Surprisingly, no!

Changing into his sports attire thankfully went without any major hitch, aside from Frank boasting about how 'he just beat the new guy into damn tomorrow'. That one put a bad aftertaste into John's mouth... Was he partially to blame for that? Did Frank take out his frustrations on James because he couldn't find the guy that threw the can at him? John wanted to check if James was okay, but at this point, he didn't see when he could check up on him without delaying the rest of his day... He just had to hope that he would see him tomorrow in some lesson and that he could ask him if anything had happened.

As he went into the gym hall where they usually started the lesson, John could already see that today dodgeball would not be the focus of the lesson. Around the whole hall were various blocks with trampolines, mattresses on the walls, horizontal poles to grip onto and various other things one might see in obstacle courses. Now, this was getting interesting. Once all the students were assembled, coach Conroy came from his personal changing room with a face one could call rather annoyed. "All right you lazy slobs, since, apparently, I had a lot of parents complain that the students were playing way too much dodgeball, that it didn't help their physical health, and because the football team has a big game coming this weekend, we're gonna do things a bit different. You're going to do a bit of parkour, also known as freerunning. I'm going to be busy with the football team getting them up to snuff so that you will have to help each other out. There's no wrong way of doing it, except when you hurt yourself, then you definitely did it wrong. All right, warm up by running four laps outside, after that, football players and cheerleaders, I guess, with me."

Now, this was indeed interesting! Not the first time coach Conroy ditched them for the football team, but the first time they actually had something to do during that aside from running laps and playing dodgeball (and those were the better rounds of dodgeball because they weren't getting pummeled into the ground by the football players).

John's fascination about this wasn't mirrored by his classmates from what he could heat during the warm-up laps. Most of them labeled it a 'new kind of ****' that only broke the monotony of dodgeball to elevate the torment. John, on the other hand, had one thing he was hoping to get out of this: a skill. Getting parkour as a skill would be pretty damn cool, especially because he could easily imagine how could incorporate it with Flash Step.

Filing back into the hall, John could see how the students here, both male and female, split themselves into autonomous little groups, trying to conquer at least one or two of the obstacles. John meanwhile looked over the various 'stations' and thought about what would get him that skill the fastest so he could use most of his time to level it up. Each of the stations had various little instructions laying beside them to explain what one had to do at this specific stop. After a bit of looking, John found something that would likely fit his desires.

In the corner of the hall was a waist-high block with a mattress tucked between the block and the wall, the instructions said that one would have to jump 'into' the wall, push himself off the wall and land on the other side of the block, without actually touching the block. Now, this didn't sound too difficult, but the various students trying and failing at this were a testament that it wasn't as easy as John might think. Then again, none of them likely had his Agility score.

Waiting for his turn to try the move, John took a running start, ran at a sharp angle into the corner of the block and the mattress, and jumped off the ground. In the air, he then put one foot in front of his body so he wouldn't faceplant the wall and pushed himself off the wall with the front foot, landing on the other side of the block without a problem. The students around him nodded acknowledingly and now that he had shown them how it was done they one by one did manage so as well.

John was meanwhile preoccupied with the pop-up appearing in front of him:

New Skill: Parkour, Lv.1, Passive
The art to efficiently move from A to B with one's own bodily abilities. You have two modes of using this passive skill: By choosing a destination by thinking about it and by simply running. In both cases, you will see elements light up according to their difficulty for you. High Intelligence will allow you to see more paths, higher Agility and higher Skill Level in Parkour and Acrobatics will make them easier to traverse. With growing levels of Parkour, you will also learn to negate the damage due to falling from greater heights.

Nice, so he could now train that skill with everything he did in the hall. Speaking of training skills, John just got a great idea to train another one that would greatly help him in the future: his Transreceptive Eye! The thing said that it would level up through usage, and when he used the thing with Brun, it actually leveled up. So far he hadn't looked through her eyes again due to her not wanting him to. But now he had a Barrier that he could indefinitely look into, and no one would notice or care. Seeing as how he should train to actually act with the split perception this was a double deal for John!

He then went to another obstacle set up not far away from the last one. This time it was an eight feet high block stuck to the wall with another mattress. This time the challenge was to use the wall vertically to gain more height and pull yourself up to the block without too much effort. Sure, John could jump that one with Flash Step but there might be a time when he had no Mana left, and he had to deal with running away from something, maybe something scary like a hydra or something...

By now John could see that most of the students didn't even bother with the obstacles anymore, most of them just took a seat on the bench with their friends and talked about their days. This made it easier for John to try out the rest of the obstacles since no one wanted to try them anymore. Well, their loss...

Activating his Transreceptive Eye and concentrating on his Bond with the Barrier, John could immediately feel his concentration cut in half as he saw the Barrier and the gym hall in front of him at the same time. He knew that this one might take some tries to get right since he wasn't fully concentrated on it, but the prospect of landing face first in the wall wasn't the worst possibility John had to face in the last two days.

So, let the grinding begin!