All I needed to do now was decide which art to work on. At present, I still wanted to focus on getting levels for the beginner art of the lightning. The attacks would add more variety to my repertoire, and the movement ability, while expensive, was extremely beneficial. Now that I could move a couple of feet at a time, I could instantly dodge ranged attacks, or rapidly close distance to break through someone’s guard. This would give me a clear advantage in many fights and give me some security when taking on more powerful foes. The stamina consumption was certainly steep, but I consumed barely any stamina while attacking normally, leaving the resource largely untouched.

Without further ado, I began to practice the lightning art. Activating focus, the world around me faded out of my perception, and I could understand the motions of the art with razor-sharp clarity. As focus improved, my ability to quickly level up skills improved as well. I wanted to try and get to the next upgrade for focus so that I could try and work on multiple skills at once. That would increase my training potential even further. It was nice to be able to work one ability so efficiently, but there were many times when synergy would allow me to train two things at once, and focus forbid the action.

A good example was when I was training the magic skills. For aerokinesis, I leveled it up at the same time as I worked on the beginner art of the blizzard. After gaining focus, I was limited to one skill at a time, and while the rate of skill experience I was granted was much faster, I was still limited one thing at a time. It was good for skill levels but bad for practicality. There were very few occasions where I only used one ability at a time, and training without it was potentially bad practice.

Regardless, there was nothing to be done for it yet. I focused in and continued working on the art of the lightning. It was mostly a foot and movement technique, focusing on engaging and disengaging from combat quickly. The method I learned during the previous two levels of attacking with greater strength was barely touched on. It only took around 30 minutes for me to feel the alert ding into my head. It was time to see if my plan paid off.

Yes! I was right! Doing a little mental dance, I pulled up the next alert.

These were a few different options than I had before. Previously, I believe that Stealth was replaced with Intermediate Quiet Movement. This was a very simple choice to make for me, as while both Poise and Ranger’s Stride seemed useful and/or interesting, neither were what I was looking for to supplement my current abilities. I chose Stealth and brought up its information.

Continuing to go through my menus, I pulled up the next alert.

Alright, what did that mean? I checked through my skill list and noticed that Claw Techniques had vanished. Looking further, I checked the Skill Descriptions of the two arts and found the difference.

Both had an additional line added to them, stating that bleed duration had been increased for all combat arts. I guess, like unarmed combat, the claw techniques neatly folded into the skills. I also noticed that the line claiming that the skill was derived from unarmed combat was missing as well, but that seemed more like flavor text than an actual important part of the skill description. Given what Luna said, I wondered what changes would happen to the skill. My guess was that the damage numbers would be removed, but it also made me curious about the critical hit damage, and the bleed durations.

Before going out and grinding skill levels some more, there was one thing I wanted to look at. The new line on the identify skill intrigued me, and it gave me an idea. I looked at my claws and activated identify.

And there it was. The simple reason I couldn’t get through the shell of the skullback warriors was that their shells had a hardness of 3, and my claws only reached 2 in every aspect. If Luna was to be believed, this meant that I would break off my talons before successfully penetrating their thick carapace. This affirmed my belief that finding something to supplement my lack of penetration was necessary to take on this dungeon.

The sword that dropped from the first floor was good enough to penetrate the shells of the warriors, if only just, and I had always wanted to learn how to use a blade. I guess there was no time like the present. I untied the blade from my backpack and headed off into the mushroom grove once again. Now that I knew I could train within the dungeon I would be spending a great deal of time on this floor. Self-improvement truly was addictive, wasn’t it?

Learning to use a sword was not easy. At all. I had seen it done in movies and had watched martial arts my whole life, but it was not a simple thing to pick up and use. I didn’t plan on avoiding fighting hand to hand completely, but I still needed a way to defeat the heavily armored spiders, and pressurized wind blade did little more than annoy them. I still had the water cutter, but it was extremely mana intensive, not to mention slow, and I wanted to use the mana for more effective attacks.

Regardless, the weapon training was good practice. I wanted to make sure I got a skill for using the sword, so I limited myself to movement and blade attacks only as I cleared spiders from the forest. I focused on practicing the beginner art of the lightning, as the straight powerful movements worked well with the chopping attacks that the one-edged spider sword necessitated, and I needed more practical experience with the martial art style.

Group by group, I took out the lesser warriors, spitters, and drones. While I wouldn’t call myself an expert, I had enough experience using slashing weapons, namely my claws, that it wasn’t such a huge change to make. I found that my favorite way to attack was to hold the sword in my right hand and use the claws on my left, attacking with both interchangeably. When the spiders were far away, I would use the reach provided by the sword, and when I got in close, I would punish them with lightning charged claw swipes, or pointed kicks. I may have been using the sword as little more than a sharp club, but if it works, it works.

