Soul of the Warrior

Reivyn walked hand in hand with Kefira through the streets of the coastal town. She wanted to spend time on the beach, but Reivyn wanted to experiment with his ideas for Stamina utilization. Kefira pointed out that he could do that on the beach. He didn’t need to go into the Dungeon to use the cave water,

Going into the cave would give Reivyn some privacy and peace, but he didn’t need that now that he had already worked through his thoughts on the matter. He wouldn’t be using his Stamina in a peaceful environment anyway if they were going to use it to reach Hard Mode in the Dungeon. The entire point was that they were going to be in combat, much less just a noisy beach.

Reivyn didn’t put up much of a fight to begin with. He just mentioned that he wanted to spend some time working through the mechanics, so they agreed they would spend the day at the beach and he would take some time to see about his idea.

It didn’t take long for them to arrive at the familiar beach. Kefira led them to an open spot on the beach and she and Serilla removed some towels from their storage pouches to lay on the sand. They were already dressed in their attire for swimming underneath the clothes they walked through the streets in. They simply removed their outer garments and sat down on the towels.

“Go ahead and do some of your experiments first,” Kefira said to Reivyn. “We’ll come join you in the water here in a little bit.”

“Sounds good,” Reivyn said.

He removed his shirt and sandals, placing them next to his own towel beside Kefira’s. The two girls basked in the sun, conversing with each other, as Reivyn made his way to the water.

Kahl had mentioned that it wasn’t safe in the deeper parts of the ocean, but that was hundreds of yards from the shore. The shallows had plenty of people wading and swimming in them.

There wasn’t really a place devoid of others on the beach. It wasn’t crowded, so there was nobody in his immediate vicinity, but there was also nowhere he could go where he would be absolutely alone. He had already resigned himself to the inevitable situation where someone might bump into him and disturb his practice, but he wasn’t too worried about it.

There were no consequences for being disturbed. It wasn’t like he was going to somehow lose control of his Stamina all together and have his body lock up on him or something. If his control slipped through his fingers, it would just revert to automatically running, just like breathing.

Reivyn waded through the waves of the ocean until he reached a point where the water was just above his waist. The water was quite comfortable. The atmosphere of the island was a bit warmer than what Reivyn was used to on the mainland, and the water was a little colder than lukewarm.

The weather on the island was a bit strange. There were no sustained storms due to the constant pressure differential from the surrounding Tier 8 Region, but there were still frequent pop-up showers. Some days there would be nothing but sunny skies, but other days Reivyn had seen three separate showers descend on the island out of nowhere in one afternoon.

They had each been caught out in the open during a sudden downpour more than once, and they had only been here for just over a week. The locals didn’t pay it any mind. They were used to the weather as it was simply a way of life on the island.

The sun was bearing down on Reivyn as he looked around. The waters were fresh and clear, and the temperature was perfect. The air wasn’t too warm, but the rays of the sun could heat one up if left out in the open for too long. The cooling waters were the perfect remedy to the sun’s heat in this situation.

Reivyn stopped dilly dallying and concentrated on the task at hand. He felt his heartbeat and the blood flowing in his veins. He focused his attention on his Stamina as he expelled all the air in his lungs and submerged himself in the water.

If he took a deep breath, he could stay underwater for over an hour. He didn’t have time for that. The entire purpose of the experiment was to figure out how to use Stamina as an alternative resource to oxygen, and what better way to do that than to completely get rid of all the oxygen first?

Reivyn’s lungs immediately began vying for his attention, telling him they needed air to fill them. His Vitality was high enough that he could survive on no stored oxygen for several minutes before it became a problem, though, and the feeling wasn’t painful or desperate.

He would most likely need to wait until his lungs were screaming at him and he was close to losing some of his Health, but that didn’t mean he had to wait before trying to figure out what to do. The desperation would fuel his abilities much like a life or death struggle would, but it wasn’t necessarily required.

Reivyn pulled on his experience with manually activating a Skill. The biggest difference between this and activating a Skill, though, was that he didn’t have an end goal with which to direct the Stamina. That was the main thing he needed to figure out.

