The sky, already the color of lead since morning, darkened completely that day, as though someone had upended an inkwell across the heavens.
Then, a deafening thunderclap tore through the firmament, and torrential rain poured down upon the earth like a dam bursting open, as if every floodgate in the sky had been flung wide at once.
In the southern reaches of the kingdom, the savage downpour that had long been threatening finally arrived in full force, crashing down upon the land without mercy.
Inside the taproom of the Oak Inn, proprietress Sofia gazed out at the rain hammering down like an overflowing sea and knitted her brows with a helpless sigh.
"Another downpour. Hardly anyone will want to venture out for a drink today."
Monster attacks had been rampant of late, disrupting grain convoys and sending food prices in Blackwater Town soaring.
Combined with this ferocious storm, foot traffic in the inn had dropped by more than half. Under mounting financial pressure, Sofia was seriously weighing whether to raise the prices of the inn's meals and nightly room rates.
In truth, every comparable lodging establishment in Blackwater Town had already completed its first round of price increases. Only the Oak Inn remained, and it had inadvertently become the most affordable, best-value accommodation in town.
"Ms. Sofia, I'm here for my shift!"
The taproom door burst open, and a drenched figure stumbled in through the curtain of rain, looking thoroughly bedraggled.
Lila wrung out her rain-soaked fiery red braids, her feet clad in a pair of flimsy sandals held together by only three or four narrow leather straps. With every step she took, she left a clear wet footprint on the wooden floor.
"I feel so cold... achoo!" She walked up to Sofia, about to duck into the kitchen, when a wave of icy air swept over her. Her body shivered involuntarily, followed by a loud sneeze.
"You silly girl, with rain this heavy, why didn't you wait for it to ease up before coming over? Go change into something dry right now. We can't have you falling ill."
Sofia took Lila's ice-cold hands in her own and led her up to the bedroom on the second floor, finding a spare set of dry clothes for her to change into.
Sofia's clothes were too large for Lila's frame and hung loosely off her, but they would have to do for now. Sofia then wrapped Lila's dripping hair in a soft towel and patted it as dry as she could.
Just then, a series of deep, thunderous crashes erupted from the back courtyard, a rapid-fire sequence of heavy impacts, as though massive stones were being hurled against one another. The strange noise immediately seized Lila's full attention.
"Ms. Sofia, is that Mr. Orum? Is he still training?" she asked, clearly surprised.
"That's right. Just like always, he's been at it without a break," Sofia replied with a soft nod.
"But there's a torrential storm outside!" Lila's eyes flashed with disbelief.
"Perhaps he carries a goal in his heart far loftier and grander than anyone else's," Sofia said, gently pushing the window frame open just a sliver, enough for Lila's curious gaze to peer through the veil of rain and make out a tall, blurred silhouette in the back courtyard.
Despite the dreadful weather, Orum had chosen not to rest. If anything, his commitment to the grueling training of Combat Skill: Blade Dance had only grown more resolute.
Beneath the rain shelter at the center of the courtyard, Orum gripped a training staff in both hands and settled into a flawlessly precise opening stance, exactly as Master Charles had demonstrated the day before.
The muscles of Orum's iron-hard arms tensed as he locked his grip on the staff.
A damp gust laden with moisture rushed at him, only to be instantly evaporated by the scorching heat radiating from his body, as though his flesh were not blood and bone at all, but a steel blast furnace roaring with molten iron.
Eight black iron training dummies stood arrayed in the courtyard, silent as eight dark knights, positioned at eight equidistant points around Orum, encircling him without a word.
The next moment, the training staff in his hands began to tremble violently.
An unstoppable force surged and built along the shaft, and the muscles of both arms swelled as if inflating, a visible manifestation of every fiber of muscle being wrung to its absolute limit in a single instant.
Though both were combat skills, Blade Dance and Thrust were fundamentally different in their execution.
Thrust was a technique that pursued a singular extreme: speed. It had only one brief starting stance, and could even be unleashed without any stance at all in a pinch, though without the proper form its speed fell slightly short.
Blade Dance, by contrast, required two distinct preparatory postures to be completed before it could be executed.
Opening stance, coiling stance, and then the eruption.
An instant later, a storm of staff shadows burst outward like a blooming dahlia, striking simultaneously at every black iron dummy in all directions.
Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom.
All eight black iron dummies shuddered at the exact same moment. Eight deep, resonant impacts rang out in near-perfect unison.
[Combat Skill: Blade Dance Proficiency +1]
Orum immediately pivoted on his heel, gritting through the aching numbness spreading up his arms, and drove the skill again.
Dozens upon hundreds of staff shadows erupted once more, blanketing every surrounding inch of space in a biting gale as the second surge detonated.
