Re: From Elf Mage to Overlord Slayer-Chapter 32: Grinding New Skills

Chapter 32: Grinding New Skills
The mess hall was just another part of the training.
A different kind of Crucible, or whatever they called it.
Here, the weapons weren’t sharp, pointy things.
They were whispers and eyeballs.
And man, was I losing.
Or, at least, that’s what all these idiots thought.
Ever since my little... disagreement with Gandalf, I’d basically become a ghost.
A walking glitch in their perfect little system of who gets to punch who.
The other trainees didn’t just avoid me anymore.
They looked straight through me, like I was a smudge on the window.
I was the level three scrub who somehow traded hits with a guy who was basically a walking nuclear reactor of sadness and muscles.
It just didn’t compute for them.
And in a place like this, anything that doesn’t compute is dangerous.
So they all just pretended I wasn’t there.
My table was a sad little island in a sea of gray goo they called food.
My Aura of Fear had become my own personal force field.
It was pretty quiet.
It was super efficient.
It was perfect, actually.
More time to focus on the grind, you know?
I scraped the last of the tasteless protein paste into my mouth and walked back to my cell.
All the other trainees parted before me like I was some kind of leper king.
The stone box they called a room had become my own private sanctuary.
My personal training dojo.
My whole world, basically.
I sat on the edge of the cot, closed my eyes, and pulled up the only thing that actually mattered.
My character sheet.
It had been a while since I’d really looked at the stats.
The System’s interface was still that same cold, silver-and-black thing.
<Name: Quinn | Gender: Male>
<Level: 15 | Race: Elf (Corrupted) | Class: Slayer>
<Title: The Error>
Attributes:
<STR: 14>
<PHY: 30>
<AGI: 13>
<INT: 12>
<WILL: 35>
<WIS: 10>
<CHA: 5 (Suppressed by Aura of Fear)>
<HP: 200/200>
<MP: 250/250>
<Available Attribute Points: 20>
Twenty points, just sitting there.
Banking them was an old habit that died hard.
You never knew when you’d need a sudden stat dump just to get past some stupid gear check on a new boss.
I scrolled down to my skills list.
<Active Skills:>
<[Swap] (Rank 1)>
<[Phase Step] (Rank 1)>
<[Shadow Bind] (Rank 1)>
<[Spatial Anchor] (Rank 1) - Extracted>
<Passive Skills:>
<[Aura of Fear] (Rank 2)>
<[Unbreakable Will] (Rank 2)>
<[Stoneheart] (Passive) - Extracted>
<[River’s Flow] (Passive) - Extracted>
Flaw:
<[Pain Eater] (Overload Warning)>
My toolbox was definitely getting bigger.
But there was one more entry on the list.
The most important one.
Summon:
<Shadow of the Unremembered | Level: 15>
<Status: Dormant>
<Bond: 85%>
The shadow titan thing.
My ultimate skill.
My giant, monstrous replacement for the friend I’d lost.
He really needed a name, though.
"Shadow of the Unremembered" was a total mouthful.
It sounded like a system designation, not a call sign.
I needed something simple.
Something functional.
Something that would smack me in the face every single time I said it, just to remind me why I was doing all this.
The reason I let them burn my old self away.
The reason I was sitting in this cold, dark box instead of being a corpse somewhere.
My mind flashed back to the system notice from that day.
The day the whole world went to crap.
<SYSTEM ERROR: PACT OF THE ANCHOR... CONNECTION SEVERED...>
Anchor.
The word just echoed in the quiet of my head.
She was my anchor.
The one who kept me from floating away, even when she was driving me totally insane.
The one whose last-ditch sacrifice rewrote my entire character file.
This shadow... this monster born from my first real temper tantrum... he was my new anchor.
The tool that would keep me chained to the main quest.
The weapon that would let me see the credits roll.
"Anchor," I whispered into the quiet of the cell.
The shadows in the corner of the room seemed to get darker, to squish together for a second, like they were nodding.
The bond percentage on my status screen ticked up by one.
<Bond: 86%>
Good.
Now for the fun part.
I spent hours in the private training rooms, the crappy ones nobody else wanted.
They were just empty black cubes.
No fancy holographic training dummies.
No instructors barking at you.
Just silence and a whole lot of space.
I practiced my skills until they weren’t skills anymore.
They were just things my body did.
[Phase Step].
The whole world would dissolve into that black-and-white static scream for a split second.
I learned to aim it with pinpoint accuracy.
Not just fifteen meters straight ahead.
Fifteen meters straight up.
Fifteen meters to the left while doing a flip.
I turned a simple teleport into a three-dimensional dance of "nope, not there anymore."
[Swap].
I set up a bunch of training dummies around the room.
I’d swap my position with one, then phase step to another, then swap that one with a third one.
It was like a magic trick, a crazy ballet of screwing with space itself.
I was learning to see the world not as a solid place, but as a grid of coordinates that I could just rewrite whenever I wanted.
[Spatial Anchor].
This one was a little trickier.
It made a tiny, fixed point in space that was totally invincible for ten seconds.
I learned to cast it right in the path of a charging dummy.
The dummy would slam into the invisible wall of ’get wrecked’ and just crumple like a tin can.
It was the perfect defensive tool.
A little micro-parry that could block literally anything.
Finally, when I was absolutely sure I was alone, I summoned him.
"Anchor," I commanded.
The shadows in the room bled together, pouring out from the corners and rising up into that giant, familiar shape.
He knelt in front of me, his single, massive eye glowing with that heartbreaking purple light.
There wasn’t any sound.
No ground-shaking footsteps.
Just a silent, heavy presence that sucked all the warmth out of the room.
I stood in front of him, a tiny little guy before a god I’d accidentally made.
"Show me," I whispered.
I pointed at the last training dummy left standing.
"Eat it."
Anchor unfolded, rising up to his full, terrifying height.
He didn’t move like a thing made of flesh and bone.
He just flowed, like a river of pure darkness.
He glided across the room like he was on ice skates.
His mouth, if you want to call it that, opened up.
It was a swirling vortex of absolutely nothing.
Tendrils of shadow, darker than the room itself, shot out and wrapped around the dummy.
There was no sound of tearing metal or splintering wood.
The dummy just... dissolved.
It unraveled, its very existence getting slurped up into the tendrils.
<System notice: Shadow Servant is consuming a non-organic target.>
<System notice: Restoring 1% of Shadow Servant’s maximum HP.>
The System still registered it, even if it was just a piece of training gear.
The mechanics were solid, at least.
I spent the next hour just messing around with Anchor.
Giving him commands.
Making him move, attack, block.
It wasn’t like controlling some stupid pet.
There was no input lag.
No chance he’d misunderstand.
My thoughts were his actions.
He was a part of me.
A big, shadowy extension of my will.
A manifestation of my singular, burning purpose.
When the training timer ran out, I dismissed him.
The shadows receded, flowing back into the corners of the room and leaving me alone again.
I checked my status screen one more time.
The bond was at 90 percent.
We were syncing up.
My control was getting better.
The furnace was built.
The fire was stuck inside.
But I could feel it, just under the surface.
That berserker rage.
The ghost of the guy who screamed his soul out in that wrecked building.
He was still in there.
Waiting.