Rise of the Punch Monkey

Chapter 10

In the early stages of training, I loathed the old man. He was an absolute sadist, fueled by what I initially thought were his desires for booze and meats, he pushed me harder every day until I nearly broken. Our standard daily schedule was to spar until he triggered my Brave Rebirth, push me to the brink again, then force feed me a healing tonic. Even though he was a frail old man, he still seemed like a giant when we sparred. My small stature as a monkey provided me with very few advantages and I had to rely heavily on breaking through his reach to actually land any sort of blow. I knew he was going extremely easy on as he could likely erase my entire existence with the wave of his hand but he still never allowed me to land a hit.

After the healing tonic, he would make me meditate while cycling Resonance Aether until lunch. After lunch he made me run at him while he blasted me with hurricane force wind magic until my stamina was depleted, fed me a fruit from the orchard to replenish my stamina, then repeated the process all over again.

The last hours of light were spent with him launching fire balls at me to use Disruptive Aether to disperse them until my health was near zero. I had no concept on how to use disruptive force during the first few days so our session usually ended fairly quickly after a few fireballs.

Whenever the ability was off cooldown, I used Passive Pilfer on the Hermit in hopes I would gain something that would help with the training. If he noticed me doing it, he never said anything but all I ever seemed to collect were temporary passives such as Poison resistance, Underwater breathing, and Puncture resistance. While I may not have gained useful passives, my Passive Pilfer ability advanced rapidly, likely due to the Hermit's insane level.

It wasn't until the evening on the second day of training that I fully realized how much the training was benefitting me. I had developed a slew of new proficiencies and my Pugilism ability had skyrocketed, but again, levels through proficiency development were slow. I had been at the beginning of level five during the Magmukade fight and after all the strenuous training I finally reached level six.

Character

Akaro – Level 6

Hit Points – 90/90

Stamina – 100/100

Aether – 70/70

Attributes:

Strength – 7 ->12

Dexterity – 9 ->15

Intelligence – 2 ->6

Vitality – 5 ->9

Endurance – 7 ->10

Aether – 5 ->7

Spirit – 5 ->17

Luck – 7 ->9

Instead of moving up a couple points each, many had double, my spirit more than tripled! The old man explained that this was due to the stress placed on my body in between each level, combined with the fact that my training was being conducted in a Dungeon which increased the overall values gained due to them being Aether rich environments and these factors being further compounded with the fact that we were training in his prison gave us an added bonus of additional strain in the training simulating result higher than true combat.

I gave him a peculiar look as I drew a picture of prison bars with a question mark and pointed at him.

"Oh yea," he said, "Well, I was put here by some real assholes and they really didn't want me to get out causin' them problems. Funny thing is they couldn't kill me so they fixed up this place and stuck me here to keep me out their hair. That Vat'shun is a bastard but he's purdy smart. He rigged up this here chamber as a giant containment field, meanin' I can't leave til the seal is broken or...ya know...someone kills Vat'shun."