Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. I got a lot of experience with the spear across the last couple days. Murat does a pretty good job of learning something about how to use the pokey parts. It takes him a day and a half, but he gets some pretty difficult moves to avoid. His natural mass and strength are pretty potent by themselves, and portaling means that he can spear you from all sorts of weird directions.

If you’re not brilliantly fast and preternaturally aware of your surroundings, then a guy who can spear at your front, and have it stab you in the back in a quarter-second makes for an impossible opponent. It's a shame those guys aren't me.

We had tested his throws when we were deciding if he could join us. They were a powerful attack. But a spear thrust and remove that synchronized with the opening portals? Those are deadly. The only issue remaining is how hard he strikes.

He’s gotta work on the strength. When we ask him about it, he says that he has been working on his strength for a while and it’s doubled since he left the tutorial area. Apparently old-school methods of strength training still work. What’s more interesting is that he says that other areas of focus can also benefit from practice beyond what your bonuses are. His herbaceous helper in the tutorial suggested that practice could even take a high speed attribute and improve it via practice, like everything else.

Apparently, at least in this world, the crossfitters are right: most of strength, speed, and other physical performance is skill, not muscle. When I heard that back on earth, I was suspicious, but if a green guru says it works here, I’m not inclined to argue. Now I just have to start training my speed.

D., Mu, and I all start doing exercises in the morning. Speed, Strength, and Endurance. We don’t work on toughness so much. We would need someone like Stinky to help with the healing, but the rest of this work is a new direction of training for us.

What bugs me is why I haven’t already gotten a lot faster; I’ve been doing pretty fast stuff for a while now. I have gotten a lot more endurance over time, and I’ve done more fast drumming than running. What gives? Maybe it’s like everything else I’ve ever done with practice: attention is at the center of everything. If I’m paying attention to working on my endurance, I get more endurance running. If I’m paying attention to speed, I get more speed? When I’m drumming, I’ve been paying attention to drum technique, more than speed so far, so my speed hasn't improved. Can it be that simple?

Of course, there’s probably also diminishing returns. I’m already pretty darned fast, while my endurance started off as pretty pitiful.

Spears work for Mu. I guess that while he’s looking like a Greek god, he may as well fight like Achilles with a spear as his primary weapon?

My experience with the spear is not quite so positive. I’ve got speed leaking out my ears, and so hitting things with a spear from far away is a pretty powerful technique. However, my strength just isn’t up to what it needs to be to be effective against something with toughness or armor. Furthermore, my core effectiveness right now comes from speed. A normal practiced Escrima student can hit you four times with each stick in a second. I have three sticks and move eight times as fast. Instead of a normal person’s eight strikes in a second, I can do close to a hundred.

Switching to a spear with its thrusting two-handed approach gets me down to about 4 strikes per second with the spear. Having an extra hand doesn’t help as much, and I can’t really use stick and spear because of variable distances. On top of that, it disrupts the tail rhythm, which was worked into the other two sticks, and I have about twenty years of practice swinging sticks, and about twenty minutes of practice thrusting with my arms. If all that weren’t bad enough, the great strength in combat from speed techniques, given a bunch of talk with Yulia and others back in Imaginetown, is in bypassing spears, in moving fast enough to get inside someone’s guard. My absurd speed is somewhat wasted on a long weapon.

I give up on spears, but start considering bladed weapons. A conversation with Phuc lets me know that basically everything we do with sticks applies to machetes as well. Sharpness matters. I haven’t hit myself with my sticks really since I left Alec, and I have a lot of experience swinging things, so this is a real option.

Unfortunately, for the time being, I don’t have a good way to get hold of some appropriately sized machetes. So I’m still on sticks. That said, Mu and his spear are doing a lot better. At least I get to work on my defense. He plays thrust through portals from random directions with a blunt spear, and I play tap it out of the way before it hits me. I’m pretty good at the game. He nearly hits me three times on the second day though.

After that, as we travel in the mornings, we do occasionally run into some beasts. Rather than avoiding them like we normally would with our speed and our portals, we decide to practice our skills with our volunteer targets. Our first opponents turn out to be a trio of giant scorpions. They’re my height before they put their tails up.

Our strategy against the scorpions is to first get the horses someplace safe. Mu’s portals and a minute manage to put the horses a couple miles away, peacefully half-tied to a tree with enough rope that they can eat the nearby grass. Danae says that’s the best way to take care of them, so that they both don’t wander off and so that they can bail if they get really scared.

After putting up the horses, the two slow ones come back, and we head towards the big bugs. The plan is, rather unsurprisingly, me as bait, Danae as backup, and Mu poking them from a distance.

The long and short of it is that it works. All three of the scorpions want a piece of me. Seems like it’s fishy behavior for scorpions, but I’m not about to tell them that. Even so, I’m a lot faster than the scorpions, and keep rotating, to force one of them to be behind the other two. That makes it just a two on one fight, mostly. When I get close, first they try to stab me, but their tails only move at about sixty miles per hour, which is completely dodgeable by me.

After a couple strikes, Mu finally gets a sense for what’s going on, and stabs the thing in the face. First scorpion commits to a strike, and all of a sudden, it gets a spear in the eye. The spear thrust is apparently strong enough to pierce the shell. Mu aims well for sure. One of the great thing about scorpions is that they don’t really run away. Their little insect brains get mad, and even more fighty. I guess that’s what happens when your only theory of problem solving is “stab it again.”

It takes Mu two strikes to disable two eyes on the first scorpion, and then he does the same thing on the other two. Only once they’re all disabled does he go back and skewer them. The whole fight takes maybe three minutes, and by the end, Danae is cleaning her nails because she’s bored.

We fight a whole collection of critters, from stirges to giant snapping turtles, lions and tigers and boars, even to a T. Rex-looking critter, and nothing even gives us much trouble any more, except seriously armored critters like Rhinoceros beetles. Danae has to help with those. Over the course of the week, Mu has gone from a curiosity to quite the fighter.