Chapter 8: Onward to Death

As soon as the combat demonstration finishes, Samantha transforms. Unlike the kind and cheerful Samantha from before, this Samantha is, for lack of a better word, overpowering.

“Listen up,” she says, her voice hard. “Here at the Adventurer Guild, our motto is, Onward to death.

“As Adventurers, you live and die by this motto. Do you understand?”

I nod.

Samantha glares at me.

“From now on, whenever you’re in class, a simple nod won’t cut it. When I ask you a question, I want verbal confirmation. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Yes, what?” Samantha asks.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Better,” Samantha says.

“As your instructor, my job is to make the three of you into full fledged Adventurers. Which means, from now on whenever I ask you to do something you have two options, do as I say, or die trying.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Bridget, Wolf, and I, shout.

“Good.”

Samantha’s glares at each of us, then turns and addresses me.

“Sage,” she says.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What is the most important asset an Adventurer can have?”

“Um. Combat skills.”

“That’s, combat skills, ma’am, to you,” Samantha says. “And, no. That is incorrect.

“Bridget?”

“Survival skills. Ma’am?”

“Wrong. Also, when you’re answering a question don’t second guess yourself. Answer like you mean it.”

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”

“Stop apologizing. It’s a bad habit of yours.”

“Sorry– I mean, yes, ma’am.”

“Wolf, what is the most important asset an Adventurer can have.”

“Physical fitness, Ma’am.”

“Correct. The most important asset an Adventurer can have is a strong body.

“Even if you combat and survival skills are Goddess level, if you aren’t physically fit, you won’t last very long as an Adventurer.

“Take Denise as an example. Her movements are crisp and her sword skills are flashy, but still, she didn’t even come close to landing a hit on me. Why? Because her physical training is lacking.

“While I can’t guarantee that you’ll ever have combat skills like Denise, I can guarantee that by the end of this course, your physical fitness will be on the same level as hers.

“Do you have any questions?”

“No. Ma’am.”

“Good. Let the physical fitness test begin.”

Samantha walks over to the door of the practice room and taps her Guild card on a metal plate embedded in the wall. Instantly, a low pitched hum fills the room, and a series of ladder like protrusions extend from the far wall.

The five of us cross the room and stop in front of the protrusions.

“This test will be conducted in stages in the order of easiest to hardest. Before each stage, I will have Denise give a quick demonstration, after which each of you will have a chance to do the exercise once. Your goal is to complete as many reps of the exercise as you can. Are there any questions?”

The three of us remain silent.

“Good.

“The first exercise you will be completing is called Doubles. It is meant to test your upper body strength, which means during this exercise you aren’t allowed to use your legs.

“Your goal is simple. Climb as high as you can.

“Your score will be based on the highest point reached.

“Denise, if you would be so kind.”

Denise hurries over to the wall and rests her hands on the first handhold.

She closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath, then after a moment, she exhales and begins to climb.

Actually, “climb” isn’t the right word. What she does is more like jumping with her arms.

Instead of letting go of the handhold with one arm and grabbing onto the one above it, then repeating the cycle with the other hand. Denise tenses her shoulders, and “jumps” both of her hands up to the next handhold at the same time.

Why does she climb in such an energy intensive way? The reason becomes clear as Denise continues to climb.

Near the floor, the handholds are no more than 15cm apart, but higher up the wall the space between the handholds increases. Near the top of the wall there is a full meter in between each handhold, making it impossible to climb between them using normal means.

Denise leaps from one handhold to the next, her movements effortless as a birds. As soon as her hands make contact with one handhold, she’s already using her momentum to carry her on to the next one.

Denise reaches the ceiling, one hundred meters above us, and gives Samantha a thumbs up, then defying all expectations, she let’s go of the wall and falls to the ground, landing in a dive roll which brings her back onto her feet. It’s like watching one of those fake parkour videos where the runner jumps from the top of a building and lands on concrete, except this one is one hundred percent real.

Onward to death, eh? If this is the easiest exercise in the assessment, it looks like I’ll be arriving at death much sooner than I expected.

“Nice job,” Samantha says. “You’ve really improved.”

“Thank you so much,” Denise says, clasping her hands to her chest and beaming at Samantha’s praise. “You don’t know how much that means to me.”

“Wolf, you’re up next,” Samantha says, turning her back on Denise who is practically glowing.

“Um, ma’am,” Wolf says, his expression uncertain. “May I ask a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“What happens if we fall.”

Thank the Goddess. Someone in this room, other than me, has some common sense.

After all, most bouldering gyms don’t allow you to climb over a certain height without a rope for a reason. That reason being, if any normal person fell 100 meters onto rock, they would probably die.

“Don’t worry, if you happen to fall either Denise or I will catch you. Probably.”

Probably? Great. That makes me feel so confident.

However, that answer seems to satisfy Wolf. Without another word, he grabs hold of the first handhold and starts climbing.

Wolf makes it to the tenth handhold, about 3 meters up the wall, before his arms give out and he drops back to the floor. Apparently, he’s not high enough to warrant catching, because neither Denise nor Samantha make any moves to soften his fall.

Ok, got it. If I fall from 3 meters up, I won’t die.

Probably.

Do you see what I did there?

Wolf lands on his feet, not even bothering to roll. After getting a nod from Samantha, he makes his way over to where Bridget and I are standing and takes a seat on the floor.

Samantha marks something down on a clipboard Denise hands to her, then turns to me and says, “okay, Sage. You’re next.”

I walk over to the wall and place my hands on the bottom most handhold. It’s cool to the touch, and has a texture similar to stone.

