Training Time!

I needed to spend my time training in the village hall with Rue and Len since the frog just sent someone from a modern peaceful world without any training. After knowing him for some time I realized that Len was right, he is a nice guy if a little stiff. How did I get close to him you ask? 

Behold! The skill granted to me by the Great Gorilla Spirit! The ability to give a good massage to buff old men! *insert fireworks here*

Yeah… I know. Ah if you’re curious I asked my animal friends about the delay to the plan, but they said that spirit can’t die anyway I should take my time (well grandma Foxy said that, the Frog was screaming at me to hurry up almost every hour). Also it seemed that they could only track one spirit at the time, but they assured me that nobody died yet since if even one of the spirits died the ruin the 3 of them were staying at would take some damage. Wait, is that why that place was a ruin? Because many spirits died already? But that still didn’t make any sense since the houses inside the ruin were clearly made for humans. I need to investigate this further next time I go back there.

Anyway on with the training.

Rue: ”So what kind of training did you have before this?”

Me: “None! Or at least none that I can remember.”

Rue: “Let’s just start from the basic then”

[Frog: “Training Shmaining. Just run and punch whatever in front of you!”]

[Me: “Don’t worry, I’ll do that to you next time we meet.”]

This insult trading continued for a few minutes before Grandma became angry at us again.

And so my training began! Rue said since I didn’t have any skill set he was just going to teach me all the basic skills of a hunter. There was a little problem though, usually the training would be done in the jungle but because of the monkeys we couldn’t practice there so the training was done in the village hall and the village itself. Rue also gave me a few things that I could use, like a knife, some rope in various sizes, a water bladder, and a few other things. He later said that I could keep them. Is it just me or people around here were generally really nice? Maybe because I lived my whole life in a metropolitan city before this but having people being this nice to me made me a little uncomfortable. 

Okay, first training. It was a simple stamina training. Everyday I needed to run around the hall at least 3 times and then do push-ups plus sit-ups. It didn’t sound that amazing but I definitely needed this to strengthen my body, sure I could just use the spirits’ power but I didn’t want to rely on them too much. Imagine if one day I was having a battle but I couldn’t reach the spirits or maybe the spirit simply didn’t want to lend me its strength (looking at you frog).

Second training. Knife stuff. Rue teached me many things you could do with a knife, you could use it to split firewoods, as a secondary weapon, use it as a hammer, and  you could even use it to create fire by hitting it with a stone. Rue even said that a hunter’s knife was a hunter’s best tool, second only to their own body. He also said that every hunter usually had their own custom made knife to suit every individual. That made me want my own custom made knife too, I mean how cool would that be. Maybe later when I could go to a town or something. By the way, he didn’t teach me how to fight with it yet.

Third training. Tracking. This one was actually pretty fun. I had to find where the village cats went. Basically I needed to look for them by only using their tracks all around the village without any help. From all of the training this one was the least practical one because tracking animals in forest would be much harder than some cats. Tracking also worked best with land based animals, it’s almost impossible to track a flying target, and it’s impossible to track anything for humans once something dived into the sea.

Fourth training. Dismantling dead animals AKA what to do to the things you caught. Rue taught me how to first skin a few hares and then how to drain their blood (it seemed that MiniGo fainted at the middle of this training). This training is important because the price of an animal also depended on the quality of material. One thing to note is that different animals had different things that could be sold to the market. In the case of these hares every part of it could be sold so I need to separate the skin from the meat and the organ. Different animals also had different methods of dismantling but that was a lesson for another time.

On a side note, the animals that you find in this world looked pretty familiar. Many of them even acted the same way, the only difference was the animals here had their own weird characteristic compared to the ones I knew, a different evolutionary path maybe. For example, those Blood Monkeys outside, they acted like a regular monkeys the majority of the time but when mating season comes then suddenly they become bloodthirsty, or the Hiding Hare, a rabbit that could change the color of their fur for camouflage, or the Hop Rat that looked like the combination of kangaroo and rat.

Fifth training. Plants. Well, more of a study than a training. I needed to remember wild plants that could be eaten in case of emergency for food or medicines. As I thought this one would be memory heavy as I needed to remember the plants that I never saw before. Also a message from Rue, ‘ don’t eat something if you don’t know’, a pretty simple advice but really important to remember.

I think that was pretty much it for the first 3 days of training, Rue just tried to hammer down all the knowledge that he could into me. It was a blessing in disguise really since I didn’t know anything at all when I arrived. Also all of the training I did really reminded me of those survival shows that I watched back then, made me feel nostalgic, I wonder if they have some sort of television in this world.