Waking up below an unfamiliar roof, in an unfamiliar bed, Rune started his new month by making an energy loop inside his body, activating the revitalization spell.

He then returned to the training room and saw Utopia using the moving pillars as well as the active offensive training modules.

This room didn’t only contain the anti-gravity module, it was covered in virtual projections technology that could make anything appear.

And when those virtual constructs remained blue, it implied that nothing touched them, if a blue pillar turned red then it meant you “collided” with it and failed to properly use the momentum technique.

If anyone wanted to know the optimization degree they could still possibly reach, they just had to check the monitor screen at the center, where the anti-gravity engine was, and read how close they were to fail.

Looking at Utopia doing what a truly original body shouldn’t be doing, Rune felt very alienated.

He only just touched the second level, the moving pillars, and Utopia was already flexing his talent for the momentum technique.

Rune had never been jealous, envy and other religious sins only came and were extinguished like he was a saint, but the 4 friends already established a hierarchy in momentum talent, and Utopia was at the top of it.

Nelo, Rune, and Astryde were average talents compared to him.

Compared to what they did, Utopia was truly manipulating his momentum, he could effortlessly change his direction and intensity without thinking.

He could even turn back and return to the beginning of the virtual training put a dead-end road before him and go back a second time, that was how insane he was.

Sighing in his mind, Rune could just use hard work and time to make up for his less impressive momentum manipulation.

40 minutes later Nelo and Astryde joined them and like the past month, their momentum training progressed as they all tried to push their own limit.

It was only 8 hours later that Nelo interrupted everyone's training.

“Utopia! Rune! Astryde! There’s big news from Gar and Arik, the first Void rift is already being surrounded by the IGS and massive movement from different companies has told everyone that they didn’t restrict the access to it.”

Stopping their training for only a few seconds, Utopia and Rune just continued like they heard nothing whereas Astryde took every excuse to stop her momentum training to go and discuss with her brother.

Nelo and Astryde already knew something about why they didn’t stop.

They actually weren’t just training momentum, they were also training their awareness.

Sending more and more of themselves to the other sides, they trained with their original body only to keep a measure of what limit they had and how every loss of awareness reflected on what they did.

Utopia, for example, had his momentum training become worse and worse, at some point every turn he did became sluggish and when it became stupid to continue, he stopped to write things down on his board notes.

Then he recalled his awareness and redid the same thing once again, noting the changes happening.

Rune was more focused on optimizing every bit of awareness used by his avatar and original body, 4% of his awareness allowed his hearing sense to function properly but not optimally, and an avatar worked in a very different way from an original body.

An avatar wasn’t a copy of oneself, that’s why it was called “avatar” and not “clone”, it was only an embodiment allowed by the Ether Law, so it worked fundamentally with a different mechanic.

In fact, the fact that it could even work was due to having a sapient ether soul connected to it, because otherwise, it would only be a mass of ether.

‘Soon we’ll start the fighting training, it’ll be my first time fighting with my own body and not in a game.’

From the start, this get-together wasn’t organized as a simple momentum technique training.

After getting the basics down, to increase their progress, even more, they’ll start to compete.

Be it the cat game, straight up fighting in a dynamic environment, and other newly created or repurposed ways of training, they would then need more than simple momentum manipulation while still needing to use it.

The reason he was thinking about it was that Rune wanted to tempt fate a bit, waiting was for kids, he didn’t want to wait, if it was coming anyway, then just starting now was for the best.

He felt confident enough.

“Utopia,” approaching his only actively training friends, he demanded a duel, “let’s go and start fighting training, every second spent grinding alone is lost for me, I need a true situation with a sapient mind against me to truly progress faster.”

And to no surprise, “Yeah! I was waiting for this! True training! Let’s go!”, walking to the control board of the room, he deactivated the training module and activated the fighting module.

Virtual terrain borders appeared on the ground to limit space, and this time, true robots came from the ground and used special foam to build obstacles in 2 minutes.

While they were preparing the terrain, he explained the first fighting training after calling Nelo and Astryde over.

“The first interactive fighting training will be the cat game, one cat and 3 mice, the cat has to touch any of the other 3, then the role change, if the cat can’t touch anyone in 3 minutes, he’s eliminated for this round, touch include kicking and any other manner imaginable except energy attacks, that’s all!”

Happy with the explanation he just gave, Utopia foolishly smiled like he did something of a great burden.

“Simple and effective, let’s hope someone didn’t slack in his training,” said Astryde after the end of the explanation, averting her eyes from the others.

“Who’ll be the first cat? I really want to try,” Rune wanted to show his prowess, eagerness was radiating from his eyes.

“Then you can begin, the three mice will enter first and you can just rush in after a few seconds,” Utopia appeared to be totally as eager, he was like Rune.

He never participated in a fight but his farming and training life of 7 months trained his spirit, and now he wanted to start the next step of his explorer’s journey.

Utopia immediately entered the 50 by 50 by 50 meters terrain, the gravity soon deactivated and slow bpm music started playing.

High on epicness, Rune was ready to use everything he learned till now, not just momentum.

