Training, or Practice
Training, or practice.
Before doing something, people repeat the motions to grow familiar with it.
Of course, easy things can be done in a single go, so you never feel the need to practice.
What we practice are, naturally, the difficult and grueling things.
Practice is repeating something hard until it becomes second nature.
It's truly tedious and miserable work.
And no matter how much you do it, improvement isn't guaranteed.
Sometimes you practice for four hours and make less progress than you did in one. In those moments, I used to pick at every little thing, get irritated, and rationalize it away.
But practice reduces the odds that we'll make mistakes or fail. Through that process, when we finally converge on perfection, we reap the fruits and put practice behind us.
The reason I know monsters so well, the reason I know how to handle weapons—it's all thanks to practice.
Repeating the same things over and over, then actually putting them into use, I felt a sense of pride.
I found joy in that process.
So I learned a great many weapons. I prepared myself to use the right weapon in the right place.
At first, each weapon had a different handling style, and that was the real challenge. Switching back and forth, my hands would get tangled as I mixed them up with other weapons.
Later on, that happened less often. A couple of warm-up swings and I'd find the feel again and move freely.
So eventually I even started walking around with concepts.
Captain Hunter Land, or Jennifer of the Chain Scythe…
But all of that was a story inside a monitor.
So when I first dropped into this world with nothing but a single greatsword, I felt fear.
Could the playstyle I'd only ever done with a keyboard and mouse actually work in reality? Doubt crept in. But that doubt vanished the moment I took hold of the sword.
If it had been impossible, I wouldn't have survived the flooded forest.
This body is remarkable.
It performs what I think far beyond what I imagined.
There's no tripping over my own footwork when I'm in a hurry. It's as if the body is already familiar with it all.
"Alright, give it a try."
Matillo said.
This was the training ground on the outskirts of the village. A number of hunters were there, drilling their weapon techniques. I stood somewhat awkwardly among them, together with Matillo and Noah.
I hadn't come to train. I'd only come to prove my ability to Matillo.
The weapons were all packed into a cart Matillo had hauled over.
Iron weapons Matillo had forged over the years. I picked up the one sitting on top.
It was a staff with something like a round gem fixed to the end.
"…Oh, a staff?"
"You know how to use sorcery too?"
Sorcery, was it?
It was a supernatural power, so sorcery wasn't wrong, exactly.
The staff was a somewhat alien and novel weapon in Hunter Land.
Closer to a hard, heavy rod than a mage's staff, this weapon had a monster's essence mounted at the head.
An essence was a monster's core—the wellspring of its power, where its strength resided.
Most of the time, when monsters fired breath attacks or used unusual abilities, it was because of their essence.
When a fight ended and a monster died, the essence was usually damaged and destroyed. But every so often, essences survived with little enough damage to keep their original form.
Those became rare materials used in equipment.
Because a staff had an essence embedded whole, it could unleash remarkable abilities.
"That one's got a Pienos essence in it."
Just a Pienos essence, huh. Well, that was the most basic one.
I stepped in front of a wooden training dummy.
I took a steady breath and spun the staff.
Holding the shaft in one hand, I whirled it around, alternating left and right as I swung. For the finish, I spun it in front of my body and tucked it against my side, settling into stance.
My body moved with perfect, uncluttered precision. Ease flowed from my hands and frame as if I'd been using a staff for years.
"Whoa…"
I heard Noah's pure, unfiltered admiration.
My pride swelled.
"That it? Your form alone could put a Master Hunter to shame."
"…"
Matillo killed the mood.
I let out a short sigh and thrust the staff forward.
Using a staff was simple.
Strike the enemy directly with the staff, and power gradually built in the essence.
That accumulated power could be released in various ways.
Because of that trait, the staff's raw physical attack power wasn't particularly high.
No matter how you attacked, a staff's first goal was always filling the essence gauge.
Even if you gritted your teeth and focused entirely on staff technique, you could never match the damage of releasing the essence's power.
I swung the staff. Smoothly, linking one strike into the next in a continuous chain.
A greatsword was heavy, so its strikes had a choppy, stop-start feel. A staff, by contrast, needed no charging—everything connected in a seamless flow.
The staff's real strengths were its rapid combos and mobility, weren't they?
Attack motions were short and light, which made evasion easy. The dodge animations were pretty stylish in their own right. I planted the staff against the ground and whipped my body around in a single fluid motion. Light as it was, my body practically flew.
The downside was that for all that speed, the staff's damage was light, and it had no truly lethal attacks.
In a game where you needed to kill monsters fast, non-critical attacks were a serious drawback. The way to offset that weakness was by releasing the essence's power.
"…Hoh."
As I struck the dummy, the Pienos essence seemed to recognize the training as combat—the gauge steadily filled. I could see a gray light gathering inside the empty essence.
When the energy finally filled it completely, I backstepped away, leveled the staff, and tapped the ground lightly.
Only then did a transparent aura begin to flow from the essence.
The gray light represented the Pienos's attribute.
Nothing at all—null attribute. A creature of pure physical attacks, so gray it was.
In cases like this, you simply got a Pienos shockwave with no elemental property.
I thrust the essence forward. The shockwave spread ahead of me, and when it hit the dummy it burst with a sharp pang.
