Chương 9

Rudra logged out of the game. The transition back to reality was jarring. It was 4: 00 AM. As he lay in the darkness of his bedroom, a strange, phantom ache rippled through his muscles. He felt the distinct burn of a heavy workout, even though his real, injured body hadn't moved an inch. He slipped out of bed to use the restroom, only to freeze in the hallway. His mother, Meera, was standing in the kitchen in her bathrobe. Her arms were crossed.

"Do you want to explain why you are awake at four in the morning with broken ribs?" she asked, her voice dangerously calm.

"Uh. I was playing?" Rudra tried for a harmless smile. The scolding was immediate. She threatened to unplug the capsule right then and there. Rudra panicked and pulled the ultimate sympathy card.

"Mom, I can't move out here without it hurting," he pleaded, keeping his voice carefully pathetic.

"In the game, my body works. I can actually run. If I just sit in this bed all day eating plain oatmeal, I'm going to lose my mind." The maternal guilt worked. Meera sighed, rubbed her temples, and reluctantly let it go.

"Go back to sleep. And don't expect me to cook you anything greasy just because you exercised in a video game." After finally escaping, he managed to sleep for two real-world hours before eagerly climbing right back into the capsule. When he materialized back at the Seabreak camp, he was immediately ambushed. Kaelen, Luna, Brick, and Galahad surrounded him. Even the quiet girl, Echo, hovered near the back.

"Bro, how did you not log out from the pain settings?" Kaelen yelled, waving his hands.

"You swung that stick for four hours straight without complaining once!"

"Are you an esports pro? Let's party up!" Brick boomed.

"Teach me thy ways, noble warrior!" Galahad pleaded. Rudra froze. His social battery instantly plummeted to zero. He could handle polite conversations with NPCs just fine, but high-energy networking with random gamers was his absolute nightmare.

"Uh. Stretching. Gotta stretch," Rudra muttered. He blindly accepted their friend requests just to get them to shut up, pushed past them, and bolted toward the northern gate. Time to grind, he thought, letting out a massive breath of relief. But today, the system decided to be stingy. During the morning stamina drills, Rudra had to work noticeably harder than the day before. While the other recruits ran their usual four miles on the loose sand, Gareth forced Rudra to run eight.

When they marched into the freezing ocean, Gareth made him wade out until the icy water reached his chin. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Despite the workout being twice as hard, the system payout remained exactly the same as yesterday: five Stamina points. Diminishing returns, Rudra realized, spitting out a mouthful of freezing saltwater. The stronger my base stats get, the harder I have to push to exceed the limit.

He confirmed this during the Strength and Agility blocks. Gareth doubled the weight of his dragging nets and tightened the gaps in the evasion drills. He pushed Rudra to the absolute brink of failure, but the stat rewards capped out at the exact same numbers. When the lunch bell finally rang, Rudra practically inhaled his food. He ate three huge bowls of meat stew and ended up swiping half a loaf of bread from a terrified-looking Luna just to refill his empty stamina bar.

"Hey! I was eating that!" Luna protested.

"You chose a bow. You're an archer. You don't need the heavy carbs," Rudra mumbled around a mouthful of bread. During the afternoon weapons training, he didn't slip back into that magical 'Deep Immersion' trance. But his growth was still steady. Gareth ordered them to perform five hundred basic stances, followed by a hundred strikes against a wooden scarecrow. Finally, they moved to supervised sparring. This was where Rudra's freakish hand-eye coordination shined.

Sparring against veteran militiamen allowed him to quickly analyze and steal their footwork, slowly integrating their techniques into his Basic Staff Mastery. At 5: 45 PM, Gareth gathered the recruits. He ripped into Brick's terrible balance, Luna's lack of focus, and Galahad's absolute refusal to dodge. When Gareth finally stopped in front of Rudra, the old veteran didn't yell.

"Your body is getting used to the pain, recruit," Gareth grunted.

"If we keep going at this pace, you'll plateau. So, starting tomorrow, I'm going to make your life a living hell." The other players shot Rudra horrified looks. Rudra just grinned.

"Yes, sir." If Gareth wanted to up the difficulty, that meant the stat points would keep flowing. He ended the physical day with +5 to Stamina, Strength, and Agility, along with a massive +6 to his Persistence stat. As soon as they were dismissed, Rudra bolted from the yard before the other players could corner him again. He ran straight to the Temple of Asterion, slapped another silver coin onto Old Medivah's table, and buried his face in ancient books until midnight.

He walked out of the temple with another +6 Intelligence. For the next four days, Rudra trapped himself in this grueling, highly optimized loop. But exactly as Gareth warned, the difficulty spiked hard. Instead of separating the drills, Gareth started combining them. By Day 6, Rudra wasn't just running in the loose sand—he was sprinting inside the freezing ocean water while dragging a weighted net.

"Fuck my life," Rudra gasped, his virtual lungs burning as he dragged the heavy stones through the tide. The weapons training evolved too. Gareth forced him to wear iron weights around his wrists and swapped his standard staff for a dense, waterlogged variant. In the sparring rings, Rudra's technical skill had actually caught up to the instructors, but he was constantly beaten down by their vastly superior levels. Meanwhile, his midnight library sessions yielded wildly fluctuating returns.

As his mental capacity expanded, basic books stopped giving him stats. He earned nine Intelligence points on Day 4, but only a measly two points by Day 6. Plus, his wallet was draining fast. He only had two silver coins left to his name. Finally, the sun rose on Day 7. It was the final day of the Murray Militia boot camp. The day they would be formally assessed on everything they had learned. Standing in the quiet dirt yard before the instructors arrived, Rudra took a deep breath.

His stomach was already rumbling for breakfast, but he pushed the hunger aside and swiped his fingers through the air.

"Status window."