An improvised military camp out of which bands of armed noobs were marching off to battle, leaving in their wake broken bottles and spilt food.

Henry's group were currently undergoing the ritual to learn the ability. Finally, after much convolution and delay, he'd receive his first tangible reward for slaying the oversized king boar! (He discounted the Legendary rapier he'd looted since it bore no relevance to his ultimate mission to win the recruitment tournament, the item being too OP to be permitted. Alex collected the set it was a part of, so Henry'd probably trade it with the dude for a couple real-life properties, maybe a pig farm. Or he might give it for a free, a nice farewell gift. He'd yet to decide.)

For the ritual, unlike the previous one, each trainee only needed to use one monster corpse, as they'd already reached Level 3 through absorbing experience on their own. As before, Henry had distributed his stats equally.

The ritual started the same way as the one with the rabbits. Their foreheads were anointed with a smelly black concoction, the trainer chanted ancient words, and they found themselves transported into the visions of their prey.

This time, though, the vision was not of the monster's death.

Through the boar's eyes, Henry saw himself jumping off a donkey, his posture relaxed, his gaze tired. With the rage-inducing booms in his boar ears, he snorted and broke into a charge. As he neared himself, he released a hateful squeal. Into his stampeding legs, burning energy rushed, making his muscles swell and their contractions tighter and faster. A burst of speed made the world blur.

When the trainer pulled them back to the present, Henry was locked in a physical stasis, unable to control any part of his body except his eyes. Around him, the other trainees were fuming in anger. His own face, he realised, was contorted into the same ugly snarl.

"Maintain that feeling!" the Instructor chanted. "Maintain the rage!" He lifted his sword, the blade glowing white. "Empowered by the souls of our foes, we advance! As infants, we mastered our bodies! As teens, we mastered our minds. Now, we master the universe! YAAAH!"

Screaming, the trainer span the sword and plunged its point into the soil as if into the chest of a sleeping giant.

At once, webs of lightning sprouted at the feet of each trainee.

Henry, as the lightning gradually worked its way up towards his head, felt that every part of him was being cleansed. It was a weird sensation, as though each cell of his body had been covered with a thick layer of rust, which the lightning was now blasting away to reveal the perfect, underlying state beneath.

The Instructor roared. "!"

Henry felt a heat rushing into his thighs. Unable to move his neck, he couldn’t look directly down, but, in front of himself, around knee level, he saw glowing motes condensing from the air. These were being grabbed by tiny forks of lighting and dragged into his legs, where they were absorbed by muscles growing larger by the moment.

"Release!"

It stopped.

The motes vanished.

The lightning returned to the earth.

Congratulations! You have learned your first physical ability, .

With the heat in Henry's legs dissipating, his muscles shrinking, he slowly regained control of his body.

Around him, the noobs reading the ability's tooltip were elated.

Henry's veteran heart stirred with a tiny amount of their happiness. With his first physical ability, his character's strength and his ability to defend himself had dramatically increased. He could now exploit the bonus Strength stats of his Spelltomes, and his buffed-up would be powerful enough to scramble the brains of an elephant with a punch. Not bad.

Instructor Apari pulled his sword out of the ground and saluted the heavens. “Death to all monster-kind! Reclaim the land for Man!" Sheathing his weapon, he returned to his previous composure (or discomposure). " is the parent of all physical abili—"

“Alright, boys," a meathead who'd finished skimming the tooltip interrupted the trainer, "let’s catch some pups!”

Summoning a battleaxe, he marched out, the other meatheads moving to follow behind him.

"Wait!" yelled Instructor Apari.

The meathead gave the trainer a confused look. "Sup, Bald Bro?"

"You haven't learned to control the ability yet."

"Oh?" The meathead, after a time not long enough to form even half a decent thought, sprinted at a tree and raised his battle axe. "Empowerment!"

His weapon slammed into the trunk, the edge biting out a chunk of wood.

He looked from the cut to the trainer. "Did that work?"

"No," replied the trainer.

The meathead turned back to his teammates. "You heard him, boys! Back into position!"

Instructor Apari, continuing the lesson, summoned a hatchet and approached the tree the meathead had attacked. "Observe, after 15 years in the army, and 7 more as a trainer, this is the force I can command with my muscles."

He dashed forward, his swing graceful yet powerful. As the hatchet head bit into the tree, it created a dent deeper than the meathead's - but not by much.

The trainees were confused, wondering why where the epicness was they'd observed from the dudes killing wolves.