I can grab ahold of my Stamina just fine, Reivyn thought. To prove his point, he manipulated his Stamina and flooded various body parts with it. He settled with concentrating his Stamina in his lungs, but that didn’t suddenly fill his oxygen needs on its own. The question is: what do I do with it?

The Stamina itself was like a fuel source to activate muscles in certain ways. It provided energy for doing strenuous activities over a long period of time, too. There had to be a way to combine those effects: fuel an activation of energy.

If it’s a fuel source… do I “burn” it?

Reivyn felt like he was on the right track, but how did he do that? Using the Stamina to activate a Skill came naturally to him. Here, he would need to activate nothing. Not not activating something, but activating literally nothingness.

What does it feel like when I activate a Skill?

Reivyn determined a direction to explore and started shadow boxing in the water. He used his Multi-Strike Skill every now and then while paying attention to what his Stamina was doing. He had never manually activated the Skill, so his first step was to do so.

He had to surface several times as he explored exactly what Stamina activation felt like. He wasn’t ready to make himself desperate and lose Health just yet, but he let himself get close to that point with his vision darkening around the edges slightly before coming up for a break each time.

He lost track of time with his experiment, but he was on the verge of manually activating his Multi-Strike Skill when he sensed Kefira and Serilla swim toward him. The water was shallow enough that they could wade, but why walk when they could swim?

“Alright, I’ve given you an hour to mess around,” Kefira said to the surprise of Reivyn. “It’s time to have some fun.”

Reivyn just smiled and shook his head. He had all day to figure things out, and even if he didn’t, he still had the next day, too, before they resumed their training with Refix. He wouldn’t be upset if he couldn’t pin it down before then, but he wanted to be able to share his method with the others so they could start practicing as well during their training sessions.

Reivyn spent his time swimming about and splashing each other with Kefira and Serilla for a time. He let himself forget about his other purpose and just enjoyed his time in the water. The trio spent a little over an hour in the water.

“Alright, before your mind starts wandering and you stop paying attention to me, Serilla and I are going to take a break,” Kefira finally said. “You can join us on the beach or go back to your experiments.”

“I’ll probably take a break next time,” Reivyn said. “I’m not tired or anything, and I really want to figure this out. We can grab a bit to eat then, too.”

“Sounds good.”

The two girls swam back to shore. Reivyn idly noticed that they had to go a bit further than he expected. They had apparently drifted further out into the water while they played, but they were still nowhere close to the danger zone.

Reivyn simply expelled his breath and descended into the water where he was. He resumed his underwater shadow boxing while activating his Skill.

He had already made decent progress on figuring out the manual activation of the Skill, so it only took a couple minutes to get back into the groove. He quickly grasped the feeling once more.

Reivyn had never attempted to activate his Charge Skill in the water, but he decided to do so now. He firmly stood on the ocean sand and manually activated the Skill. His body didn’t move nearly as fast as it did on land, but it still worked approximately the same way. He compared the feeling of his Stamina to how it felt while using Multi-Strike.

After dashing about several times, Reivyn stood in place with his eyes closed as he thought about his Stamina. With determination in his eyes, he assumed a boxing stance, threw out a punch, and summoned his Stamina.

Without relying on the Skill itself, his fist produced 19 afterimages as he successfully performed the Skill manually. He pumped his fist in the air in triumph.

“Alright, step one,” Reivyn said to himself. “The purpose of the training isn’t to activate my Skills manually. That’s just to get a baseline for how the Stamina feels.”

He could have just used his Charge Skill manual activation, but he felt it would be better to have two different Skills so he could separate the pure feeling of the Stamina usage. The two Skills used his Stamina in completely different muscles, activating two Skills that had nothing in common with each other.

He performed the manual activation of both Skills several more times and was able to finally pinpoint the feeling of the Stamina being used.

“Ok. Here goes nothing.”

Reivyn submerged himself in the water once more after expelling his breath. He gathered the Stamina in his lungs and mentally flexed. His Stamina burned and he felt relief in his lungs as if he had just taken a deep breath, “filling” his lungs with oxygen.

Success!

Reivyn was thrilled that his idea was correct. Now he needed to figure out how to communicate how to do it so the others could follow suit.

