Chapter 8: Light Weight!

Kaius squatted for what felt like the thousandth time in front of the low heat of the hearth. Tightly held to his chest was a stray flagstone from the crumbling wall outside, large enough that its weight dug uncomfortably into his arms.

Reaching the bottom of his descent, he felt his quads stretch with a deep burn that brought a grimace to his face. Another drop of sweat from his face baptised the stone, its surface turning ever more slick. Forcing him to hold the rock tighter, and aggravating his already exhausted arms.

Pushing himself upwards he felt himself hit a wall, shaking as what felt like the weight of a giant pushed down on his trembling legs. Individual muscle fibres began to ping, his lower body consumed by a bone deep agony.

A low roar left his throat. Kaius pushed, driving his heels into the ground. Scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Finger-length by finger-length, his quaking figure rose.

He had been at this for hours now, his Stamina long since drained. Without fail, he would hit the wall, and without fail, he would push a little further. Quickly he would reach his limit and collapse. A few moments spent bonelessly on the floor, giving liquid muscles a moment’s respite, and he would rise again to switch to a new grouping.

Kaius squatted again, thick veins bulging in his neck.

Again. Here he got stuck, straining upwards. A loud crack emanating from the back of his jaw. The pain of his broken tooth cutting through his exhausted fugue. Quickly taken over by the burning itch of regeneration. Still he strained upwards.

Again.

Again.

Again. His legs refused, one shaking knee buckling inwards as his legs totally gave out. His mind blanked, his narrow cone of vision and the ringing in his ears subsuming all of senses for just a moment. The stone slipped from his limp hands.

The jarring impact of hitting the cold stone floor brought him back. As did the crunching sensation and blaring pain as the rock landed squarely on his right foot.

“Fuck!” Kaius swore. Pushing himself upright as fast as possible to roll the stone off.

**Ding! Strength has reached level 20!*

**Ding! Physical Conditioning has reached level 15!**

Physical Conditioning:

Level 15

Uncommon

The thumping of a heart that outruns a predator. Blood fueling muscles that burn with the savage delight of the hunt. Lungs that bellow, gaseous transfusion bringing necessary vitality. Life. It lives and dies on the basis of exertion.

Each level slightly increases peak physical fitness. Each level slightly decreases the deleterious effects of exertion

Even clutching his stinging foot Kaius couldn’t help but let out a loud laugh

He had done it. The unthinkable. Two levels in the same skill and a stat point in the same day.

His breath still heaving, Kaius grabbed his water skin and drained it to the last with great, greedy gulps. The cool water, faintly tasting of must and leather, soothing his parched throat. Once it was done, he shook the neck of the skin over his face, encouraging the last few stray drips free.

With an unsatisfied sigh he threw the skin to the side. It landed with a dull thwack.

“Well, now that that’s done I guess it’s time to find a water source.”

He winced as he shifted his leg, wounded foot and thrashed muscles complaining loudly.

“Maybe once I’ve recovered.” Kaius then eyed the slowly smoking hearth, and the nearly complete batch of jerky hanging above it. “And maybe once I’ve tended to the fire and put on some more meat. Wouldn’t want to risk it going bad after all.”

He flopped onto his back, the cold support of the stone ground feeling like a prized feathered mattress to his overworked body.

**Ding! Physical Conditioning has reached level 20!**

Kaius lay on the floor, his naked chest heaving. Each ragged gasp he made scraped uncomfortably against his bone dry throat.

Two days.

Two bloody minded, gruelling days.

He’d worked himself until he puked, and then he’d picked himself up to do it all over again. Every type of exercise he could manage with his body and a few torturously heavy stones, switching things up to avoid monotony.

A supernatural effort. The human body simply wasn’t designed to push itself to true exhaustion even once, let alone consistently and repetitively. Sure, with the regenerative properties of Health and Stamina it was possible, but the mental strain alone to push through the pain and fatigue was a demon in its own right.

Kaius was sure that without Rapid Adaptation and the resistance to pain that it brought, he would have had no chance. Certainly, the pain had been enough to push that skill up a level as well.

Even then, even with his herculean effort, it should have been impossible.

Kaius frowned.

“People just don’t gain five levels in one skill, and one in another, in two days. I’ve pushed myself to the brink for years, and it still would have been tight to keep the pace of a skill level a day that I need to fully cap myself before class selection. Father mentioned that classes increase skill levelling speed … somehow, but I dont have one. It can’t be the combat multiplier either.” He thought.

It was a conundrum. A question with an answer he had no way of discovering.

Kaius sat up, reaching for one of his spare shirts to mop the sweat off his face and body. In the end it didn’t really matter. Whatever the cause of his increased growth, it was something that could only be beneficial for him. Besides, if this was something that happened across the Depths as a whole it would be something that was widely known. Especially amongst the large community of risk takers that plumbed its expanse.

Whatever it was, his father must have kept it from him for a reason.

Honestly, it wasn’t even too hard to guess at. If it was a Depths-wide effect, which he couldn’t be sure of, he completely understood why the information was withheld from him. He would even understand if it was some greater taboo to share with people before they had a class.

He had been …. Brash at times. When he was younger. The process of planning a full stack of general skills, acquiring them, and then levelling both them and your stats was an incredibly gruelling process in the five years between matriculation and class selection.

In many ways it was far worse for those with legacy skills, and according to his father most people with means had at least some access to an incredibly limited selection that were more widely known. He himself would be making use of a few of those.

The fact he had a complete set of legacy skills was incredibly lucky. Not just because of the sheer bloody rarity and power of it, but because as a full build it was an incredibly wide and flexible base. Not so specialised he was locked in to anything, and not so disparate that he felt like he had a single tool from ten different professions.

It meant his path to classing up was relatively laid out, and he really only had to think about his final skill and the spell casting experimentation he would have to do later.

Even with all that, and a consummate prodigy of a father as a round the clock trainer, he had often felt like he was floundering when he was younger. That he wouldn’t make it in time.

If he’d known that he could accelerate it all, even if it meant he would be in immense danger? He couldn’t lie and pretend he wouldn’t have been tempted.

“And what if I was a poor peasant boy with grandiose dreams? Pressured by my father to take the skills needed to have a stable life, taking over the farm. Surrounded by monotony when all I really wanted was to live the life of those I heard in the solstice bard songs? Yeah I can see why this would be kept secret, overconfident young men and women would inadvertently kill themselves in droves.” He thought.

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Kaius pulled himself up, lurching with a wry smile as his overworked legs made their protest known by buckling slightly at the knee. Groaning in discomfort, he forced himself through a series of gentle stretches. He knew that recovering his stamina would fully do away with his state of weakness, but as an unclassed his regeneration was painfully slow. He may as well make himself a little more comfortable while he waited.

After that he would set off. He was overdue for a full scouting of the glade . With luck he might find himself some more undead. Sense Weakness was getting close to its cap, after all.

Kaius moved through the trees with a surety and confidence borne from a lifetime in the forest. His senses were fully in tune with the environment around him as an unexplainable breeze rustled through the canopy overhead. Without conscious thought he tuned the noise out, vigilant for any sign of beast or undead.