Chapter 5: Training Or Punishment
David started pacing the length of the room, back and forth, the motion helping him think the way it always did when his head got too crowded to sit still.
’Okay. Fourteen days. Haven’t even started yet — so really, it’s more like thirty.’ He ran a hand through his hair, eyeing the three stat names looping through his mind, trying to figure out which one deserved his attention first.
[Would player like a recommendation?]
’Not now, system.’ He grunted as he paced about but at the end still couldn’t think of much, so taking a sigh, he finally gave in.
"Sure," he said, huffing out something between a laugh and a sigh. "Hit me, dad."
[Player may increase Strength through resistance training such as push-ups. Muscular gain will translate proportionally to the Strength stat. Following a rest period, jogging approximately ten kilometers will raise both Endurance and Stamina simultaneously. Increases to Skill related to Player’s penile strength category may be achieved through private, individual activity.]
[Complete 20/20 push-ups/ reps, 10 kilometer run and pleasurable acts to increase said players stats by +1]
David blinked at that last one, mouth twitching. "Wait, hold on — did you just tell me to masturb—" He shook his head, laughing under his breath despite himself.
"Okay, forget it, I don’t even want confirmation on that."
Still, turning the rest of the plan over, he had to admit it wasn’t bad. Genuinely wasn’t bad.
He’d half expected the system to hand him something useless or needlessly cruel, and instead he’d gotten something that actually resembled a real training plan.
"Not gonna lie," he said, glancing at the window.
"you’re kind of on top of things for a glorified notification bar."
[Player may continue his comedic routine at his leisure. Recommend he do so until his testicles fall off.]
David’s mouth fell open. "Okay, rude — noted, though. Duly noted."
Harsh as it was, he couldn’t argue the point buried under it. He didn’t have time to mess around. Even if he managed a flat plus-one to every stat every single day without fail, thirty days still wouldn’t be enough to close the gap sitting in front of him. He needed more than steady. He needed to actually push.
’Fine,’ he thought, exhaling slowly. ’Guess I’ll just follow what it told me. Push-ups first. Add in the running after.’ A quieter thought slid in right behind that one, less certain, tinged with something closer to doubt.
’I already know I’m not exactly the athletic type. Never have been.’ He didn’t have a better plan waiting in the wings, though, and the system’s advice was the only thing on the table, so he decided to just go with it and see what happened.
He settled on a number — twenty push-ups, rest five minutes, twenty more — and figured he’d adjust from there depending on how badly his body betrayed him.
Clearing a space on the floor took all of ten seconds, mostly just kicking aside whatever junk had accumulated in front of the couch, promising himself he’d deal with the actual cleaning later. He already knew, deep down, exactly how that promise was going to age.
He dropped into position, palms flat against the floor, and lowered himself down.
One.
His arms trembled almost immediately on the way back up, and he gritted his teeth through it, forcing his elbows to lock out at the top like his body wasn’t already screaming about it.
He started to lower himself for the second rep, and that was as far as he got — his arms gave out somewhere in the middle, and he collapsed flat onto the floor, chest heaving, face mashed sideways against the carpet.
"One," he wheezed into the floor, voice muffled.
[One push-up completed. Incredible. Player is truly an elite hunter material.]
"Ohh, please." David grunted as he lay there a moment longer, lungs working overtime for something that should have been nothing.
It was then that the realization settle in fully, undeniable now in a way it hadn’t quite been before.
His body was, in every possible sense of the word, extremely weak.
He didn’t stay down long. Disappointment wasn’t exactly a stranger to him — nineteen years of it had a way of losing its sting after a while — so he just huffed out a short laugh, pushed himself up off the floor, and let the whole embarrassing display roll right off him.
’Push-ups can wait,’ he decided, already talking himself into it. ’Run first. Get the blood pumping, ease into it. That’s smarter anyway.’
He nodded to himself, fully convinced by his own logic, and headed for his bedroom. The closet door stuck a little when he pulled it open, the way it always did, and he stood there a moment scanning the sparse selection hanging inside before grabbing a plain T-shirt and a pair of jogging pants that had seen better decades. His sneakers waited at the bottom of the closet, worn thin at the heel, and he laced them up quick before straightening.
Last thing — he grabbed the cheap bottle of cologne sitting on his dresser, the kind that came three-for-a-dollar at some discount store, and gave himself two spritzes.
"Can’t be out here smelling like a dungeon break," he muttered, checking himself in the cracked mirror with an expression that was trying very hard to look roguish and mostly just looked constipated. "Gotta keep it smooth. For the ladies."
He immediately regretted saying that out loud, even to an empty room.
Phone in hand, he set a timer, muttering the math out loud like it needed to be spoken into existence to be real.
"It’s 6p.m. now. Ten K, split it — five out, five back. Should have me home by eight, easy." He nodded to himself again, satisfied with the plan, already deciding that if he came back starving out of his mind, he’d just grit his teeth and go to bed hungry. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Stepping outside, the evening air hit him thick and heavy, the particular staleness that seemed to hang permanently over the lower side no matter the season.
His apartment building was small, barely big enough to be called that, wedged in among a row of others just as cramped.
But it was what sat behind it that always caught the eye first — a wide stretch of chain-link fencing, tall and rusted at the seams, cordoning off a patch of the district like a scar someone had tried and failed to hide.
A dungeon break marker. One of the ugly kind.
It hadn’t been anything catastrophic, not by upper-side standards — a low C-rank, nothing that would’ve made the news beyond the district itself — but the lower side barely kept any hunters worth the name stationed nearby.
Anyone with real rank got shipped off to where the money and the glory were, leaving whatever thin coverage remained to deal with whatever crawled out down here.
A poison-type had come through during the break, and though it hadn’t taken much to eventually put down, it had taken its time doing damage first.
The mechanism of how it happened wasn’t complicated, really.
Whenever someone Awakened in the lower side and turned out to have something worth using — real combat ability, a skill set worth building on — they mostly left.
The upper side had most of the funding, the guilds, the actual infrastructure to develop a Hunter properly, and nobody in their right mind stuck around scraping by in the lower side when the alternative was a real career, real pay, and a life that didn’t involve stretching one soda across three days.
Even the ones who awakened with weaker, more mundane abilities eventually drifted upward if they could manage it — better to be a desk Hunter in the upper side, filing reports and doing inventory for some guild, than sticking it out down here.
What stayed behind wasn’t nothing — a handful of Hunters had planted their feet and refused to leave, either out of loyalty to where they’d grown up or because leaving simply wasn’t in the cards for them. They handled what breaks they could, patched what they were able to patch.
But a handful of committed people covering a district that used to have proper coverage wasn’t the same math, no matter how much any of them cared. Breaks that would’ve been caught early elsewhere lingered longer down here.
Damage that should’ve been temporary became permanent scar tissue on the block, fenced off and left to rot because nobody upstream saw the profit in fixing it.
David jogged past the fence, glancing briefly at the row of buildings behind it — walls scorched black in patches, windows blown out, the whole block sitting there like a monument to how little the lower side actually mattered to anyone with the power to fix it.
None of that concerned him tonight, though. Tonight, there was just the road ahead of him and ten kilometers standing between him and a system that was already keeping score.
