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Chapter 108: Field Work
🕑 Added 2023-10-25 16:17:46 +0000 UTCDerek was having a pretty good day. He had woken up, eaten a sensible but delicious breakfast, gone on a ten-mile run, worked with the weight set the old blacksmith had made for him, went on his swim, freestyle-climbed the city wall, took his fighting class, and finally ate a big lunch.
And now, for the first time, he was holding his own against the old man. He had managed to either dodge or deflect all of the old man’s strikes, redirecting the force from the massive iron bar he swung around rather than meeting them head-on. Further, he kept switching up his motions, so the old man couldn't predict and demolish him. He had even, wonder of wonders, gotten in a few pokes with the blunted training sword that the old man had him fight with. He wasn’t just not losing, he was arguably winning.
After weaving through a flurry of iron-bar pokes aimed directly at his nose, Derek managed to land another strike of his own that clacked loudly off the old man’s knee. With a roar, the blacksmith disengaged, taking several steps back before Derek could press the attack. Then, he threw his iron bar to the ground and brought his hands up boxer-style. Later on, Derek would reflect that this should have been his first warning about what was about to happen.
Without the weight of several dozen pounds of moving metal, it made sense that the old man would move faster. But what Derek saw was more than that. The blacksmith suddenly flew through the air with no more drag than a diving hawk, barely touching the ground as he closed the distance between them and then suddenly disappearing.
Shit, Derek thought. He must be an unarmed class. A lightbulb went off in his head as he realized what that meant. The old man didn’t use the iron bar to be intimidating, or because he was skilled with it. He used it to generate the wrong-weapon-for-the-class limitations and disable some of his class benefits entirely so Derek could keep up.
Then, just as suddenly as that lightbulb lit up, all the lights in Derek’s head were suddenly put out. When he came too, he was still standing, but only because the impact of his body had bent the blacksmith’s fence enough to prop him up on the incline. He shook his head and brought his hands up, hoping he could find the blacksmith before he landed his next blow.
“Huh. I’ve never seen someone get knocked out and stay standing like that before. Weird of ya.”
Derek was confused. It sounded like the voice was coming from above him. Looking up, he realized that was exactly what was happening. Standing on top of the fence to his left, perfectly balanced on the half inch or so of rail it provided, was the massive blacksmith. He looked about as natural as a hippo in a bird’s nest.
“Here’s the lesson for ya today. With stats, how a person looks matters less.”
It was true that while Derek didn't think of the big man as slow, he implicitly assumed that his teacher would be slower and less agile than a smaller person would be. But this wasn’t Earth, and the old man wasn’t constrained by non-system physics. If a small man could lift a wagon, and Derek had seen them do it, there was no reason a big man couldn’t be a gymnast.
The shock of the realization was enough to prevent Derek from taking a single evasive action as the blacksmith’s foot swung down, caught him in the chin, and knocked him out properly and completely.
—
This time, when Derek came to, he was inside the old man’s house. Between them, they had at some point figured out that the fastest way to dull his pain during the time between injuries and his VIT healing him up was just to drop him directly into an ice bath. As an added bonus, it seemed to help keep the swelling from his workout schedule under control. He was so used to it by now the cold dunk hadn’t even shocked him awake, although he wasn’t sure how much of that was acclimation and how much of it was the fact that he had just been kicked in the face with all the force of a semi-truck slamming into a concrete wall.
“Ya did good, ya know.”
“Tell that to my jaw, you old fart.”
“No, ya really did. Had to use my class, to keep up.”
“You were holding out on me that whole time? Just keeping your class under wraps and making me think I had a chance?”
“I didn’t want ya to get discouraged, boy. Now that ya know, to can train until ya can beat my class. At the rate your stats have been growing, it won’t be long now.”
Derek considered this. He was picking up stats at an alarming rate, and his Common Man class made each one of those stats do more work than it should have. Even, say, a single point of DEX was enough that he could feel it in how he moved. Of course, the only way to get that point of DEX was through brutal grinding, usually in some dangerous and ill-advised way. But it was worth it, especially since earning the stats that way also trained him up to actually use them.
Training with the old man was unusually effective for almost every stat somehow. He got DEX from dodging, STR from blocking and striking, and WIS from contemplating what exactly had gone wrong every time he woke up with a new broken bone that trained his VIT.
