Return of the Woodcutter

After buying the necessary items from D3 and the bazar, Aito headed for the training ground with a large heavy backpack he had purchased to avoid buying multiple inventory bags since it was cheaper this way considering the size of the items he carried. Reflecting back on his last interaction with Gwen, he started to regret his choices.

First, he had accepted to tell her about his basic stats, omitting none of them since he thought they weren't anything special apart from his strength, but he didn't see a reason to hide it.

Second, when it had come to his skills, he had been pickier about them and only revealed the following.

2. Skills:

Passive:

- Ax Mastery Lv2

- Shield Mastery Lv1

- Weapon Throw Mastery Lv1

Active:

- Durability Lv1

- Shield Bash Lv1

- Ax Throw Lv1

- Whirlwind Lv1

He had kept the most unusual-looking ones hidden. He planned on using the future knowledge he'd acquire from the moderator and train them in secret. Aito wanted to appear as normal as possible—even with his apparent fame in the Tower—to keep his trump cards to himself. The less other people knew, the better. This was as far as he was willing to go for the sake of training with Gwen.

Finally, what bothered him the most was the money issue. Considering it could last 30 days, it meant 30000 TPs total, added to it the myriads of items he had to buy, without taking into account other supplies, he roughly estimated that his account balance would downscale to 40000 or 50000 TPs at the end of the training session.

'Hopefully not less,' he thought, reaching the third floor where Gwen was sitting on her bench, smoking a pipe of dried green leaves while watching the few challengers running on the track field and a distant figure who appeared to shoot arrows at targets that hadn't been there before.

"Got everything?" Gwen asked, blowing a cloud of white smoke in his direction.

He nodded and put the huge backpack down at her feet. Gwen verified its content. Satisfied, she stored it in her inventory.

Aito wanted to ask why but stopped when she used her long pipe to point at the track field.

"Let's start with a warm-up," she said. "Run ten laps and come back to me when you're done."

'Just running laps?' He thought, disappointed. He had been expecting something less… common. However, he already invested too much into it. Complaining wouldn't help his case.

Since he had promised her to follow her regimen by the letter, before going shopping, he wouldn't object unless Gwen's coaching really made no sense.

"Okay," he said, starting to remove his armor parts for more comfort. After all, the others challengers were all wearing light clothes.

"Keep it on," she said. "You gotta get used to wearing heavy armor when running. Considering your level 3 strength, thirty kilograms of steel on your body shouldn't be heavy. Also, keep your weapon in hand."

Aito grunted in response. He was already used to wearing an armor and weapon all day long from the black trial, just maybe not as heavy as the ones he currently had.

He turned around and started to run.

Gwen followed him with her gaze, checked that no other challengers were around him, then used her moderator's rights to summon an archery straw target in the air a few meters in front of him, thinking it shouldn't hurt him.

The straw target caught him by surprise and crashed on his head. Knowing this couldn't have happened naturally—whatever that meant—Aito pieced the puzzle together and turned towards the giantess that simply gestured him to keep going.

'Is she going to keep doing this?' He complained. A reply to his question quickly came in form of another straw target dropping on his head.

'Damn you!' He cursed her internally, running to avoid getting hit again, albeit faster this time.

The few runners he passed by eyed him oddly. After all, he was running with a full plated armor, and where the man went, straw targets followed.

One woman with blue eyes holding a bow, he couldn't see since he was too focused on dodging falling items, eyed him with a complicated gaze.

A mixture of hostility and gratefulness.

***

Around one hour and a half later.

Gwen watched Aito coming back to her, or more accurately, felt his soul moving at a running speed a hundred meters away. She refilled her white pipe with brum leaves, infused her mana into the pipe to activate the delicate flame mechanism to light the leaves, and breathed in.

Her body couldn't be affected by the brum leaf's calming properties since it had almost reached a level comparable to Englad's Pope. Even so, she liked to smoke more by habit than to be high.

She took a puff, summoned one last straw target that Aito dodged, and waited for him to reach her. He appeared tired, but not quite as tired as she expected he would be.

'Weird, he should be exhausted by now,' she thought. 'Whatever, let's proceed to the next exercise.'

"What was… that for?" Aito asked, panting.

"To train your stamina and overall awareness. You weren't bad, but could use improvement." She said, summoning a glass bottle of water before offering it to him. "You'll do that every morning as a warmup."

Aito took it, drunk like there was no tomorrow, and wiped his mouth using his arm guard. "Can you really call it a warmup?"

"Aye, the mean little bastards I train can cover that distance in less than thirty minutes." She said.

Although, those "mean little bastards", aka foot soldiers she talked about averaged level 3, Gwen glossed over that detail and preferred to keep it to herself. The little man needed to learn that complaining would do him no good.

Aito sighed and asked, still panting, "What's… next?"

"While you slowly regain your stamina, go familiarize yourself with the usage of Durability using your weapon, since I assume you only got the skill recently. Also, disable your skill as soon as it's activated. Once you've run out of mana, use these." She said, throwing four colorless beads storing blue clouds of energy; mana cores Aito had previously bought in the magic district. "Drawing mana from these works exactly like mana infusion, but backward. You'll figure it out, eventually. If you really can't, just swallow the mana core."

He looked skeptical, but nodded and went on to do his business.

Gwen's training regimen was fairly simple—to her, at least. She would rotate between basic stats training and skill training.

Training him to use all the skills he had been willing to show her to manual activation would be impossible. Not in a month's time, at least. He would be more proficient with them, but that was it.

So she decided to focus on Durability, for now, if he at least managed to activate this skill manually, then it'll be an excellent asset for him to reach the top floors. Clearing them was another matter.

Fortunately, Aito had high basic stats for a level 1 warrior class, particularly his strength. She attributed that to either an information he hadn't been willing to give her and the black trial on which Aito had probably been forced to surpass his limits times and times again.

Usually, a challenger who had a warrior class would have one basic stat at level 2, but he had almost all of them at Lv2, safe for his Lv3 strength.

Thankfully, to her knowledge, he hadn't a Lv4 strength. With his current body and soul level, he wouldn't be able to handle it correctly. It could even be dangerous and tear his muscles apart if abused.

The moderator was intent on doing her best to keep him alive to recruit him later. Aito seemed too stubborn to be convinced to stay on the third floor for the next two months. Eventually, with or without her accord, he would ascend the Tower.

So training him to the best of her abilities was the only option the giantess had if she wanted to increase his chances of coming back alive from the top floors.

Feeling dozens of souls coming her way, she turned towards the staircase leading down to the second floor. Sure enough, a bald head showed soon as a furious man with a bruised face and missing teeth entered the third floor.

Sam was followed by dozens of people with a clear intent of killing her temporary disciple.

'Foolish,' she thought, wondering why they would be as stupid as to try killing someone in front of a moderator, despite knowing it was forbidden.

From her bench, Gwen sent a wave of invisible force towards them, halting their steps. Aside from Sam, the others seem to suffocate, barely able to breathe.

The bald man turned towards her. Wanting to talk things out. Probably. But she shut his mouth by increasing the pressure. Her point made, she retracted her invisible attack and gestured for them to go back from where they came.

Sam stamped away, furious and powerless.

Gwen knew the baldy wouldn't leave it at that, but they couldn't attack while Aito was here. Although, they would certainly attack the little man on his way to his room. His problem, not hers.. If Aito couldn't deal with it, he wouldn't deserve the title a few legendary figures of Iris bore—though compare to them, he didn't seem to have lost his mind.

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