Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion (Book 7) - Chapter 9 - Training Trance

The process of pushing out the impurities from Xavier’s body didn’t take as long as he’d imagined.

When he’d begun, pushing out that first bit of terrible-smelling sludge, he’d thought the entire process would take him weeks, maybe even months. But once he’d gotten started, pushing more and more of it out of him—the smell overwhelming him no matter how hard he worked on compartmentalising it—the process seemed almost…

Automatic.

It spurred something within him. Something he didn’t fully understand. Rapidly, as the black substance came out of every inch of his skin, Xavier began to feel an intense amount of pain, along with other sensations that felt somewhat familiar.

He ended up falling to the ground, writhing in the grass, unable to control his own body as something fundamental changed within it.

Xavier’s body had changed many times since he’d been integrated into the System. Whenever he gained more Strength, Toughness, or Speed, it changed. Whenever he advanced, it changed. When he’d consumed beast parts, it had changed.

And when he’d become dragonkin, it had changed more than ever.

This process felt similar to all of those, and yet different.

More… Perfect.

Somehow, even through all the pain, he could tell that the changes spurred on by expelling the impurities were altering his body more effectively than anything else he’d ever been through.

The thought that he was advancing again flashed through his mind, yet no notifications had appeared in his vision. Despite the pain, he would have seen them if they came.

Besides, it was impossible for him to advance. He wasn’t Level 300 yet. He couldn’t push forward to C Grade. He didn’t even have working cores!

And yet, to him, this felt like advancing.

He felt it inside him. With all his will, he used his newly refined spiritual sense to examine what was happening. His muscles and tendons were strengthening. His bones. His skin. His organs and the very veins his blood ran through.

Even his very blood itself, where a good portion of the impurities his body had held had been.

These things had happened before, to different degrees. With his attributes as high as they were, and being D Grade, he’d already strengthened and improved these parts of his body. And, every time he hit a certain threshold with one of his attributes, it improved him even more.

And now, everything is becoming better… Striving toward perfection…

The process lasted for perhaps an hour. When the pain had stopped, the impurities all expelled from his body, and the changes had come to an end, Xavier picked himself up from the ground.

The difference he felt was instantaneous.

The air he breathed felt richer. The clarity of the world before him was enhanced. His hearing, his sense of touch and smell, all of it had been improved.

And his body…

The sludge, to his great relief, had all fallen off him, sloughing off like a snake shedding its skin. He’d thought he would have to scrub his body until he bled to get rid of it and was glad that hadn’t come to pass. The impurities sat nearby, a large black puddle on the ground, smelling fouler than ever.

Xavier stepped away from the black puddle. The time dilation field was still in effect. He carved the field, altering where the edge of the barrier resided so the black substance was no longer inside it. The smell persisted—it was in the air.

He tilted his head to the side in thought, then carved the time dilation field wider one way toward the trees. At the same time, he flapped his wings, churning the air, pushing the foul smell away. Then, he pushed the time dilation field behind him.

It didn’t take long for the bad air to cycle out of the immediate area, ridding the field of the putrid smell.

The smell no longer bothering him, he focused back on the changes that he’d gone through. He wasn’t wearing his armour. Instead, he was in a plain black shirt and jeans, the kind he wore before the integration. His armour was in a large backpack off to the side of the time dilation field.

His clothes were, surprisingly, unharmed by the black sludge. He’d had them enchanted with self-cleaning and self-repair runes and was glad for that.

Beside the backpack was all of the rations he needed to maintain himself inside this field—enough for two years—for food and water were still a necessity. He’d had others from the town buy what he needed from the System Shop.

He missed his Storage Ring.

Xavier looked first at his fingers. The skin was smooth, just as it had been before. He bore no callouses from his weapon training. Those weren’t something that plagued people with the ability to heal like Denizens. He ran a finger along his palm.

No, it isn’t as smooth as before. It’s smoother.

He didn’t need to test a blade know the skin would be tougher and harder to pierce. He could feel that easily enough.

Xavier made a fist, flexing the muscles in his right forearm and bicep. The muscles didn’t look stronger than before, but the strength he felt… It was something else. Instinctively, he knew it was a huge step up.

