The second martial art he studied in this Overdream session was Hardman Handaxe.

The 'Hardmen' were Fighters in the armies of the West Togavian Schwervolk clans, who performed a disruption role, diving suicidally into enemy formations alone and flinging troops around. For this purpose, they employed a short war-axe that was no longer than one-foot. The weapon's hooked beard was used to trip and pull the enemy as often as to split a skull. One's off-hand alternated between a shield, a second axe, and being weaponless for grappling.

Hardman Handaxe was significantly more aggressive than any previous style Henry'd learned. Consequently, the first months were irritating for him, as he suffered countless deaths flinging himself axe-first into battle after battle without much plan.

With the increased focus and discipline of Floating Leaf, he managed to hit 70% of his potential in the art according to The Overdream's feedback system. This was 4% higher than what he'd achieved with The King's Harem, which he assessed to be of a similar difficulty. As negligible as that figure might sound, because his improvement declined rapidly the longer he'd been studying a style, it actually reflected over a doubling of his previous acquisition rate.

And after getting the hang of it, he developed an appreciation for the art. There was something satisfying in being able to directly rush a tin-can tank, shove them off balance, and bash in their brains. Some days, you weren't in the mood to dance around like a ballerina.

...

During his off-hours between writing and fighting, he began visiting the mainland territories he'd scouted to gather resources for upgrading his farm. There, he felled sturdier trees, made river bends wider for his transport ships, and collected more colourful herbs. With the fruits of this work, he expanded his barns to support fatter livestock, imported richer soil for tastier crops, and filled-out the shelves of his Alchemy Lab with more potent potions.

To these ends, the winters, once his enemy, became his friend. During the frozen months, he was able to leave his home unattended and the monsters on the mainland ignored him as they hiberated, and so he could labour in peace.

...

Abhayan Hulk Wrestling.

Abhaya was a Starting Zone in Yamalai presently ruled by a dynasty established during the glory days of the Old Rangbitan Empire. As such, it remained the only place in Saana's Central Continent where Bloodmancy and slavery continued to be legal. Henry'd wanted to change this situation, but he needed to kill their Zone Guardian first.

One troop type enlisted into the Abhayan slave armies were the Lagaala Hulks. These were 9-foot-tall giant men native to an island near Abhaya. Clad in heavy armour, the hulks waded into battle and tossed everyone around with their staggering strength. Theirs was a similar disruptive function to the Hardmen of West Togavi; however, that wasn't the reason Henry learned the art. Rather, he hoped to steal the Hulks' wrestling techniques for his Silverback Gorilla form.

And it worked. After years of popping elf heads with his gorilla palms and snapping goblin spines on his gorilla knees, he was confident in defeating any human player with the misfortune of being snagged between his gorilla fingers.

In fact, the adaptation worked too well. To counteract the improvement, he recalibrated his Supreme Poison to up the frequency of partial hand paralysis episodes while shapeshifted.

...

Whenever the fancy took him, he went on longer trips abroad. Following the path he'd sketched across the mainland by following the Flying Crab migration, he branched out to explore the connected zones.

The fertile region of The Three Rivers contained five Tier-0 Starting Zones, along with accompanying Tier-1 through Tier-4 zones. This was similar in size to Saana's Aion Laisije, which supported a current population of 146 million NPCs and 30.4 million players. Instead of humans, though, The Three Rivers fed their nutrients into a flourishing bounty of wildlife and plants. Reigning over these were hundreds of Treant Colossi, who tended the forests like gardeners. The one that Henry'd first seen acting as a bridge had not been a particularly big specimen.

...

Volatile Nomad Beast-Slaying Sabre, or Nomad Sabre for short.

This was a style for long, heavy, two-handed swords. These weapons were trash in Saana's combat system; they were too easily negated by fighting up close, and their high amount of metal consumed a lot of one's Armour Rating, leaving their body less protected. Nevertheless, Henry wanted to study at least one two-handed style due to the weapon's unwarranted popularity amongst noobs.

The root cause of the popularity problem was actually Alex. Henry's frenemy had spent the past few real-life months appearing at publicity events with an Ortheerian zweihander, Worlddevourer, which had a vampiric enhancement that converted any blood spilt around the wielder into Stamina and HP. Impressionable kids all around the globe had taken to imitating Alex despite their own swords lacking any special buff.

