Just pretend “Training Mix” from Gravity Falls is playing during part of this

“So, to start things off we need to work on your physicality.”

John looked down at himself. He wasn’t really doing that badly in his opinion. After all, he did some work on his stats and he had a nice 17 Agility. That had to count for something, right? “Am I really that bad?”

Erik Castellan looked him over for a brief moment. “... Not the worst I’ve worked with. But if I am to teach you how to properly fight and elevate yourself to a new level of combative ability, you will need to be a bit… more than you are now.” Erik had taken John to another room after dispelling the illusion of the other one. This room had space for John to properly work out, along with some equipment to help him, and a white board and markers. Erik uncapped one of the markers and began to write. “Now, tell me how your magic works.”

John sat down and rubbed his chin in thought. “Well, my magic essentially translates my life into video game styled mechanics. Any damage I take is taken out of my HP instead of actual lasting damage on my body. Additionally, I can pull up a character sheet of myself which has all my major magical skills as well as stats. Oh, and I get quests, achievements, skills, and now fighting styles all like a game character would.”

Erik was silent for a moment, not even writing a thing down as he listened to John explain things. “... You know, she’s made some odd choices before with her champions, but I gotta say this one takes the cake.”

“Got other examples of odd champions?” John asked.

“Tons. But that's a story for another time.” Erik began to jot down various notes. “Alright, so your powers work akin to a video game. That's fine. If anything, I would assume progression for you is increased because you can just grind stats and get rewards, correct?”

“Yup. Also I got a class update recently to Brawler, as well as some skills that play into that.” John then pulled up his character sheet and gave Erik a full rundown of how his fighting style seemed to work and the other abilities that complimented it, like Lock the Fuck In and Fightin’ Words.

Erik scribbled some notes on the whiteboard, things like John’s fighting style and the dodge, attack, and block percentages. “Alright. Well, it seems to me my original plan will still have to go on. You just happen to be lucky in the fact that you’ll get to advance far quicker than most students. First off, we work on training up your stats to some proper levels. Care to guess which ones we will be training?”

“I would assume my Strength, Agility, and Endurance.”

“WRONG!” Erik threw a small marker cap at John, smacking him right on his forehead. “Well, sort of wrong. You need to train all of your stats! Not just the physical ones.”

John rubbed the spot the cap hit. “But why? Wouldn’t focusing on those allow me to be able to fight better, thus making me safer and more of a threat to those who wanna hurt me?”

“Of course, but you need to think of fighting as an art rather than just something to get you out of trouble.” Erik then wrote John’s six main stats on the board, excluding Libido for obvious reasons. “Each one makes you a well rounded fighter, and improving each one will even make you a better and more efficient fighter. Your Strength, Agility, and Endurance bonuses are obvious. But what about Intellect?”

“I suppose it would… let me figure out how to beat opponents like the illusion?”

“See, look who has a high intelligence already!” Erik threw a little checkmark next to the three physical stats as well as Intellect. “Now, what about Wisdom?”

“Well, if intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit and wisdom is knowing that tomatoes don’t go in fruit salad, I guess that wisdom for a fighter would make me not do stupid shit?”

“In a way. But it also will make you more observant of the world around you. Truly wise fighters are ones who can see when things are too good to be true, see a trap coming, or know when it is time to fight and time to run. Sure, you may be able to deduce that an opponent in front of you is physically weaker and thus able to be beaten. But would you wisely predict that his confident stance, despite his clear weakness, means he probably has a trick or two up his sleeve? That maybe there's a trap awaiting you? And based on those ideas, would you be able to wisely handle this obvious trap?”

“Huh, I guess I never thought about it that way,” John remarked.

Erik looked quite proud of himself. “Thats why I’m the teacher and you are not, kid. Now, what about Charisma?”

“Yeah, what about Charisma?” John asked. “Aside from my Fightin’ Words skill, how does Charisma help me be a better fighter?”

