NOVEL WEB CHAPTER 36: NEVER UNARMED
Sarah Avery Vasilias, Great House Scion, Reborn Lvl 1
Tutorial Realm
The days had quickly run together into weeks under Gammon’s intense tutelage. It had started easily enough with basic exercises, but it quickly became far more challenging than anything she’d done before. Gammon wasn’t satisfied with traditional forms of exercise. He mixed academics with meditation sessions and then pushed an esoteric and exhausting physical exercise regime which left her completely drained every night. Every morning, she’d be woken up before she felt like she got a good night’s sleep and Gammon would have her running while balancing a glass of water on her head or doing back-handsprings from the house to the strip mall until she got too dizzy to stand.
Gammon had started mixing in sparring sessions with the other training he had her doing, often when she least expected it. He had insisted she used her Never Unarmed racial ability as much as she could and had started teaching her weapon forms, immediately mixing in the sparring training. She had been nervous about hurting him with the weapons her ability made, but he’d laughed at her. Gammon had said when she was a threat to him with a weapon, she wouldn’t need to be in the Tutorial Realm anymore.
Today’s sparring session was accompanied by a pop quiz. Sarah grunted in exertion as she caught Gammon’s blow on her crystalline blue blade. Six seconds ago, she’d been doing one-handed pushups while Gammon lectured. Then her teacher had suddenly held his hand out to the side and a ludicrously big sword appeared out of nowhere and he grabbed it and swung it right at her. Sweat soaked her entire Training Outfit and her Grippy Slippers skidded across the faded blue floormats with an ear-splitting squeak.
“What are the Gates of Ascension!?” Gammon roared as he attacked.
Sarah dashed a hand across her brow and didn’t try to catch Gammon’s overwhelmingly strong attack on her sword this time. Her hands were still tingling and numb. Gammon charged forward with a wide and wild swing and Sarah rolled out of the way.
“Sapphire, Amethyst…” Sarah began, shaking her hands as she came up from a roll.
“In ORDER!” Gammon yelled, spinning unbelievably fast out of his wild swings and thrusting out his left leg in a back kick that caught her off-guard and blasted into her unprotected belly. She flew back five meters and smashed into the mirrored walls. The mirrors didn’t shatter—they never did. They were infused with tensa and were designed to withstand far more damage than her body could dish out. Sarah’s vision spun with color bursts but she cleared her head almost as soon as she landed with a quick flex of her anima to cycle her tensa a little faster.
She reconfigured her anima into a three-meter spear weaponform, pouring her will into it, and felt her tensa drain as she summoned another anima weapon, her sword disappearing into motes of light. By now, she had the System entry for her Never Unarmed racial gift memorized, but as she used it, she still saw the System notification of the ability floating in her peripheral vision.
Never Unarmed
Racial Gift: First form
Evolution Conditions: ???
Cost: 100 sparks per weapon
Cooldown: None
Description: Create weapons using Second Form anima projections. Infuse the projection with tensa to create a melee weapon. Size and weapon type are dependent upon the wielder. Weapons are considered Enchanted at level 1 for the sake of overcoming damage resistance.
Ignoring the message box, she slammed the base of her spear into the ground behind her, launching herself at Gammon and spinning at the same time. Gammon caught her anima spear with one hand, but it dissolved into nothingness. “Stone Gate!” Sarah growled as her spin continued and she hooked her leg around the back of Gammon’s and he slammed into the ground.
“Ivory! Sapphire… Jade!” Each word was accompanied by another lightning-quick attack. She’d climbed on top of Gammon and formed her anima into a spike. She was repeatedly slamming her spike down at Gammon though the teacher had no issue with fending off her attacks.
“Amethyst!” She screamed in frustration as she tried one last stabbing attack with both hands.
Gammon caught her wrists with one hand and casually tossed her over his head with a snakelike twist and kick, smoothly coming to his feet in the same motion. Once again, Sarah went flying into the mirrored wall. She caught herself in the mirror absorbing the impact of her impromptu flight, once again marveling at the incredible resilience her high Dominion attribute gave her.
“When can you pass through the Stone Gate?” Gammon said as stalked toward her, closing off her avenues of escape as he advanced.
He swung his ridiculous anime-style sword like it weighed nothing, executing a spinning flourish designed to intimidate and impress. Sarah didn’t bother escaping. She ran right at him, her anima forming into a pair of spiked gauntlets as she launched into a series of powerful punch attacks. He paced her, stepping back as she advanced, his wide sword blade always in the way as he blocked every attack.