Henry chose Nomad Sabre specifically because it covered multiple two-hander styles, the art having the unique feature of switching modes based on the emotional state of the practitioner. In this respect, it was like Floating Leaf, imbued with the life philosophy of its creators.

Anthropology time:

The nomadic Druk clans of the Parani Steppes were renowned for raging and fighting over the smallest slights. To the outsider, they seemed your run-of-the-mill, hot-headed, monster-riding barbarians. Upon closer inspection, though, one would learn that there was a method to their madness.

Druks possessed a peculiar view of emotions, which they divided into two main categories. There were 'active' emotions—e.g., anger, fear, and love—which prompted the experiencer to take action, and 'reactive' emotions—happiness, shame, and sadness—that arose in response to something. The active type were for the strong, who did things, and the reactive type were for the weak, to whom things were done.

With such a perspective, the Druks conscientiously exaggerated the first while suppressing the second. Infants were given extra servings of monster milk for tantruming louder, while both smiles and tears were rewarded with slaps. By adulthood, having been forced to feel beyond reason, a Druk could summon any emotion on command with any desired intensity - although, they usually defaulted to rage.

Elders, paradoxically, were very level-headed masters of emotion. They behaved as captains navigating the emotional ship of their clan, deducing the necessary emotion to achieve the clan's goals and dictating them to feel it.

The result was a people both aggressive and controlled, vigorous yet stable.

At least, that was the underlying architecture of their society. In practise, these customs weren't so explicitly conscientious, being embedded within an esoteric system of totemic mythology and ritual.

End of anthropology time.

With the enormous cultural importance the Druk's placed on feelings, their martial art Nomad Sabre was intimately linked with emotions, too. Fighting modes switched drastically depending on one's mood. Angry nomads slashed with broad, deep strokes. Lustful nomads drove in closer, stabbing fast and relentlessly. Envious nomads observed their opponent from afar, waiting to detect vulnerabilities. Anxious nomads observed closer still and held their sword back for parrying. Fearful nomads ran away.

Henry—after 33 months of impassioned shouting and screaming—obtained 37% mastery of this volatile martial art. That made it his third least complete so far behind Nine Fists and Floating Leaf. The swordplay wasn't the hiccup, though. Instead, the assigned study period had simply been too brief to obtain the necessary degree of emotional control for Nomad Sabre's advanced, rapid-mode-shifting tactics.

(Anthropology side-note: It also didn't help that the Druks, scientists of the heart that they were, had defined hundreds more emotions than any reasonable culture. Some of these were plain impossible for Henry to relate to. For example, 'Binnutekja' described the extreme anger one felt when a female clan member was bridenapped by a same-Tier stranger with a clashing totemic alignment. The related emotion of 'Binnutakja', meanwhile, referred to the slightly less extreme anger one felt when a female clan member was bridenapped by a same-Tier stranger with a compatible totemic alignment. Naturally, their corresponding combat modes were wildly different. The former utilised more beheading attempts, the latter more throws.)

Interestingly, his mechanical GQ jumped 12 points in the most intense rage modes, although this came at the cost of about 40 mental GQ points. It would've been nice to investigate whether this gap could be closed, but he couldn't prioritise this for now. Scheduling a couple decades to revisit the matter three millennia later in his calendar, he moved on.

But before that, even more interestingly, the training to induce emotional states had had a splendid effect on his conquest of literature by allowing him to write more authen—

...

The herds turned out to have begun their migration from a woodland a thousand kilometres west of where the Flying Crabs had split off to enter Pelican Griffon Hills.

This woodland was home to exotic hardwood trees whose grains would produce lovely furniture. Dotted around the territory were vast lakes of boiling mud that kept certain pockets of the woodland green through the winters. These sanctuaries of warmth were monopolised by the strongest members of the herds, who cruelly kicked out the weaklings in autumn like unloved step-children on their 18th birthdays.

...

Forbidden Knife Boxing.

This Cutthroat knife-boxing style originated from the northernmost Aion Laisije region of Traxia, a maritime nation that dominated trade in Saana's north.