Erik smiled. “This is one of my favorites to explain. Let me paint you a picture, John. Suppose you and your opponent are about to fight. Now your opponent hits you with a really hard hitting attack that manages to do quite a bit of damage. A good Charisma would allow you to play that hit off like it meant nothing. It means you can control your physicality and shrug it off, thus psyching your opponent out and making him think his strongest attack did nothing to you! He might become so terrified of you that he may very well give up on the spot! Oh, but then we have the reverse.” Erik’s grin widened. “Suppose they hit you with an attack and it does barely anything. Your own powers mitigated the damage and you can take a hundred more hits like that before you reach anything close to a problem. But what if you sold it like it was a really good hit? What if you made your opponent cocky and think they’ve got this in the bag? They would drop their guard. They would move in closer to gloat and show off. And you can take that mistake and make them pay for it when you spring up out of nowhere and show them the might of a good, well placed punch to the face!”

John chuckled at the imagery, thinking how funny it would have been to pull something like that against Frank. “Damn. Guess Charisma can really help.”

Erik nodded. “Yup. Plus, by training your other stats, your own Charisma may increase on its own. Keeping yourself in shape and with a good mindset is important to being a charismatic person. So, from now on when you are here, we are going to work on training your stats.”

John cocked his head to the side. “But what about new fighting styles? Or the one I currently have?”

“We will train that style. You need to get comfortable with it, and learn how to best utilize it and how to naturally fight. But our main goal is training your body to be ready to fight. Additionally, a healthy body will allow your mana to flow properly, which is very important to fighting.”

“Yeah, about that,” John interrupted. “How does mana work? And how is it going to make me a better fighter? I honestly haven’t used it aside from Observing people.”

“Ah, another important question, my pupil. How does mana make you a better fighter?” Erik then turned to the board and sketched out a man, akin to what would be on the door to a bathroom. “You see, mana is very easily comparable to blood. You have blood pumping through your body, being pumped through you by your heart.” Erik took a red marker, drawing a little heart in the chest of the man and then drawing some lines to represent the blood going from the heart to the body. “Mana, similarly, is pumped through your body as well. Instead of a heart, it comes from your soul.” He then drew a little blue circle next to the heart, and drew similar lines to the blood lines but in blue. “Mana, once it is throughout your body, allows you to enhance yourself magically. Every step or punch you could do can be enhanced and altered with mana, making you a much better fighter. Additionally your access to mana will allow you to be more connected with the world around you, taking in mana from the world itself to help strengthen you.”

“Hang on,” John said, holding up a hand. “If mana is produced by the soul, why is there mana out in the world?”

“You misunderstand. While your mana is produced by the soul, mana also exists all around us. All things in life, from humans to animals to plants to even rocks, have a baseline of mana. All souls produce mana, but since your soul has been awakened to magic, you can now spend and make more mana.”

“Does that mean mundane people also make mana?”

Erik nodded. “Though their issue is that without a properly awakened soul, their own mana remains forever topped off and inaccessible. This does mean that they are more immune to magical effects, as they essentially have a barrier blocking their soul from mana-based effects. That's why if someone were to create a magically induced plague, both mundanes and Abyssals would be affected but mundanes would have less symptoms than you or I.”

John, at this point, had pulled out a small notebook and was taking various notes on what Erik said. “So since we can access magic, we are both stronger and more **** because of it?”

“See, this is why I like teaching smart kids,” Erik gave John a thumbs up. “You’ve got it in one.”

“But for me, in training my use of mana, we are going to work on finding ways for me to use it to punch harder and move faster?”

Erik nodded. “Correct. If your powers are to be understood in how they work, I should be able to run you through the basics and let you try it. Once you get it, you should have easy access to it. But that will be tomorrow's lesson.”

“Then what’s today?”

Erik leaned forward, putting a hand on John’s shoulder. “Glad you asked. Today’s lesson is… give me 10 laps around the block. And 25 push-ups and sit-ups. And 10 squats.”

Gamer's Body: Your body is like a video game character, damage reduces your health rather than wounding you.

