Chapter 89 – Competition Progress

Tom glanced around the isolation room. He had an hour to kill now before his next lecture. Mostly, the sessions he got into with the two open competitors depended on their real-world responsibilities. Unless it specifically clashed with his dodge or obstacle course training, Tom made it to every open slot he had been offered. 

His eyes fell on the smallest war hammer intended for ten-year-olds, resting in its usual place. That was what he was here to do, but his thoughtful mood made him drag his feet.

Soon, he decided, but not yet. He knew his drive was not going to let him procrastinate for more than a few minutes, but self-reflection was important, and a lot had happened in the last two weeks since he had won the spot in the Divine Champions’ trial. Life had been a whirlwind of frenetic activity with barely any time to breathe, and his sleep had been compromised badly.

It was so oppressive that he had almost drifted off during a lecture.

“Get more sleep,” he told himself furiously. Between his nightly tempering, lair fighting, and squeezing in extra study sessions, he had been reduced to the point of only receiving an average of six hours per night. It was nowhere near enough for this body. “I’ll slow down and look after myself,” he told the empty room.

Mentally, he made the correction to his outlook. Going forward, he would enforce sleep time and, if he failed, he was going to skip the nightly sessions until the issue was corrected. Tom did not like the decision he had come to, but he was going to stick to it, because he didn’t want to risk his efficiency dropping. To be at his best, he knew he had to get sufficient sleep.

Especially in this body.  

Two weeks, and four embarrassing losses in official battles. It was what logic had told him was likely, but his pride still stung a little. Corrine’s lessons on the risks of partial shields had been borne out, as he couldn’t remember anything from his encounter with the FAMES representative, an enemy that had six prior incapacitations to its name. It had been his second fight, and, for days after, he would catch himself wondering what had been done to him. What had been so horrific that it had forced the GOD’s shield to completely suppress the memories of the entire experience?

Tom couldn’t even remember what it had looked like and he could only imagine what would have happened if he had gone in without a shield. It really highlighted how dangerous these encounters were.

With the help of all the practice, he had forced himself to stop thinking about it. The others he had fought had been far more accommodating, and he had even been offered the chance to surrender by a giant four-armed ape-like creature. Given that it had three incapacitations and three kills, it clearly did not fight with a GOD’s shield. That had been an example of their gentlemen’s agreement in action. The WADOR fighter had extended him the deal, as per the unofficial rules.

Tom, with his full GOD’s shield, could have fought, but he recognised it was pointless. That particular opponent had been way too strong. He had taken the offer and conceded the match.

Then there was the crafting.

He was devoting everything he could to it, but it was not going stellar.

At the end of the first week, Throm and Vturalta had decided he had sufficient basic knowledge to push hard into practical exercises.

Those tests had been a debacle. A six-year-old, even one with an adult mind, did not have the same capacity as the masters with hundreds or thousands of years of experience like they were used to teaching.

April  had almost fallen off the stool laughing when he had whinged at her. Her response had been simple:

“They’re just not Tomifying the information enough.”

“That’s not a word.”

She had laughed. “No, it’s a depressing concept. The bane of my existence.”

“I’m not that bad.”

“That’s debatable, Tom. Listen, I think I can help.”

“Really?”

“Yes; can you promise to pass on a message for me?”

Tom had considered that for a moment. He had known that it was going to backfire somehow, but, if whatever message she sent cut a week off his training time, it was worth it.

April had smirked. “I want you to tell Throm something for me. ‘Imagine Tom as a wormling that swims down and teach him accordingly.’ Those exact words, Tom. Tell him those. It will help.”

When he had passed on the message to Throm, the centipede’s reaction had literally broken what, until that point, he had considered to be an unbreakable floor. The massive creature had shattered all the stone under every one of his legs as a result of vibrating so quickly. Then he had been unable to form words for almost a minute afterward.

Tom couldn’t comprehend the humour, but he was damn sure he was the one being laughed at.

“Is it really that funny?” he asked.

“Wormling swims down.” Throm had chortled in response, and the already-broken stone was ground into a finer dust. After that Tom had tried to keep to a strategy of not reminding anyone.

They had thankfully taken the message seriously, and the way they were training him had shifted again in response. Instead of giving Tom practical exercises, Throm decided he would get him to build the ritual he needed out of wire. Only once it was correct was he going to take the next steps to minimise it and engrave it within a wooden disk.  

The sessions went from lectures to him creating different sections under their watchful eyes. The flood of information didn’t stop - it just came in an alternative form. They would notice something minor, like what degree of bend was best, and then interrogate him about whether he was certain that he was making the right decision. Pro tip, he was never in the right; then, having established the problem, they would willingly spend an hour debating the risks and benefits of his method against the alternatives. Tom would work while the argument occurred, and only switch his hands to building something that was less controversial for a while. Then, worn out, he would change the amount of bend slightly, so it was one and a half degrees less than what it had been like, the lecture had concluded, was the optimal amount.

