DAY 121
MIDMORNING
I know an old dungeon that swallowed a fly…
A FRONTIER DUNGEON
DEPENDING ON HOW you look at it, the insides of dungeons are better for practice. No wind + tight corridors = easy-to-calculate air movement. Take it away, Wisdom.
“Whoa!”
A stray updraft blasted me sky-high. I lashed out, kicking, and went up ass over teakettle.
“Too tall! And long! And spooky! First hippos, now giraffes!”
This being a world of sword and sorcery, I was hoping for a few Questing Beasts, myself. Perhaps a Beast Glatisant? But no, we got generic giraffes—level 41 whip giraffes. Their long, whiplike necks snapped toward me, which was downright terrifying at close range.
“Agh! And they bite! These things are obnoxious and scary. And their heads are huge!”
Those necks generated no end of wind, and the heads kept snaking after me with intent to bite. These giant giraffes could easily peep into a second story window—we’re talking tremendous attack range here.
“Giraffes are the tallest animals alive today, and half of that stupendous stature is all neck. These lanky beanpoles are well known for having the highest blood pressure of all animals, so if they twist their heads too quickly, they…snap clean off…?”
Moooo!
“Moo?! What are you, a cow?”
And these cloven-hoofed critters could hoof it! Perhaps this was to be expected. The word “giraffe” comes from the ancient Arabic zirafa—“fast runner.” But you’d never guess from their laid-back appearances!
“I guess it makes sense; you can cover a lot of ground with legs that long—oh, for crying out loud, could you cut it out with those annoying necks? They whip up so much wind I’m forced into the air, but the ceilings of this dungeon are too low for me to fly out of boy-biting range! Those chompers are prime anti-aircraft technology!”
Jiggle, jiggle.
Oh yeah, just stand there and watch, why don’t you? Glad someone’s having fun! Aw, but I couldn’t be too hard on Slimey and Sleeping Beauty. Giraffes were as rare a sight in this world as they were back home.
“And back home, giraffes are always some of the most popular animals in the zoos. Even I can’t resist a good giraffe print on the right pers—urgh, I’ve had it with those stupid bitey heads! Get off! Kick, kick, kick!”
Moooo!
“Speaking of rare sights, I think a capoeira-kicking teenage boy being chased through the air by a giraffe slightly outranks a plain giraffe on the rare sight scale, but what do I know? You’d be surprised how well capoeira goes with aerial acrobatics. I wonder if the old sages of legend ever did capoeira with their Qing Qigong. It’s good exercise, I’ll grant you that!”
Weightless Qing Qigong kicks packed so little punch it did nothing—save for punt me along via the recoil. Fortunately, I could still put my muscle power behind the move. Concentrate that into a single point, and you had tongbeiquan, baby.
“Or tongbei kick, rather. Kicky, kicky! Get away from me!”
I placed a well-aimed foot right in the face of the giraffe trying to make a snack out of me from below. I roundhouse kicked the snaking head coming in from the left before doing the same to its twin on my opposite side. Here a kick, there a kick, everywhere a kick, kick. A fresh neck swooped in from left field as I twisted and gyrated in midair, so I dropped an axe kick on it, backflipped, and hit a giraffe directly behind it. I landed briefly on the next head, used a powerful stomp to crush its skull, then bashed the giraffes on either side of me with simultaneous paoquan strikes.
“Geez! Give a guy a second to catch his breath. It’s hard to tell where these heads are aiming when the necks are all tangled up in one another.”
With well-timed air kicks, I kept myself airborne and unleashed my Black Demon’s Bladed Wings with a flap of wings. And then I was off for round two!
“It all comes down to what I can do with my body. The moment I add Skills, I self-destruct. Right?”
Nod nod. Wiggle wiggle.
Welp. Them’s the breaks. My radio calisthenics were wretched; my tai chi, terrible; my tongbeiquan, tormented; my wuxingquan, worst of all. But bad as it was, everything was slowly but surely coming together. My footwork could use some work, and everyone said I’d be done for in a dungeon. The billboard in the Adventurers’ Guild never changed; Sleeping Beauty was a chaperone in name and a merciless, Lamaze-technique-learning killing machine in practice; and these giraffes were little more than enormous cows.
“So it goes. All that matters is that I can kill ’em.”
Training was all well and good, but if I couldn’t pull off a trick in training, I had no hope of doing so in real battle. And something learned in training didn’t guarantee its usage in battle. But something learned in battle—now, something learned in battle would become so automatic it could be utilized in one’s sleep. I’d done this all before, I told myself. I was just a little different now. Yeah, I had a different biological, magical, and neurological makeup, but hey, who was counting? There may have been much that still eluded me, but so long as I killed my opponents, did it matter?
“My MO is to wait until the last possible second until I’m royally screwed. I’m the late-riser, slow-starter kind of guy. I do my best optimizing in the middle of fights for my life, y’know?”
There were some things you just couldn’t learn unless your life was on the line.
“Besides, things have cooled down enough that I’m able to keep a hold on myself, provided I don’t go full throttle. I’m not gonna learn anything unless I turn up the heat. And hey—there’s nothing a teenage boy likes better than a little heat and a hot bath!”
All sorts of new powers were coming to life in me—or rather, if I didn’t look alive, I stood on the precipice of losing my life!
“Among the worst ways to go out, being bitten by a giraffe ranks less bad than getting eaten by a hippo. I don’t want to turn into one of those old fogeys who’s like ‘Ah, the old war wound’s acting up. Yup. Got bit by a hippo.’ Or a giraffe!”
Thing was, I hadn’t actually solved any of the issues plaguing my new body. I was simply procrastinating in the hopes that they would all work themselves out amicably someday. God, I wish. Come on, happy future, I’m rooting for you!
“Aaaand, done. Are you eating the giraffes? Hey, if that gives you a Whip Skill, I’m not complaining. I’d say don’t come crying to me when it makes your neck grow, but you don’t have a neck at all, so… Let’s keep going. We should prolly stop around the 50th floor… Unless we go just a little eensy-weensy bit farther…”
Mm-hmm. Jiggle jiggle.
There was nothing wrong with taking my time. I didn’t have an urgent goal that demanded I rush. I didn’t need all the bells and whistles of isekai cheat powers. All I wanted were the skills to give me a nice, happy life, and preferably a big fat wad of cash. Really, what more could a boy need?
So, my first goal was to get myself back to normal. Nothing more, nothing less. I’d learned how to puppet myself in that one battle with what’s-his-face, and when my sensory system self-destructed later, that became the only way for me to move myself. Now I could, at long last, use my senses and nervous system to move intuitively once more. All that was left was—well, everything. Slow and steady would win the race, even if that race involved a lot of procrastination.
“The most important thing is to get comfortable in my body again. Let’s start with learning how to walk and getting a hang of my own nervous system. Or that’s what I used to say, at least. Go, shoulder shield funnels! I’m offloading all the work to you! Slimey and Sleeping Beauty have run for their lives, and I’m following suit! This fight is not for me!”