Blade Dance, Second Stage.
Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom.
[Combat Skill: Blade Dance Proficiency +1]
With the aid of the system panel, a single viewing of Charles's demonstration had been enough for Orum to grasp the foundational form of Combat Skill: Blade Dance. All that remained now was relentless, repetitive training to raise its proficiency step by step until it reached mastery.
The principal reason Orum was pushing himself this hard was the crushing pressure bearing down on him from the Black Gate.
Over the past two days he had made time to visit the monitoring station, where Scholar Hal had given him a response that was neither quite bad news nor good.
As they had suspected, Rock Village had been utterly obliterated by the red dragon, with the ruins swallowed directly into the depths of the Abyss.
Apart from those five surviving villagers, not a single soul from Rock Village had made it out alive.
After destroying the village, the terrifying red dragon had vanished without a trace, its destination unknown.
An elite team dispatched by the Adventurers' Hall had set up camp near the ruins and waited three full days before the Black Gate pulsed again.
Unexpectedly, the Gate did not simply open as it had before. Instead, it hung suspended in the murky sky.
Upon its door, seething with intense spatial disturbances, two ancient crests were inscribed.
The first was an antique metal scale. In its left pan lay seven human finger bones; in its right glowed a star radiating brilliant blue light.
Their weights were perfectly matched, and the scale did not move so much as a hair, holding in absolute equilibrium.
The second crest depicted a thick chain that bound the entire Gate, its core a heavy iron lock that exuded an air of deep antiquity. Carved clearly onto the lock was a hourglass rune, its sand visibly trickling away.
Upon receiving this intelligence from the elite team, the Adventurers' Hall reached a preliminary conclusion: once the last grain of sand fell through the hourglass, the Black Gate would open once more.
Confronted with this dire situation, the Hall immediately escalated the matter to the royal capital and formally requested the aid of a court mage residing in the Radiant Mage Tower.
Within a few days, a Legendary-tier archmage would arrive in person to place a seal upon the unstable Gate and conduct a thorough analysis of it.
Orum did not fully understand what the Black Gate's descent meant for this world, nor what outcome might follow the Legendary archmage's first encounter with it.
By all reasoning, a Legendary archmage acting under royal command would never take any action that endangered the kingdom's southern frontier.
Yet an intangible sense of impending catastrophe lingered within him regardless, a sharp, incessant alarm that refused to fall silent.
It was as though a voice from the depths of his very soul was bellowing at the top of its lungs.
"Grow stronger. Stronger still. Or death is all that awaits."
Driven by that overwhelming conviction, Orum once again became a cold, tireless training machine, pouring every waking hour and every drop of energy into the relentless pursuit of Blade Dance.
The training itself, at least, was not something he had to endure through gritted teeth alone.
Each execution of Blade Dance was a full-body detonation, wringing every muscle to its limit. A surging, volcanic force coursed through him like a hammer striking iron, then converged in a torrent like a great river rushing into the staff in his hands.
In the early stages, the discomfort had been severe. His arms and chest had hardened like red-hot iron, and the slightest movement sent tearing pain radiating through them.
But with the enhancement to his constitution from the magical beast organs, his body had adapted quickly.
Solid muscle now flexed with fluid ease; savage, unrestrained power erupted like a volcano, and not a trace of stiffness or discomfort remained. In its place surged wave after wave of exhilarating release.
With every execution of Blade Dance, his form grew more precise, and the staff shadows slashing outward in all directions became sharper and swifter.
More than anything, each time he executed Blade Dance, the system panel delivered the immediate, tangible feedback of [Proficiency +1], and that reward mechanism, which gave him concrete proof of progress every few seconds, was something Orum had first experienced while training Thrust. He had found it utterly addictive, impossible to step away from.
Time flew by, and two full weeks passed.
After a half-month of training so grueling it bordered on asceticism, a sharp crack rang out from beneath the rain shelter.
The hundredth training staff in Orum's hands snapped cleanly in two.
[Combat Skill: Blade Dance Proficiency +1]
[Combat Skill: Blade Dance]
[Current Skill Level: LV5 (495/500)]
Searing vapor billowed off Orum in rolling white clouds. Every sculpted muscle across his body was swollen and straining, as if ready to split open.
Within his chest, two powerful hearts thundered at an astonishing pace.
He reached out to the weapon rack, picked up a fresh training staff without a second thought, let his gaze sharpen to a knife's edge, and raised his arms into position.
A fierce gale instantly enveloped him, like a dragon woven from storm winds spiraling around his body and letting out a low, resonant roar.