The 'Forbidden' component of the name stemmed from the martial art being outlawed from between 774 and 416 years Before Present, when Aion Laisije and Basindi were united under an invading Druk empire. During that era of oppression, members of the Knife Boxing sects were implicated in several high-profile public assassinations against their foreign rulers.

Stylistically, it was boxing but with a knife.

There was a bit of overlap with Jaguar Fang, the Yamalaian dagger grappling style. However, Jaguar Fang favoured slicing a disabled enemy, Forbidden Knife Boxing jab-stabbing someone mobile. Subtle but crucial differences.

The boxing aspect forced Henry to put in thousands of hours 'in-fighting', fighting within his opponent's weapon length. This was the range where reaction speed mattered most and therefore his worst historically.

Many broken noses later, having Stretched his observations of his enemy's body language, he learned to read the minutest signs telegraphing an attack. This decreased his effective reaction time by 8 whole milliseconds on average during the first encounter with a new opponent. Similarly, his mechanical GQ increased by 3 points while in-fighting, and 1 point overall.

Not bad for 2.8 years of effort.

...

He made several return trips to the Bamboo Jungle of the Elementosaurs, diving ever deeper into the territory. Eventually, he located the special species of grass that he'd hypothesised were giving the creatures their unbalanced power.

The grasses were thousands of metres tall, so he labeled them Cloud-Piercing Grass. At night, these towering grasses rained down a shower of watermelon-sized seeds that the Elementosaur packs, flocking to their base, greedily gobbled up. Further observation revealed a symbiotic relationship between the plants and the creatures. The grasses provided the food. In exchange, the Elementosaurs waged fast-paced, bloody wars against 'rival' grasses and their packs.

Eating a handful of seeds from less powerful grasses he'd gathered earlier, Henry discovered that this decreased his lethargy when shapeshifted into an Elementosaur himself. Additionally, the speed of the world slowed down slightly, as if he'd activated a mild bullet-time. However, the magnitude of these effects was negligible, the seeds lacking potency.

He tried collecting the watermelon-sized seeds dropped by the Cloud-Piercing Grasses, but the plants themselves stopped him. Whenever he stepped within 2 kilometres of one, he was apprehended by their extensive root network and choked to death. Shapeshifting into an Elementosaur didn't fix this. Neither did trying to sneak in with the elemental forms of his Legendary cloaks; the grass, when it couldn't grab him, signalled the Elementosaurs to obliterate him with thunder and fire.

...

Icedancing Shortspear.

In Heimland, his guild had a Public Zone in the territory of Lumimaaki, a region matted in a magical permafrost that resisted all attempts to melt it. One of the native tribes dwelling in this frozen domain, the Yaa'aanimset, eked out a living by hunting glacial demons in the hill country. This lifestyle, the generations of dancing on snow-slippery slopes, had gifted them the ability to perform spectacular feats of athletic acrobatics.

Their martial art, Icedancing Shortspear, was suitably nimble. It mixed dazzling spear thrusts with long-range, flexible aerial kicks reminiscent of the Chinese martial art Changquan but way faster.

The spear-side was unimpressive, but Henry'd theorised that the legwork could prove valuable when dual-handed spellcasting without a shield or weapon. With custom-forged lower body armour, his legs could be used for blocking attacks or opening up the opponent's guard. Call him childish, but he'd envisioned himself pirouetting around the geodesic dome of his Jungle Gym arena map, giving the noobs climbing after him a taste of toes and peppering their weeping eyeballs with . It should be sick as hell.

And after thousands of bumped tailbones and tumbles into lava lakes, his legs became super agile. When battling clones of Kabit The Green, he could Naruto run on top of the monster's utility-pole-sized antennae, bouncing from antenna to antenna. It was sick as hell.

The training also yielded a host of unexpected benefits. His improved legwork caused his mastery of Wingless Dragon to jump from 55 to 57%, while the supremely-difficult Nine Fists leapt from 32.1 to 32.4%. By using the of his Chameleon Monkey as a pseudo spear, the form became more viable in direct combat. Lastly, his movement speed increased by 4% in snow, 12% in mountainous terrain, 42% in snow-covered mountains, and 3% on average for the maps of his arena.