“Here, take this,” the old man said.
Derek shrugged his cloth-armored back up the side of the tub to sit up straighter, then reached to take the enormous turkey-like bird leg the old man was offering. Having had a food-buffed class before that took him places he didn’t want to revisit, Derek was pretty cautious about gluttony. This wasn’t that, though. His new class basically ran on burning calories in training, which meant they had to be replenished from somewhere. For the most part, the old man controlled his lunches, and seemed to have as sixth sense for how much food Derek needed any given day to get optimal growth. He had no idea where the old man had come by this skill, but he had long since quit asking those kinds of questions.
The blacksmith pulled out a turkey leg of his own, and for a minute or so it was silent as they both worked seriously on their food. Having a lead on finishing his food to begin with, and being the more hungry of the two, Derek finished his food first and broke the silence.
“So what’s on the workout plan for tomorrow? Throwing me at a wall of spikes? Chasing me around, poking me with a big spike?” Derek was joking, but only sort of. The training was harsh, but the old man didn’t do it to be malicious, as funny as it was. Derek didn’t grow unless he was actively pushing himself, and the old man was the only person in town who could do that these days. As Derek had gotten tougher, his tortures had become more inventive. But it wasn’t because he liked it, exactly.
“Tomorrow? Probably no training for ya tomorrow, boy. At least not from me.”
Sometimes this happened. The blacksmith wasn’t just his trainer, after all. He was a working blacksmith, and orders still came in.
“Who needs swords this time? The army, or something special for an adventurer?”
“Neither. It’s ya that’s busy, boy.” The blacksmith fished one of his meaty hands into a pocket and pulled out a letter. “I had a word with that Brennan, told him ya could probably use some field work. Good chance for all the learning to sink in, ya see.”
Derek goggled at the man for a moment. Since back when he was Asadel, all he had really wanted was to go on real, important missions with the real adventurers, but he had always been prevented from doing so. Back then, he had thought that this was just them holding him back, but now he knew it was because he had been far from ready. He used to be weak. But if the old man had been talking to Brennan, and had succeeded in convincing him, that meant something entirely different.
He jumped out of the water and hugged the old man as hard as he could.
“Agghh, boy!”
“Too hard for you, old man? Did I break your delicate bones?”
“Naw, ya idiot! Ya’s covered in ice!”
Oh, yeah. Derek thought. So I am.
He kept hugging anyway.
—
Outside the blacksmith’s shop, Derek was sprinting down the road, whistling sharply every few steps. The whistling was a rule the town had imposed on him. They wanted him to train, but after his first few weeks of pushing himself, his running had become dangerous for the unsuspecting normal folk in the town. The whistling let them know he was coming, like putting a bell around a cat’s neck to keep the mice safe.
Having had his second lunch at the blacksmith’s shop, he didn’t need to stop before going to see Brennan. The blacksmith had told him the mission would start tomorrow, but the blacksmith had told him to go meet everyone today anyway and be part of the planning. Derek assumed he wouldn’t be that helpful in improving the plans themselves, since he didn’t know much in comparison to the other people that would be in that room. But to be in the room at all was a big deal.
Mission planning took place in a small building owned by the church. It was a nice enough building, but not one you’d expect was important. Derek suspected this was to keep people from coming by and goggling at the heroes, not that it worked. He suppressed his reflex to barge in through the front door, instead pulling the rope pull to the door’s literal bell.
“Come in, Derek.” Brennan’s voice rang out over the bell. Derek opened the door and stepped in. Brennan was seated at the table, as were Artemis and a few other non-reincarnator adventurers. Despite not having with the crazy growth rate of reincarnated heroes, the native Ra’Zorian adventurers often had specific skills and knowledge that made them worthy of going on missions anyway. Derek had come to respect them.
Artemis herself was a different story. Derek wasn’t sure, but he thought she could still probably kill him if it came right down too it.
But in that moment, as he pulled out a chair and sat down, none of that mattered. He was part of the big show now. An actual member of the team. He would get to go on real adventures, take real risks, and actually help people for once in a way that went beyond swatting down minor demons even strong, normal teenagers could kill. It was going to be realnow.
He tried his hardest to look serious and as adult as possible as he sat down. It didn’t work. He was grinning like an idiot the whole time.