With this ability, I won’t need to get the Breath Control Skill, Reivyn thought. That being said, most people would get that Skill before working on their manual usage of Stamina, and it might grant some unexpected benefits if I’m able to train it to Transcendence. There’s no reason not to work on the Skill when I have a chance.

Thoughts of different abilities for reaching Transcendence with Breath Control filled his mind as Reivyn stayed underwater. ,He still needed to verify that his lungs were actually using his Stamina as an alternate resource to oxygen and not just feeling like he had a full breath.

If he just felt like his lungs were full, it would actually be extremely dangerous. It would be like someone not being able to feel pain. It might seem like a boon at first, but then his body wouldn’t be able to send the proper signals to his brain to warn him of something doing damage. If he couldn’t feel pain, he might accidentally permanently scar or cripple himself.

The same thing applied to drowning. If he didn’t feel like he was drowning when he really was, he would lose consciousness and risk death. He kept an eye on his Health as the time ticked by to make sure it wasn’t going down.

I’ll give myself twenty minutes underwater, he determined. It’s been long enough that an additional twenty minutes should be around the time necessary for the first tick of Health damage.

With nothing else to do other than float in the water just beneath the surface, Reivyn inspected the underwater ocean around himself. The waters were very clear, and he could see colorful fish swimming about and seashells littering the ocean floor. With his enhanced perception, he could even see the tiny shark teeth that inevitably made their way to the beaches jutting out of the sand.

I’ve drifted a bit closer to the deeper water, but I’m still quite a bit away from it. I wonder what’s so dangerous about the deeper waters? Why would it be more dangerous over there than over here?

Reivyn looked into the distance. His vision was unimpeded in the crystal clear water, and he could see all the way beyond the storm wall. The water grew considerably darker as the storm wall blocked out the sunlight, but he could still see quite a ways.

He frowned as he saw a landform jutting up out of the water just a short ways into the Tier 8 region.

Is it not an ocean over there? He thought. Considering the steep dropoff of the seafloor, it doesn’t make sense that there would be an island right there. Surely the locals would know that there was another island just on the other side of the border.

The landmass Reivyn spotted was quite steep. It could be a volcanic island or something for all he knew, but it jutted out suddenly from the deep waters all the way to the surface.

Reivyn frowned deeper as he continued to inspect the strange landmass. Even from this distance, he could see movement shifting about on the surface of the landmass.

Reivyn activated his Eagle Eye Skill and his vision zoomed in. It was like looking through a looking glass. His vision wasn’t improved, but his perception of his vision seemed to zoom in on what he was looking at.

Upon closer inspection, it wasn’t that there were creatures moving about on the landmass like Reivyn had first thought. Instead, there were long ridges and chasms shifting about. Reivyn couldn’t figure out what he was looking at.

Suddenly, a giant tentacle appeared in his vision from the deep between him and the landmass. The size of the tentacle was mind-boggling. Reivyn couldn’t see the end of it as it disappeared into the dark waters below the dropoff of the seafloor in the distance.

Just from the size of what he could see, the tentacle had to be dozens of miles long. The suckers littering the length of the appendage could be anywhere from house-sized to stadium-sized.

The moving of the ridges and chasms suddenly sped up tremendously. The entire landmass shifted in place.

A giant, horizontal crack appeared in Reivn’s vision. It suddenly shot apart, and a giant eye revealed itself. The pupil shifted about in all directions before settling on Reivyn.

That’s not a landmass! Reivyn frantically thought as pure terror seized his body. That’s a kraken!

The word for the giant squid came to his mind from his memories. From his past life, he knew that it was a mythical sea creature, but it was a real thing in this world.

The giant squid continued to shift until two eyes were now fully focused on Reivyn. He was unable to move his body under the intense stare of the massive sea creature. All thoughts fled his mind as he floated motionlessly in the water.

The tentacle snapped forward and launched toward him at lightning speed. It was so fast that he could only see a blur of motion even with his enhanced Perception and Clarity.

Reivyn’s Danger Sense didn’t trigger, but the situation finally brought Reivyn out of his terror-induced paralysis. He madly dashed for the surface, his limbs flailing. He was so disturbed and frantic that his movements didn’t even trigger his Swimming Skill, and his speed was greatly reduced.

