MT 288 - This Chapter is Not a Training Montage

Tavio caved my skull in with a hammer.

It was the third time he’d done it that day.

I rolled with the hit to reduce the impact and released a groan of frustration when I lost my footing and stumbled. I lowered Gracorvus and dismissed Somncres, then reached up to explore the grapefruit-sized indent in my head.

Tavio took my irritation in stride, choosing to use this moment–as he had many, many others–as a teaching opportunity.

“I think there is much agony you could be circling with your shield, given its unique countryside,” he said. 

For a moment, I seriously considered how I could use Gracorvus to circle myself some agony. I stopped poking at my broken head and squinted at the muscular, brown-furred Littan. His facial features were all in the wrong places.

“Fabio,” I said. “Brain dramage. No learn good right now.” I held up five fingers. “Gimme ten minutes.”

Tavio leaned to one side to get a better look at the damage to my cranium. His whiskers pulled back as he sucked in a sympathetic breath and nodded.

“Very swell,” he said, or something similar. “Fake a short break.”

I made my way to the ruined remains of a tree that had been the victim of one of our spars, leaning heavily to the left to compensate for the ground trying to toss me onto my side. I sat down heavily on the ragged stump, my derrière obliterating enough of its splintered shards to create a comfortable seat. 

We were camping out in a Shields dungeon called The Baobab’s Whip, about fifty miles deep into the Less-Than-Habitable Forest. The Dungeon consisted of a one-mile radius of thick vegetation, at the center of which was a small clearing dominated by the fattest tree I’d ever seen. At the top of the tree’s protuberant trunk was a single curving branch that ended in a sharpened point. 

Just below this primitive-looking spear, several more branches wrapped around the tree, giving it the appearance of a coiled spring. I knew from painful experience that each of these ‘coils’ would unravel to reveal a new branch that would whip out at incredible speeds. The moment you proved you could block one branch, another would join, forcing you to face down two branches, then three branches, then four, and the branches just kept coming, seemingly without end. The titular Baobab whipped you until you were either forced to retreat or until you became a mess of quivering pulp. As an aside, this is how I’d discovered that I could survive after half my body had become a chunky human slushie.

To my chagrin, relentlessly throwing myself at the tree had only gotten me so far. I could destroy the tree using any number of methods, whereupon the Dungeon would disappear and relocate, leaving me with nothing to show for my efforts. By the time I found the Dungeon again, the tree had repaired or fully regrown itself. Tavio pointed out that I’d been relying on my durability and regeneration to deal with the tree’s attacks, while using those moments to make space for a counter. That wasn’t the point of the challenge. 

Killing the tree wasn’t the answer. The only way to defeat the tree was to weather all of its attacks using my shield or a related skill. Sadly, my body didn’t count as a shield, and growing back minced limbs wasn’t a shield-related skill. My arguments to the contrary fell upon deaf ears, which was understandable since the Dungeon didn’t have any ears.

This is where Tavio had stepped in, opting to give me some more actionable feedback than the Baobab was willing to provide through its wordless delivery of bodily harm. Thus, while I waited for my regeneration to repair my crushed gray matter, I thought over my last exchange with Tavio and what I could learn from it. My cognitive functions were hampered, but thanks to Body of Theseus, I still had 70% of the capacity lost to the head wound. I estimated that about a third of my brain was demolished, meaning I was only really down about ten percent of my functionality. 

This left me with plenty of noggin to muse upon the lesson and simmer over how Tavio was a frustrating opponent in melee. I’d known this already, but it was further beaten into me throughout the last week of intensive training. I’d probably spent more time regenerating health than actually fighting during those seven days, but I couldn’t argue with the results.

Between the Baobab’s tender instruction and Tavio’s no-nonsense lessons, my Shields skill had gone from 30 to 39. It was a single point from the next evolution, but that final skill level was elusive. After my Shields gains had slowed to a crawl, Tavio had begun narrowing what skills I was allowed to use during our duels. Naturally, Tavio reduced his own skill use in kind, and we were now both down to two intrinsics each. We both had Blunt, we both had Shields, and we’d agreed that everything else was off the table. 

