Systematic Survival

48 - Drop

Matt was in between a rock and a hard place. Not literally, but basically as bad. He saw both of the men carrying their overly-sized weapons while sprinting full speed toward him. They were converging on his position very quickly.

'Well, there's only one way out now.'

He had to fight. At least, enough where he could carve out an opening big enough to let him start his ascent of the construction site. Though, now that plan as well was flawed.

'No, it could still work.'

He had something very particular in mind and if he played his cards right, all he needed to do next was follow through. He was still a few hundred feet from the construction site but it was a straight shot to it if he could only get past the man with the scythe.

He decided to play defensive and see what he could do with the fighting skills he had trained. Not to mention the self-defense skill he had gotten to level 2. This was getting scary, but there wasn't much else he could do.

'I can't die here.'

Matt readied his hands and aimed them at his incoming attackers. It looked like a strange fusion of martial arts. He had to go all out or else he might die here. He was going to use what he had learned from the different combat skills he had acquired and mix the most advantageous features of each into his movements.

In total, he was mixing his level 2 Self Defense skills, level 2 Boxing, level 2 Karate, level 2 Kung Fu, level 1 Wrestling, level 1 Judo, and level 1 Kickboxing skills together. It was quite a combo, but he wasn't using all of them at once, since there were too many opposing types of techniques.

He had thought of this when he was training his skills a few days ago. He thought, since some of the styles he learned conflict, instead of using them all at once, he would use individual movements from each skill the moment one was required.

In this instance, the two men were about to reach him, swinging their swords and scythe down toward his body. As they swung downward, Matt used his first skill like it was something he had practiced for months. He didn't need to activate it manually, since it was just ingrained in his muscle memory now.

'I wasn't sure if this one was going to come in handy, but it might save me here.'

He used what he had learned from his self-defense skill to gently push against the flat side of their weapons with both hands. He pushed them at the same time in different directions, causing both weapons to miss him, since they moved a few inches to each side of him.

Both of the attackers looked confused. They were both sure they had landed a hit, but then they saw him move his hands, and they missed by a mile. It made them feel pretty stupid.

Before they could comprehend what happened, Matt infused a punch with his boxing, kung fu, and karate to deliver a high-force hit to the sword user. With lightning-fast speed, he punched him hard in the chest using his best level 2 martial skills.

Matt thought it would only buy him some time, but to his surprise, the man went flying. He had sent him back by at least 10 feet. He looked at his fist confused.

'When did I get that strong?'

But that's when he realized something. An advantage he had that he never considered was much of an advantage against other players. The mind palace skill allowed him to train his skills without passing time. He had assumed that skills were fairly useless against players, at least the naturally learned ones, but they seemed to increase drastically in strength when stacked.

He also wasn't sure how common knowledge training skills naturally were for other players. If their [Help]s were just as unhelpful, then maybe he had discovered something niche. But in the time he had gotten the system, he had trained 10 skills and 6 of them to level 2.