“Yeah, I feel kind of bored and tired, it appeared suddenly and I checked my body and spirit but there’s nothing, so unless you already have a case like me then I want to call an available psychologist,” Rune was speaking alone next to the ether tower.

“No problem, take your time I’m not in a dangerous place,” after half a minute he once again spoke, and this time after finishing he sat down and waited.

Half an hour later, he was contacted again, but not by someone that was part of his contact.

“Hello Mr. Tudor, I’m here to do a quick diagnosis of your mental state, can you answer some of my questions?” A soft male voice sounded out in his mind.

“Ask away,” Rune answered.

“Can you first allow your complete lens backlog to be transmitted?”

“Ok,” Rune accepted the request that came up on his connected lenses.

“So, can you tell me what you are currently doing and why you’re doing it? Add as much detail as you can, your motivation prior to arriving, your current environment, your expectations, anything that goes through your head.”

“Currently I’m journeying towards the center of the gravity anomaly, I got this idea after coming back from my last adventure and…”

He told everything that passed through his mind to describe what his interlocutor wanted.

“Huhu, so once you reach your current limit you would continue fighting around? Why don’t you tell me more about what you’ll do after that?”

“Literally fighting around I think, if I’m even able to. My limit should be pretty deep into tier 4 territory after all, and when I reach tier 4 I’ll make a trip back through the huge tier 3 mountainous zone covering the south, mapping some parts, then…”

“So reaching tier 4 is your current primary goal? If I were to tell you that you couldn’t reach tier 4 for whatever reason would you still continue in your journey?”

“Huuuu… Probably? If I really only wanted to reach tier 4 as fast as possible I wouldn’t have come here, I’m here to feel the impact of walking under gravity hundreds of times its normal value, to feel…”

As Rune discussed more and more with that person, he told more and more things, he had nothing to hide, and emptying everything was very relaxing and curative.

After talking for the majority of 2 hours with the other side only questioning and guiding the discussion, he finally had nothing else to say.

“That’s a very long quick diagnosis of my mental state… Am I missing something?”

“Haha! Not at all, it’s just a lie I do every time, I’m your assigned psychologist, and the better part of the last hour is just useless rambling only used for you to speak more. Well, if we are at this point then maybe I can start to do the talking, can’t I?”

The initial surprise at being tricked was very mild, it was just an inoffensive joke in the end, but when it came to a diagnosis being given back, Rune awaited that.

“What you should be feeling is something that’s currently called ‘Weary Wave’ in our circle, it’s something that happens to every young adventurer and patroller when they’re pushing themselves to their limit for a long period of time.”

“You’re far from being the first case, nearly all the prospects have been through that a few months ago, but you having reached this step now means you’re really passionate about your life.”

“I’ll not say it directly here but if we had a true educational structure to help people like you, you would have probably escaped it or at least delayed it for some years,” the compliment Rune received felt a little empty.

“The causes are long-term high-intensity passive all-round training, if you want it to be resolved then you need to stop seeking levels, just experience the world without any background activities.”

“In your case, and from the backlog I received, you need to completely stop using your energy for other purposes than for your energy armor.”

“Also stop all your awareness division, return it to its natural state, stop using momentum, stop training your perception control, stop using permanent reinforcement, stop using all your strength while moving, keep it at half and that’s it.”

‘Wut?’

“Ok, I’ll do that,” Rune didn’t let the strange cure affect him too much.

“I’ll send you a meditation technique that is currently assessed to be more efficient for empty sessions where you do nothing. Apart from what I just discussed, you don’t seem to have any psychological problem, you are perfectly acclimated to the life of an adventurer, on those words, good luck Mr. Tudor and good continuation.”

“Thank you, goodbye.”

Not putting the name of the other at the end felt a little strange but at least Rune transmitted the correct civility before the call was hung up.

Looking over the thousand kilometers of mountains, Rune decided to start to resolve his problem right now.

‘In the end, it all comes back to work or health, and no way I’m choosing work over health.’

He cut his permanent reinforcement.

He decided to travel at only 400 meters per second, which paradoxically was equivalent to a perfect strength-based speed of 12 000.

He reset his ether soul, letting all his awareness go back to equalize all of his natural senses.

‘I’ll deactivate my temporal perception, maybe it also has something to do with it.’