At the start of my training, in each encounter I would take anywhere from 40 to 70 damage from drone poison, the acid spray from the spitters, or the blades of the lesser warriors. But, as I continued to fight, I continued to learn. Both of the arts I had chosen with my class relied on movement and avoidance over all things. Being tanky was well and good, but the best way to take on a group of enemies and walk away was to not get hurt in the first place. I could heal up quick enough, but I would rather save the mana for emergencies if I could.

When I first changed, my constitution was high enough to make me feel a bit cocky, and the resistances that having a higher constitution granted were nice. When I started getting into more fights, particularly with the badgerkin bandit early on and the leader of the gems, I learned very quickly that constitution was a wonderful support, but the best way to keep fighting was to avoid damage. I liked the help that my martial arts provided with dodging and improving my combat potential, and while my constitution had been neglected as of late, it was starting to feel increasingly unnecessary compared to agility and dexterity.

My arts allowed me to tackle multiple opponents by diving into the fights using the art of the lightning, enter into the guards of the enemies and strike critical spots using the art of the blizzard, and then retreat and reposition. I just repeated that tactic over and over again, and soon I was taking on the groups of spiders and leaving unscathed. After practicing for a while, I was even able to take on the swarms of drones, and by constantly retreating and falling back, I could pick them off one by one before they could ever reach me. My magic was used to rapidly reposition my body with gusts of wind, blast enemies away, or occasionally take out an unlucky spider with a quick lightning blast or water blade.

I could imagine that I was quickly becoming a terrifying enemy to fight as my electroreceptivity gave me an accurate image of the monsters around me and my elemental senses informed me of the air they displaced as they moved. As I learned to understand the new senses further, I could tell where the enemies were located, what size they were, and where they were going. At that point, I could reason out what type of spider they were and could then attack based on educated guesses. Within ten feet I had no blind spots whatsoever. Any enemy with range on their attacks was potentially problematic, but I could still see and hear like normal so the spitters were simple enough to avoid.

Once I had fought enough spiders to have some skill level ups, I took to the air and flew back to the start of the floor. It was time to check on my progress, and level up my arts again. I had several epiphanies while fighting that I believed would help me train my two arts quickly, and I wanted to devote some more time to them while I was feeling up to it. If I ever wanted to change classes, I needed to max out these skills, and there was no time like the present. I was already grinding skill levels. What were a few more?

This time, I decided to work on a level of beginner art of the blizzard this time first. My grinding plan for the floor was as follows; I would go out and grind skill levels, then I would come back to my camp at the start of the floor. After that I would level up my both of my arts a single time, where I would then go out and repeat the process. I would move on only when I got my arts to a decent level, or when I ran out of spiders. I was in no rush for time or resources either. When I was out fighting earlier, I identified the mushroom trees and learned a bit about them, which gave me some security if I decided to stay on the floor for a while.  I could sleep at the entrance to the level where there were no spiders. I could get water from the atmosphere using storm command and identify gave me access to food.

A quick taste test proved that while flavorless and chewy, the gills of the mushroom trees weren’t all that bad. They tasted way better than the monster spider did, anyway.

After fighting for such a long time using the arts, I felt very comfortable with them. It may have taken me almost four hours to go from level 5 to 6 on the beginner art of the blizzard, but I was able to get to level 7 in only 20 minutes this time. Next, instead of opening the skill sheet to look at my progress, I went ahead and started right on the beginner art of the lightning. That, too, came rather quickly. Both techniques expanded on movement and provided greater insight into causing the most possible damage to enemies. I was excited to try out the new moved that they offered.

First, though, I needed to check my skill progress, and then eat some mushroom.

My skills were coming along nicely. Sword Techniques seemed to give you some basic pointers on how to hold the sword, where to keep it in relation to your body, and what to do with it. From what I could tell, there were no additional abilities that it offered, but the knowledge granted by the skill was still immensely helpful. I had gone from completely incompetent to only mostly incompetent in just a few hours of personal training.

My current stats were also moving along nicely. I had reached the max with dexterity, wisdom, and luck already, and I was well on my way reaching the max level of all of them. Each of the abilities ended in an aggravating number nine. I decided to put a single unassigned skill point into each of them so that they could be nice round numbers. I would save the rest of my points for stats that I really needed.

I bit down on some mushroom, wrapped a hand around my spider blade, and walked back out into the woods. I had always enjoyed grinding, and I was thirsty for more.