Power Leveling (4)
Power Leveling (4)
Having received encouragement from Dojin, Ilone joined the Knight Candidates and headed out to hunt.
As was to be expected, the Knight Candidates didn't look at her with kind eyes.
It looked like she was just some skill-less woman who had charmed a guy and was reaping the benefits.
Among the female knights who had earned recognition through their own abilities, relying on a man to get something was treated as utterly disgraceful.
"Hah, with such pathetic skills..."
"Why don't you just fuck off?"
"Loser, trash— you think you can train with us with that kind of crap?"
The female knights subtly glanced at Dojin while picking on Ilone.
And the moment they realized Dojin wasn't going to intervene, they unleashed every insult a human mouth could spew.
Ilone endured all the abuse in silence and quietly hunted the monsters.
With the worry of losing her life gone, she could act a bit more boldly and confidently.
'Still... not enough.'
She had more real combat experience than anyone else there, but life in the world wasn't something you could solve with experience alone.
Her improvisation and split-second reactions from experience were the best among them, but once the initial moves passed, her lack of solid fundamentals showed.
'If only... if only I had swordsmanship too...'
As a Guard, the only martial arts she'd learned were the most basic ones for catching criminals.
And even that, she'd built up through real fights rather than long-term training...
Dojin, watching from behind to make sure they didn't get hurt or killed, quickly grasped the fact.
That Ilone lacked swordsmanship.
But there was nothing Dojin could do about it.
Ilone was older. She wasn't a genius either.
Even if Dojin taught swordsmanship to someone like her, no magical growth spurt would happen where she'd suddenly shine and crush everyone.
'Learning the fundamentals now... she'd be lucky to scrape by as a knight.'
What Ilone needed to nurture wasn't swordsmanship skill.
It was her standout combat experience and the fighting style built from it.
That was the only path for Ilone to grow.
The fact that a day has 24 hours felt meaningless.
The reality that a week has 7 days felt cruel.
Dojin's time flew by like a beam of light.
During the day, he cleared dungeons with his companions; in the afternoon, with the elves; at night, with the knights.
He was spending almost all 24 hours of the day in dungeons.
'Is this what a human life is?'
If he didn't have those nightly flirt sessions with the girls in his room, he would've exploded and charged into the dungeon long ago.
His days were that packed.
Then one day.
"...I have a favor to ask."
"Sure, our Guard captainnim. What favor?"
Ilone came to find Dojin. She'd shown up at his mansion out of the blue and was hemming and hawing, unable to open her mouth easily.
Probably because what she had to say wasn't easy to bring up.
Considering recent events and her usual complex, what she wanted to ask was obvious.
"Alright."
"Teach me the sword..."
Before she could even finish, Dojin accepted, and Ilone stared at him in disbelief, asking if he was serious.
"No way, you're really gonna teach me...?"
"You think I wouldn't teach you, so you didn't even come? That'd be more impressive."
As Dojin teased with an exaggerated sigh of admiration, Ilone stuck out her tongue like she'd made a mistake.
Yeah, she believed it too. That he'd teach her the sword...
Watching Ilone fidget in front of him, Dojin said,
"Shall we start with the nine bows first?"
"Nine... bows? What's that?"
"Bowing nine times."
Dojin spread false knowledge to this Otherworlder and began teaching Ilone the sword that very day.
However, the swordsmanship Dojin taught was vastly different from what Ilone had imagined.
"Ah, that's wrong. Again."
"Ugh, urgh..."
Dojin, who had been blankly stargazing, struck Ilone's thigh and shoulder with a wooden sword to correct her Sword Technique posture, then ordered her to start over from the beginning.
Hearing that, Ilone made a face like she wanted to scream, but she didn't give up.
After all, this training was something she'd asked for first—if she'd quit just because it was hard, he'd have been hugely disappointed in her.
"Hoo, haak! Haa, hook!"
Dojin taught Ilone the swordsmanship he'd created himself. He didn't bother naming it. It was too bare-bones to warrant a name.
'No choice...'