“Yeah… It… Doesn’t say… stops you… from getting… EXHAUSTED!”

John huffed and puffed, trying to catch his breath while lying on the floor of the room. He had done exactly as Erik had said. Or rather, he had gotten halfway through. He did the 10 laps. He did the 25 sit-ups. But the second he had to start on the push-ups, his body collapsed and he just couldn’t get his breath back.

“C’mon, kid. Just a few more exercises and then you’re done.”

“Mr.-”

“Ah ah ah, I’m your teacher now. Sir will work.”

“... Sir, I am telling you I can’t. My body is dead!”

Erik rolled his eyes, walking over to John and pushing him with his foot. “You know you’re gonna have to get up. Even if you stop working out today, I refuse to carry you down the stairs.”

“I don’t think I can feel my legs,” John muttered.

Erik leaned down, passing John a bottle of water. “Take a drink and a few minutes rest. I want you to finish the workout, kid. And you need to finish it if you want to see results.”

John peered up at the bottle of ice cold water, and the parched nature of his throat won out over his tired bones, letting him sit up and grab the bottle to take a swig. When he went outside to run, he had noticed a couple of popups had come up but he hadn’t bothered to pull them up, having been focused on his workout.

But now? He could take a look-see.

Well, first things first: He had stats to allocate

The Intellect point and Wisdom point wouldn’t be cemented into his stats until he selected a place for the physical stat point. And unfortunately, none of his physical stats were near a threshold. Even Libido, if it was a physical stat, was two points away. Plus, he really didn’t think it was a good idea to put his quest rewards into his sex drive, especially since he didn’t have an outlet for those sexual desires other than porn and his hand.

So where to put them? His build was still dodge focused, so working towards 21 Agility seemed like a good idea. But he also needed to be well rounded, and dodging every hit while doing nothing in return was just asking for trouble.

‘Well, this workout quest says it will be a random physical stat. So maybe to hedge my bets, I should go with Endurance. That way if it does boost something other than that stat, it won’t be lagging too far behind,’ John thought, and with a swipe of his hand, allocated the point and fully got the reward, including the XP. And said XP did get him over the halfway threshold to the next level, so he had even more to be happy about! With this kind of growth, he would be catching up to Moira in no time!

“Alright, kid, break time is over,” Erik said, taking a step closer to John. “25 push-ups. And no wimpy push-ups. 25 full ones or I double it.”

John’s body felt dead. Those last push-ups and the squats just did his arms and legs in, and that was ignoring how tired the rest of him was. If it weren’t for the fact that he had to go down the stairs to where his mom’s car was, he would have just collapsed again in the bar.

“Not bad, kid. We need to work on your stamina, but not bad for a first time. We should talk schedule though.” Erik pulled out a phone, typing something up. “What other after-school things do you have?”

“None really,” John said with labored breaths. “But I do spend Fridays with my best friends and I’d hate to give that up.”

“No problem. You should probably have at least one weekday and one on the weekend off from training, so how about you get Friday evenings aaaannd Sundays off?”

“When would you want me in on Saturdays?”

“Midday. Around 11. You show up and stay for an extra long training session. Sound good?”

John nodded, and Erik put his phone away. “Wonderful. Now, go get plenty of rest. You’ve got another training session to prepare for tomorrow.”

John smiled, and murmured a quick thank you before slowly climbing down the stairs. He did pay attention to when the shift of being out of the illusion barrier happened again, and was eager to try casting that at some point. Just to see if he could. But right now? All he wanted was to collapse in his bed and sleep for about a bajillion years. Give or take a day or two.

But as John left the bar, if he had turned around and taken a look behind him or peered through the door’s window, he might have seen Erik look to the sky with a gaze of concern and confusion.

He might have heard his teacher ask Gaia if she knew what she was doing, and that the Abyss would be unkind to John.

And maybe if he had stayed a moment longer, he might have heard the whisper of Gaia answer his teacher with, “He will be a great warrior and great man.”