As she attacked, she spoke, her focus unbroken, "Once I've unlocked all my Attributes, I'll be able to--" she grunted as she dodged as Gammon nearly skewered her with his enormous sword, then picked back up where she left off. "I'll be able to step through any Quest Gate for my Stone Gate Quest, but I shouldn't." She circled slowly, trying to find an opening.
"Why not?" Gammon didn't let her have any time to think, flicking out a few exploratory attacks that made her parry and dodge for a few seconds without speaking.
It took a moment, but she regained her balance and pressed her own attack. They went back and forth, neither one gaining the upper hand. When they broke again, Sarah dashed her forearm across her brow, wiping away sweat. "Because I need to increase my Attributes first," she said, eyeing Gammon cautiously. "Any Gate Quest is going to test me to my breaking point, so I'll need all the help I can get."
“You must also be very careful about what Quests you take and what System Achievements you accomplish; all of those variables will be considered when you are offered your choice of Class--assuming you survive. your Quest of course. Now, you’ve already absorbed what kind of ethershard?” Gammon went on the attack, swinging his sword with lightning speed and a giant’s strength.
Sarah had no choice but to attempt to block the blows—she just wasn’t fast enough to dodge them. She decided to try something she had never attempted before. She formed her anima into a pillar-like sword with a thick handle near the middle: a weapon that was completely impractical and awkward but that would serve as a persistent obstacle between them. Her tensa drained again, leaving her dangerously near empty, but the weapon manifested in the same ultramarine crystal substance. It dug into the floor and Sarah felt the weight of it solid and real in her grasp.
Gammon’s sword smashed into it a microsecond later and even braced and with every advantage, Sarah’s entire right arm went numb with the shock of the impact. She reacted as quickly as she could, ignoring her dangling right arm, she rolled backward, using her Ten Star Vortex technique to absorb as much tensa as she could while she went. “It’s a… Dimension ethershard… thatwas…bonded to…my Dominion…Attribute,” Sarah gasped, feeling her ribs creaking painfully as hot air pumped in and out of her.
She slowly retreated backward, unable to keep a bit of a limp out of her stride when she felt her ankle twinge. “Gammon,” she asked a little breathlessly before he could ask another question, “why did I get… shoved through…the portal without Griffin? Why didn’t…August Vasilias go through himself?” She still retreated warily, breathing heavily and using her Ten Star Vortex technique to refill her anemic tensa pool, keeping her senses attuned for any hint of an attack.
Gammon straightened from his fighting stance, lowering his enormous blade. Sarah took a cue from him and allowed her weapon to dissipate. She just stood there for a long moment and breathed hard. Then she trudged over to the far side of the room and dug a towel and a water bottle out of her bag. She drank a mouthful and dumped the rest on her head and neck, not caring about getting the floormats wet. As the water dripped off her, the mats soaked up the moisture as quickly as a sponge leaving them perfectly dry.
It had been five months of near-ceaseless training since that first day Sarah had arrived. The room that Gammon trained her in day after endless day was located in the tiny strip mall just down the street from his tiny house. Everything else was long red grass and deadly monsters as far as the eye could see. Oh, and of course the floating islands of stone tethered by the impossibly thick vines growing between them. Couldn’t forget about those. Her entire world had expanded so infinitely far in so short a time and now it had contracted to two places: the tiny house, and the depressing strip mall.
She glanced over her shoulder toward the big plate-glass windows at the front of the training hall. Menacing grey clouds threatened on the horizon, casting the red grass in bloody shadow far away. She scowled. She hated it when it rained here. “Portal abilities are rare, highly sought-after grafts that can provide near instantaneous travel for people,” Gammon said, walking up next to her and staring out at the gathering storm clouds as well. “But they’re limited by who created it and by the graft being used.”
He looked over at her, his eyes troubled, “It sounds like the portal you were pushed through was an Artifact, an extremely powerful infused item. The way you’ve described Earth—only such a powerful and complex infused item would be able to hold together enough tensa to bridge the dimensional gap. Artifacts are even more limited in their use than a graft, though anyone can use them. My point,” he said, holding up a finger to forestall her complaint, “Is that if August could have gone through the portal, he would have. But he was Ascendant and their bodies—well, they require an insane amount of energy to teleport due to their incredibly energy-dense infused bodies.”
“So the portal was, what, too weak for him?” Sarah shook her head, wiping her face with a towel, “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would he go through the effort for me and Griffin?” She squeezed the towel out, wringing a stream of sweat onto the miraculous mats.
Gammon turned away from the window and walked over to the wall by the glass door at the entrance. He waved a hand and a small screen appeared on the wall. He pressed a few buttons on the screen and the twenty by ten-meter empty room with the faded blue mats on the floor and mirrors on the walls stretched back another fifty meters and filled with various obstacles. The mats on the floor melted away to be replaced by concrete and steel rebar.