After examining his body a little longer, and flexing the different muscles in his arms, chest, abs, legs, back, and wings, he took a deep breath and released it with a smile.

Even my lungs feel more efficient. I thought they were powerful before.

Xavier wanted to draw his soul bound weapon—even in jeans, the sword belt was still wrapped about his waist, with Bones sheathed in the form of a longsword—but he hesitated.

First, he began moving through an unarmed combat form.

Xavier had become adept at unarmed combat when he’d first gotten his claws—before he’d become dragonkin. That was when his body had been changing in mysterious, unexpected ways from all of the beast parts he’d been integrating into himself, a practice he’d stopped once he’d gained enough to change his race.

Fighting unarmed wasn’t something he did as often as fighting with a weapon. The versatility of fighting with his soul bound weapon, having the ability to shift it into anything he wished, had become the main way he fought for melee combat.

But he still did fight unarmed some of the time, and not only because he’d needed to in order to rank up skills like Red In Tooth And Claw, which boosted most of his stats while unarmed.

His soul bound weapon could shift and sink into his skin to reinforce his forearm, hand, and especially claws, making them longer and sharper than before, but Xavier wanted to experience what they were like without that boost.

Xavier looked at the tops of his fingers and extended his dragonkin claws with a thought. He smiled at the sight of them, shaking his head. Sometimes he barely thought about the fact he wasn’t human anymore. Even as long as he’d been dragonkin, it was still a little strange.

But he couldn’t help finding it incredibly awesome, as well.

He blinked, tilted his head to the side, stared at the claws. Comparing them to a memory of the last time he did this without his soul bound weapon confirmed his suspicion. His claws had grown longer.

Xavier didn’t have anything appropriate near him to test their level of sharpness, but he didn’t need to. He knew they were both tougher and sharper than before, even if he didn’t know exactly how much they’d improved. There was even a part of him that insisted they would now be more powerful than they had been with the soul bound weapon’s boost. Though he didn’t know why he thought that, it felt right.

He moved forward and swiped at an imaginary opponent, stepping with his left as his lead leg. The moment he did, he stumbled. The strength of the movement surprised him. His right leg had pushed harder than he’d intended, and what he’d meant to be a step turned into a bound.

Trying to catch his balance only made him fall, face-first into the soft grass.

Xavier lay there a moment, laughing into the dirt. He must have looked a complete fool. There had been so very many times that he’d gained vast amount of Strength and Speed, taking him to new heights of power. Each of those times, he’d managed to—relatively easily—adjust. Adjusting to the difference in the movements of his body as it grew more powerful was almost a skill in itself.

He’d thought it was a skill he’d mastered.

Evidently not.

But as foolish as he must have looked, all Xavier felt in that moment with hysterical glee. He still didn’t understand what he’d done. Not truly. But he knew it had propelled him forward in unforeseen ways.

He remained there, laughing into the dirt like an insane person, for far longer than he would ever admit.

Finally, Xavier slowly picked himself up, almost as though he were drunk. Small, careful movements brought him to his feet.

After looking down at his body once more, he stepped and swiped again, adjusting for his newfound power, only to find he still overbalanced. Since entering that clearing, he’d spent a great deal of time relearning his combat skills, feeling clumsy as he found his body strangely unfamiliar with movements that were once so natural.

Now, it was though that had all started over again.

He did not allow himself to feel frustrated by this. Inside the time dilation field, time was once more on his side.

This could only be a good thing.

~

Xavier moved through a myriad of unarmed combat movements and forms thousands and thousands of times over before he drew Bones and shifted it into a scythe-staff, beginning the process again.

Sword. Dagger. Spear. Axe. Warhammer. Halberd.

He relearnt how to use each of them now his body had once more changed. He did not, however, use a bow. He currently lacked the ability to create new bone arrows, and he couldn’t access his Storage Ring to gain more. He also didn’t want to stop the time dilation field and get someone to purchase arrows from the System Shop.

He didn’t want to lose the time. He could focus on the bow later.

Not that arrows did any good against the World Destroyer when I faced it on the eightieth floor…

Xavier paid no attention to the passing of time as he went through the different movements over and over again. It was as though he were in a trance. His level of focus was unlike anything he’d ever experienced, his determination harder than it had ever been.

