Titan: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 4) by Jez Cajiao (beach books .txt) 📗

you once we start sparring, so take your time and rest now. I’d assign those points as well, and good job on holding off this long.” He nodded briefly to me and walked away to take a drink from a canteen that hung from a nail. He’d told me in no uncertain terms that I’d be a fool to assign the points before we finished for the day, so I’d held off. Now I pulled up my screens and read through the waiting notifications.

Congratulations!

You have begun formal training under Master Trainer Restun Bashir. As a trainee, you gain 25% to your skill and physical attribute growth due to studying under a professed Trainer!

Congratulations! Through hard work and perseverance, you have increased your Agility by one point. Continue to train and learn to increase this further.

Congratulations! Through hard work and perseverance, you have increased your Endurance by one point. Continue to train and learn to increase this further.

Congratulations! Through hard work and perseverance, you have increased your Luck by one point. Continue to train and learn to increase this further.

Congratulations! Through hard work and perseverance, you have increased your Strength by two points. Continue to train and learn to increase this further.

I winced, feeling the painful burn from the damage I’d endured to increase all of those, but I had to admit that I was damn pleased as well.

“How… how far… can… you push... it in… training…?” I wheezed out, dismissing the screens, and pulling up my character sheet in order to decide where to add the points.

“Depends on the trainee and the trainer,” Restun said calmly. “It’s generally agreed that the hard limit for any stat is fifty points. Once you hit that, it becomes all about maintaining the level, rather than losing the points.”

“Losing…?” I gasped in horror.

“Of course. If you stop exercising, you’ll lose the points. What did you expect, that you’d do this once and just keep them all? No; with physical stats, if you stop exercising, you’ll grow flabby, weak! But don’t you worry, Jax,” he said, grinning evilly. “You won’t have to experience that! In fact, I’m intending on finding out if it’s truly a hard limit on the fifty, or if it’s possible to push past it.”

“Oh, god, no…” I whispered, and I finally did what I kept threatening to do, but rarely found a reason to justify: I sank all of my points, all seven of them, into Endurance, boosting it from twenty-seven up to thirty-four.

“God, that hurts…” I groaned as my body adjusted to the changes, altering at the cellular level to become more efficient and recover quicker.

“What did you do?” Restun asked curiously, and I told him, earning a nod of approval once I explained my choice.

“Good! That means I can push you harder!” he stated crisply, throwing me the canteen. “Take a drink, then get ready, because it’s time to teach you to fight.”

“I know how to fight,” I groaned, rolling to my feet.

“No, you think you do; there’s a difference. I am ranked as a Journeyman Trainer in Asha’tuun, the elite martial art of the Legion. It is based around a single guiding principle, and that is death. From the beginning of any fight, any disagreement or conflict, you will be trained to kill your opponent. You will be taught that this,” he lifted a dagger up, then tossed it aside to clatter on the deck, “this is a tool.” He left the small blade lying on the wooden surface and reached forward. “While this,” His finger jabbed out to strike me on the forehead, then again on the chest above my heart, “is a weapon. It must be honed, prepared, and forged; it must be acknowledged as the weapon, and all else must be seen as a tool. I will teach you this; I will teach you to view the world in a different way. It will not make you a happier man, but it will make you a stronger one. One that can survive to become the Emperor we need you to be.”

“You’re going to teach me to fight by changing the way I look at everything?” I asked, confused.

“When everything around you is a tool to kill with, it takes some of the beauty of the world away…” he admitted soberly. “But in return, it means you will have the strength to save those who can still see such beauty. As a Legionnaire, we willingly sacrifice those things to enable us to stand between the Empire’s citizens and the oncoming night. Will you do less?” he asked, and I growled in defiance as I straightened up.

“Hell no,” I snapped, and he nodded to me in respect.

“Then it’s time that I taught you to truly fight. These methods, these skills, are difficult to learn. They take time and dedication, but you can master them, and once you do, nothing will be able to stand against you, Lord Jax of the Empire.”

“Then let’s start…” I said, and he guided me to a clear space where we began to stretch, working out the kinks in our muscles from the previous exercise. Ten minutes later, we began to move, slowly at first, our motions feeling almost like a dance as we shifted from one stance to another.

Restun taught me five different positions, and how to move fluidly from one to another. Then we simply repeated them over and over, slowly, and the entire time, he commented, pointing out differences in bodies, in instinctive versus trained movements, discussing the kinds of joints that all sentient species had as bipeds and quadrupeds.

He explained the way we were built, and how to take us apart. The way he taught drew a mental picture for me, and as he went on, he filled in the thousands of details that made the image live and breathe. He spoke of veins, of arteries, how a slight cut here, or a blow there, would sever the flow, stun, or even kill.

He spoke of the thousand ways a