**CRACK!**
The sound of wood on wood snapped through the stagnant air between the dunes, a dry, sharp echo that bled into the distant hum of the searing desert wind. I lunged forward again, sweat plastering a few strands of pink hair to my forehead, hoping this time the strike would land with anything resembling force. It didn't. He sidestepped, effortless movement, leaving me swinging at nothing but stuffy air. My bo staff, which had felt like an extension of my arm while tracing circles, was now wielded as a clumsy, heavy club. Every parry, every lunge, sent a residual ache rippling through my joints; my avatar truly was acting like a broken-down vehicle.
"Weak," Godspeed stated, his voice flat, devoid of the slightest tremor or hint of exertion. He barely looked up as he caught the tip of my staff mid-swing in a casual, one-handed block. His hair, a fiery mess of red, remained miraculously dry, not a single strand damp in this blistering sun. The blatant unfairness of it all sparked an acidic burn in my chest.
'Motherfucker—I'm dying over here!'
My lungs burned; each breath I sucked in rasped down my lungs like sandpaper. I forced down the rising nausea and spun, pulling my end of the staff for a wild, wide sweep. His feet barely moved; just a slight shift of weight, and the attack sailed harmlessly by a full foot from his midriff.
"Not strong enough." He pressed forward now, his own staff a blur as it appeared to casually flick mine upward, sending a ripple of agonizing pain through my shoulder. The tip of his bo staff tapped my neck. "Open."
My mind raced to scream at every instinct in my body to defend, to hit him, to justdo something right. But my body felt leaden; vision blurring at the edges from sheer exhaustion.
'This is hell. Why does everything in this fucking game have to be so damn har–!'
"**HACKK/?**"
My internal monologue died on a wheeze. I tried to speak and snap back, but all that came out was a pathetic, gasping and dry cough.
Godspeed watched my pathetic attempt to recompose myself, his head tilting slightly. "Your stance is off again." His staff moved, a quiet, precise tap against the back of my knee. "Plant your feet again. Harder."
**CLACK!**
Wood impacted wood for the umpteenth time, with enough force to send a shockwave vibrating right up my forearms, rattling my teeth in my skull. I didn't even have time to wince before the next one came.
**THWACK!**
Left side blocked. And then—!
**TONNK!**
Overhead strike, parried—barely.
My lungs felt like I'd inhaled a bag of broken glass at this point, asking for an end to the misery that still had hours to go, and dust to breathe in just to clog my airways.
"Your stance is too narrow," Godspeed interjected amidst my mini-spiral, his voice maddeningly bored. He wasn't even breathing hard. He looked less like he was fighting and more like he was calmly waving a stick in careless directions. "This surface is unstable. Positionally, you need a wider base."
'Oh. My Gawd. Shut. Up~!'
I didn't have the breath to say it out loud. My stamina bar in the corner of my HUD was flashing bold, panicked red—somewhere around nine percent. Every movement cost me. Every time I lifted this stupid, heavy stick, the game's fatigue mechanics punished me with fake lactic acid burns and sensations that felt, terrifyingly, way too real.
He stepped in, swinging horizontally. A robotic, cardinal-direction attack. Left to right; nothing overly fancy here. I gritted my teeth, planting my feet into the shifting gold powder beneath us, and swung my staff to intercept.
**CLACK!**
The impact pushed me back a step. The sand gave way under my heel.
"Sloppy," he noted once more. He spun his bo-staff without breaking a sweat. "Come on. Stay Motivated! That was worse than the last swing's block."
"I… I know that already!!" I squeezed the words out between ragged, wheezing gasps. Sweat—gross,virtual sweat—was matting my bangs to my forehead under the helmet.
"No, you do not."
He didn't give me an inch. I saw a vertical strike coming—perfectly perpendicular, 90 degrees down. I adjusted my grip, my fingers way-past numb. If I messed this up, if I mistimed a block and he cracked a wrist or a digit? Lasting injury. In this hellish game, damage stuck until you keeled over and revived, or shelled out massive amounts of coin to a healer. I liked having functional hands so, despite wanting to just lay down and pass out, I forced my twitching muscles to snap upward.
I raised the guard.
**WHAM!**
The vibration down my spine nearly made me puke.
"Very low aggression, I'm still noticing…" He droned, seemingly unbothered that I looked like I was having a cardiac event. "Want to slow down already? Pause for some tea?"
"Fuck… you…" I managed.
Aggression. He wanted aggression? Fine.
I hollered—a pathetic, strangled sound—and shoved my weight forward. My boots dug for traction on the slope. I tried to lash out, to interrupt his merciless rhythm, swinging the butt of my staff towards his ribs.
It was bold. It was loud.
It was, frankly… a mistake.
The sand chose that exact second to betray me. A shelf of the dune crumbled under my back foot. My balance vanished instantly, my weight dropping, my grand offensive turning into a flailing stumble.
Godspeed saw it. His eyes didn't even flicker. He didn't execute another standard swing. Didn't even bother continuing his rhythm.
He just shifted his grip, levelled the end of his staff like a pool cue, and, like… poked. Swiftly. Easily.
**THWOCK!**
The blunt end of the wood drove straight into my right shoulder with the force of a hydraulic piston. Definitely not a poke.
"OOPH—!"
It drove the breath out of me violently, lifting me clean off my feet. Time seemed to stretch for a second—me suspended in the air, the bright blue sky spanning forever above, and Godspeed standing there with that calm, teacher-like disappointment on his face.
Then gravity—and velocity—took over.
