Time was like sand slipping through his fingers—look away for a moment and it was gone.
Fully immersed in drilling the basics of swordsmanship, Keyaru set no specific targets and just kept going on sheer will… until he'd wrung out the last drop of strength and his muscles ached so badly he couldn't even lift the blade.
"Training…"
"Gotta say, it actually feels great!"
He slumped to the ground.
Outside the abandoned church, the street shimmered under blazing sunlight; it was nearly noon. He'd burned through his stamina and was starving, but in his condition even walking out to get food was a fantasy. Muscle soreness only fades with time.
And then—
A bold idea surfaced.
"If I use Heal to reset the soreness and stamina back to baseline… doesn't that make me a kind of perpetual-motion machine?"
A man of action, he tried it at once. He lifted his right hand with effort to his throbbing shoulder and cast Heal.
Soft light bloomed—along with vivid flashes of the true cause of his strain: the basic drills where he'd pushed past his limits. The whole session replayed before his eyes.
He was submerged in it, feeling it completely—as if his mind were reviewing the training again, stamping every detail deeper.
"Tsk…"
"Doesn't this count as Imitation?"
From this round of healing, Keyaru could confirm it for sure: his spell just burned a lot of mana. The old side effect—sharing the target's pain—was gone. But it still preserved the patient's injury process; if he focused, he could pull battle experience out of it.
He ignored the out-of-mana dizziness, elated.
His salute to Koby was mostly a joke; no human could really go that far. But with Heal, he could literally double his training time.
Drive the body past its limits; then use Heal to relive the grind again.
"So…"
"Put in the work and get double the return?"
When the post-cast crash faded, his body felt lighter than ever. He stood, rolled his shoulders and limbs, confirmed the healing—then was about to keep going when a wave of hunger nearly swallowed him whole. Heal only heals. If he wanted stamina back, he had to eat.
"Call it a morning."
"With this double regimen, I should be able to move up my Dungeon schedule!"
After washing off the sticky sweat, Keyaru set a clear goal: head to the southwest adventurers' street in Orario where the food stalls were, and cheap. Hestia had only left him 300 valis; at a restaurant that barely covered a staple. He needed quantity over taste if he was going to keep training this hard.
"Fried potato balls… the broke man's best friend."
At a North Main Street stall, the sign read 40 valis each. He didn't have much choice.
"Seven fried potato balls, please."
"Just a moment. That'll be 280 valis."
—
Now that he'd nailed down the right way to use Heal, he effectively had his shortcut. The next steps were simple: grind, improve, then use Heal to "replay" the path he'd just trained.
Pound away until his body hit its limit, then burn mana to reset to baseline.
Rinse and repeat.
The results were striking. After nearly a thousand repetitions, the motions had started to settle into muscle memory—and the healing "replays" carved a deeper imprint in his mind.
Reset again.
"That's probably enough for now."
Bathed in Orario's golden sunset, he felt the hours had been well spent. The grind was boring, but the gains were obvious: at the very least, he now handled the basic forms with confidence.
"At this pace my stats will definitely rise!"
"But I'll have to wait for Hestia to update them. As for tonight… should I go find Takemikazuchi for live sparring?"
Real sparring—not last night's quick check. Whether it went well or ended in bruises, it would help. Train normally to build combat skill; if he got hurt, use Heal to relive the fight and patch the gaps.
With that thought, a new path seemed to open. The "Healer" stereotype was too ingrained—just a hero good with a club. Most of his old derivative tricks wouldn't fly in DanMachi. But if he'd found the right way to use this power, who's to say it couldn't rival a cheat system?
"Gotta milk this."
"Best if I can keep live-combat training to three days."
Just then, from the other end of South Main, a girl in a Hephaestus Familia shop uniform came briskly toward the base. As she got closer and saw the boy waiting, the fatigue of her shift seemed to melt away.
"Keyaru! I'm back. For dinner… I brought two bentos from the restaurant. You can't live on fried potato balls—no nutrition. You're still growing."
Hestia lifted the two lunch boxes.
All he had to do was train; a cute loli goddess handled the meals. In his previous life he wouldn't have dared to dream it, yet here it was—like something out of sci-fi, right in front of him.
"Thank you, Lady Hestia. After dinner, could you update my stats?"
"Of course." Updating a child's status was a goddess's duty. He'd probably trained hard and wanted a clear readout.
Except—
His next words almost froze her smile in place.
"I'll likely be troubling Lord Takemikazuchi for training the next few days. Once I'm ready, I'm heading into the Dungeon."
"??"
"So soon?!"