Mystical Fencer

Yuki gave us break for the rest of the day upon maxing our stats. Next day right after breakfast she led us to a makeshift armory she created with Sebastian. It was a simple room on larger side, it had about four meters in every direction. One could see tables with weapons all around the walls of the room. Starting with daggers on one side and ending with huge polearms on the other.

All of them were just basic weapons without any enhancements but one could find here any weapon you would want. Yuki gestured for us to step towards the tables as she spoke.

"Go ahead, pick up any weapon and give it a few swings. It should feel just right in your hands; that's how you will know you found what you were looking for."

Rina headed straight towards the side with smaller blades, like daggers and shortswords while I decided to check larger one-handed blades like arming swords, sabers and so on.

First blade I tried was standard western style arming sword, but it felt too unwieldy in hand. It felt like I needed something lighter, something more agile. I felt that dimensions of the blade were right just but that arming sword was too heavy for my liking.

This made me look towards two weapons that I had highest hopes for, one of them being saber and second being Jian.

Saber was light curved sword with a single blade and Jian being light straight sword with two blades. First, I decided to try using saber. It felt much better than using western style arming sword but the fact that it had just a single blade and a curve made it harder for me to use.

After this I grabbed the Jian and tried to swing it around a bit. It felt incredible right away. It was very light and agile sword. It had about 75 centimeters long and rather thin blade.

After about ten minutes of swinging the blade around I decided, this is the weapon I want. I turned towards Yuki, where I already saw Rina standing holding her weapon in hand. She ended up choosing the butterfly swords. They were straight single bladed shortswords that were used in pairs, one in each hand.

Seeing this I could not help but smile. I found the weapon extremely fitting for Rina and there was even nice pair that I could get for her rather easily.

I raised my weapon towards the two women and spoke.

"I will use this! It feels really good in hand!"

Rina reacted right away. "I thought you would go for bigger weapon!"

Yuki shook her head as she spoke. "No way! He is more of an agile type not a big blade type. I knew he would pick something smaller! Anyway, now that you have your weapons, we will change your training a little. The fitness training will be limited to one hour after breakfast after that will be training with weapons until lunch, after break we will continue with our normal schedule of mana training but we will add weapon infusion to the mix so that your mana depletes faster. Since your mana pool is large enough for your natural mana regen to offset the cost of the body infusion with your mastery of the skill."

"What do you mean mastery?" Asked Rina.

"You didn't notice? The more you use the skill, more efficiently you can use it. You can keep the infusion running for much less mana than before and it is much stronger than it was before, you can even activate it faster. It works with every skill, the more you use, better you are at it!"

"Is there a way to see it in the status?" I asked hoping that there is going to be something since game always kept you in dark on this.

Yuki shook her head as she spoke. "Vic sadly there is not, to be precise there is not until you completely master the skill. Once the skill is mastered the name will change, but before that there is not."

"Thanks, Yuki!"

Yuki decided that we will skip the stamina training for the day and go straight to the weapon training. Our first weapon training consisted from training swings and blocks while maintaining a stance. Point of this exercise was to make sure we have a correct stance and that we are swinging our weapons properly. Meaning we have good edge alignment; we are not making too huge swings that would open us to counterattacks and so on. She explained to us that we need get this to muscle memory, we can't be thinking about this, we just need to be able to do it.

This was how the next month of our training looked like. The training was fine but it had one frustrating aspect, no matter how much I trained my stats didn't change. They remained exactly the same since the moment I started training with my sword. The only thing I gained during this month was a skill, weapon infusion. It allowed me to infuse mana into my weapon, similarly like the body infusion let me infuse my body with mana. Infusing the weapon increased its damage very significantly.

Together with body infusion these two skills were core of almost all the builds in Mystical Fencer. Even pure caster builds used weapon infusion since it shortened their casting time by a little, with it you just had to get the mana into the staff and it started automatically gathering in front of the staff thanks to the fact that the staff was already saturated with mana. Without the infusion one had to move the mana through the staff manually. At least that was the in-game lore about it.

After the month of frustrating training, a significant change happened from nowhere, without warning. Our morning training changed drastically, instead of training swings and blocks we started sparring with random soldiers Yuki grabbed from our family barracks. She made sure to grab different soldiers with different weapons every day. Sometimes she asked them to grab a weapon they are not very proficient with, sometimes she asked them to grab their strongest weapon, sometimes she asked them to use shield, sometimes she prohibited them from using one. Sometimes she swapped the soldiers between us, sometimes she didn't. Sometimes we fought 2v2 sometimes 1v1 sometimes 1v2 or 2v1. She made us guessing what will happen next, never telling us anything before we experienced it. Sometimes we fought in the garden, sometimes in cramped room, sometimes even on the stairs in the mansion. Honestly this made us totally forget about any frustration, the training was hard but very interesting. According to her this was the best way to teach us how to adapt during the fight.

And as for the after-lunch training in encompassed everything we were doing until now. We were meant to wear the heavy bracelets while we were maintaining both infusions and doing the ghost fencing. In other words, repeating basic parries, slashes and stabs in a choreography. This part of the training was even harder than the previous one. Maintaining two spells while bracing myself against the heavy bracelets and performing a choreography was hard, extremely hard.

After every day of this torture, I fell down into bed and slept. I didn't have the luxury to think about the fact the I was not getting stamina or mana. All I ever thought about was, when is this torture going to end. And it lasted for two months, just a month before I was fifteen years old it happened.

It was during the one-on-one sparring session against a soldier that was using a halberd. Out of nowhere a notification window popped right in front of me, and as the first one popped more followed in quick succession. Seeing this and quickly reading the first one I screamed while I parried the halberd and quickly closed the distance pressing my training sword against the neck of the soldier.

"I got it! I received a fencing skill!"

Yuki stopped the training right away, next moment I saw two rockets flew at me at high-speed trying to hug me. Their faces filled with smiles. I was not able to hold balance so the two women ended up toppling me down to the ground and lying on top of me. The moment we landed both of them started congratulating me. I chuckled shook my head and spoke.

"Thanks girls but would you mind climbing down from me?"

They chuckled and answered both at once. "Yes, we would mind that!"

I sighed and decided to let them have their fun. Next moment Yuki asked.

"What classes can you chose from? You should be having a good selection! What affinities did you get? Did you get stat multiplicators?"

I started to read all the notifications I had until I came across the answer to one of the Yuki's questions.

"Yes, I have two multiplicators. 2.5 for reaching a class and 2 for overtraining?"

Yuki nodded satisfied. "That's why I was pushing you so hard. When you receive your class after training hard enough on maxed stats you get your stats doubled. And this is multiplicative with the 2.5 multiplier you normally get. This means that both your stamina and mana will be multiplied by five once you pick out your class."