This favored Tavio to a laughable degree, but we weren’t here for me to win any matches against the brawny Littan. We were here so that I could learn to use my shield more effectively. When it came to people who knew how to work a shield, Tavio was apparently among the best in the world. His Shields skill sat at 70, and while I was struggling over my final point to make it to 40, I took solace in the fact that the major’s own skill hadn’t gone up a single time.

That simply meant that Tavio hadn’t been challenged enough to develop any profound insights into the art of the block, but I comfortably ignored the idea that my prowess was insufficient to serve as a stepping stone to the Littan’s own greatness.

When it came to hammering, Tavio’s Blunt skill was also at 70.

In fact, Tavio had a lot of skills at Level 70, which is where most Delvers stalled out. Well, that wasn’t true. Most Delvers never got anything above 40, but of those that did, most of them never broke past 70.

Regardless, facing down an opponent of such expertise was giving me a fantastic amount of experience dealing with high-level bullshit. Tavio’s hammer strikes had Penetration with all damage types, bypassing at least half of my DR. If they dealt damage, they applied the Stupefied status, which prevented me from casting spells or using focus. I wasn’t allowed to use spells that weren’t shield-related anyway, so the latter was more important for our training. Any time Tavio landed a hit, I could no longer split my mind into two threads; something I’d come to rely on quite heavily ever since Avarice had sold me my Focus Trinket.

Further, Tavio’s Blunt attacks caused my shield arm to go limp for an instant after each block, allowing him to get in one or two strikes while my arm recovered from becoming a wet noodle. Those hits then applied Distracted, diminishing my awareness of anything outside of Tavio. I’d initially thought that didn’t matter much since it was just the two of us in the Dungeon, but Tavio had disabused me of that notion by cunningly maneuvering me into the Baobab’s range. I was swiftly pummeled into oblivion from behind.

If all that weren’t enough, every blow also threatened to send me flying for more than a hundred feet through the Forest, and it was only after some serious debate that Tavio agreed to let me use Gravity Anchor to counter the effect. I won the argument by pointing out that I’d created the skill specifically to prevent that exact thing from happening after my first brawl with the Littan in Hiward, years prior. Since Gravity Anchor’s intended function was to keep me in one place while blocking, it was, in the most technical sense, a shield-related skill.

Winning that argument had even gotten me a level in Shields, which was the first time I’d gotten a level in a martial skill purely through an intellectual exercise. The verbal spar had helped firm up my understanding of how I used Gravity Anchor and how it was intertwined with the use of my shield.

Now, the problem I was facing was that I just couldn’t block everything Tavio was throwing my way. It was the same problem I was having with the Baobab. Tavio accomplished it by temporarily deboning my arm, whereas the Baobab did it by attacking a whole lot, really fast, and from multiple directions.

I needed to be able to block without the use of my arm, and I also needed to block from multiple angles simultaneously. By the time my head had fully regenerated, I felt a fog lift from my comprehension. The answer was obvious, and I felt stupid for how much I was underutilizing Gracorvus.

I stood up and got Tavio’s attention, interrupting some kind of martial kata he was performing.

“My shield’s countryside is its ability to fly and separate itself into multiple parts,” I said.

“I… do not follow. Your shield has a countryside?”

“No, but that’s what I heard you say earlier, and I like the sound of it.”

“I said nothing about the countryside. That does not even make sense.”

“It’s a metaphor.”

“For what?”

“If blocking attacks is my shield’s town center, then its other abilities are its countryside,” I said.

Tavio scratched behind his ear but knew better than to argue with me. During our time together, he’d learned.

Boy, how he’d learned.

“Okay,” he said, slowly. “Then take me on a tour of this… countryside.”

I held up my shield and mentally commanded it to hover in front of me. The shield detached from my armguard and hung in the air. 

The original version of Gracorvus consisted of eight hexagonal slabs. One slab lived in the armguard and served as a home point for the other slabs to reference when moving. Another slab sat directly on top of the one in the armguard, serving as the center of the shield when attached to my arm. That was surrounded by six more slabs, forming a honeycomb pattern.

