Dur Bloodskull had seen many things in her long years within Nightshade. She'd ventured beyond when the orcish clans came into conflict with other species on the Redwind Plains, and seen some of Mudwood in her youth before the humans took it over nearly 30 years ago now. But she had very rarely seen someone like Azotreh.
They worked like the most resilient horse. She'd told them to punch her dummy a hundred times, since that was about as long as it took her to realize her own Punch skill. But Azotreh hadn't stopped at a hundred.
Their aura didn't fluctuate, so she didn't know if they'd gotten the skill, but she assumed they didn't. Why would they continue if they had gotten it?
Atu had mentioned a time just before she and the others had arrived when Azotreh spent every waking moment carving new rooms into the stone around them with their arcane power. Rooms that were now obsolete, apparently. It was like they were in a trance, according to Atu, and had only come out of it after some kind of breakthrough.
She understood that kind of determination. She'd felt much the same when taking her Power conception to the third stage, but never from one so young.
Even stranger, the others around them seemed to be the same way. She'd been able to peek in on the weird orc monster, or slime monster now, and saw that he was doing the same thing at the same time. Without break, rest, or any kind of relaxation.
Even their kitsune familiar, Ruby, had taken to this obsessive training. She wasn't much older than Azotreh, with two tails instead of the common nine. But she spent most of her time manipulating her aura through Azotreh to create fires. Even stranger, it had worked. She wasn't using her aura to shape mana into the runes of spellcraft, but instead, seemingly found something inside herself that allowed her aura to create flames.
As Azotreh punched away, she was creating small bursts of flame around their fist. Her initial goal seemed to have been to implement fire damage into Azotreh's strikes, but recently had figured out that her fire was actually weakening the force of Azotreh's punches. Instead, she'd started igniting the air behind Azotreh's elbow to create additional force. It wasn't a lot, but still deeply impressive.
She knew the method would be good for gains. She knew how this kind of obsessive work paid off. But even she took breaks often. Azotreh didn't. She was tempted to step in and stop the kid before they hurt themselves, but Kurdan had discouraged the notion.
Instead, she just had to watch them keep going without end.
Chief Asergia, first of his line, was having trouble keeping his body from twitching.
The royal ancestor, Lord Rabbit, had scolded him for losing the contract with the child. With a mere child. A child who wasn't even qualified for candidate status.
He was still deep underground, near a world vent. The dispersed mana of the nightshade region's surface was great for no monsters to spawn, something that apparently extended into the homes of most current candidates, but made it harder to exist up there for a high ranker like Asergia.
His guards were a ways away. Even at this relatively high point in the world vent, the raw energy emerging from the world vent was dangerous to anyone of a lower rank. He didn't even need the guards, since he was stronger than all of them put together in raw poten might, let alone the strength of his advanced concept cultivation.
He'd crush Azotreh under his boot if he weren't stuck down here for another few weeks. His body was closer to breaking down than he'd expected, and required much more time to recover. See how the Lord Rabbit likes watching one of the potential candidates die. Maybe then his father would acknowledge him as deserving. Deserving of power and privilege beyond the minimal guidance he provided.
He wanted to send one of his guards as a messenger to the other rabbit-kin clans, but they still couldn't get close, and he couldn't leave unless he wanted to extend his stay. He just hoped the other rabbits would try to find out what Azotreh was and hunt him as a slime.
Chief Hadruga, third of her line, was troubled. Her fellow clan leader had descended to the world vent, and in the meantime, his clan had collapsed. Her clan, the violet rabbit-kin or amethyst rabbit-kin, depending on who was asked, had a tenuous alliance with the emerald rabbit-kin.
The emerald rabbits were the youngest of the clans, but were rising quickly. Unlike the amber rabbit-kin who were slowly falling into obsolescence, the emerald rabbits had made a name for themselves. Chief Asergia was a prideful idiot, but still one of the strongest rabbit-kin in the nightshade region. Perhaps one of the strongest of the beastkin overall. She wanted an explanation of how the entire clan had seemingly vanished overnight, and why a small cluster of its warriors had arrived at her doorstep.
If things kept moving like this, there was a chance the amethyst rabbit-kin would be the last of the three clans in nightshade. It wasn't an idea she was exactly looking forward to, since their alliance with the amber rabbit-kin and emerald rabbit-kin had defended two of her own borders.
Without the emerald rabbits, the deer-kin had begun to creep into their formerly occupied territory. She was willing to give up the space to them as she consolidated her own forces, but knew the deer wouldn't ally with the amethyst rabbit-kin. The leader of the stonehide deer clan was a coward and was likely leading some wolf-kin to her territory.
Despite their shared humanoid nature, beastkin still fed upon each other and didn't incur the Curse of the Wendigo. They were, strictly speaking, different species. In the same way most of them could feed on a human, they could feed on one another.
