RAWR. Despite having heard the roar for countless times, Ellowyn couldn't help but freeze in place as a primal sense of terror gripped her heart.

Not again. She sighed, staring transfixed at the charging bear.

The bear raised its arm, ready to tear apart the trembling girl beneath its claws.

Clang. Ellowyn raised her shield just in time to hear the sound of scratching metal right after the impact send her flying backwards.

"Gah." Even as the system suppressed her pain receptors, the fall still knocked the air from her lungs and made her vision spin.

Dissatisfied that its target was still alive, the bear charged once again, rawring louder than ever.

Come on come on! She struggled to stand up and aimed her handgun at the beast. Bang. Bang. The two bullets landed squarely within its chest, but that did nothing to slow the creature down.

She cliched her tongue and dived to the side.

Applying force

Assisted by the system, her dive turned into a high leap as she flew for seven meters. Her vision spun as she made a rough landing on the ground.

Damage:

Light concussion

Light Rib Fracture

Dismissing the warning, she stood up and fired twice again before repeating the dive.

Damage:

Serious concussion

Lung punctured

Left femur fractured

...

She frowned, her body was getting too battered for efficient movement and she was slowly suffocating as blood filled up her lungs. A quick glance at the energy meter told her the system only had 4% left, not enough for any more aerial manures.

Her lips curved into a bitter smirk. I guess this is where the hero puts up her last stand.

Kneeling on one knee, she switched the gun to close combat mode and wielded it like a dagger.

Her left arm held a force blade the length of a short sword and her shield also shrunk in size, allowing her to perform more flexible movement.

The bear continued its relentless charge and pounced on her frail looking body.

"Gahhh!" The bear flinched at her scream.

She thrusted her gun upward, letting the force blade shred through its arm like paper while firing on auto.

The bear retaliated by bashing its other arm on her shield and sending her rolling on the ground with the gun knocked out of her hand.

Cough. Her tongue sensed a foreign iron taste as blood surged up her throat. Even with her blurry vision, she could still see one of the bear's arm nearly torn off and one of its eye blinded. There were no blood gushing out because the force blade sheared its wound shut.

The bear stood before her battered and bloody figure, declaring its victory with its loudest rawr yet.

Staring at its wide open jaw, she gave a faint smirk before using all of her strength to throw the blade in her left hand upward.

Assisted by the system, the blade flew with pinpoint accuracy into its open maw and pierced its skull.

"Yes!" She exclaimed, but her joyous expression quickly faded as the bear's standing corpse started to lean forward.

She tried to crawl away, but her battered limbs refused to move fast enough.

Darkness overtook her vision.

"At least I killed it." She whimpered, trying to console herself.

You have died. Stopping simulation

The white training room dematerialized, in its place stood the familiar scene of a tranquil forest and a lake.

Ellowyn watched the replay of the previous scene in a virtual window and sighed. This is my limit. She sent the combat log to Carl.

She laid her back on the soft blanket of grass and closed her eyes, listening to the sound of wind blowing through the leaves and letting the fresh smell of nature permeate through her nostrils.

Good job

Her eyes jerked awake at the chat notification sound. She had been asleep for two hours. Still sleepy, she splashed her face with the fresh water of the lake.

Not good enough, I still can't handle more than one enemy at a time.

She wanted to tell him about all of her frustrations, from her weak body that often ran out of breath even with all the adrenaline the system pumped into her bloodstream, to the inefficiency in her dodging tactic that drained too much system power. But she knew well that he already knew from the reports.

I know you want to do better, but I doubt you can't progress anymore with your current strength and skills. Focus on improving your health and physical abilities for now. If you really want to improve your combat abilities then I suggest you do some more research on modern combat strategies.

Why can't you at least give me more specific suggestions? You know more about the system than I ever would. If you're trying to play the part of a mysterious wise man then you're doing a terrible job.

You know I'd love to, Ellowyn, but my hands are tied here. Our interactions can be revealed, so I have to keep my influence to the absolute minimum, at least until I get these legal things solved out.

Whatever you're doing to fix this, please hurry up.

I am doing all I can alright. Talk to you later.

She left the soul room just in time for dinner.

With a full stomach, she began looking around the net for various combat strategies, from footages of trained soldiers in close combat to group battles, all of which she had seen many times before in the soul room simulation.

She had to admit that Carl was right, attempting any of the movement she saw was too difficult if not downright impossible with her weak body. However, she doubt that even were her condition to improve, she'd still be far too weak compared to the professionally trained and the system had nothing that would help in physical strengthening.

Perhaps I can improve myself mechanically? She started looking up power suits and mechanical extensions of limbs, but quickly gave up on the idea. For the power suits were too expensive and clunky and while even prosthetic limbs were stronger and faster, they had too many moving parts that might malfunction during battle.

She put her hand on her chin and reconsidered her priorities. If she only focus on survival and evasion, there was no need to be on the offensive. Granted she still needed to have speed and precision to dodge incoming attacks, but that could be solved by giving the system a full 360 view of her surroundings and calculate the required body maneuvers.

There was still the issue of movement speed that one was harder to solve. While the system could change her movement vector by applying force in a specific direction, the energy cost was too high to maintain if the battle ever dragged on.

And then the image of Zekke appeared in her mind, a smile lined her lips. Alice, if you think what you did was crazy, then what I'm about to do would be borderline insane.

Back in the soul room, she opened sandbox mode and began experimenting with various ways to attach thrusters into her suit. She started by simply strapping them into the fabric itself, but their strong propulsion would often rip the fabric.