Tremendous force gathered rapidly within the staff. The training weapon trembled with violent life, humming with a high, keen whine like the rattling tail of a viper coiling to strike.
The next instant, dozens upon hundreds of staff shadows exploded outward, swallowing the black iron dummies standing at every point of the compass.
Charles had once described Blade Dance as perhaps the most suited of all combat skills for fighting multiple opponents simultaneously.
In the hands of a high-tier Sword Saint, it was said to reach perfection, creating a sword field so airtight that not even water could seep through, where not one man among a thousand charging soldiers could come close.
Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom.
The shadows crashed down like a tempest, and all eight black iron dummies shuddered and groaned in violent unison.
But the force in Orum's hands did not diminish in the slightest. A fiercer, more ferocious storm of energy swept in, and Blade Dance ignited once more.
Blade Dance, Second Stage.
A sky's worth of staff shadows swept outward again, pouring down like a sudden cloudburst, hammering relentlessly against the iron shells of the dummies.
Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom.
But this was far from the ceiling of what Orum could do.
With a training staff in hand, he could trigger Blade Dance in continuous succession, each release more devastating than the last, reaching a maximum of five consecutive stages: Blade Dance, Fifth Stage.
Had any adventurer been watching at that moment, they would have been left slack-jawed at what they witnessed.
Before obtaining a class, it was extremely rare for anyone to chain combat skills back to back.
Two consecutive uses was the absolute ceiling for most bodies to endure; three was the stuff of fantasy, as ordinary muscles would simply be torn to shreds. Orum could do five.
What a terrifying, almost monstrous physique.
Rumble.
A blazing bolt of lightning split the sky, followed instantly by a concussive thunderclap. Howling winds raged and tore the Oak Inn's freshly hung sign clean from its post, sending it tumbling and shattering down the street.
Caught in the terrible pressure differential the gale created, the rain shelter above Orum finally gave out, wrenching free with a groan and collapsing in a heap into the far corner of the courtyard.
Rain hammered down on Orum in sheets, soaking him through in an instant, but his skin was so scorchingly hot that the water evaporated the moment it touched him, leaving a thin haze of white mist clinging to his frame.
He took no notice whatsoever of the collapsed shelter, the howling winds, or the drenching rain. His entire being had entered the realm of martial immersion.
In this moment, his world contained only the eight black iron dummies and the staff in his hands.
Riding the tremendous residual force left by Blade Dance's Second Stage, his body erupted with power once more. The ground beneath his feet sank three inches as he stamped out a visible depression.
The storm of shadows surged again.
Blade Dance, Third Stage.
As the sharp cracks splitting the air grew ever more piercing, the shadows continued without pause. Orum triggered the skill again without hesitation.
Blade Dance, Fourth Stage.
The shadows screamed through the air as if the training staff itself had been imbued with the rolling force of wind and thunder, and each swing carried the weight of something that could shatter mountains.
After the Fourth Stage landed, Orum endured the sensation that his limbs were on the verge of rupturing and drove the skill one final time, pushing Blade Dance to the very limit his body could sustain.
Crack.
The training staff at last gave way. At the exact moment the shadows surged outward, it exploded into several fragments, sending splinters flying.
Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom.
The shells of all eight black iron dummies convulsed under the ferocious assault. Eight stark, spiderweb cracks split open across their surfaces, and then the dummies shattered completely, flying apart into pieces.
After two solid weeks of relentless punishment, all eight black iron dummies had finally reached the end of their service life, reduced to a scattered heap of metal fragments on the ground.
What brought Orum genuine elation was the familiar panel notification that appeared at that very moment, arriving right on schedule.
[Proficiency +1]
[Blade Dance] LV5 (500/500) ... [Blade Dance] LV6 (Max)
[Strength +1, Agility +1]
Just as when he had brought Thrust to mastery, the instant the panel notification appeared, it was as though a boundless, majestic force descended from the void, pouring into every bone and sinew of his body like the waters of a vast ocean.
Perhaps because his body had already undergone a comprehensive qualitative transformation, his perception of this force was far more vivid and tangible than it had been the first time.
He felt as though invisible shackles within his body were snapping, one after another, breaking apart with a clean crack.
It was the power of the world's laws, reforging him at a fundamental level, driving his flesh through an all-encompassing evolution.
The explosive strength that governed power, the raw force within his muscles.
The reaction speed that governed agility, his reflexes, his combat instincts.
In this single moment, all of it advanced simultaneously to a higher tier.
This was the resonance and gift bestowed by the world's laws once a combat skill was trained to mastery: a permanent elevation of the practitioner's attributes.
Under the world's laws, before obtaining a class, each individual could receive a maximum of four instances of Law Resonance: two from combat skills, and two from spells.