So she sought a way of escape from her troubles, and her primary clue lay in the absence of the emerald rabbit-kin. They hadn't been slaughtered, but simply moved. Their homes vanished down to the foundations, and their territory not even carrying a trace of them.
But she had found something of interest to her and to her secondary patron. Bright, glistening blue slime. It was alive, but carried a faint bond to its progenitor. Like one of the rare splitting oozes, her diviner had found the silver strings of arcane power linking these globs of barely living material to an original source. She just hadn't managed to track them back to the source.
If only even a single hair of the formerly occupying rabbit-kin had remained. At this point, she was willing to actively track the source of the slime. The bear-kin to the west had been her biggest problem for most of her life, and for those of her mother and grandmother. But the sudden appearance of the slimes had become her largest problem very quickly. They never appeared in large numbers, but they were hard to damage.
At least they could be looted to produce large quantities of raw metal. Mostly copper and some silver, but some iron slimes had also begun to appear recently. They were all still tin-rank, but especially strong for their rank. She knew that they, too, had a source. A root entity that was spawning them. Her diviner had told her as much from the odd cores they left behind. But the slimes' progenitor was somewhere deep below the surface. She didn't have the courage to send her kin that deep. She hoped that the emerald rabbit-kin would provide a haven for her people.
Azotreh didn't get frustrated after the hundredth punch didn't grant anything. Instead, they just kept going. They had nothing to lose but time, and they knew that time was on their side.
As one ascended the ranks, their lifespan increased naturally. Not by small amounts either. It was the only way to keep up with the exponential time costs required to increase in rank. Otherwise, anything attempting to progress would die of old age long before they even hit ruby-rank.
So they kept at it. Punching the dummy over and over with Ruby's occasional help in the creation of small bursts of force to empower their punches. Whenever she did, Azotreh felt a slight burning sensation in the back of their arm.
Truly, they had made some small gains. But only in their resistances, and one thing they hadn't expected. Their Diligence ability had been pushed to level 3.
They had no idea how the ability leveled. Most abilities they had increased along with use. Astral Bolt also increased in level quickly back when they'd been killing with it. But the spell was still far too volatile to attempt to use underground. It would just as easily blow up in their face as it would turn a monster into a fine mist. But Diligence wasn't an active ability. But it had still leveled twice since they started hitting the dummy.
They'd been at it for hours when finally, the thing they assumed Dur wanted to happen did so.
[New Skill: Punch (Apprentice-1)]
A trickle of new information entered their mind, and they realized why it took so long. The way Dur had commanded them, they assumed they'd reach her goal after a hundred hits. But as it turned out, they had genuinely been doing it wrong.
Their slimy body had to move their individual parts with the backbone resource. But they used far less of it than most. They used even less when inhabiting the body of one of their monsters.
While in their primary avatar or a monster, most of the internal mechanics of their body are governed by mana rather than the backbone resource. The only thing that remained consistent is their heartbeat, which is still solely based on backbone. As it turns out, a lot of the parts used to punch rely on specific chemical releases in the cells of the body, chemicals produced by their mana-based cells.
Nicholas had some rough idea of how muscles work from his old life, which he still didn't like talking about. But plenty of his raw understanding still made it to the others, so Azotreh vaguely knew how muscles tense and release. But the punch skill informed them about how to actively channel their backbone into the punch, the way most do unconsciously.
They closed their eyes, feeling that heart beating in their chest. They channeled the light information provided by the skill system and their own vague understanding, and channeled backbone into their right arm. They wound up and punched.
Their hand exploded into blue slime as it made contact with the wool dummy. The wool was soft, but more powerful than their tin-ranked body. But the main benefit of their slimy body was their speedy regeneration. They picked up the small bits of slime and regrew the hand with some concentration.
Finally, they turned back to the dummy. With their understanding, they had some ideas to test.
Dur watched Azotreh's hand explode. Instead of the normal crimson gore she expected of most people whose entire hand broke into pieces, the fragments of Azotreh instead turned into slime the same color as mana. Some of it began to dissolve into essence smoke, but Azotreh bent down and picked up little bits of the slime before regenerating their hand.
They'd gotten the skill, apparently, and it was much stronger than she expected. Or, probably, their body was weaker than she expected. She'd watched the hands of that stone elymental easily dig into Azotreh's flesh in a way they wouldn't with a body like hers.
But Azotreh wasn't done showing off or testing their new skill. They covered their right hand in black scales before striking the dummy again with the same force. It wasn't enough to even partially harm her magical construct, but she felt a slight drain on her vibrancy. The punch once again did more damage to Azotreh than to the dummy, with bright slime dripping from the gaps between the scales. But the slime was quickly reabsorbed again.
She wanted to continue the lesson, but Azotreh began to do exactly what she wanted them to, and tried more ways to attack. She quickly had to step in to guide them on kicks, since they were doing something that exploded their leg into gobbets of bright slime over and over. But at least Azotreh was enthusiastic about training.