It has been about two months since Ryu recalled that top-tier nightmare. Different from the usual, he and his group were currently gathered on one of the Forest City hills. Ryu hadn't told his group the reason why they suddenly moved the training to here. Although, after staying in there for a week straight, they ultimately found the answer themself. If before it was 8 hours of hell on earth, now its duration was doubled.

"Umm, Ryu, could we go back to our residence backyard for the daily training? You see, I started to miss going to school..." the sky-blue haired girl politely asked as she sits on the side of their leader, joining his duty for the tent lookout at night.

Throwing more wood toward the flame, Ryu sighed, "Didn't we get two weeks permittance leave from the school? Why so hasty?" Ryu then cast a smirk on his face, "Or what? Don't tell me you can't last any longer with this daily routine in this hill?"

"As I said, I just missed some of my friends in school." Mizuha retorted.

"Sorry, it sounds like an empty word to me. So, I'm afraid that I can't fulfill that request." Scratching his head, Ryu added while directing his thumb at the tent, "You also should take a rest, I'll rise the difficulty for tomorrow's training after all."

"That was a joke, right? There's no way that you've come up with something more hardcore than what we currently do." Seeing that her eyes are quivered with anxiety, Ryu tapped her back, "You don't need to worry about that. For tomorrow, it simply will be a sparring match between you and Ayano with a little twist of the rule."

"I heard this from Narukami, he said nowadays there's nothing good would happen if you state something with a straight face..." Hesitated, she continued, "Could you tell me how much is this little twist of yours?"

"Just go back to the tent, it's not fixed yet, there's a chance that I would change the rule in the last second."

With some further persuasion, Mizuha finally gave up on influencing Ryu to end the training. Confirming that she had gone into the tent, Ryu then pulled his dagger, polishing it on a nearby stone.

'We're about to hit the two months mark, huh.'

'They've improved a lot, especially for the last 7 days.'

"All of them really have a will as hard as this stone."

Ryu unconsciously smiled when he thought about the Dragonewt members. Standing up, Ryu moved into the wood with the tent was still on his sight. Because the party activity on the hill wasn't sparring, he himself doesn't get any progress from monitoring his companions' daily training from day until midnight. Thus, the only time he could go to train for his own was post-midnight, which was also not maximized as he needs to divide his focus on the tent. Still, Ryu doesn't mind those things a bit when he saw their rapid growth.

***

Entering the 2nd hour of his practice, Ryu suddenly could be seen landing from the air while gasping for a breath, "Why it's still so hard to grasp the feeling, even though it's already been a week."

Ryu couldn't help but feel frustrated by his result. Actually, for this period, his friends weren't the only one that he scheduled with a different kind of training, he also comes up with a brand-new type of combat style, and that was airborne fighting. He actually got an insight about this at the time he had a sparring match between him and Verdi-Mizuha pair. The loss that he took at that time struck a realization at him, 'I literally couldn't do anything when I am on the air, huh.'

Following that understanding, there's a lot of scenarios that crossed his mind,

'What if there's a ground that couldn't be used as a footing?'

'What if there's a Dungeon floor with open space just like an arena?'

'What if there's no pillar in the Dungeon Guardian chamber?'

'What if he could fight in the air when he's up against Ellaine?'

Of course, when he fought against her, he could use a footing made of mana. But, it merely stops at the stage of knowing how to do it. At that level, it definitely did not highly contribute in his match against Ellaine. However, if he were to train this technique of his to its peak, he had a strong intuition that this could be one of the factors that enable him to prevail against his nemesis later. It could also overcome those situations where he can't dash at all.

With all that being said, practicing this fighting style wasn't by no means an easy task. There's a lot of things that he needed to master to muster this style to its fullest, one of it was how to properly use the Mana Footing.

On the first day of Ryu's self-training, he was knocked by a harsh fact, and that was how suck is he at mana proficiency. Just like stamina and intuition, it couldn't be got shortcutted by increasing the individual's mana. With a good mana proficiency, one could tell how to gain a maximum effect from the technique or spell without consuming their own mana too much.

Horrible as he, Ryu ended up wasting 3 points of his mana solely for a single Mana footing. It was actually the same case for a Quick-Steps and Violet Crash. Except, because of the nature of the technique, Ryu respectively only used 0,2 and 4 points of his mana every time he executed it.

Now that he's required to release out his mana and molded it into a shape, he eventually forced to revert to his usual practice after created a total of 7 one-use Mana Footing. Well, there's no helping it as it was the first trial for his reincarnated life. Back to the current day, Ryu noticed that he could create additional blocks even though he hasn't leveled-up yet.

"I didn't know I had a talent in mana proficiency..." stated Ryu as he stands dazedly on his place.