After obtaining a class, the world's laws would continue to help them break open more shackles buried deeper in the body, guiding them forward step by step toward ever more distant heights of power.
This was precisely why, despite magical beasts being far superior to ordinary humans in strength, physical constitution, and reproductive capacity, humanity had still managed to build a vast and powerful empire, driving those formidable creatures back to the fringes of the world.
It was because humans possessed a greater capacity for learning, and could more readily ascend the path of class progression, reaching the level of Legendary and beyond, all the way to the road of apotheosis.
"Where does the power of these world laws actually come from? Is it a blessing, or an invisible chain?"
Just as Orum was sinking into the profound reflections stirred by the Law Resonance, a plea tinged with unmistakable desolation cut through his thoughts.
"Mr. Orum... could you possibly... could you help me fetch the inn's sign back?"
Standing at the back courtyard entrance, Sofia was soaked to the bone by the wind and rain, looking every bit like a drowned cat.
Her face wore a trace of pitiful distress as she breathed in short, rapid gasps, her chest rising and falling dramatically. It was clear the loss of the sign had cut deep.
"The inn still has a loan to pay off, you see."
"Of course. I'll get it." Orum nodded without hesitation. After living here so long, Sofia and Lila had looked after him well enough to feel something like neighbors. A small favor like this was nothing.
---
"I truly cannot thank you enough. I don't know what I would have done without you, Mr. Orum!" Sofia held open the taproom's heavy door for him, her lovely face suffused with heartfelt gratitude.
"Don't mention it. It was nothing." Orum carried the heavy remnants of the broken sign inside and set them carefully in the entryway.
"Adventurer, sir..." In these tense days of howling winds and pouring rain, Sofia found her eyes drifting to the knotted, boulder-solid muscles on Orum's frame, then to his youthful, striking face, and a faint blush rose unbidden to her cheeks.
A heart that had grown still and quiet began, in that moment, to stir with a gentle flutter, her pulse quickening against her will.
This was the phenomenon psychologists would recognize as the suspension bridge effect: in a moment of crisis, people often develop an acute sense of warmth and reliance toward a person of the opposite sex who is facing the danger alongside them.
Orum, for his part, noticed none of the suddenly charged atmosphere. His mind was entirely occupied with dinner.
Should he have the fragrant braised pork ribs, or the refreshing stir-fried chicken? He was completely oblivious to the soft, lingering gaze Sofia was casting his way.
It was at that moment that the thunder of hoofbeats exploded behind him, urgent and violent.
A carriage drawn by two magnificent warhorses was tearing through the long street, bearing down on them with the force of wind and lightning, closing in on the inn at breathtaking speed.
Orum spun around instantly.
Through the driving rain, he saw two powerful horses crash through the wall of rain like beasts breaching a wave, surging straight for the Oak Inn's front door.
The coachman's skill was exceptional. Under his guidance on the reins, the two horses slowed from a full gallop with the precision of finely tuned machinery, and came to a stop with exact, hair's-breadth accuracy right before the Oak Inn's entrance.
Orum's gaze fixed warily on the coachman, whose figure was entirely hidden beneath a hood, and a powerful instinct surged through him in the same breath: this carriage had come for him.
Then, the next moment, he heard a familiar laugh ring out clearly through the roaring storm.
"Little Orum, what are you standing around for? Get in the carriage!"
The coachman pulled back his hood, revealing a head of brilliantly golden hair that shone even in the dim light, along with a face of almost divine, flawless beauty.
Felix wore his characteristic warm smile as he extended his hand toward Orum.
"The Adventurers' Hall has issued an emergency mission. We move immediately."
"The mission is exceptionally difficult. The last party that took it was completely wiped out."
"I hear you've been deep in combat skill training these past weeks. I certainly hope you've made at least some meaningful progress."
Seeing Felix again after so long, along with Ronald and Raygore inside the carriage, looking as thoroughly rain-soaked as two drowned cats, Orum felt an unexpected warmth rise in his chest, something familiar and long-missed.
He gripped Felix's hand firmly and stepped up into the carriage without hesitation.
"As you wished, Captain. My progress will exceed anything you imagined."
"Hiyah!"
At Felix's sharp command, the two warhorses dug in and surged forward, building from a walk to a gallop, until the carriage roared like a war chariot through the downpour, racing away into the storm.
Mission. Journey. Adventure.
These were the eternal creed of adventurers: rather than waste away in idle years, better to carry courage in your heart, draw your blade, and fight for what lies ahead, because boundless glory and treasure wait in the unknown distance, awaiting the arrival of the bold.
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~ Push the story forward with your Power Stones