6 Exploration

As the pair wandered deeper into the dungeon, the fluorescent mushrooms gradually became less plentiful, causing more and more darkness to manifest. Arwin had convinced Isabella to leave behind the rat meat, as it would quickly go bad, and it would not fit in the small burlap sack she had brought.

The dungeon became wider and wider with every step, such that they could no longer see the tunnel walls, leaving a vast plain of soil before them. Every so often, branching tunnels would appear, providing a passage into the darkness. They soon learned to avoid such areas as they were often the homes of aggressive rodents.

Along the way they encountered no shortage of monsters. The rodent populations suggested that place hadn't been visited in several decades or rather, it was likely it hadn't been discovered at all. Due to the abundance of encounters, Arwin and Isabella both received plenty of battle experience.

After a couple of battles, Arwin seemed to have gotten the hang of basic combat. As his new body had not received battle training before, he confirmed his suspicion that he didn't possess a proper class yet. Back in the game world, classless players were called novices. As such, he could only use novice combat skills consisting of the "slash" and "block" abilities.

As a beginner to fighting, Arwin received quite a couple of blows from the monsters. However, since he restricted his battles to weaker monster species, he only had some light scratches. Although he wasn't used to the pain, it was nowhere near unbearable.

From watching Isabella fight, he gathered some more details about this worlds combat system. Isabella always led off with the same posture and motion when performing a skill, closely resembling the startup frames of the skills back in the game. For example, before using the charge skill, she would always place her right foot behind her and lowered her body by bending her knees. She would then thrust herself off the ground while swinging her dagger in a horizontal fashion. Surprisingly, charge even had the same ending lag animations, as Isabella would be forced to contort her body to regain her balance after completing the skill, identical to what a player would be forced to do in the game.

This discovery led Arwin to believe that advanced in-game techniques such as animation canceling might be possible to emulate in this world. Unfortunately, he could not test this theory out himself since novice skills were too simplistic. He would need to instruct Isabella to test out his theories.

Arwin called out to her just as she was just finishing landing the killing blow on a tunnel muskrat. He cringed at the gross display of blood and guts.

"What's up?" she asked cheerfully, seemingly unbothered by the gruesome scene before her.

"If you don't mind, I'd like you to try some combat techniques" replied Arwin.