The obstacle course looked for all the world like a crowded alleyway, complete with hanging laundry lines, garbage dumpsters, and piles of refuse. Sarah groaned, “Another round of the obstacle course? I’ve done this—I can’t even remember how many times now.”
“If you can beat your previous time, I’ll have a surprise for you,” Gammon promised.
That caught Sarah’s attention and raised the competitive edge within her. Still a little sore from the sparring session, Sarah jogged over to the beginning of the obstacle course and readied herself to begin, trying to think through her route. The first leg of the alley obstacle course was a maze of narrow passages, hissing pipes, disgusting piles of garbage, and rusted fences. She’d need to be careful with her footing there, but it was pretty straightforward and she thought she’d have been able to complete that part of the course without her magic powers. But things took a turn for the dicey when she got to the roof.
Sarah started her run at top speed, using her unlocked Dominion Attribute to its fullest. There was a lot of strength and endurance in even the most agile of gymnastics and Sarah was experienced with the kinds of movements this style of running required. What Gammon had been teaching her was a combination of parkour and techniques designed to take advantage of both her Attributes and her grafts. At the moment, the only way she could use her abilities to speed her run was to conjure weapons out of her anima that could help her in specific methods. Her favorite technique lately had been to start her run with a simple pole.
She dashed toward a tall fence, her Training Tunic streaked with grime already where she’d slid under a protruding pipe. Instead of attempting to climb the fence, she thrust her arms forward and surged her tensa into her simple pole. It instantly extended four meters, launching her up in an arc over the fence. She let her pole go, allowing it to dissipate and fizz away into sparkles as she grabbed a ladder hanging from a fire escape.
She scrambled and swung and launched herself through the course with more abandon than she ever had before. She felt like she was taking her frustrations out on the course itself. No matter what she did, she felt like it was never enough. Sarah had never trained her physical body as hard as she had here and yet she was always a little too weak, a little too slow to succeed. It was maddening.
It didn’t register in her head when the course changed, elevating itself until it was towering fifty meters above the floor. Her anger and frustration found their release in her exertion against the obstacle course where she hadn’t managed to find such peace when sparring against Gammon. She found herself sprinting full-tilt along a narrow, wet beam as simulated thunder and lightning flashed around her. The training room, though it looked like a tiny martial arts McDojo from the outside, was more like a holodeck from Star Trek on the inside and could be programmed with any environment Gammon wanted and even adjusted on the fly. She was reaching the end of the beam and had found her next spot, still going on instinct and autopilot as her mind spun through her situation.
She missed the jump. Her foot slipped at the worst possible moment and instead of launching off the beam and flying across the gap to the next “rooftop”, her toes slipped out from under her and she ended up tipping forward and banging her shin on the beam as she fell. Sarah gasped with pain and shock, but her constant training had drilled certain reactions into her. She barely needed to think to form her anima into a weaponform and a moment later, a thin chain of bluish crystal materialized in her fist with a heavy weight on the end. It was a weapon she’d seen in one of the kung-fu movies Griffin loved so much called a meteor hammer.
She whirled the chain around in her other hand, tossing it desperately at a gargoyle-like statue flashing by. The chain whipped around it, pulling taught as she fell. It wasn’t a smooth fall that launched her into another jump. She’d timed it wrong and threw it at the wrong target. Instead, she jerked to a sudden stop as the chain tightened around her wrist. She screamed again as her shoulder dislocated forcefully when her entire weight came down on it. Sarah hung there for a few moments before the floor rose to meet her and she collapsed to the ground. The rain vanished, as did the dingy alleyway. She was back on the training room’s floor, face pressed into the faded blue mats once more.
She lay on the ground, gripping her shoulder, hot tears streaming from her eyes. The pain was bad, but that wasn’t what was making her cry. She had been holding onto the desperate hope that she was in some kind of elaborate and long-lasting dream or coma or a psychotic break. But the pain in her shoulder was too real for her to just invent out of nothing. The pain cut through the mental fog she’d unconsciously been in and it brought home that despite all the impossibilities, this was her reality.
It meant that Earth was gone—assuming August Vasilias hadn’t been lying or wrong. It meant that she was so far away from everything she knew, she was essentially cast adrift. The injury in her shoulder knitted together quickly leaving just the memory of the pain; the Tutorial Realm combined with her Fast Healing racial gift wouldn’t let her stay hurt for long. Sarah sat up and dismissed her anima weapon, rubbing at her sore shoulder.