Tom hoped the revisions were working, but he was unable to estimate how long the entire effort was going to take. The current construction might turn out to be the template he needed - or they might tell him to start again from scratch. He just didn’t know.

The whole thing sucked.  

“But the fruit,” he reminded himself out loud, “And the rest of the power.”

He remembered the other items on the curated list, and the additional goodies that might appear once he worked through them. All the current ones were great. They were all things that he wanted - starting with the spatial storage, a trait which was going to open up lots of interesting options in the real world. For example, he would be able to carry poisons and weapons around with him, which would be amazing.

As for the ones in the future, he expected them to be just as good. Hopefully, there would even be discounted tier-five and -six items to really kickstart his title acquisitions.

“And a grand total of zero wins,” he said wryly. As much as it hurt him to admit it, his combat strength wasn’t going to get him what he wanted. 

Once more, he glanced around the room, then decided he had delayed enough. Almost two minutes of training time had been wasted due to his procrastination.

His eyes slid to the war hammer and then, because he wasn’t ready for that yet, they went to the small folder of information on the current state of the world. A couple of minutes refreshing his knowledge of what was happening in the rest of Existentia couldn’t hurt.    

He immediately flipped to the ranking section.

A huge smile broke out upon his face.

Finally, somebody had done something.

It was only a jump of three million, but that was ten percent of the gap to third place, so it was not nothing.

He smiled as he re-read the disclaimer that the cause was unknown, and he wondered why that was the case.

Why was it unknown? He asked himself. Was it because someone was hiding it deliberately?

That didn’t seem right, though. Perhaps, the explanation was more mundane. Could it be a team of adventurers, ones operating months or years of travel away from human-controlled land, who had done something impressive, but distance meant they couldn’t brag to anyone about it? Or, possibly, it was a lone tinkerer who had set about to do a project like the failed crystal slimes, but it had gained traction and succeeded. It was unknown, because, instead of being a collective effort of experts drawn from multiple towns, it was just one person pottering around and doing their thing.

If Tom could choose the outcome, he hoped it was a team of adventurers. If there was a group out there capable of making a couple of million experience per month, it was possible they would be able to beat the Wador and Giants. Then, if whatever crazy stuff the inventors were doing slowed down, they could snatch the third place.

It was a dream, but him being here meant that he had to be a part of the solution. After all, that was why he had been reincarnated in the first place.

1.                Dragons: Current Rank 1 with accumulated points of 328 million and year on year accumulation of 11 million. Additional notes: Peaked at 433 million.

2.                Insects: Current Rank 2 with accumulated points of 315 million and year on year accumulation of 8 million. Additional notes: Peaked at 420 million.

3.                Inventors: Current Rank 3 with accumulated points of 292 million and year on year accumulation of ? million.

4.                Giants: Current Rank 4 with accumulated points of 285 million and year on year accumulation of 4 million. Additional notes: Benefited from an unexplained 20 and 30 million jump in earth years 28 and 34.

5.                Wador: Current Rank 5 with accumulated points of 282 million and year on year accumulation of 4 million.

6.                Humans: Current Rank65 with accumulated points of 271 million and year on year accumulation of 3 million. Additional notes: One off gain of 100 million from GOD’s action. Unexplained 3 million boost this week.

7.                Chosen: Current Rank 7 with accumulated points of 43 million and year on year accumulation of < 1 million.

Tom read the next page and frowned. There was no more good news.

Instead, there were a series of dot points covering points of interest.

The monitors of the crystal slimes had reported that equilibrium had been reached, and they had done tests, but didn’t think they could destabilize the new normal.

Chiura Okimi, a powerhouse, had died, having disappeared from spot four on the ladder.

An environmental engineering project that had been worked on for ten years was declared a write-off as a result of a shift in the Underground.

There were over ten more points along similar lines.

It was depressing. 

Annoyed and frustrated, he grabbed the hammer. Hard physical work was what he needed to ground himself. A long session, Tom figured, with an oversized and too-heavy practice war hammer was just what the doctor ordered. The physical stress of the hammer forms interspaced with Quick Step should distract himself from thinking about the annoying things he had just read. It rankled to be practicing with the hammer, because it was not part of his core build.

Ideally, he would be training spear forms, but April hadn’t given him anything to pursue and had refused to teach any advanced katas to let him try to progress Spear Mastery independently. She claimed it was because she didn’t want him starting anything before Extended Spear Skill Execution became available in his next session. Privately, Tom suspected, it was because she knew that him focusing on the hammer abilities was important for his cover, and wanted to force him to develop appropriately in that direction.