It looked like magic, but it wasn't a human wielding mana.
It was simply channeling the monster energy stored in the essence through the staff.
That was the staff's crowning glory.
I casually flicked the shaft this way and that, sending shockwaves out in three branching paths, then set my stance and thrust the staff forward, gathering energy.
Power concentrated in front of the essence until the shaft trembled.
Soon the staff could no longer contain it and released everything. The recoil naturally flung my hands backward.
Paaang—.
The dummy shuddered. That final shockwave, charged and released at close range, packed serious firepower.
But while charging, the body was left completely open. I would have liked to show a little more, but against a motionless wooden dummy, this was all I could demonstrate.
Well, this much should be enough.
I tapped the ground once more with the staff and deactivated the essence release.
"Next."
Matillo couldn't help but doubt his own eyes.
He'd only ever heard about Alice through rumors and secondhand stories, so he'd never truly grasped how strong she was. He was the type who trusted what he saw with his own eyes more than anything he was told.
In Matillo's eyes, Alice had been nothing more than "a kid with more talent than expected," still a long way from becoming a Master Hunter.
This was dizzying.
Matillo felt a touch of vertigo. He was witnessing something so intense that his mind couldn't quite process it.
"…Miss. Did you know about this?"
"Ah, n-no…"
Noah answered Matillo's question in a dazed voice, slowly shaking her head.
Noah had thought she'd traveled with Alice quite a lot by now.
Until today, she'd only ever seen her use a greatsword.
There had to be a reason she stuck to the greatsword among so many weapons, she'd figured.
So she'd assumed Alice couldn't use anything else. She was completely wrong.
Noah felt it all over again—that she truly knew nothing about her. Alice was hiding far more than Noah had ever known.
Just how much was she still concealing? Noah absently rubbed her own hands.
Alice kept pulling weapons from Matillo's cart and putting them to use.
Even the people training nearby completely forgot what they were doing and stared at Alice's spectacle.
Starting with the staff, then spear, sword and shield, hammer, axe, dual blades, dual spears, chain scythe, tachi…
There was nothing she couldn't handle. The moment she picked up a weapon, she moved like an entirely different person.
Weapons that had been rotting away in storage finally shone the instant they entered Alice's hands. As if they'd found their master, they moved freely in her grip.
"Hoo…"
Alice set down a saber.
What she picked up next shook Matillo to his core.
"What the hell is that…"
This time she held a round shield in each hand and was thrashing the dummy with them.
At a glance it looked like wild, indiscriminate beating—but there was a clear flow to her attacks.
She was holding nothing but two shields, yet Matillo felt she was far more dangerous than most hunters with a sword in hand.
Matillo clutched his head. It was throbbing.
He had no idea how to even begin assessing this.
Knowing how to use multiple weapons meant a great deal. It meant you could deploy the right weapon for the right situation. But using this many weapons hit differently. Even evaluating it was overwhelming.
Matillo had dabbled in various weapons himself, but that didn't mean he was good at all of them.
So until now, he'd believed that learning a bunch of weapons half-heartedly was worse than mastering just one.
Watching that belief get demolished right in front of him, he had nothing to say.
A monster. That thing was a monster.
A monster without precedent in hunter history.
Where on earth had a monster like this come from? Matillo let out a hollow laugh.
Skill like that at her age. Just where had this kid rolled in from?
Matillo dredged up old memories.
Among the Master Hunters he knew, there had been a weapon master who could handle every weapon the way she did.
If he had to say who was better, Matillo wanted to give the edge to young Alice. She still had a long road ahead of her.
…Her future was bright.
In Matillo's estimation, Alice becoming a Master Hunter was only a matter of time.
Alice finally stopped after the dual shields.
She was drenched in sweat from head to toe, breathing hard. A few strands of hair clung to her flushed cheeks. Alice lowered her eyes and steadied her breath.
Around them, the only sound was people swallowing. Admiration spilled out for what must have been the umpteenth time.
There was something alluring about the way she looked, but her martial prowess was so terrifying it overshadowed even that.
She was the white-haired greatsword who had appeared in the flooded forest—the new light rising among the hunters.
The hunters who had come to the training ground today had been lucky enough to witness a rare spectacle they might never see again in their lives.
Practice so refined that simply watching it nourished you. It kindled passion in the hunters' chests.
When it became clear Alice's demonstration wouldn't continue, they threw themselves into their own training with even greater fervor. Spurred on, they dug in hotter and deeper than before.
Alice set the shields on the ground and looked at her hands.
At some point blisters had formed—her palms were covered in broken blister marks. It hadn't hurt until she saw them; only now did the pain creep in, slow and seeping.
She clenched her fists, her body trembling slightly, then turned and looked back at Noah and Matillo.
"How was that?"
Alice asked, looking at Matillo and Noah.
There was no answer, but their expressions said everything. Even so, time passed and they still didn't react.
"I'm done, though…?"
Alice waved a hand, but Noah and Matillo paid no attention.
Both of them were lost in the afterglow, sunk so deep in thought they couldn't surface.
Alice stood there awkwardly, glancing between the two of them as they said nothing, then quietly put the shields back in the cart.
For reasons she couldn't name, Alice felt left out.