So Rune also deactivated his 100% extended time perception state.

The permanent momentum bringing him downward vanished.

His perception sphere stopped spinning and returned back to its perfectly still spherical shape.

He didn’t even launch a little firework to celebrate, he sealed his grand and fine manipulation, not even compromising on using them in battle.

In his effort to minimize everything, he even thought of using only his instinct to replace his fighting instinct with high-intensity thinking, but he didn’t want to go that far, so now Rune was back to a state he had never been in unless he wanted to rest.

And even then it was rare to be so “back to nature”.

Looking at his flat compass, and not feeling tired enough to go to sleep, he decided to continue. But something came up after only half an hour of travel.

Pain.

Rune persisted but even though he knew he was a bit of a masochist inside, like when he hurt his little pinky somewhere he acted like a hard-boiled and praised himself for ignoring it, 10 minutes after the pain appeared, it never stopped to spread.

His throat, his lung, his legs, his abs, and his ribs.

‘What! The! F*ckng! Penguin! Is! Freaking! Happening! It’s so painful!’

It became so intense that Rune had no choice but to slow down, but even after slowing down, he felt like sh*t, like he ran a marathon with his human body prior to acquiring stats.

“Ah… Ah… Ah… Ah…” Heavy breath was the only sound Rune could make for tens of minutes.

He was so uncomfortable that he even cut the permanent light music background that always played.

He checked and rechecked, even filling his reinforcement shape with energy to confirm his body had everything it needed, but there was nothing he could do.

To add to his not yet resolved misery, a speedster goat appeared in his sphere and was charging towards him at maximum speed.

Rune’s response was simply to stop walking and adopt a defensive posture, ready to take on a charge.

10 seconds later the goat who he knew so much arrived and mindlessly collided with him, but even without using momentum or anything, the gravity allowed him to be unmoving and the goat just crashed into a wall.

Using his experience, he grabbed the neck and one of its legs before blocking it on the ground with him on top.

It was really the most simple environmental advantage he deducted, once on top, he just had to punch with all he had and the gravity would help him keep his opponent grounded under his increased weight.

The goat stopped moving after 5 perfect punches, but Rune didn’t put its body in his pocket dimension.

“Ah… Ah… Ah… Ah… Ah…”

He felt so out of breath despite not needing to breathe, all his body was burning. The little bit of breath he recovered was lost after this high-intensity fight that lasted less than 2 minutes.

“Ah… I want to die… Ah…”

He wasn’t tired, he knew he could just go for another marathon, but for some reason, his body couldn’t follow and it kept sending messages that he couldn’t go on.

Only 10 minutes later did Rune become capable of complex thoughts again.

‘Is gravity f*cking with my body? But the intel would have said something if it did that, is everyone cutting their own pain sense so they can’t feel it? Is it permanent or momentary? Sorry doctor but I think I’ll allow myself some corrections in my treatment…’

The moment he cut his sense of pain, everything came back to its usual state, no more burning throat, no more trembling legs, and his breathing speed stabilized back to near absent.

Half a minute after cutting it, he stood up, feeling like a reborn man. He marveled at how intense his body could react even when there was no danger, only intense exercise in an unfamiliar environment.

‘I’m definitely noting it down.'

Rune opened his diary and described what he just lived in under 3 hours. It was a true ordeal from his perspective, the weirdest ordeal ever.

After writing everything, he verified that he didn’t accidentally upset his natural awareness allocation, besides the new cut pain sense, or accidentally start to passively train.

Concluding those weird events, he once again set out, he had a limit to reach.

…

*Ding* Physical Fundamental: Fighting Instinct reached Tier 3 Level 100

*Ding* Body Control: Basic Humanoid Body reached Tier 3 Level 4

*Ding* Body Control: Basic Prolonged Body Use reached Tier 3 Level 4

“Blow a kiss, fire a gun,

We all need someone to lean on,

Blow a kiss, fire a gun,

All we need is somebody to lean on,

Eeh ooh, eeh ooh, eeh ooh, eeh ooh!”

Dancing in the middle of a squad of 18 peak tier 3 monsters, Rune was back to his usual self.

It’s been only a few days since he recovered, and his energy was at its peak since that time, he wanted to do a lot of things.

He didn’t restart his passive training yet but in maybe another month he would.

