Chapter Five - Training Time is Good Time

The training was probably worth it, but I called it to an end after what had to be a solid six or seven hours of non-stop practice.

I... couldn't do more than that. My body felt absolutely fine, but I was starting to get this weird feeling of detachment with myself. I was in my own skin, obviously, but every Reload removed more wounds and bruises and machine muscles. It was starting to feel wrong.

Some part of my brain was warning me that I was hurt even if I clearly wasn't, and after enough repetitions it was taking a few minutes to realize that I wasn't hurt.

That was especially obvious after one session of Jiu-Jitsu where a wrong move on my part broke my knee. I reset the moment I saw my leg bending the wrong way, but I still felt like I had to walk with a limp right after.

We switched to kendo after, but Natalie could tell that I had no idea what I was doing. It took a few attempts to fake it well enough to actually fight Natalie, then I got clobbered, but this time with sticks involved.

Natalie was... kind, actually. When she was in the ring she beat me without speaking, but out of it, afterwards, she had a surprising gentleness to her that she didn't have before the fight. It was almost too bad that I Reloaded every time and never got to experience that in full.

I gave in after a while.

Instead, I decided to train my actual body while bringing up some articles on my shitty old, rather laggy, augs.

First on what to actually train.

From what I could tell, and from a few discussions with Natalie where she berated me for not being trained enough, the amount of physical conditioning I'd need to be up to standard would take years.

Maybe if I pushed it real hard, I could reach the level where I was a halfway competent martial artist in a year. That would mean careful dieting, multiple days a week of exercising, and lots of training.

I was, of course, going to cheat a ton with magic.

A normal human could go from baseline to combat ready in three months, but that was just 'basic' training. Real martial training took two or more years. Soldiers were the 'good enough' baseline.

An E-ranker could go from untrained to competent in half the time as a normal person.

A D-ranker could do it in six months, without expending insane amounts of effort for it.

I had nine months, and the ability to cheat like mad. Unfortunately, 'good' was probably not what I had to aim for. If I was going to fight the people that I was afraid I'd have to fight, then I'd need to be way stronger than just a well-trained D-ranker.

I sighed, then started jogging on a treadmill, getting my heartrate up while looking up exercise routines that I could do consistently.

The goal was a five-days a week workout routine that didn't take too long. Normally that'd be too much, but I could take it, probably.

Muscle memory was the next thing I looked up. There were two parts to that. The first was the more physical aspect.

A trained muscle that wasn't used would degrade, but it would more rapidly return to that trained state after retraining. So, the muscle 'remembered' how to return to its previous form.

I lacked that. I'd done some exercise throughout my life, but it was mostly cardio and stretching and stuff to keep in shape. Maintenance exercise, not so much combat.

I... was willing to admit that the me of nine-months ago (my clock) was woefully unprepared for life in a job that was so close to danger.

Anyway, the other part of muscle memory was mental, ironically. It was the brain signalling the muscles to move. If you did it enough, your brain would 'memorize' the motions and no longer need conscious thought to act.

That was something I could train. My sparring was a good way to learn how to handle a fight, and if I spent a few hundred wasted hours repeating stances and forms, then the motions would be locked into my muscle memory as well. There was some amount of 'nervous system' memory as well, but I couldn't parse the research I found on that on account of not having a doctorate on the subject and only a few minutes to read into it.

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Ideally, I'd have a brain able to process combat and I'd know, instinctually, what to do. I'd just not have a body able to keep up yet.

Frustrating, but time would fix that, eventually.

Now, my next issue... I thought about it while lifting weights. I needed gear. I had an idea of where to pick gear up, but no cash to spend on it. Only... couldn't I make that easily?

The idea of walking into a casino appealed to me a lot, but I wasn't close to one, and I didn't exactly have seed money for that. Not today, in any case. Theft? Stealing items was stupid, but credit card info?

One Save and Reload and a clumsy attempt at pickpocketing would give me the details on the back of anyone's card. I barely had to remember it, only long enough to Reload and write them down in a notepad app.

But theft like that wasn't what I wanted either.

Stupid morals, holding me back. I knew from a purely utilitarian perspective it was stupid. A bit of theft to save a city? Chump change.

Still didn't want to do it.

I finished exercising a solid two hours later, then walked out of the gym on wobbly legs. Still, because I hated myself, I decided to walk most of the way home.

That plan changed three blocks later, because the bus had seats and fuck walking across even just a tenth of Fortress ENE. The city was not

designed to be walkable all over, and that included past the mid-city fortress walls.

I paid the bus fare, sighed at the expense, then glared at a creep that wouldn't stop staring at me with a dopey smile on his face. Weirdo sniffed me on the way by.

No one ever claimed that this city was filled with the best and brightest.

I was kind of counting on that, actually.

My goal for the next day was to grab some equipment. I'd need something to hide my ID, sure, and that was the easy part. Masks weren't too hard to come by, and not too expensive. Armour was a little tougher to get my hands on.

There was a market for it. I saw at least three people on the bus with plate carriers, and one man with a thickly padded leather coat with inset cooling that had to be armoured.

Guns were around too. I saw a few grips tucked in pants and under shirts, and armoured-coat guy had a full-on rifle half sticking out of a backpack. Even the granny a few seats down had a little piece on her.

Used guns were purchasable. Armour was too. Masks were easy. Getting any of that at a level of quality that wasn't 'ass' was going to be a little tougher, especially without raising suspicions, but I believed I could do it.

But not at my current budget. That was a problem that still hung over my head.

If I was willing to wait...

But no, the iron was hot right now, and I wanted to hit that portal hard and fast and soon. The experience would be worth the trouble, probably.

I did make it home eventually, however, and on entering and resetting my next Save point, I felt a wave of exhaustion hitting me and a massive urge to just do... nothing.

It felt like I'd been awake for days, and in a way I had. How many hours of training did I do? I'd kind of lost count of the repetitions after fifty or so. Each loop lasted some ten, fifteen minutes. That was... what, at least eight hours of rigorous training? Maybe three hours of that spent in the ring, sparring.

No physical toll, but a mental one. I wasn't exactly bleeding from the ears, but I needed a nap. It was only seven in the evening, but I took a much needed shower, cursed the fact that I was burning through my weekly water allotment, then crashed into my bed.

Usually I'd play shitty mobile games, but the appeal was lost to me.

Damn, that'd be on my record, wouldn't it? Almost everything people did online was traced and followed, and most of it was used by one corp or another in some way. Not playing a game I'd been doing dailies with for a year? That'd trigger something, somewhere.

But maybe not. The new job and change in life circumstances might account for any discrepancies.

I didn't really want to think about it, so I didn't. I shut my eyes, and slept the sleep of the damned.

***