Mastery Grinding
The hunting grounds belonging to the Revan family.
It was a dangerous place, and access by the common folk of the territory was strictly forbidden. The reason was simple: the ecosystem of monsters was deliberately preserved so the family's knights and standing soldiers could hone their combat strength.
I had trained here myself, hunting weaklings like goblins and kobolds alongside the gamekeeper to raise the base stats I needed for my class-change event.
And in that very place, I was—
Thud! Thok! Thud-thok! Thud!
Pieeeeeek—!!!
—getting dogpiled by a swarm of absurdly adorable Horn Rabbits.
Thud! Thok! Thud-thud-thud-thok! Thok!
It didn't hurt. It didn't even itch. Of course it didn't. I was wearing a gambeson of fine wool, a well-tanned leather cuirass over that, a sturdy iron helm on my head, and a massive round shield strapped across both arms and my back. This was gear that would shrug off a goblin mob's beating without a scratch—and here I was, taking hits from Horn Rabbits so pathetic it felt unfair to even call them monsters.
I could do this all day.
Not that I had any reason—or need—to.
"Pieeeek! Pieeeeek!!!"
Pitiful screams rang out as they begged their mother to save them.
"Wooooooaaargh!!!"
Answering those cries, I activated the Guardian's basic skill, Taunt. A voice thicker and clearer than before thundered through the forest.
Taunt
The Horn Rabbits completely lost their minds. These were creatures that bolted at the mere eye contact of a ten-year-old brat—and yet they charged, fearless, at a man over six feet tall. Reality wasn't the game; that was the only reason this worked.
Back-attack count is at 170… no, 180? Hmm… almost 200.
While under the Guardian basic skill Endure, successfully defend against five hundred or more enemy critical-hit attacks, and you unlock the advanced skill Defense Stance—and from it, the derived skill Parrying.
Critical hits were normally a matter of chance. In the game, though, a back attack was a guaranteed critical. Successfully blocking five hundred critical-rated attacks under normal combat conditions? That would take forever. It would be agonizingly hard.
But now? All I had to do was drop to my knees, curl up, and hold the shape of a pill bug—and the mastery climbed on its own. When a path this easy and comfortable existed, why would anyone take the hard road?
Every so often the noble part of me lifted its head and asked whether this was truly the right way…
— We're making one hell of an omelette, Jack. You can't fuss over every single egg!
Vulgar, maybe—but nothing answered the question more cleanly. For the greater good, you had to know when to sacrifice the small things.
Hah. Right on schedule.
This Pill Bug Training was originally meant to be run on goblin packs. In the game, Horn Rabbits had a hard-coded flee trait, so even Taunt couldn't force them to attack. Reality, however, diverged from the game in a few convenient ways. Even the most cowardly Horn Rabbit was a different animal when its young was being held hostage—especially when the kidnapper was nothing more than a screaming sandbag who did nothing but shout.
"Pieek, pieeeek… pieek…."
"Pyaaak, pyaaak! Pieek!"
No matter how hard they hit me, I didn't budge, and the exhausted Horn Rabbits started showing signs of giving up. Sometimes you don't even need words to get a point across. I glanced down at the baby Horn Rabbit cradled against my chest, clicked my tongue, and poured everything I had into another Taunt.
"Wooooooaaargh—!!!"
"Pyaaak, pyaaak! Pyaaak!"
The pack that had been eyeing escape routes charged me all over again. I curled back into a pill bug and activated Endure.
About an hour into the Horn Rabbit beatdown, a warm green light overflowed from my right hand.
Green means mastery.
It was written into the game's lore, and ten years of observation had confirmed it. I set the baby Horn Rabbit free from my arms and slammed the shield in my right hand hard into the dirt.
"Peep?!"
The pack that had been charging me like lunatics bolted in an instant. The aggression of a moment ago might as well have been a lie.
All right. Let's begin.
I set the shield down and stretched out my right hand, still pouring green light. The glow that began on the back of my hand resolved into a mystical shape.
Cretus…
The Immortal Cretus. The image of him raising his shield and standing square against a tide of monsters flashed through my mind. I drew a short breath, fixed Defense Stance in my thoughts, and settled into the posture.
Defense Stance
My body moved as if it had drilled this single motion for decades, settling into a near-perfect defensive form—center of gravity, distribution of force, a breath gone calm. My mind cleared, and I locked into a machine-precise guard.