...

He began to chase an idea of becoming a Windraptor, zooming across the land with the wind in his wind feathers. In addition to shortening travel times, the species' unnatural speed might allow him to slip past the Cloud-Piercing Grasses. These had been acting as a final barrier against him traversing the Bamboo Jungle and seeing the end of the Flying Crab migration. (Alternatively, he could have followed the land herds the other way around the continent, but where was the fun in that?)

However, to fuel the Windraptor form, he first needed Cloud-Piercing Grass seeds, and he'd been unable to acquire any of these without being killed. Thus, he decided to breed one of its weaker, cousin species to be more potent.

Challenge number one was that none of the specimens he'd selected could tolerate the colder climate of his farm, which explained why the species'd never spread further north. This trait could be bred out, but he decided against doing so in case he accidentally caused the planet to be overtaken by the grass. Instead, he constructed massive greenhouses from the higher-level resources he'd gathered.

Next, he needed to figure out how to grow the species in the local soils since the Bamboo Jungle was too distant for large scale back-and-forth transportation. This step would require extensive soil analysis, advancement of his understanding of native mineralogy and botany, fertiliser development, and selective plant breeding.

...

Kolonia Sacred Warrior.

This was another basic style that Henry studied to familiarise himself with his noob enemies, yet it would also be the most torturous martial art thus far.

For essential background information, Kolonia was one of Yamalai's three major sub-regions, along with the slave-owning Abhaya and Maranya with its pygmies. The Kolonians were the last hold-outs from when The Neeshif Empire invaded Yamalai and Kanaru to replace the Old Rangbitan Empire influence with polytheism. The Neeshifs were themselves ejected from most of these domains two centuries later. In Kolonia, though, their crusade continued, them and the Abhayans locked in an eternal struggle, two sad shadows of faded glory.

At the beginning of Saana III, the Kolonians were the first faction to truly capitalise on the arrival of the players. Their leaders sent veterans from their 'Sacred Army' to Starting Zones around the globe to tutor noobs while recruiting them into the cause. As a result, their 'Sacred Arts' were today used by about 16% of the player base.

Kolonia Sacred Warrior, the most popular Sacred Art and the one Henry chose, was for frontliners. It paired a round shield with a one-handed spear, longsword, and dagger, the practitioner switching between the three weapons depending on the range from the opponent. Contrary to the name, it was a no-frills, meat-and-potato, pragmatic approach to combat. Its training program was designed mainly to get a novice into shape quickly and ship them out to die on the battlefield.

There was, however, a bunch of accompanying religious mumbo jumbo.

Initially, he'd intended on ignoring the lore when first scheduling this martial art. However, his mind had wavered after meeting the tragic figure of Justinian. Maybe, just maybe, the Crusader's fanatical devotion to whatever he was trying to accomplish in Suchi was contributing to his freakish motor skills. Henry himself, even after sympathising with the NPCs, had never pretended that Saana was anything but a game. Perhaps this detachment of his had been causing him to miss out. Perhaps only by dunking one's body, one's heart, and one's brain fully into the holy waters of a cause could one penetrate the invisible psychological power limiter that seals the unfathomably-deep pool of human potential.

A silly notion, but in the pursuit of perfection, one must explore every revolting avenue.

Thus, he roleplayed.

Yes...tossing all his morals into the trash, blowing away his disdainful thoughts with Floating Leaf, and hacking apart his shame with Nomad Sabre, he roleplayed.

Before and after training sessions, he cleaned his equipment while invoking prayers to the Gods associated with each...

His neurons, he molested with the mediocre poetry of the holy texts...

Demons and skeletons and warlocks became his practice dummies, and, while slaying them, he pretended to be liberating the feeble folk from their suffering...

And the final answer, he discovered on the other side of this torment, was no. Roleplaying provided zero discernible benefit.

Thankfully, no one but he would ever be aware of these black days.

...

On the digital day he finally exited The Overdream, the seed-trays in his greenhouses with the local soils were still uniformly brown. Not a single seed had successfully germinated yet.

Henry wasn't dispirited, though. Farming in Saana was as deep a field as Cooking and Alchemy and combat. Alone, this step would probably take him decades. But, decades, he had.