He didn’t care. Right now, he was training for the burn. Forcing his body to swing the heavy weapon through his forms was cathartic. His arms were arching, and it was made worse because he deliberately broke the choreographed movements to throw in Quick Steps at random points, just the way he would when using the eventual skill in battle. 

There was no magic in the forced rapid footwork.

There was no sense of a skill hovering just out of reach. For now, it was a physical motion that, by its nature, disrupting the individual forms which were designed to flow from one to another.

However, Tom didn’t allow himself to cheat. He remembered the process he had gone through to acquire both Power and Instant Strike. They had required mind numbing monotony before the skill had begun to form, so he was going to do the same for these.

He persisted.

It was a simple routine, ten minutes’ worth of hard work, then a minute break to use the healing crystal, because he wasn’t wasting his mana on self-healing. What little mana he had went into his experimental lightning spells. It responded to his need and purged the lactic acid buildup and treated the micro and not so micro muscle tears. It was amazing how refreshed he felt the moment the healing stopped. Pain and tiredness that had been slowing him down without him realising it suddenly vanished, and he was back to being able to throw in a hundred percent effort.

While Quick Step continued to feel artificial and anything but magical, the same couldn’t be said for his hammer movements. He could feel the resonance as he went through the forms. It was still a long way from ticking over to a complete skill. However, when he swung the weapon down, there was an  impression of weight in his swing, and then the hammer felt lighter when he spun it back up.

The hour finished, and, even though he had another hour in the isolation room, he dutifully went to attend his lecture.

Blue grass greeted him, and, the instant he appeared, he spotted Vturalta waiting for him in the common area. She was resting happily in her little pool of water, about half of her in and the rest out. Without fuss, he joined her and sat down across from her.

Immediately, his current project appeared in front of him on the table. It was a mass of wire - some of it had been bent into complicated geometric shapes; other bits felt orderly, but also wild at the same time.

Tom smiled and took up at where he had left off. Compared to what April had made him memorise, this was probably four times as intricate. Just in the bottom section, he had to double the number of tracks, and, instead of straight lines linking the next level, he had to slow the energy down by adding regular spirals.

“What do you think about thickness?” Vturalta asked suddenly.

Tom froze his mind rushing to understand why she had asked that particular question.

“In the spirals?”

“Energy conduits,” Vturalta corrected him. “But yes. Is the wire thickness there important?”

“Yes… um… um… No,” he amended himself hurriedly at her look. “Maybe.”

Her tentacles splashed in the water. When Throm had told her the wormling joke, she had almost emptied her pool. Right now, it was just a couple of splashes, which were closer to an indulgent chuckle than anything:

“Well, which is it? A yes, or a no, or a maybe?”

Tom considered the fundamentals and the purpose of the base of the ritual. It was kind of like a battery, but more complicated, because there was a two-way exchange. Power could flow up from the base, then back again with an information overlay added. The question was not about the current coming back, but about the flow. “I think it depends on what it’s feeding the energy into.”

“Very good,” she said with a grin. “Who said you would swim down?” She splashed.

Tom felt his face harden. “I didn’t see you defending me.”

More water went flying. “Who am I to argue with the assessment of an ancient trial administrator? Especially one of a Special trial. And stop pretending to be grumpy,” she said. “Don’t prove April right.”

“Shut up.” he retorted not knowing if she was making that comment up or not. She had attempted to trick him on these sorts of silly issues before.

This time, she splashed him deliberately, and it must have been magic controlled because it felt like it drenched him as thoroughly as jumping in a pool would have done.

He spluttered in shock and discretely checked around him. No water had touched the ground - it had all gone on him. “What was that for?”

“As your mentor, I must have your absolute respect.” Her tentacles were writhing in the pool, sending little waves sloshing everywhere.

“Translation - you thought it would be funny.”

“And I was right!”

The water vanished before it could distract him further. He kept creating the wire spirals, but, as he approached the sensing section of the ritual, he changed to a slightly thinner wire. At this rate, it was going to take him over a month to create the first version, and then who knows how many more were going to be required if they kept finding issues after that. Vturalta had already told him to redo a part after he had finished it. And it was for an error that an earlier warning could have completely prevented. They had noticed the flaw and allowed him to waste days building over the top of it before making him revert it all and start from scratch.

Tom understood the value of the lesson. You measure three times before cutting; it just sucked to have to suffer through it.

An hour and a half later, she released him, since she was needed back in her own world.

He returned to his system room to discover that the three had already started running the obstacle course. He waited until his body crashed to the ground, and then stepped into it. Everything hurt, but he stood up and, as was his custom, ignored the lure of the healing crystal and prepared to go again.