And he wasn’t the only one with this mindset, Nelo and Astryde already deployed their energy wings, it was a real application of fighting.

The “cat game” name was only there for fun, it didn’t represent what was going to happen soon.

‘I can first cannonball to Astryde, she puts fewer efforts than everyone else, then I’ll decelerate to 8 meters per second to allow my momentum to be completely controlled, then touch her and rush to Nelo to shift the agro.’

Making a simple plan was the only thing he could do, everyone here didn’t have true fighting experiences, so the newbie rush should be fine.

Using his strength stat, Rune propelled himself at a speed of 20 meters per second, largely above what his current momentum stat allowed him to control.

But as perception increased his reaction speed, he adjusted his after-impulsion speed to decrease when, surprisingly, Astryde rushed to the side of Nelo.

Rune remained focused on Astryde and 2 seconds after launching himself, he was only some meters from her.

With his initial speed having been reduced to 8 meters per second, he was now in complete control of his movement, it was currently the perfect speed.

After nearing Astryde from above, he plunged in the direction of her shoulder.

As an answer, she used her momentum to disappear from his human eyesight, but she could not escape his sphere.

He adjusted his momentum to turn right immediately and extend his arm, his hand was centimeters away from touching her back.

Suddenly, she used her energy wings to try and accelerate, but this spell was still in its infancy, only allowing for straight acceleration, so Rune saw the obvious sign of her energy wings activating and decided to just go and appear before her in case of the acceleration being too fast and escaping his range.

But while he focused on traversing her position and appearing on the other side, the sphere of Astryde informed her of what he was doing and she canceled her wings burst and instead changed her momentum to reverse her direction, going backward without turning her body.

But she underestimated Rune’s reaction speed.

Suddenly she saw him extend his leg and kick right where she was, and having just modified her momentum, she didn’t have the required training to adjust it again in the next millisecond.

Upon feeling the sensation of contact, Rune saw her fly from the impact of his kick, probably taking 1 point of damage from it, he immediately used his sphere to know where Nelo was and rushed to his position.

“So intense and satisfying!” Grinning from what he just did, he arrived at Nelo’s position and observed Astryde already rushing in their direction, ignoring Utopia that was on the other side and carefully observing everything.

3 minutes later she got disqualified and Rune randomly became the cat again, he tried going for Utopia who was coincidentally near him but over the chase, they moved over to Nelo and he shifted target.

Nelo, behind his simple and casual smile, was a ruthless and stubborn friend, once he was touched he didn’t stop and touched Rune again after a 1-minute fight by a punch to his right leg.

“I reserved a trump card for Utopia, so I’ll just use it now,” Rune looked in Utopia’s direction and started to rush after him once he said that.

With a smile showing all his teeth, Utopia waited for him to come and use his trump card, he was confident.

Hearing the wordless provocation from Utopia, Rune activated his trump card.

He had cut his hearing, taste, and smell senses and focused on his sight.

He was still very primitive about it, but he could still shift some percent from still activated senses like touch and equilibrioception that were too important to the situation.

Utopia landing on the ground was unexpected but it was probably one of his strategies, his young appearance would be the death of anyone believing him to be pure and naive.

This trump card was simple, his sight and perception sphere allowed him to not only know what he was doing, but to some measure, he could also sort of reacting immediately to what he was planning to do!

It was only guesswork by his amateur mind but against fellow noobs? Totally useful!

The slight flinching of his right leg, and the ground below indicated only forward, right, top, and behind possible evasion movement.

Preparing a feint of going for the left and reacting immediately after that, he proceeded to arrive slightly to the left of Utopia and do as planned.

Feint of rushing to his left, Utopia used the ground as support to launch himself to the right, but after his impulsion, he saw that Rune followed him with only a 30 centimeters distance.

Reacting a little too much, he did a stupid mistake and tried to turn, but activating his momentum while above the controlled speed, just slowed him down, and Rune crashed into him.

He got cat-ched.

With a damaged pride, Utopia then rushed to Nelo to release his frustration, Rune having evacuated like a scared rabbit after catching him.

And 3 minutes later Nelo got eliminated with a very strained smile as he was chasing Rune.

Rune once again became the cat, “Is your system broken?” he asked.

“No you’re just lucky, or unlucky it depends,” excited to be at the last battle, Utopia appeared ready to destroy Rune.

“I already caught you one time, I’ll do it a second and a third time if need be,” with his calm blue eyes, he stared into those of Utopia.

“Can you change the music to Genesis of Aquarion, common IGS rearranged version?”.

“Yes,” and immediately the music changed.

Hearing a true legendary motivating music, he was ready.

Even with Utopia being above him in momentum training, it meant nothing, he already proved it.

Rushing to him, he did a swirl to try and confuse Utopia, but he reacted in the best way and stopped moving to confuse him even more.

He tried rushing, feints, double feints, pure momentum, and everything else, but Utopia acted like he was in the zone and was completely imperious.

Rune concluded that he was too far behind to try it the technical way, it was too difficult with Utopia facing him.

He even used his trump card again but it didn’t have the expected effect, probably the rululus eidetic memory in effect.