In his panic to reach the surface, Reivyn had forgotten he was just barely underwater and could easily stand with his head, shoulders, and chest above the water. He broke the surface and gasped frantically for air as he tried to rush to the shore as fast as possible.

His own panic was working against him, though, and he moved at a fraction of the speed that he normally could traverse through the water. He was unable to think about anything other than escaping.

He was so caught up in his frantic movements that it eluded his notice that no tentacle ever appeared to snatch him to the depths.

His panicked movements didn’t go unnoticed, though. Other swimmers nearby didn’t wait to try and find out what the danger was, they all just turned and rushed for the shore along with him. They quickly outdistanced Reivyn, and seeing them all swim past him at much faster speeds, he finally realized the futility of his movements.

His heart was still pounding in his chest, but he was finally able to calm down enough to get his movements in sync with his Swimming Skill. He shot forward toward the shore, but he quickly saw that Kefira and Serilla had noticed something was wrong and they were rushing to the water.

“No! Go Back!” Reivyn screamed, infusing his voice with Commanding Shout so that it would carry.

Kefira and Serilla came to a stop with their ankles in the water, but that didn’t mean they were done. Reivyn saw and felt the Mana accumulate around Kefira, and with a crack in reality, she was suddenly next to him in the water.

“What are you doing?!” Reivyn shouted in panic. He was sure that the monster would get a hold of him and drag him into its waiting maw any second.

Kefira ignored him as she spluttered at suddenly being submerged in the ocean water. She didn’t try to reorient herself, though, and she simply grabbed Reivyn and once more activated her Jump Spell.

Reivyn found himself on the dry shore with Kefira hanging around his neck. He didn’t have time to appreciate her body pressed up against his as he collapsed to his hands and knees and gasped for breath.

Relief at being the survivor of a disaster flooded his adrenaline-fueled body. His heart still hammered in his chest, but he was able to slowly calm down and assess the situation. Before he could come to terms with the situation, though, a foreign presence intruded in his mind.

Ha Ha Ha, an amused chuckle reverberated through his mind before the foreign presence receded from his mind.

Reivyn rolled over to a sitting position and stared out at the storm wall with wide eyes. He felt his Mental Fortitude and Iron Will Skills activate with a force they never had before, and he was able to shake himself free. He came to himself and noticed that Kefira had her hands around his face, peering into his eyes with concern.

“...the matter? Talk to me!” She pleaded.

Reivyn lifted his own hand to rest on one of hers as he took a deep, steadying breath.

“I’m fine,” Reivyn said. “Sorry for scaring you.”

“What was that? What happened?” Kefira asked. She kept her hands on his face as she sat in his lap, comforting him the best way she knew how.

“A monster,” Reivyn answered, glancing back at the storm wall. “An honest, real monster.”

Other ocean-goers surrounded them, waiting for the explanation of what had spooked him so bad. Upon hearing the answer, many of them murmured in comprehension.

A hole was made as several bystanders stepped aside for a patrol of guardians to come investigate the disturbance. The squad leader took one look at Reivyn and saw where he was looking.

“You looked, didn’t you?” The man asked.

Reivyn looked up at the man and silently nodded. The guardian took a deep breath and sighed.

“What’s up with that?” Reivyn asked. “Does that… creature, just sit out there?”

“Nah, there’s a bunch of them,” the guardian shook his head. “Man, we warned you. Kahl said it: Here be monsters. You’re lucky. Most people who see the truth of what’s waiting on the other side of the storm wall go crazy. You must have a strong Mental Resistance Skill.”

Reivyn simply nodded his head.

“Alright, folks! There’s no problem here. Just someone getting too curious for their own good. You know the drill.”

The bystanders drifted apart, going back to what they were doing. Reivyn heard snippets of conversation from the locals. They took the whole situation in stride, and many of them even immediately went back out into the water.

It wasn’t the first time they had experienced someone looking beyond the veil, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Reivyn shakily got to his feet with Kefira’s help. She kept a steadying hand on him. He looked down at her and gave a strained smile.

“I think I’m done with the ocean for today.”