Chapter 27 – Training montage

Day 20 -32

Mike’s POV:

Mike started his training on the next morning with a ten kilometer run up and down a small hill next to his village. His next exercise was to jump up a stone stairwell step by step. He did this, while he was carrying 50kg of iron weights in each of his hands. The chief supported him with this part of the training. Every time Mike collapsed, the chief used some low level healing magic to refresh his body and heal the wear and tear in his muscles. While the chief wasn’t a sorcerer but a warrior, he learned enough on his adventurer career to know some basic healing magic.

When Mike thought about it, his book said there were skills for every type of magic for each the warrior path and the sorcerer path. There was nothing preventing you from learning them all, except time.

This strength, endurance and pain resistance training lasted two hours on every morning. Before lunch, he used the anvil and other heavy equipment in Gunthar’s forge to do some weight training. Again the chief used his magic, otherwise he would only be able to do very few lifts with some of the weights. With the chief’s support, he was able to do two hours of weight training without making a pause.

When it was time for the lunch break, Mike was already dead tired. There was only so much the low level magic was able to do with that. Most of the time, he sat down quietly and ate his meal without saying a word.

After finishing his lunch, it was time to train his speed and reflexes. For this the chief fired arrows with blunt metal tip at him, while he was running from cover to cover on an obstacle course. When he was hit, it didn’t kill but bruised him.

The next part of the training was the one Mike learned to hate the most. Hand to hand combat lessons with the chief, who even invited the village healer as a support. It helped him with the training a lot and he was getting better, but he’d lost count how often the healer needed to reset his broken arms and legs. It especially annoyed him that he didn’t even manage to land one hit.

After the combat training, Mike repeated the run to the hill. On his way back, he stopped at the chief’s house and used his grading stone to see if his rank increased. Then it was time to go home. Most of the time, Mike didn’t even manage to undress before he felt asleep.

It only took him eight days to reach rank F12. He’d never trained this hard in his life before, but the visit to the dungeon and the tome he got, showed him a larger world, one full of possibilities. In that world a village boy could rise to levels, so that kings had to bow before their might. This appealed to him, the only thing he ever wanted after his parents died, was to master his own fate. He didn’t want to get killed by a random attack on his village or be forced to war just to fight for some degenerated nobleman. For the first time in his life, he saw the possibility for real freedom, to go where he wanted, do what he wanted and to have the power to intervene if he saw something he didn’t like. The path of an adventurer could give him all of these things and Mike decided to embrace it. He knew, he would get hurt, probably even die, but he was one hundred percent sure that he wouldn’t be able to live with himself, if he was too cowardly to try.

After reaching the new rank, Mike cut his training time in half. He no longer needed to improve, but to maintain his physical condition. In the afternoon, he started to cultivate mana, with the technique Neo gave him.

Two days later he changed, he felt it and didn’t need the grading stone. He was a little bit surprised with the speed of the breakthrough. But when he thought about it, the book said it was easier to break through with each rank increase on the old level. One could break through to the E rank starting from F8, but he trained all the way up to F12, so this was no wonder. Now that he broke through, the mana in his body would retain his condition even without training. Future improvements would not come from training his body, but from training his magic to improve his body condition.

He thought a little bit about which focus he should choose. From the stories he heard from his parents and what the chief told him, most people focused only on one element and increased their affinity in that element. The higher the affinity, the faster it would be to improve one’s skill in that element. But the book especially warned him from this path.

The reason for most people to specialize this way, was the way ranking up worked. While one could increase from E0 to E12 without any skill in any type of magic and just focus on the mana gathering technique, the level up to D needed one to have a certain amount of control over one’s mana. It didn’t matter if one would use a sorcerers skill to control fire magic or a warriors skill to control earth magic, the human mana pool could be controlled by all of the techniques used on the elements. So in the end, only the highest skill level was important for improving.

Mike thought about the issue for a day. Should he go the fast way and concentrate on one element and improve his affinities to speed up his growth, or should he listen to the advice from the book. It warned him that the downsides of affinities mostly only started on the S rank. When Mike asked the chief about that rank, he was told that more than 99% of the adventurers would never even reach the A rank. Realistically it would not be smart to make ones path more difficult for just this small chance. But Mike had seen limitless possibilities for the first time in his life, and he decided to never put a limit on his future himself, even if it would make the path easier. That's why he went for the path of keeping his affinities neutral.

The next thing for him to decide was how to balance his affinity. He could concentrate on one element and just spend an equal amount of mana on low level magic from the opposite element. With a water specialization, he could just heat a lake with fire mana for balance. He thought about this for a second, but then decided to go for the harder path and train on two opposing elements. One moment he thought about training all elements, but if you weren’t some super genius, you would still be at the E rank, while others reached the C rank. Some people decided to train new elements later on, when the improvement of the mana pool took more time. But from what he knew, in the E rank the biggest challenge wasn’t to improve the mana pool, but the skill necessary to rank up to D.

The last thing for him to decide was which element pair he should choose. The basic elements were fire and water, earth, and air and at last life and dead magic. The chief told him, he’d heard of higher tiered elements which could be used later on, like order and chaos or space and time. For now, he was only able to choose from the basic elements. So he went through them in his mind, one by one. He knew, elements had different areas of application, if they were used by sorcerers, but he had already decided he would become a warrior.

The first element - Fire, is the best to create destruction. For a warrior, it's main application was to use it with a weapon, for example a flaming war hammer. The next one - Water, is mainly used to create shields over the skin. They were offering very good protection against ranged attacks, but were a little weaker in melee. The second application was self healing. It was not as strong as life magic, but enough to close smaller wounds pretty fast.

The third element - Earth, was the element almost all close combat tanks were using. It helped with increasing one' strength, one's defense and to connect to the ground to stand up against heavier opponents. A good earth specialist fighter, was able to stand up against a charging bull without moving an inch. He didn't even need to go further Mike thought, earth magic was essential for all frontline fighters, but he wanted to go through the rest too. He didn't want to risk missing something

Opposed to earth was wind. It was primarily used to improve speed. In addition, it could increase the cutting power if used together with a blade. It was not as strong as fire, but it was a nice extra. Most fighters that focused on agility and speed, used this element. They could use the damage upgrade as a compensation for their lower strength.

The last two elements - Life and Death, were almost never be chosen by fighters. Life offered the strongest healing magic. In theory it could be used to regenerate while fighting, like a troll. But first of all, almost nobody was crazy enough to fight that way and secondly one would be too slow and too weak to do any real damage compared to other elements. The most useless element for a fighter was death. It could not be used with a weapon and needed to use skin contact. The only people who used it sometimes, according to the book, where assassins and torturers, who wanted to kill you by slowly withering away your body. It made some more sense for mages, because they had ranged attacks, but that was of no importance for Mike.

He thought about the elements for a couple more minutes, just to be sure he didn't oversee anything and then decided to go for earth and wind. He'd already learned tough body and haste from the skillbook and started to train them.

When Mike came down to the kitchen the next morning to eat his breakfast, he was surprised to find Gunthar and Anna there, already waiting for him. In front of Gunthar, there was a new looking steel sword lying on the table.