The simplest cost effective design was to strap the thrusters onto a modified climbing harness. She held it up and marveled at the odd creation. From afar, it looked no different than a normal climbing harness, only with various small boxes strapped to its surface.

What impressed her more was the technology of the world that allowed for the production of such advanced thrusters. At the size of half a phone, only around ten of those things were needed to make her hover on the ground. They also came with individual power supply that could be recharged wirelessly.

The idea still sounded insane to her and perhaps to any sensible weapon manufacturer. The chances of something going wrong was simply too high, the individual thrusters could fail and send the user into an unstable trajectory, there also were no brain wave control system reliable enough to allow a human to control them effectively.

However, she had the system. It would calculate the most effective movement and all she had to do was to move her body in accordance with the thrusters that it controlled, like a marionette.

With the prototype suit completed, she still needed to update the code from Carl's self defense module. The seemingly trivial task took her nearly five hours for Carl's coding style was not very back track friendly.

It was nearly one in the morning, determined to test out her creation, she ignored the nagging of her sleep deprived mind and started the combat simulation.

The white training room materialized along with a new instance of the modified harness. She put it on and made sure the harnesses were tightened.

Hover mode. She held her arms to a T shape, and waited for the thrusters to turn on their axis towards the ground, like turrets.

Gasp. Her eyes opened wide as she was carried up and hovered at one meter above ground. She felt uncomfortable when the tight harnesses tugged at her skin and potential restricting blood flow. I'll have to pad them later. However, the sensation of being lifted into the air was quite thrilling to her.

She had to turn them off half a minute later because the thrusters produced too much heat. Looks like Zekke didn't get overheated because his wings supported most of his weight.

It wasn't too much a problem however, since she had no intention to use the suit for flying or hovering.

Yawning, Ellowyn decided to do one last combat test before she sleep.

Simulating body status:

Releasing Adrenaline

Heightened mental state

She felt energized as the virtual adrenaline flooded her bloodstream.

Spawning target

A large green wolf materialized across the room. It stared at her and snarled.

"Come at me you ugly puppy!" The wolf started its charge at her jeer.

She stood still, her eyes trained on the massive figure of the wolf. Calm down, its just a simulation. Even when she already knew what to do according to the instructions, the familiar sense of terror still ran through her spine. Everything was too real, from the foul smell of its body to the sharp canines mounted in its snarling jaw.

But after having been through countless quick time events in games, the gamer within her responded the moment the system signaled.

As the wolf was leaping through the air, she made a leap to the front right. Four thrusters, two on her back and two on her hip thrusted downward to keep her in the air longer, while the rest of the thrusters pushed her forward to increase her speed. Like a spaceship. She grinned

The wolf turned its head towards her and tried to bite, only to meet the force blade of her handgun head on.

"Awoooo!" It howled in pain as she used her jump momentum to make a wide gash on part of its face and side.

Shit. Upon her landing, the system wanted her to do a barrel roll on the ground and stand back up, an impossible task for her. She could only roll on her side helplessly.

By the time she managed to stand up, the wolf was already half way to her.

There was no time for moving or jumping, all she could do was fall to the left, assisted by the thrusters on her arm.

Surprised that its target managed to fall faster than the law of gravity, the wolf missed her body but still managed to make a deep gash on her arm with its claw.

"Arg!" The ground knocked the air from her lungs and smashed one of the thrusters on her arm to pieces.

She immediately stood up and ran backward while firing at the wolf. Two thrusters on her back and two on her belt kept her balance.

The wolf turned around and restarted its chase, ignoring the stream of bullets showering its body.

Come on come on. She watched helplessly as the wolf got closer, its speed unaffected by the metal slugs lodged in its flesh.

Despite her unsteady aim from the injured arm, her last bullet managed to pierce the wolf's skull, killing it instantly. It was too late, however, as the wolf was already in mid air.

The body hit her at full force, pushing her to the ground and sent them both sliding for a few seconds.

She grimaced, feeling the broken pieces of the two thrusters stabbing into her back. She stared at the trail of blood of both hers and the wolf on the floor and sighed. At least I killed it, I guess.

Stopping simulation

There was much to-do, she needed to reposition the thrusters so they'd less likely stab her with broken pieces when she fall, the self-defense module needed to be recalibrated to fit more with her current skills.

But most important of all was her ability to perform the needed actions. The more movements and poses she could do, the more flexible was the plan the system could make to increase her success chance in battle.

She needed to practice choreographing new movement combinations and implement them to the combat algorithm.

Like a dance. She chuckled at the notion but couldn't refute it. For all she had done was to perform a set number of body movements in accordance with a precompiled plan.

In the loosest sense of the word, she was dancing.

Overtaken by a wave of fatigue, she fell asleep while scrolling through the schematics.

##

"Why do you like this so much, Ellowyn? It just look like a bunch of people flailing their limbs to me." Alex hugged her from behind as she was watching a video on her computer.

"For the last time Alex, its called Freestyle dancing. Get it right." She chuckled. “And its not that I want to be able to do it since you know about my condition.”

“Then why?” Alex pressed on.

“Have you ever had that one desire to achieve something that you know you may never can?” She stared into his eyes.

“Not really, but I can understand what you mean.”

“I know you put logic before feeling, but please think twice before making such questions. They’re rather rude.” She sighed.

He held his hand up and laughed. “Alright, I’ll try to think more before I speak.”

I have not PR it yet, too busy with school.

Tell me if you think there are too much sciency jargon and I'll try to trim them down.

GDoc link Please comment if you find any grammar errors of have any suggestions for better wording