"Sad, isn't it?" said the instructor. "All that work and my body is almost as weak as a teen's. However, now, I, and yourselves, can tap into the power of something infinitely higher than us. Observe again."

Without the instructor saying anything, the action initiated by his thoughts, motes condensed around the hatchet and funnelled towards it, forming a thin, glowing coating across its edge.

When he struck the tree again, its trunk was easily cleaved in half, the separated top falling with a crash.

The Instructor paused somberly for a moment, seeing something different in the wound rent in the tree. "Now...we command The Strength of The Universe."

Turning, he revelled in the awe of the class, until he saw the student in the monkey-mask, whose dead gaze seemed to be peering into him.

Henry—tired, impatient to ditch the class—yawned with boredom.

Ultimately, for him, this was still just the noob tutorial in a videogame. After enslaving tornadoes and lunching with Gods, it would take a bit more than one-stroke tree toppling to impress him.

Instructor Apari coughed. "The process is almost identical to the manipulation of objects that we practised earlier with your Spatial Bracelets. First..."

He started the lesson by having the trainees gather energy into the soles of their feet and practice stomping the ground.

A trainee trying to activate the ability twice in quick succession found the follow-up attempt failed.

"The Universe caters to many," explained the instructor. "With the ability, you must wait 6 seconds between requests."

Another trainee noticed that there was barely a difference between their empowered and unempowered stomps.

"The amount of force you can summon into your blows is determined by the Strength Aspect of your martial body, which is low for most of you. If you observe the...shirtless gentlemen, you'll notice the effect of increasing that Aspect further."

With the meatheads having put all their points in Strength, their stomps were creating holes a few centimetres deeper.

One of the meatheads, excited at having the classes' attention, tried to show off by using the ability again. However, the pit created by his stomp was pitifully shallow.

The meathead's eyes darted between the pitiful pit and a previous pit.

The Instructor explained. "And here we see the importance of balancing the Aspects of your Martial Bodies. As with your muscles, you cannot draw endlessly from The Universe. You have a limited 'Stamina Pool', as you Offworlders refer to it. The size of this is a function of the Aspects of Vitality and Technique..."

To summarise, Vitality increased one's Stamina Pool, while Tech reduced the amount of Stamina an ability burned. As far as Stamina usage was concerned, 1 point distributed to either of these stats had the same functional effect. Which stat, Vit or Tech, a player preferred was based on their other bonuses, such as increasing resilience or improving accuracy.

As a rule of thumb, whatever amount of Vitality an opponent had, if a player's Vit and Tech stats were both around the same level (e.g. 20, 20, 20), then that player could summon enough force for a mortal wound—like driving a longsword into the opponent's stomach, through their organs, and out their back—approximately two and a half times. Recharge-wise, the player would gain an extra sword thrust every minute.

Extrapolating what those abstract figures meant in a practical scenario, most duellists in Saana were quite conservative with their attack usage. A single, well-aimed attack could have enough power to be lethal, but very few attacks were available to waste. Thus, much of the art of duelling revolved around setting up a lethal blow, through combos with disable abilities or manual grappling.

The trainees, after getting a handle of empowering their feet, moved on to other parts of their body, from their knees to their hands. Following that, the trainer had them practice modifying the strength and duration of the ability by throwing sandbags of various weights.

Conceptually, could be viewed as granting the user an allotment of force every 6 seconds, the maximum quantity based on their Strength, which they could freely distribute in any way they wanted. It could be used for explosive, high damage bursts, but it could also be stretched out over several seconds for lifting a few extra kilograms beyond the body's capabilities.

At first, players would find moderating the force clumsy, but, with practice, it would become as intuitive as wriggling a finger.

Amongst the trainees, Dan, trying to throw a sack, was surprised when he saw Big Bro, his mask lifted slightly, chomping through a stick with glowing teeth. "Woah. You can do that, too?"

"Can do pretty much anything with it." Henry, the tip of a finger glowing, flicked a bug on his shoulder, the creature evaporating.

was a general-purpose skill whose advantage lay in its versatility. In exchange, it was less efficient in terms of Stamina usage and force-generated per second than the other abilities the players would learn later on. For example, at level 5, when Class specialisation started, most melee Classes would learn a basic physical ability that could produce the same force as an empowered blow, while having half the cooldown (3 seconds) and costing half the stamina. However, the force of these basic abilities could only be channelled into the edge or points of a weapon.

Saana's convoluted skill system usually annoyed Henry, but, with the 1v1 tournament looming, he was thankful for its existence. The complexity gave him a bit of wiggle room to strategise, which had always been more his forte than martial arts.