The handhold itself is similar in shape to a thin piece of wood. It’s small enough to grab, but not deep enough to rest more than the first knuckle of my fingers on. Up close, I notice the wall is tilted outwards from the bottom at a slight angle, which only adds to my growing unease.

This entire situation reminds me of high school PE classes from my previous life.

For whatever reason, my classes’ PE teacher was obsessed with pull ups.

Every time we had class we always had to do pull ups.

Running cross country? Warm up with pull ups.

Playing dodge ball? When you get knocked out do pull ups.

Learning to play Volleyball? Before you serve do pull ups.

You’d think after doing so many pull ups, I’d be super good at them, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case.

Even after two whole years of doing pull ups every single class, I still couldn’t do more than five in a row. All of the other boys, and even some of the girls, could easily do more than fifteen, but for whatever reason I never could.

After watching Wolf do Doubles, I can already tell that doing one of those is like doing a hundred pull ups. Which means, after doing a little math, I can probably do exactly zero of them.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath, praying with all my might for a miracle to take place.

I exhale sharply and tighten my core, then flexing my muscles, I fly through the air to the second handhold.

Soaring like a bird, I flit from one handhold to the next. Below me, the rungs fly past, blurring with the speed of my climb.

Everything is going better than I can imagine, until Samantha says, “um, Sage. Are you okay?”

Back in the real world, I find myself struggling to get my chin above the first handhold. I flex my muscles and kick my legs, but try as I might I can’t seem to reach the second handhold.

After several minutes of this, I release my grip and drop to the floor. With fire in my arms and humiliation in my heart, I collapse onto the floor next to Wolf and try to do my best impression of the invisible man.

How did this happen?

What did I do to deserve this fate?

Was it the time, ten years ago, where I gave all the cabbage from my cabbage soup to a stray dog instead of eating it? The orphanage’s director always told us that if we didn’t eat our cabbage we wouldn’t grow up to be big and strong, but I never took her seriously.

Or maybe it was the time when I lied to the orphanage’s director about scrubbing the floor like I was supposed to. I mean, she did say lies always catch up to you in the end.

“Don’t worry about it,” Wolf says, patting my shoulder. “The first time I tried to do that exercise, I couldn’t even get my chin over the bar.”

I sit up straight, my depression gone.

See, aren’t I incredible. Giving away my cabbage. Lying to the director. Everything I’ve done in my life has all been for this beautiful moment.

Ahem. Moving on.

Thankfully, for my fragile ego, Bridget isn’t any better at doing Doubles than I was. In fact, in my totally unbiased opinion, when I did them, I was able to get my chin higher than her.

Yeah, sure. It was only by 1 millimeter. But, higher is higher, so take that.

As soon as Samantha finishes marking Bridget’s score on her clipboard, Denise appears with three backpack like contraptions, and plunks them down on the floor right in front of us.

“Within each of these bags,” Samantha says, “is an MSPD called a Weight, which as you might have already guess, weighs a lot.”

“For this assessment, each of the Weights are set to 150 kilograms. However, by the end of the course I expect that each of you will be able to do all of these exercises with at least twice that amount.”

150 kilograms, isn’t that like 300 pounds, and I’m supposed to carry that on my back while doing exercises? You’ve got to be kidding me, that’s almost twice as much as I weighed in my previous life.

“We’ll start out nice and easy with a simple jump test. Denise, please start the demonstration.”

Denise places a large box about one meter high, on the ground in front of her, then she straps on one of the backpacks and jumps from the ground to the top of the box, landing light as a feather.

“Easy, right?” Samantha says. “Now it’s your turn.”

After finishing the final exercise, I collapse onto the floor with exhaustion.

The exercises themselves, box jumps, line runs, pull ups, push ups, sit ups, planks, squats, long jump, and high jump, weren’t that difficult. However, carrying 150 kilograms while doing the exercises, was impossible.

Box jumps with 150 kilograms on my back? No way. I couldn’t even lift up the stupid backpack from the ground, let alone do any exercises with them.

Despite my shortcomings, I was nearly crushed to death while doing planks, so at least I managed to live by the Adventurer Guild’s motto. Hopefully, Samantha noticed and my score will improve, but I’m not holding my breath.

Bridget didn’t do much better than I did, but Wolf was an entirely different story.

Because he was a soldier, I figured he might be able to do a couple of reps of each exercise, but he blew my expectations out of the water by putting up nearly half as many repetitions as Denise.

While half might not seem like a lot, it’s well above the big fat zero I put up, and Samantha seemed to be genuinely impressed at his performance, even going as far as praising him once the assessment was over. It made me a little bit jealous, but after reminding myself he was a trained in the military, I felt a little better.

Why are Wolf and Denise so much stronger than the rest of us?

That’s what I would like to know. However, I do have a theory, and no it doesn’t have to do with me not getting enough sleep last night.

This is purely conjecture, but I would guess that this world has “levels”. Yes, you heard that right. “Levels”, as in levels in a role playing game or RPG.

In an RPG, your base stats increase whenever you level up. In other words, whenever you level up you grow stronger.

While the term “level” didn’t show up at the Measuring Ceremony, and is not listed on my Guild Card. This concept would explain why a trained soldier like Wolf is weaker than slender Denise, and Samantha’s emphasis on physical training, supports this theory.

In any normal world, it would take years of hard physical training to reach Denise’s level of strength and agility. However, Samantha seems to believe we can reach a similar level in the span of eight weeks.

Of course, there might be some other totally valid explanation, but the only one I can think of is hidden levels. Which means, if I want to survive this hellish boot camp, I’m going to have to level up as soon as possible.