Swordsmanship wasn't just about swinging the sword—it required contemplation on how to swing it.
Not just swinging fast and hard, but the angle of your stance, the width of your grip on the hilt, etc. The difference in caliber came from tiny details.
And all that required sense. Innate talent in sensation—without it, even learning was impossible.
It was an extremely difficult area for talentless Ilone to pick up.
So—Dojin used a very simple method to solve it.
"Come on, grip direction's wrong, wrist angle—thumb pointing to the sky, I said."
"B-but—why does this motion go here...?"
"Why? Why are you curious? Just shut up and memorize it."
Making her memorize every possible variation for swinging the sword.
If she were a proper disciple, or even a talented one,
Dojin would've taught her meticulously from one to ten.
'That won't work.'
But Ilone wasn't a formal disciple, nor talented.
If she wanted to get even somewhat as strong as others, she couldn't take the same path as them.
A path no one else took.
She had to walk the path of the asura.
"Ilone, as you know... you have no talent."
"Haak—! I know!"
"You learn ten moves, forget the first one, and to memorize those ten, you swing the sword a hundred, a thousand times."
"What are you trying to say—!"
"For talentless you to beat—or even keep up with—the talented ones... you gotta work your ass off like shitting blood."
Exactly a hundred swings in, Ilone glared at Dojin while gasping for breath.
Seeing her spirited attitude, Dojin grinned. What allowed a talentless hard worker to keep up with the gifted? One thing.
Stamina—Ilone's stamina, honed for years catching criminals, was on par with any knight, no, better.
"Good, good. Stamina overflowing, huh?"
"Hng, let's rest a bit!"
"Next training. Don't worry. Never seen anyone in this Otherworld go crippled from overtraining."
A world where the more you get nagged, the stronger you get.
A world where the more you train a human, the endlessly stronger they become.
So, a world where training only brought gains.
"World's strongest is a stretch, but... I'll make you the world's strongest Guard."
Dojin said that and swung his sword at her.
A few weeks after Ilone started learning the sword from Dojin...
With even the slowest knight candidate on the verge of leveling up, Ilone calmly headed out to hunt with the knights.
"Shields!"
Having experience leading Guard Force members as their captain, she skillfully commanded the other candidates.
The candidates, knowing it was better to have a leader than act solo, obeyed the lower-status Ilone's orders without refusal—and followed them perfectly.
The moment the hunt ended safely, beams of light began bursting from the knights' bodies.
And when the last Knight Candidate leveled up, a beam of light shot from Ilone's body too.
"Ah, aaah— aaaaaah...."
Ecstasy flooding her whole body. Pleasure nothing else could replace.
Some adventurers who've leveled up probably dive back into dungeons craving this bliss again.
It was that phenomenal an experience—and Ilone bowed her head to Dojin.
"...Thank you. Thanks to you."
Thanks to him—as he'd said, she could now claim to be the strongest Guard.
Of course, she wasn't satisfied there. Since she'd leveled up anyway, she decided to aim for knight.
Hearing that, Dojin burst into admiration and blessed her.
"You're gonna become a knight? You?"
"Yeah."
"Not gonna be easy."
"I've already talked it over with the Lord."
Ah—now Dojin finally understood how she could even say that.
The dungeon city's Lord must've been giving Ilone conveniences out of consideration for Dojin, and in investigating what the two wanted, he'd learned Ilone aimed to become a knight.
Then the rest was easy. The reason becoming a knight is hard? No one hires unskilled ones.
'Connections are strength too, huh?'
And as Dojin's lover-to-be, Ilone became a must-hire Knight Candidate, skill irrelevant.
Freshly level 2, no other conditions needed.
If she wanted, she could become the Lord's knight anytime—or quit the Guard Force, switch to adventurer, and earn dozens of times more than now.
"Do your best."
Whichever she chose, she'd live without lacking honor or money.
That's what leveling up was. God's grace. They'd harvested it too easily, but... leveled-up people still made up less than 1% of humanity.
She'd reached the top 1% of humanity now.