Chương 29: Exhaustion Training

I felt my second presence disappear as soon as the Art triggered, but I wasn't ready for the wave of exhaustion that hit. I just wanted to go to sleep, but I knew I wasn't physically tired. It was just a mental hurdle to cross, which I promised myself I would. Blinking to keep myself awake, I relied on my Focus. I cautiously stepped toward my field of enhanced gravity, and for a second, I contemplated stepping into it, but when I saw the remains of the grass still quivering, I thought better of it.

I didn't have a death wish. The field was still active. I searched the field until I found a clump of stone, then lobbed it into the field. As soon as the stone passed the boundary, it dropped, plummeting into the soil with a thud. It created a small crater, but the force of enhanced gravity flattened the ground out within seconds. After about thirty seconds, the field relented. A few blades of grass—those that hadn't been turned into green sludge—popped back up.

I stuck my hand into the field hesitantly, and nothing happened.

"That was double, nay, triple the original gravity," Elf said.

"Maybe even quadruple."

"Definitely quadruple," Romance said.

"So…wait a minute, you guys know about gravity?" I tilted my head. My brain was still processing words as if we were speaking English, but we were speaking a different language, and they probably had a different word for it here. The concept was the same though.

"What else makes things fall?" Romance asked.

"I—" I cut myself off.

"I suppose it makes sense that you would have a word for that concept. Wait, do you know why it works?" I remembered on the few nights I got to hang out with Dad (which had been the best nights, no matter how few they were) pestering him about how things worked. That included gravity. He never had a proper answer. No one I asked really did—not for sure. There were theories about warping spacetime and such, but no one could really explain the 'why' in a satisfying way. Shave shrugged.

"All things have a natural place, according to the Path. That place is sometimes down." A natural place, determined by the laws of the universe?

"All things have a destiny," Elf said.

"At least, that was the reasoning the philosophers of the old empire came up with." I tilted my head, trying to wrap my head around their reasoning. They weren't necessarily correct about the nature of gravity, either. It reminded me of what I'd read about the ancient Greeks' beliefs about gravity—and well, we knew they weren't right about everything. But the people of this world seemed to at least be partially correct about souls, so maybe they knew something about how gravity worked.

"You could say that gravity is caused by a 'natural place'," Shave said, responding to my earlier question.

"Same as with men. Some are made to be lords, some are made to be soldiers."

"I don't buy that," I replied.

"You're a Dupe." Shave shrugged.

"We all are. What else would you have been made for?"

"You said we have a choice of how we behave, because we have souls. That means we should be able to make our own destinies."

"I didn't think about it at all!" Romance said with a cackle.

"You were too busy reading fiction," Ticks muttered.

"For the record, I'm in Romance's boat," Elf replied.

"Though I put more of a focus into history."

"How much education did you guys get?" I asked.

"At Homecamp, we all received a basic education in the sciences and history," Shave answered."

"Most of us were Coppers when we were sent out, too," Shave added.

"If we'd made it to Iron that quickly, I'm sure we would've been sent to a better battalion—better as in more opportunities for combat, which means more opportunities to gain Skills and Presences. If we were really good, we would've been sent to the sappers."

"Now, I've got another question," I said.

"The Art seemed to work with my Focus. It's hard to explain. It was like it was leveraging the attribute to accomplish something."

"Some Arts are like that," Shave said.

"Some only work if you've reached a certain attribute level, like with your Focus, and if you don't meet the attribute prerequisite, you won't be able to merge the right Art you want." This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"That…kinda makes sense. But it also makes it just a little bit more complex." I paused.

"Well, I'm going to pack it up for the day. I'm probably starving, though I can't really feel it at the moment. I'm too exhausted."

"You are most definitely starving, kid," Romance said.

"After I first learned to use my resonance Skill, I could've eaten an entire cow."

"And you only had one Presence," Elf said.

"Levi's used two in a row." I dragged myself back to the camp, and although it was late afternoon, it wasn't dinnertime yet. At first, I was about to head back to the tent and take an afternoon nap—considering I'd finished my daily tasks, and I doubted that taking an afternoon nap was the laziest thing this battalion got up to, but I stopped myself before dropping down on my bed. Resting right now was exactly the wrong choice, wasn't it? Presence wasn't a physical tiredness, and it wasn't even a mental tiredness.