Fighting was accumulating experience and from it deriving the best moves, Utopia was still far from that, and scientific research proved that in the end, they didn’t have that much of an advantage.

Even humans stocked fighting memories in easily accessible places and once trained, rululus didn’t get an ultimate benefit.

Approaching again, Rune planned to play dirty, even if he didn’t win in the end, he wouldn’t go down without a fight.

First launching a kick that Utopia easily evaded, Rune approached again, the brute approach was his only serviceable one.

Making a combo of 30 punches and kicks, he reduced the distance a little with every mistake of Utopia like evading too soon or bad trajectories.

He also lost distance with bad combo choice or bad fluidity of chaining, but he didn’t have any other answer.

With only 1 and a half minute remaining, the music, that was probably the short version, played the logical next music, and it happened to be Aquarion Evol, common IGS rearranged version.

Motivation coming back, Rune kept focusing on how to trap the brat before him and kept insisting, Utopia knew he couldn’t become used to the situation, in combat one second could be the end.

And after preparing the big one, Rune set in motion his plan.

And for a moment in Utopia vision, he saw Rune executing a simple kick, but this kick that he was preparing to evade by launching to the right suddenly appeared 10 centimeters away from his face.

He understood in a moment what happened, Rune used focused momentum on his leg.

If he could evade this kick, Rune would have lost all his momentum for 1 or 2 seconds, but evading it…

In his current position?

Impossible, he couldn’t do focused momentum on his head, it couldn’t rotate and evade by itself, he needed his whole body to rotate to bring his head to safety.

And so he received a kick in his face.

“Worth it!” Rune exclaimed before immediately running, as Utopia never dawdled long before acting.

And so 3 minutes of chasing began, with a dirty kick technique from Rune.

“Stop running!” Utopia was trying to reach him but Rune was using the ground and momentum replacing gravity to just run.

“Next game you can just change the rule! Hahaha! You lost this one!” Feeling safe, Rune just ran and circled around his enraged friend's blue face.

And Rune won the first game of cat.

But Utopia was still chasing after him, “come here, my revenge has to be taken now!”

Finally, Nelo and Astryde helped Utopia catch Rune and he received respectively nothing, a kick, and a tackle.

Miserable, Rune concluded, “Still… Worth it…”

…

“My theory is being proved right at a pace so frightening that even I didn’t expect,” Utopia was explaining the recent event of the Deep Void dimension.

“Monsters, another term used to describe all the ether life forms that attack on sight, abbreviations from dimensional ether life form monsters, are blowing the recent challenger like they are simple peasants fighting against a tank.”

He was used to transmitting what he read to his 3 friends by now.

“Also, coming back to the Void map, it’s pretty much confirmed that every avatar from our universe sector, and maybe the entire universe, spawned in one place the size of a dwarf galaxy.

But big difficulties are being encountered in resource gathering, scanners with usually kilometers of range become useless and engine propulsion breaks in minutes after their activation…”

Breathing a little he continued.

“It's probably linked to the fact that the matter of our universe is not transformed by the Ether Law yet due to the low ether density...

So only still very experimental engine work, they are recruiting lots of people to baptize their spaceship in energy with the help from the government.

The administrative groups created on the board have no effects and are being widely used for...”

“Stop! Stop! Stop talking!” Astryde interrupted his monologue, “Be concise! To the point!”

A little annoyed, Utopia still continued.

“Groups and alliances truly have no effect.

The Void map center is being filled very quickly and resources are being used as high-value currency, exchangeable for lots of money.

The physical branch had a breakthrough and is currently atomizing other paths in every way in fighting simulation.

Vegetation can be found in the Deep Void dimension but the few samples found have no particular effects.

A complete solar system has been found in the Void dimension, named the misty system due to the unique planet orbiting it being covered in mist.

Sivan, the successor to the Catastrophia Corporation, reached 5 000 total stats and is not able to fight the monster nests in the Deep Void dimension…”

And on and on.

Now at the end of the 8th month of the Ether Law awakening, historians will have to write everything Utopia said to really transmit how much every news was important at the moment.

After 1 month of real fighting training practice, where they grandly diverged 3 weeks in as they started to farm again at full power, the group became a lot more familiar with each other.

Adjusting their path and clearly expressing when their opinion changed or evolved, was a true mark of friendship!

As a rululu, Utopia received their special education program about social interactions, so even though he was 16 years old, 5 years younger than Rune, he was the social core in their group.

His great observation skill and considerate mind made it so that he identified the preferences of his 3 friends and could adapt and understand what passed through their minds.

Rune influenced everyone present and even the other 3 missing members, Adreana, Arik, and Gar, to take the time to try everything and have an impression of their own talent.

Utopia had an above-average talent for momentum manipulation, and that was certain.

After only a week of fighting, he dominated all the three against one fight, only a new dirty strategy sometimes got a point from him.

And after 3 weeks, he was without opponents, so he had to do high-level training alone, they then all stopped fighting all day and restarted their farming schedule.

Soon, after they had their monthly sleep, unfortunately without contest of will, they were going to plan their next step with criticism from a rululu point of view.

They didn’t look forward to it, but it was inevitable that they were going to be spiritually abused by a 16 years old boy.