Wild Gourmet: Chapter 10

He got her drift. Not every threat came from the system. They had been lucky enough to get a steady stream of useful refugees, but that wasn’t the only kind of person wandering the wreck of the kingdom right now. There were strong people out there who wanted worse for other people, who made a profit by making other lives worse. If Bell wasn’t strong enough when they found them, it would be a problem for everyone.

“So what do I do?”

“For now, just what you’ve been doing. Don’t worry too much about the details. I’ll work out whatever advantages for you I can in the meantime. We’ll do it together, OK? It’s our best chance of everything working out.”

After leaving Moira. Brand returned to tend his soup. There wasn’t much tending to do. He gave it a quick stir and taste to make sure it hadn’t scorched while he was away, then arranged the still glowing charcoal underneath it to make sure it would stay warm for a few more hours. Even cold, it would still be tasty, and he expected that it would be totally gone by the end of the day.

It was then that he realized he had little to do besides that. He hadn’t had a real day off in years. The army had always needed him working. Today had been pretty busy for a day of leisure, too, and only now did he find himself really and truly idle.

He tried to enjoy it. Taking a seat on the rock, he let the sun warm him as he rested, watching the town go about what limited business it could accomplish. That was nice for a while, but it didn’t last. Soon he was antsy, overflowing with energy and no place to put it.

He stood from the rock after a while and decided to see what his body could do, now. The system was pretty nice about stat increases, buffering how people experienced the sometimes quick changes in capability that happened around level changes and major class milestones. Even so, the consolidation that Moira had mentioned was an important unofficial part of making the best out of that grace-period understanding.

Today, that meant doing some moving, even if that movement wasn’t in real combat. Brand pulled his dagger and began to make movements like he imagined would come up in combat, mostly with his body and not with the weapon at all. He imagined charging beasts of great size, striking vipers, and swooping birds as he stepped, sidestepped, and backstepped out of hte way of their imaginary attacks.

Every step he made covered more distance than he would have thought, but sometimes big dodges weren’t best. He was a knife fighter, at least for now. Knives didn’t have much range, which meant in idea circumstances he’d be fighting with the aim of staying close enough to the enemy to carve them up while not getting carved up himself.

He slowly but surely tightened his motions, imagining his enemies moving closer and closer as he dodged by less and less margin. Finally, when he had got about all he could out of the imaginary footwork part of the fight, he began to integrate his weapon strikes back into the mix. He stepped, swiped, stabbed, and slowly uncovered problems iwth how he moved that would have almost certainly tripped him up in a real fight.

It became very apparent how lucky he had been with the flock of cranes. They were direct attackers without even a drop of subterfuge in them, which meant he had been able to predict every move they’d make and put his stats to work to their fullest. If they had been tricky, that fight might have ended with him tripped up, tied up, and in real danger from a pack of dangerous monsters.

His new body was up to the challenge of quite a lot of exercise, and the imaginary sparring was more engaging than he thought it would be. He had never had any formal combat training beyond learning what it took to properly grip a spear, and most of his discoveries during this time were truly new to him. Engaged, he kept at the work until he was soaked in sweat and out of breath.

That took longer than he imagined it had. As he rinsed himself clean with a bucket of cold water dumped over his head, he took note of the sun. It was noon, now. He had spent hours in training without even noticing.

It was hard to think of that time as a waste. His body felt better than it had before. Looser, really. Hopeful, he took a look at his stats page, wondering if the new changes in his expertise might show up in the absolute numbers that powered his combat.

Nothing had really changed. He was stronger than he had any right to be, but any improvements made during his practice were to his mentality, not his actual honest-to-god combat power as represented by the system.

To get all that advantage, he’d need practice and consolidation in battle. It was another loop, he realized. He’d need to fight, get stats, get used to those stats, and fight. Only by doing everything in that cycle plus his cooking, Exceptional Hunts, and anything else his class asked for would he be able to realize what he should actually be at any given level.

Still, he felt better. His body felt loose, and despite his near total lack of combat training he felt he was starting to get a handle on how his class wanted him to fight. He was mostly what books described as a spring fighter, named after the metal object and not the season. He would dodge away, recoil back towards his prey, do some damage, then spring away again.

What he couldn’t do, he sensed, was to stand toe to toe with anything that could hurt him and try to win with sheer force. There were classes that could do that, but even in the early levels it was easy to see what made that kind of endurance possible. They were bigger and stronger, and usually had a source of armor to mitigate the damage they’d take. Despite his huge increases in his strength stat, his body was still on the slim side. His muscles were more defined, but not bigger.

Maybe that would change later, but for now his focus was on agility.

Does that make me a rogue?