calls to him the way that Weight of the Mountain did, even if it is only a G ranked skill. Considering he has only practiced it to the small success stage as well, he has a long way to go.

Sending a message to everyone that he wants to go hunting so he can get some more contribution points, Julie included, he goes to the practice yard to train while waiting on their replies. He gets a couple messages, but they all say that they’re practicing and that they’ll be up to go in maybe an hour. He sends his agreement, and pays for one of the G ranked array rooms, as help with controlling his energy will be the best way to practice with the tournament being tomorrow.

While in there, he simply practices Weight of the Mountain over and over, each time refining the flow of his energy, trying to match it more and more perfectly with the diagram on his little handout. By the end of the hour, he’s improved, the practice dummy in the room becoming more and more wounded from his attacks as he perfects his blow.

Getting out, he waits for a while until Julie shows up, who seems a bit uncomfortable with him, even though they’d spent around a year playing immersion games together until her parents had banned meeting with him “because he is a bad influence”. They walk over to the Lotus school, where only Lynna has come out so far, and Julie greets her with much more enthusiasm than Sen. After they’re done hugging, Xue and Jennifer show up together, and they call an automated vehicle to go out to the forest.

Once they arrive, they keep hunting in the outskirts, thankfully not running into any spider territory or people from the King guild, though they see a few other groups hunting in the vicinity. Julie has an interesting fighting style, all harsh angles and calculated blows, using the perfect amount of force to kill something. It’s effective, not having any excess movements, but with the lack of variation she shows, she’ll likely not do too well in PVP.

They hunt for a couple hours, until they start to get tired, and then have Julie set up an illusion array. The illusion array doesn’t make them invisible, but makes it near impossible to focus on them. It’ll functionally make it so that monsters will just walk by without bothering them. Everyone asks about what other arrays she can set up, and she mentions that the only other array she’s practiced enough to reliably make is an array that makes an illusion of her appear while making her true body invisible. While it won’t kill anyone, it will make it much harder to fight her.

“So Julie, you know Sen and Lynna in real, right? How did you meet?” Jennifer asks after the explanation on arrays.

“My parents and Sen’s were both having issues getting us to play with other kids. They threw us together until Sen got me too interested in immersion games, so they stopped us from hanging out.”

“You seem to be pretty good at immersion games to be new at them.”

Julie gets an evil grin on her face. “As if I would stop playing them just because my parents didn’t want me to.”

“So why didn’t you play with us again?” Lynna asks.

“You’re the ones who changed your usernames by the time I convinced my parents to let me play again!”

Sen and Lynna both look away. They both regretted the names they’d chosen back then, Sen not knowing the language enough to realize his name was an innuendo, and Lynna getting too many comments on her girly name.

“We could all meet up in real you know, we’re placed in different cities based on our geographical location,” Sen says.

Julie seems a bit nervous about the thought, but Jennifer agrees. She’d never met them in real, even though she’d played a lot with them online. Sen and Lynna tend to be a bit paranoid about sharing their information, especially after the debacle where King’s sub-leader had practically ended up stalking her. At this point though, they trusted Jennifer enough to meet up with her, even if they wouldn’t be giving her their address.

They all take advantage of the break to log off for a bit for sustenance, then log back in, chatting, mainly Lynna and Jennifer, while resting.

After the hour break, Julie packs up the array to reuse, and they all get back to hunting. They only run into a single E rank monster, and with the skills and stat increases, they handle it with ease.

“Hey Tir, why are E ranked monsters so rare?”

“E ranked and above monsters are rarely found in the wilderness. For larger numbers of them, you’ll have to do dungeons.”

“So where can I find a dungeon?”

“I cannot tell you.”

Sen grumbles at that. Fine, he’ll just look it up on the wiki when he gets out. They hunt for another couple of hours, and by that time everyone is exhausted. They quick travel to Falan before logging out again. The first thing Sen does when he logs off is head over to the computer to check out the map location near Falan. He sees that there are currently two dungeons discovered, a hobgoblin dungeon with an E ranked orc boss, and a spine panther dungeon that everyone avoids because it’s extremely dark and the spine panthers like to ambush people in it.

Looking through the comments, he finds that King guild has actually taken control of the hobgoblin dungeon, completely ignoring the fact that it’s instanced so any number of people can be within it at the same time. None of the powerhouse guilds have contested it, but Sen expects it won’t be too long before one of them takes control in order to try and get a foot up on their competition.

After thinking for a bit, Sen decides that he’s going to try and contact the one guild he usually works with, though he acts more as a mercenary rather than being a member. He hops on their chat server, which is active as always, and shoots off a quick ‘Anyone down to take the Falan hobgoblin dungeon from King?’.

The battle maniacs that make up the guild soon agree, and they agree to meet up in front of the school that the guild has made their main base after the tournament the next day.