Perhaps it was spiritual, but whatever it was, I wouldn't just be able to take a nap in the middle of a battle. If I didn't start getting used to Presence loss, then I was going to die the moment I used a Skill in a real fight. Instead, I settled down on the floor of our squad's tent. Instead of napping, like they thought I was, I practiced my situps. After three situps, I experimented with the same exercise that Elf had shown me.

When I was upright, I threw a punch with each hand, forcing myself to keep going even after all the exertion. ~ ~ ~ For the next few weeks, my schedule stayed the same. In the mornings, I woke up, ate breakfast, then finished my daily chores around the camp as quickly as I could. A few Dupes still tried to pawn their chores off on me, and if the others in my squad—who I needed as training partners—weren't done with their tasks, I accepted the extra work.

Throughout the camp, I noticed that a few Dupes whose names I didn't know were beginning to step up as well. They were moving faster and taking spare tasks too, and my extra workload was lessening. So far, it was only four or five of them, but they were working harder, that much was obvious. In the afternoons, I joined Shave on the fields outside the camp, and we trained. I continued practicing my spearmanship.

I was an apprentice, but apparently, the skill tiers went up much higher than just 'Apprentice,' and there was plenty more work to do. Besides, with how short of a time I'd been here, getting to Apprentice alone was incredible. (The Labyrinth had to have helped with that. Sure, I hadn't learnt any new techniques or fancy new blocks or anything, but at the same time, I had gotten used to aiming my spear at targets, at how hard I needed to stab something, and at the best technique to use to do so.) But now that I was out of the Labyrinth, and facing a real human opponent, Shave taught me defensive techniques. Not just the Sun Splinter, but a different style that he called Pillar's Fence. It required a lot of blocking with the shaft of the spear. Progress was slow, and I was far better at offence. Every day ended with a sparring match. When the others joined us, we made sure to take turns, and I always tried using my resonance Skill once in sparring.

It was dangerous, and I never aimed it at anyone, but I made sure to practice exhausting myself mid-battle and continuing to fight. As the days passed by, the fields dried and the trees yellowed faster. Word got out around camp that I had an Art, and a few wanted to see it. Even Maurifus came to check it out, saying that he'd never seen an Art in action before. (And he brought my reward for pawning the deer antlers with him, which I tried to tuck into my haversack as subtly as possible.) Then the next day, Maurifus said, "Use your Art on me."

"Pardon?" I tilted my head.

"You've never used it on a man yet, have you?"

"No, but I don't want to hurt you."

"Ah, I'm a big guy. I can take it." The crowd of other Dupes who had gathered around corroborated his claims, and someone shouted, "Maurifus would probably have a Vitality rating of three if he was a Dupe!" The highest a mortal could get.

"If you say so…" I wasn't going to pass up on an opportunity to test my Art on a living creature—someone comparable to an orc, hopefully.

"Ready?" Maurifus held out his arms and grinned.

"Always. I—" Inhaling sharply, I triggered the Art. Pressure swelled around Maurifus, pressing him down toward the ground, and he shouted in surprise. I didn't think four Gs was enough to kill someone, especially someone as large as him, so it was probably fine, but it threw him off and made him stagger.

"Try to hit him!" someone shouted at Maurifus. The blacksmith pulled a hammer out of his toolbelt and tried to swing it. I was well out of range, but even then, the hammer wouldn't have done much. It took all his strength to lift it. Swinging it was barely possible. He was on the verge of blacking out, and he was blinking furiously to stay conscious. Finally, the field of enhanced gravity ended, and Maurifus fell to his knees, panting. With that out of the way, a few others wanted to test themselves.

So in the coming days, I tested my Art on people with varying Vitality attributes. The less they had, the more effective the Art was, and I knocked a few of them unconscious with the sheer force of the Skill. After training, I always returned to camp and made sure to continue my proper conditioning. I found a list of exercises we were supposed to do as Dupes and I performed them to the best of my ability, no matter how exhausted I was.

If I ever still had a point of Presence left after sparring or training, I made sure to use it to test myself against the boulder. I stabbed it into the side of the boulder, making the largest hole I could. After five attempts, I finally pierced through all the way with my spear. On the sixth attempt, a day later at high noon, I was about to start my training session by using a Resonance skill on the boulder, but I stopped when a horn sounded and a bell began tolling.

I turned my attention back to the camp, then to Slowbend, but I didn't need to look far to tell what was going wrong. The alert runes from the watchtower were glowing blue.