So this is what it feels like.
For more than ten years I had watched skills fire under the power of a blessing. I knew what changed—but feeling it in my own body was something else entirely.
Next up… goblins.
I lowered my stance, scanned the surroundings, and mimicked the techniques Bern the gamekeeper had taught me. I hadn't perfectly absorbed a Ranger's craft—
Here.
—but finding a pack of low-intelligence goblins was well within my reach.
Eight of them.
"Kekek!"
"Kek-kek! Kruk!"
"Keeek, keeek!"
All right. Time to open the Goblin Batting Cage.
Parrying—the skill a Guardian had to secure early and would keep using all the way to the end. The grinding session to unlock it was about to begin.
Bern had guarded the hunting grounds of the Revan Viscounty for a full twenty years. He could say with confidence that he had seen just about everything a forest could throw at a man. And yet everything those twenty years had taught him was reduced, in a single day, to something trivial and forgettable.
What in the world is he doing?
"Wooooooaaargh—!!!"
Horn Rabbit burrows were hidden where only a seasoned Ranger could find them. So Edwin had simply asked Bern where they were, and Bern—without a shred of suspicion—had told him. That was the kind of person Edwin was to him.
What Edwin did once he found the burrow, however, was shocking. He kidnapped a Horn Rabbit kit on the spot, curled himself into a ball, and started bellowing at the top of his lungs. This was Edwin—who, even without a blessing, could solo about six goblins—and Bern could not begin to understand it. Least of all the fact that, while shrieking like a maniac, Edwin's mouth was full of pure, unfiltered joy.
He couldn't understand it. He didn't want to. So he sent a letter to the manor as fast as he could. He had prayed it was a dream.
It was not a dream. It was reality.
"Wooooooaaargh—!!!"
Edwin, hefting his massive round shield, let out another roar.
"Kekek!"
"Kruk!"
"Kieeeek!!!"
The goblins tied to the trees thrashed in confusion. Seven of them were bound to trunks in a ring facing Edwin. One more was tied to a tree at his back. The difference lay in the stones placed at the goblins' feet.
He put those stones there on purpose?
There was no natural reason for rocks to be sitting in those spots. Bern realized Edwin had deliberately planted them. Understanding stopped there.
"Kruk!"
The enraged goblins started hurling the stones. Weak creatures to begin with, throwing from unstable, bound postures—their accuracy was pitiful, and precious few of the rocks flew straight at Edwin. He watched them with the most serious eyes in the world, then flicked them aside with his shield in a motion as smooth as flowing water.
"Kruk?!"
Some of the stones he deflected smacked into the goblin tied alone behind him.
"Twenty-three, twenty-four… heh heh…."
Twenty-three, twenty-four… He's counting. What is the point of any of this?
While he counted, he wore the loose, stupid grin of a man high on drugs or drink. It was the behavior of a lunatic beyond all comprehension. Had taking too many hits from Horn Rabbits scrambled his brains? Bern nearly blurted, What the hell kind of nonsense is this, young master? right to his face. At this rate, Edwin ranked in the same league of madmen as Malcolm—the one who'd gotten himself a goat, caught a disease, and had his manhood cut off.
This is beyond me…
A forest gamekeeper was obligated to report anomalies to the lord at once. Ordinarily that meant natural disasters that upended the woods' ecology. Bern, however, found himself filing a second report in a little over an hour. The first: Edwin getting dogpiled by Horn Rabbits. The second: the current spectacle of him batting away goblin-thrown stones with a dopey grin on his face, as if working off a grudge.
What on earth happened to you, young master…
Even as a second son who would never inherit the estate, Edwin had been a boy whose cleverness and diligence made his future look bright. What could have driven him to become a madman like this? Bern's vision swam; dizziness closed in.
"Ahh…."
A sigh thick with pure annoyance slipped from Edwin's mouth. Bern looked over—every last stone that had been piled at the goblins' feet was gone. Edwin began picking them up again, one by one, like a farmwife gathering fallen grain. The sight was so grotesque that Bern finally resolved to send that second report for certain.
And it was in that brief window, while Bern stepped away, that it happened.
"Grrrr…."
In the quiet forest of early spring, an alien noise had woken a beast from its sleep. It began to stalk the woods, hunting for the source of the disturbance. It was precisely the kind of anomaly a gamekeeper should have been the first to notice—but he had left his post to report Edwin's strange behavior to the manor.