I slammed back-first into the slope. The world turned into a chaotic blur of golds, tans, and blinding sunlight as I tumbled, ass over elbows, uncontrollably down the massive dune.
The world became a nauseating, sandy blur. Sand, sky, sun—it all tumbled and jumbled together in a dizzying kaleidoscope of gold-ish tan and blinding white. Each impact of my armored body against the dune was a dull, jarring **WHUMP**, knocking what little air I had left out of my lungs in painful bursts. When my chaotic descent finally ended at the dune's flat base, I just lay there, a discarded heap of dented metal and aching limbs, my face pressed into the warm grit. For a long moment, the only sound was the ragged, desperate rasp of my own breathing.
'Spinning… world, spinning….'
And in that dizzy, disoriented space, the present dissolved.
{{ FLASHBACK: START ; DATE: [[May 8. 2038.]] }}
"Your goal," Godspeed had said, his voice dropping slightly, becoming a quiet, definitive order: "At the end of the month… is to take down an entire hobgoblin settlement."
We hadn't even left through the main entrance of Avarnove yet, when he sprung such a declaration on me. Not that it mattered, because…. Like… WTF?
His words seemed to still themselves in space, hanging there just to be shared between us, from one's voice to another's ears—but these ears? MY EARS? They REFUSE to listen. Whatever weird idea and itinerary he had building up between his temples had me tempted to go psycho on him. I gave him the harshest stare, my mouth slightly agape and unable to speak, as the absolute idiocy and impossibility of the task he mentioned just sucked my focus into the space that this crazy man occupied.
"Are you insane?" I'd finally managed, the words a strangled whisper. "I've fought before with one of them. One! And I almost DIED because of it! And you want me to… to what? March into a fortified camp and just, like… beat them up? Pshh." I scoffed.
"You're thinking about it like a straight-up fight," Godspeed had countered, his tone infuriatingly patient, as if explaining basic addition to a struggling child. "That's your first mistake. This isn't a duel. It will be an infiltration, turned into a dismantling, turned into a hunt."
I gave another scoff, crossing my arms tight over my chest, getting just a tad-bit defensive.. "Okay, Sun Tzu, then what's your brilliant plan? How does one person—one weak, Level 63 person—dismantle an entire settlement?"
"It's not going to be just one random person," he corrected softly. "You're going to end up as an incredibly prepared person. Someone trained for this scenario specifically. That's what this next month is for. I'm calling it 'Hell Month'."
My jaw tightened. Of course he named it. And of course, it sounded exactly as miserable as it possibly could.
Now Godspeed was pacing his boots kicking up little puffs of dust, his mind clearly already mapping out the brutal curriculum. "And it's going to be more than just grinding levels. We will be building an entire foundation from scratch. And there will be a few very important ingredients we will need to make this foundation strong." He pivots towards me, holding up a single, bandaged finger.
"One: Weapon Mastery and Maneuverability. That sword and shield you lean on? You are using it as a crutch. It makes you slow, predictable. You treat your armor like a sponge and your shield like a wall, but you're not built like a tank, and you definitely don't fight like one, either. That ends now; we're going to break that habit. I will have you learn a few weapons and styles, see how compatible you are with each so you can become someone adaptable to any fight. You will learn the bo staff for control and reach, the spear for precision and exploitation, as well as proper techniques for use your sword and shield effectively. You'll learn how each one changes your movement, your timing, and your entire presence in a fight."
A second finger is then held up.
"Two: Environmental Observation and Tactical Execution. You fight like you're in a sterile arena. The desert, the rocks, the time of day—you are acting like it all serves as background noise. That's Wrong. The environment is your second-most powerful weapon. I will teach you how to use the terrain for ambushes, how to use the sun to blind your enemy, how to read tracks, how to learn an enemy's patrol route by eye, and more, because before you ever draw a weapon, you will need to be able to see the battlefield for what it is: a set of tools waiting to be used. A battle isn't won when the first blow is thrown. It is won in its planning. You will learn to think like a general, and not a punk brawler. I will have you scout their settlement, map their defenses, and create schematics. You will learn the difference between a high-value target and a distraction, as well as how to analyze tactical advantages and disadvantages on the fly. You will understand when to strike and when to fade back into the shadows; what to attack to cripple their command, and who to attack to break their morale. Every move you make will be a calculated step in a larger strategy."
A third finger joined the other two.
"Three: System Exploitation. You have skills you've never even looked at, game mechanics you're completely ignoring. We're going to find every synergy, every small advantage the game's code gives you and abuse the hell out of it. We'll learn enemy weaknesses not just from basic, boring online research, but by baiting out their attacks and identifying their cooldowns. You're going to stop fighting these monsters and start dissecting each individual atom of their existence"
His counting hand suddenly clenched, and he tucked it behind his back with the other, standing straight and at attention while his swirling, crimson eyes bored into me, their intensity pinning me in place.
"You are going to be more than just strong after this month. More than just some warrior," he says, his voice quiet, yet carrying an unnerving weight at the same time. "You'll be made into a predator, one that sees everything in its eyesight as prey."
{{ FLASHBACK: END ; RETURN TO PRESENT DAY: [[May 9. 2038.]] }}
A whirling sky. Followed by rashes on the sand. Then sky. Then sand. Then gold. Then Blue.
It was in that spiraling descent, my brain chose to not flash my life before my eyes like some cheesy daytime soap opera. Instead it gave something worse. It had continued to rewind the tape of yesterday, to the exact moment I signed my soul away to the devil in bandages.
Back to the dustiness outside Avarnove, right as my vision gave out.
{{ FLASHBACK: START ; DATE: [[May 8. 2038.]] }}