Tim's POV
The first day of training established something immediately.
I was bad at this.
Not bad in the way of someone who needed instruction and practice to become good. Bad in the way of someone whose body wouldn't learn, no matter how many times they try. *stupid shitty talent*.
Vesuchā watched me swing a practice sword for approximately ten minutes on the first morning and then sat down on a bench and looked at the middle distance for a moment with the expression of a man revising his assumptions.
"You trying your best, right.?," he said.
"Yes," I said.
"This...will take longer than I thought ."
"I know," I said. "can help me not suck"
He looked at me with something like pity. Then he stood up and began the actual instruction, which started from fundamentals so basic that any of the other students would have been insulted by them, and which I received without complaint because the fundamentals were genuinely where I needed to start.
On the third day I made my request about the martial arts, I wanted to learn.
I had thought carefully about how to frame it, as a student who had done his research and came up with his goals posts. I named the three things I wanted to learn: Limit Breaker, Limit Breaker: Mind, and Fourfold Slash of Light(lesser version of the Sixfold slash of light), I explained my reasoning for prioritising them.
Vesuchā's reaction to the first two was immediate and serious. He leaned forward and set down the weapon he had been holding and gave me THAT look.
The warning he started delivering me was not the warning of a teacher discouraging a student, this warning of a man who had seen what these martial arts did to skilled people who used them without understanding the major cost, the muscle tearing, the neurological strain of removing the brain's protective limiters, the debt that the body accumulated and paid afterward in damage that were permanent.
"These are last-resort tools," he said. "You use them when the alternative is death. Not before. Not to win a fight you could walk away from. Do you understand BOY?"
"That's exactly why I want them for," I said. "I'm already strong enough that most things won't require them. But if something comes along that's stronger than me, strong enough that my power isn't sufficient, I need an exit. Not a victory. Just an exit."
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "That is a more sensible reason than most people have for wanting them."
He agreed to teach them as part of the curriculum.
The other students had already been training for varying periods when I arrived, and I took the time in those first weeks to observe them while training my bases. Six of them I couldn't place where I saw them for Overlord, good fighters, talented by any normal measure, progressing at the rate that genuine talent plus Vesuchā's instruction produced. They trained with the focused intensity.
The Seventh student I knew immediately.
Gazef.
He was nine years old too, the same age as me, with the build of someone who had been doing physical work since he could walk, *I guess he been here awhile, He moved differently from the other students.
Where they had technique learning over natural instinct, Gazef had natural instinct so deeply developed that technique was layering onto an already-solid foundation.*I am not jealous, I swear*
He was also, I noted in those first weeks, the only student who treated me with complete normalcy. The others had the slight wariness of me. *maybe beacuse when i swing my sword, the wind knocks them over* Gazef watched me train with the assessment of someone genuinely interested in how other people approached physical problems, and occasionally asked questions how did I get so strong if I sucked at fighting, that kind of hurted kid, but that came from real curiosity rather than him being an asshole.
I answered him semi-honestly, which in this context meant talking about when I was a priest, anyways back to training.
Year one passed.
I learned nothing. I understood the theory of everything Vesuchā taught with complete clarity, could describe each technique in detail, could watch another student perform it and identify every element correctly. But understanding and execution were the gap I couldn't close, the same gap that had made the tier one spells take so long, my body wouldn't learn.
The other students progressed visibly. Gazef progressed faster than all of them, which should not have surprised me, but BOY did it make me mad as hell.
I trained harder. Ten times harder. I was on the practice floor before anyone else arrived and still there after everyone else had stopped, running through the forms that my body understood intellectually and refused to internalise physically.
Vesuchā watched me during these extra sessions with an expression I couldn't fully read, not pity, not frustration, something more complex that I eventually identified as a kind of sustained interest. The combination of zero progress and absolute persistence was something he had not encountered before.
Year two passed.
Nothing, AGAIN.
Year three passed.
Nothing, except a conversation with Gazef late on an autumn evening when we were both still on the practice floor, in which he asked me why I kept going when it wasn't working and I told him that my talent maybe crappy, but wasn't ZERO, that means I can still learn, and he nodded slowly with the expression of understanding.
The fourth year.
