DAY 121
MORNING
Peacock-a-doodle-doo!
A FRONTIER DUNGEON
CROOKED WALLS? Uneven flooring? Who built this dump?
“Tsk, tsk! These middle floors have gone to the dogs. I mean, this layout is just trash!”
Wiggle wiggle? Scythey skepticism.
Well, here we were, faulty architecture and all. I wanted to go deeper, where the good loot was, but I didn’t want to piss off the dungeon emperors more—lord knew they were already furious at me for various reasons this chronicle shall not elaborate on. So, I kept to the middle floors like a good boy. The floors nearest the surface were being taken care of by the adventurers and knights, so that left the middle of the dungeon for me. I thought the dungeon emperors wanted me to stay in baby-sized dungeons, but to heck with that. I’d held my own in the forest just fine yesterday. I’d be fine here.
In fact, I wanted to sweep through this dungeon, but I knew I needed to train and optimize my control scheme. Speed attacks would have to wait. I could run, but anything above a brisk jog inevitably led to me tripping. I could now move myself intuitively once more, but anything that I hadn’t committed to muscle memory resulted in my body going haywire. I simply had to visualize in my head what I wanted to do, and I could do it. Problem was, most teenage boys didn’t sprint so fast the air resistance knocked them over, so I had a hell of a time making a mental image for that.
“When I sprint, the lower half of my body moves so quickly the upper half gets bowled over by air pressure. Next thing I know, I trip and execute a perfect back flip. I don’t remember anyone pulling those maneuvers in track and field back on earth… I guess I can’t control my Wing magic at a subconscious level yet. Entanglement will simply have to make up the difference.”
Jiggle jiggle.
Ah, and now it was battle time. Or should I call it training? One was just the thing I needed but not fun, and the other was exactly what I needed but a bore. I s’pose it came down to the choice of opponent.
“Should I take it slow? Slow fox, fox, fox… Slow foxtrot?”
I let myself move languidly, one action flowing into the next. Being fast came easily, just like how riding a bike at high speeds made it easier to keep your balance. It was when I slowed down and paid careful attention that the cracks started to show—and by that, I meant my bones started to crack. Without the momentum, my balance vanished and I toppled from my metaphorical bicycle seat. That left me with only one choice: Bring on the heuristics!
“I gotta say, though—even in fiction, a Qing Qigong-wielding, Martial Qi Wizardry-mastering teenage boy waltzing with monsters is kinda weird… Even the monsters don’t know what to make of it.”
Wiggle wiggle.
Yeah, I made the jaw drop on the orc I was fighting. Orc, I said! A real orc! Not a terrifying housewife whose resemblance to an orc started and ended at her brutishness! Jupiter Eye enabled me to see every one of those powerful piggy punches coming from a mile away. It certainly made these orcs a lot less terrifying than their distant cousins, the housewives…
“It’s very easy to tell the difference between an orc and a housewife. One is a terrifying force to be reckoned with, and the other’s an orc.”
The orc in question lifted its mighty club and swung it at me with all the force contained in its bulging muscles. Its arm was as thick around as the log it wielded for a weapon. Orcs howled and keened with every swing of the club, so skipping out of the way was almost too easy. They made perfect practice opponents. Like the average frontier housewife, orcs were built like brick houses and had the faces to match, but one was much, much more frightening than the other—orcs were little more than glorified piggies, while housewives were akin to vengeful demons.
“Slow, quick, quick… S, Q, Q…”
The orc tried to slam its club into my side, but I rode the resulting rush of wind to safety, performed a backstep followed by a turn, and leaned into the breeze. I glided on the wind with rare elegance. I weighed nothing. I was a dancer on the gusts of air. (Admittedly, I felt like a bit of a dolt dancing with a macho, club-wielding hog on two legs.)
“Five, six, seven, eight. Two S, one Q, one Q—that’s measure one. The trick is to add a half-beat, an and, whenever you get off track. S, Q, Q?”
I fluttered and flew like a willow leaf on the breeze. I let the wind fan me along, sashaying and shimmying my way into a perfect defense. When I saw my chance, I broke out into a quick step, skipped forward between gusts of wind, and made myself a whirlwind of frenzied strikes.
“Yeah, doing the Charleston might’ve been overkill, but it never hurts to take these things seriously.”
Bobble bobble.
While my torso flipped and flapped in the wind, I forced all my weight into my lower half to keep my legs chugging along. The jitterbug slid into the quickstep as I danced, hopped, and sprang into an ever faster form of locomotion. I was speed, I was grace, I was all beguiling lightness and misleading haste. The jitterbug propelled me forward; the quickstep let me sidle around enemy attacks unharmed. I was doing it! I was moving!
Using the memories of puppeting myself around via massive calculations, I could force myself to move as intuitively as anyone else. Linking my nervous system to my Wisdom-based calculation system became even easier when I used fixed, regular patterns. About the only experience I had with that in this world was that one ball scene—that, and my habitual radio calisthenics.
“It’d be kinda pathetic if I lost to a level 6 snarling, club-wielding monster—excuse me, I mean an orc. Kobolds, at least, are twice as fast.”
The dance ended—or perhaps it’d only morphed into a new dance, a dance of singing swords, a dance of buffeting winds, a dance of whirling about the enemy, striking here, cutting there. Qing Qigong prevented me from ever taking hits. I was a whirlwind of activity, a gale-force of weaponry, a hurricane of cane strikes. Hey! I’m weak to fans, so stop blowing me all over the damn place!
“Sleeping Beauty, knock it off! I know you’re bored, but this isn’t a game. I thought that war fan was Dancer Girl’s anyway. What’s that? She let you borrow it? Just to throw me off my groove?! Okay, well…this is just practice, so it’s not the end of the world. But don’t you dare flap that thing at me in a real battle. It’s distracting, okay? You’re distracting the orc too. Look, see? He’s flapping furious.”
Tee-hee!
Sleeping Beauty had tagged along with me today for some level grinding and gear testing. Slimey made three; his role was to mentor us and guard us as need be. It was nice to be back running dungeons in the frontier in a trio, even if these floors were too close to the surface to be lucrative.
“By the way, how come you guys never talk in dungeons?”
“No one jabbers on, in battle. Just you.”
Wriggle wriggle!
I still had yet to master the art of subconscious moving. Time was a-wasting, so I switched gears. I capped my highspeed movements and ultraquick reaction times, slowed time via Thought Acceleration, and forced my mind to do a better job of keeping pace with my subconscious reactions. It would take more time to clear the dungeon this way, but I wanted to be a good boy and do a proper job of things. Basically, I didn’t want to give the dungeon emperors any more ammunition to be mad at me.