That single-minded focus on relearning how his body moved and perfecting his skills with all the different weapons he’d mastered in the past made him blind to everything else happening around him. Blind even to the processes in his own body. All he needed to know was that the time dilation field was still in effect to continue to push himself.

On occasion, as he trained, a notification would pop up into his vision. As with the passing of time, he paid the notifications no attention. He would get to them when he was ready, and not a moment before.

It wasn’t until the time dilation field stopped working that Xavier was thrown out of his intensely focused training. He stopped, mid-swing, at the feeling of a hot breeze rolling into the clearing. Then he caught a whiff of the foul-smelling puddle of black sludge that was the impurities he’d expelled nearby and crinkled his nose.

The Time Alteration spell pattern that powered the field was gone.

For a moment, all Xavier felt was confusion. He’d been inside the time dilation field for several months by his own time before he’d started this physical training after the impurities had been expelled. The field, he’d thought, had enough energy to last for close to two years. Even if he’d overestimated that, it still should have lasted him at least a single year.

It couldn’t possibly have come down on its own. Couldn’t possibly have run out of energy so fast.

With his enhanced senses—ignoring the putrid black puddle—he pushed out his awareness, trying to feel if there were any threats nearby. Even controlling the time dilation field through a spell pattern, he was confident he would have felt if an outside presence were trying to affect the field, despite his training-trance.

He definitely would have felt if something had broken the time dilation field.

Still, in case he was wrong, he quickly searched his memories.

There had been nothing.

Could a being be so subtle in their breaking of my time dilation field that I couldn’t even feel it happening?

Before following that line of thought, he quickly checked something. Instead of bringing up his entire stat sheet, Xavier simply brought up his age. When he’d entered this time dilation field, he’d been incredibly surprised to find that he was 29 years old. Whenever he looked at his stat sheet, his attention was taken straight to his attributes, spells, and skills. Even with the ability to speed read and a perfect memory, if he didn’t turn his attention toward something, it wouldn’t come to the top of his mind.

He’d known a lot of time had passed since his cores had been shattered, but even then, the majority of the time he’d aged had been inside time dilation fields.

The notification stating his age came before his vision.

Age: 31

Xavier took a stumbling step backward.

No. That’s impossible. I couldn’t have spent two years inside that time dilation field!

Xavier stood there for a long moment, absorbing the shock of what had happened. It didn’t make any sense. Yes, the time dilation field could have lasted for that length of time, but he couldn’t have lasted that long.

He couldn’t have trained, non-stop, for a year and a half. Even if he had the focus to pull off something like that, since his cores had shattered, he needed to eat and sleep every single day. Even before his cores had shattered, he was sure he wouldn’t have been able to do such a thing. Even D Grades needed to sleep occasionally.

But…

His body had changed.

Xavier shut his eyes and felt the sensations inside of him. He wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t thirsty. He wasn’t tired. And despite all the training he’d gone through, he didn’t so much as have a drop of sweat on his brow.

He didn’t even feel exhausted.

With a thought, he entered the rooms he’d been rebuilding in his mind. As swiftly as his mind could manage—which was incredibly swift—he went through his recent memories. Time may have lost all meaning to him as he’d trained, but if he ever wished to, he had access to an internal sense of time passing.

It simply wasn’t something he tended to concern himself with.

He sped through all the memories of his training and found that the impossible was true.

For a year-and-seven-months’ inside of his time dilation field, Xavier had trained nonstop. As he went through the memories, he noticed things that he hadn’t paid any attention to while training. His body, instinctively cultivating Celestial Energy and cycling it through his channels, feeding that energy in a trickle to his muscles and organs, taking away his need to eat or sleep or even take a moment’s break.

Bones hadn’t remained silent during this time, at least at first. There had been several attempts by the soul bound weapon to speak with Xavier after enough time had elapsed during his training-trance.

He’d stopped trying after a while.

Xavier hadn’t even noticed.

He blinked out of the memories and shook his head, struggling to believe any of what he’d done. But the impossible was something he’d become used to.

So, he took it in stride.