In the months needed to recover, Rune incarnated what he considered as the essence of the evolved juggernaut style, the behemoth style, just punching things till the thing died and be done with it.

Without the erosion he was currently regenerating 752 armor per second with his 803% efficiency, he was finally reaching a point where he could be considered to be on the behemoth path for a tier 3.

His armor acted like a heart that kept beating and increased or decreased with the timing but never ceased.

One by one, he killed every monster that assaulted him while letting them try to break his 45 000 energy armor, in vain of course.

What changed since he adapted to using the increased gravity was that he couldn’t really jump anymore, and the greater the gravity the more he understood why the guide told that when entering a different environment you had to be careful of everything.

With his current 25 000 equivalent strength, he could escape even if he was under multiple hundreds of tons of weight, but for that, he would need to be able to exercise it, once he became used to pinning down a monster, it just became so easy.

Every punch he made felt so heavy he wondered if he didn’t reach beyond Ether law in strength sometimes, only to be grounded by reality when a monster successfully did what he did to others.

It was like being under a mountain, with his energy armor taking thousands of damage when the monster flattened him, then every subsequent strike ripped other thousands of armor.

Finishing the fight an hour later, he packed up everything and departed, leaving behind no marks of his passage, no corpses, and no craters, the blood would disintegrate soon enough.

2 hours later he put to rest another squad of 14 peak tier 3 monsters.

An additional hour after, he encountered a lone peak tier 3 that he similarly killed.

And it went on and on, now that he was launched, Rune only planned to stop when taking a step would be so hard to take he would laugh at the absurdity.

He knew it would happen.

He also knew that soon he would reach the zone border to the tier 4 zone.

For some time already, he only encountered peak tier 3, now he was expecting the first wandering tier 4 monster to appear soon.

However, maybe Rune’s prediction was a little slanted due to his experience with the erosion anomaly where no tier 4 monsters appeared in the neighboring tier 3 zone.

A week later, the gravity kept increasing following the same chaotic schema, not a linear one in any case, and he encountered the first gravity anomaly tier 4 monster, an enormous 5 meters high mountain bear when it was on all four.

He didn’t panic and prepared for a confrontation, in the same manner, he approached a moving monolith’s training center or a hunter snake’s ambush, knowing he would lose.

‘If I want to escape I need to go up, the chance of being pursued and the number of delay tactics is the most numerous that way.'

Having made up his mind beforehand, Rune entered his 100% extended time temporality, he also overloaded his sensitivity and applied all his momentum upwards.

The last time he measured the gravity was 2 days ago and it indicated 124.6, he remembered it because he decided to do an autopsy of a tree for whatever reason he had at the moment.

‘If he can send me flying despite my weight being over 8.7 tons and me opposing a resistance of more than 25 000 strength, I’m getting the hell outta here.’

With strength and energy-based speed with momentum added to the mix and provided masteries, Rune long abandoned the method of using a monster’s speed to determine anything.

Seconds after the bear appeared, it successfully charged Rune. Not like he wanted to evade.

Only a reinforcement specialist would be able to send Rune flying, and this bear didn’t appear to be one.

In a classic deadlock position, Rune couldn’t even kick because the moment he lifted a leg to do it, he would lose too much resistance and end up toppled by the mindless bear who was roaring and spilling saliva all over his face.

As the intelligent one here, he decided to launch a simple continuous energy laser, all his excess energy was used to erode the armor of the bear at a rate of 200 per second, the result of his fundamental grand manipulation mastery.

The bear remained mindless for the better part of 10 minutes, leading Rune to think that maybe it didn’t care for the damage.

Till he realized something.

‘Oh god am I stupid? Of course, it doesn't care! Its fundamental energy compression mastery is necessarily higher than 200%! That’s why it doesn’t care about this annoying thing!’

Interrupting his energy laser, he had to think, the tier 4 bear still didn’t show any card and didn’t have enough strength to push him into a disadvantageous situation, so he had to start hitting its head.

Creating a weakness on his right, the bear pushed him, and from this suddenly changed situation it tried to flatten Rune but only received a punch in the face.

Before he continued with his plan, the bear did something decisive.

A paw crashed into Rune’s armor and took 8 000 armor with it.

‘Reinforcement!’

Taking such a heavy hit, he exchanged empirically with another hit to the bear’s head, but the armor held on and they could only start to exchange massive hits.