After the shield was nearly destroyed during our exploits in The Cage, Varrin’s grandpa, Papa Junior, had repaired and improved the shield. The legendary smith added another ring of hexagonal slabs, making the shield much larger and more than doubling the number of slabs.

Looking at the item now, I began to realize that it might be time for another round of repairs. The shield was covered in pitting and deep scratches. A few of the slabs even had thin cracks running through them, and the outer material had chipped away in several places, exposing the dark blue material at its core.

Granted, I’d blocked a mega-redwood-sized staff swung by a 700-foot kaiju three months prior. That the shield could hold up to that kind of abuse at all was a testament to its durability and the skill of the craftsman who’d made it. I’d have repaired it myself, but I didn’t have a high enough Smithing skill to be confident that I wouldn’t mess something up.

I sent Grotto a mental note to see if he could get me an appointment with Varrin’s gramps. I then ignored the resulting tirade about how he wasn’t my secretary, reminded him that he literally introduced himself to people as my majordomo and was thus exactly my secretary, then got on to the business at hand.

“The main body of Gracorvus has nineteen pieces that I can mentally direct at the cost of mana,” I said. As I spoke, I had seven of the haggard slabs break away to form a smaller shield. “This gives the shield a lot of potential for creative use and applications. Potential that I’ve been squandering.”

“Yes,” said Tavio. I frowned at the interruption, and he gestured for me to continue.

“Back when I first got Gracorvus, I had a lot of uses for this ability. It gave me a mana-intensive way to fly, or I could reconfigure the shield into a sort of shitty punching dagger and bash somebody in the throat. I also used it to block for my allies from a distance. I even have an evolution to make that last one more effective.

“As we grew in Level, a lot of these functions became overshadowed by other abilities,” I continued. “Therianthropy from Physical magic lets me fly without spending mana, Somncres is vastly more powerful than any weapon form I could assemble Gracorvus into, and my allies are usually either too far away or moving too fast for the shield to keep up and get into position to block attacks. Overall, it’s been faster for me to move myself between an incoming attack and my ally.”

“How fast is the shield on its own?”

“It scales linearly with Intelligence,” I said. “Right now, it can go up to fifty-five yards per second, which is about one hundred and twelve miles per hour.”

“Hmm, I agree. That is much too slow.”

“However!” I said, raising a finger. “Why move the shield when I can do this?” I mana-shaped Shortcut and targeted the smaller shield I’d split off from Gracorvus. The targe-sized shield instantly appeared behind Tavio. The Littan glanced back over his shoulder, then turned to me and nodded.

“Interesting,” he said. “But what is the range of your version of Shortcut?”

“If I don’t want to trigger a long cooldown, it’s currently at about 530 feet. But that’s not what’s important here.”

Tavio watched me expectantly until I raised an eyebrow at him. Once he realized I wouldn’t continue without his participation, he shook his head and gave in. “Then what is important, Arlo?”

“This means that Shortcut is a shield-related skill!”

Tavio pursed his lips and looked up and away for a moment. “Your definition of ‘shield-related’ is becoming too loose, I think.”

I let the criticism roll right off me and continued with my dubious conclusions. “Shortcut costs some mana, more when I shape it, but it’s a way to instantly move my shield across a short to medium distance. But why spend mana? Why even move my shield at all?” I held up my hands and waggled my fingers towards myself in a “come on” gesture. “Try and hit me.”

Tavio hefted his hammer and swung straight on without hesitation. Halfway through his weapon’s arc, I opened a small Closet portal in front of the head of the weapon. The exit led to the surface of Gracorvus behind Tavio, and when his hammer suddenly met resistance, he wasn’t expecting it. Tavio was a master of melee combat, however, and the sudden jerk of his hammer meeting a surprise force only interrupted him for an instant. Still, that was an instant that could be exploited.

As I was congratulating myself on my insight, Tavio immediately abandoned the hit, pivoted, and brought the hammer around from the other side.

The Littan was a simple man. You ask him to try and hit you with a hammer, and he’s going to do his best to hit you with that hammer.

I swore and opened another portal.