It happened on an unremarkable morning in early spring, three years and seven months into training that had produced exactly zero measurable technical improvement.
I was running the first movement of Fourfold Slash of Light for what was probably the four thousandth time, the same movement, the same sequence, the same gap between what I was doing and what the technique required, when something in the execution shifted.
Just a small, fundamental click of alignment.
One slash. Clean. Fast in a way that my previous strikes had not been fast, the speed coming not from the force I applied but from the geometry of the movement, the efficient path, the correct lever, the technique expressing itself.
I stopped.
Stood very still.
Did it again.
Same result.
I went and found Vesuchā.
He watched me perform it three times. His face went through something controlled and quiet. Then he said: "Again," and watched three more times, and then he was quiet for a long moment.
"Yep, that's the first slash of light, congrats" he said.
"Yes," I said.
"Most people would have left by now."
"SHUT UP."
"The other three slashes will come faster now," he said. "The first is always the hardest. Once through it, the rest is easy."
I ran the scan that evening in private. Danger level one hundred and fourteen. Six danger levels gained, two normal levels, the slow accumulation of genuine sword work finally registering in the system. The swordsman class had incremented. And then, arriving quietly alongside it, something I had been waiting for Years.
Paladin.
The class had unlocked, priest and swordsman combined, the moral alignment condition apparently satisfied, the system acknowledging my moral high ground.
One level in paladin. And with it, something that announced itself not as a sensation but as a word, arriving fully formed in my mind the way the druid perception had arrived, a new channel of awareness suddenly open.
*Smite.*
I was in the practice yard. I looked at my sword, which was glowing with a soft gold-white light that I had not asked it to produce and found extremely interesting.
I swung at the practice post.
The sword connected. The light discharged. The post stood completely undamaged, as solid as it had been before I hit it.
I stood there for a moment.
Smite does damage proportional to the evil of the target.* A practice post had no evil. The capacity was real and the discharge had been real, but the damage calculation against non-evil targets was zero, which meant the spell was currently impressive to look at and useless in most practice.
The potential against an actually evil target, a genuinely malicious person, a creature of pure darkness, thinking about it makes me smile.
I went back to practicing the slash.
Year five.
The second slash came within five months, as Vesuchā had predicted. The first had been the wall, the next one was easier. My danger level climbed three more points, one normal level, the swordsman class continuing its slow increment.
I trained against Gazef too, when Vesuchā arranged it, and I won those sessions consistently and for the wrong reasons, not because my technique was better but because my base statistics simply overwhelmed the gap in technical skill. This bothered me more than losing would have. Winning through raw strength while your technique was inferior was not progress.
Year six.
Limit Breaker came first, on a hot summer morning, the sensation of the brain's protective governing removed, the body's full capacity suddenly available without the subconscious filters that normally kept muscle exertion within safe limits. I held it for four seconds and released it and spent the following hour experiencing what four seconds of unfiltered physical exertion cost in muscle damage and neurological strain.
I had been preparing to feel discouraged by the number and found, unexpectedly, that I wasn't. Not because forty was sufficient, it wasn't, not by any measure that mattered when the endpoint was Nazarick.
I practiced both exactly once each, confirming their function, and then set them aside for later use.
I had been preparing to feel discouraged by the number and found, unexpectedly, that I wasn't. Not because forty was sufficient, it wasn't, not by any measure that mattered when the endpoint was Nazarick.
Fall of my sixth year of training.
I was turning fifteen years old today.
I ran the scan in my room, Danger level one hundred and twenty. Level forty.
Forty levels. Level forty, at fifteen years old, with approximately seventeen years remaining before Ainz arrived.
I had been preparing to feel discouraged by the number and found, unexpectedly, that I wasn't. Not because forty was sufficient, it wasn't, not by any measure that mattered when the endpoint was Nazarick.
*But I now have Smite, baby*
Tim's stats ( he can't see his true stats)
LeveL [40]
Vermin killer: [2/10]
Assassin: [2/10]
Priest: [1/10]
Gardener: [15/15]
Chef: [9/15]
Doctor: [4/10]
Wizard: [1/10]
Durid: [1/5]
Farmer: [1/15]
Swordsman: [2/10] [NEW]
Paladin: [1/5] [NEW]