‘I can’t evade at all.’

Rune tried to evade, but all of the bear’s strikes were powered with energy, he even suspected that some momentum was at play here due to their speed.

Blocking what he could and using those opportunities to counter, he made sure to keep his energy balance positive as much as possible.

After half an hour of enduring massive hits, he felt something give under his latest punch, the bear’s armor was gone.

It of course didn’t care and just continued to use all its energy to make massive hits on him.

‘The build is right, a bit of armor, a bit of reinforcement, a bit of strength, if it pinned me down I would be like a baby.’

Rune knew all the events he had to evade at all prices, and losing his mobility was the worst situation he could think of, with not blocking a reinforced strike being the second-worst.

Every time the bear struck, and with him dispersing as much damage and strength as etherly possible, his armor still took thousands upon thousands of damage.

Now that the bear’s head was unveiled, he continued to keep on his rhythm, shallow strikes for 10 seconds, block the apocalyptic strike from the bear, punch the head, temporize, repeat.

If the bear kept the current rhythm, Rune was sure it would die, and that’s why he was so careful in keeping the rhythm, not even using any opening he saw.

Half an hour later, his perception sphere detected some change, the bear was slowing down, only striking every 20 seconds, and another half an hour later, it started to accumulate half of its energy pool before striking.

Even when his armor canceled the momentum, he still felt something, like the earth and air around him was being struck at the same time as him.

Fortunately, the bear was too mindless to understand that half a minute of recovery for it was also half a minute of recovery for him.

Rune was even more careful now, never leaving the bear 4 limbs out of his focus, no tier 4 had a weak or absurd build, there was a reason for everything.

‘If it pounces on me with half an energy pool worth of reinforcement… I need to be ready.’

His only move would be to similarly instantly use a reinforcement of his own to evade.

Eroding its health for an additional 10 minutes, it did the only thing that could reverse the situation, something he probably did a lot prior to fighting Rune.

It pounced.

And Rune evaded.

“Of course you’d do that, of course, are you ready to be my first ever tier 4 monster kill?” Rune taunted with a slight grin on his face.

The bear monster seemed indignant at failing this move and after accumulating his energy for another 30 seconds, it repeated exactly the same move, which he evaded in the same way.

The next half an hour was this same sequence being played non-stop.

Rune wouldn’t admit to the massive adrenaline rush he felt from the moment it started to jump around trying to catch him.

Just from the experience gathered after punching it hundreds of times, he estimated the bear’s weight to be hundreds of tons, he could still lift that but only if it was a deadlift, not an alive lift that struggled and tried to kill him.

Slowly but surely, the bear started to become berserk as its health was draining away, death had this effect on every monster, not only tier 4.

Rune took no chance, even when his energy pool was full he didn’t try anything, the bear was killing itself and he was observing.

Even berserk the bear had no choice but to submit to an artificial rhythm his opponent created, it was inevitable, a monster couldn’t flee, it couldn’t think.

Ultimately, the bear stopped moving after a total confrontation time of 4 hours, becoming the first tier 4 monster kill of Rune’s adventurer life.

Standing over the bear's body, he felt joy and happiness fill him, it was a very personal step he just took and he wanted to remember it for a long time.

‘A selfie of course!’

Taking his camera out, it wasn’t made to take a selfie but after some failures, he successfully took a satisfying one.

Putting the bear’s corpse in his pocket dimension, which wasn’t able to store tier 4 matter, Rune emptied his spirit and looked over his notifications.

*Ding* Cohesion: Specialized Cohesion Infusion reached Tier 3 Level 28

*Ding* Energy Compression: Basic Energy Structure reached Tier 3 Level 6

*Ding* Body Control: Basic Humanoid Body reached Tier 3 Level 7

*Ding* Body Control: Basic Prolonged Body Use reached Tier 3 Level 7

‘If I’m fighting with tier 4 it should go back to one level every two to three days, but who knows, maybe it was just a very remote tier 4.’

Due to the increased gravity, Rune knew that no bird-type monsters were around this part, and maybe because they played an important role as indicators of where an important fight happened, not even one of the monsters came during those 4 hours of fight.

Setting off after finding nothing else to do, he got back to his natural state, awareness reset, momentum nullified.

It was only the first step of another journey, the journey to becoming a tier 4 adventurer.