Night out

A few minutes later Erik arrived. Feeling both excited and nervous Eldrian climbed into the car, greeting Erik as he did, "Hey Erik."

"Hey Eldrian, are you ready for tonight?"

"I guess so, I don't really know."

"Right! Well, let's go and see what it is like." Erik started driving after saying this, luckily the place they were going wasn't very far from Eldrian, allowing them to quickly arrive.

Looking at all the people at Midnight, Eldrian couldn't help but feel out of place. They had come quite early, making it an easy task to find parking. This had been something they had heard from others in their classes. If you arrive after a certain time, then there would be no hope of parking your car.

Climbing out they both headed to the club, fidgeting a little.

Both Eldrian and Erik felt out of place as they entered the club. Most people were clearly not minding what others thought. Dancing crazily on the dance floor or snuggling on the benches.

Trying to overcome their nervousness they both grabbed something to drink and sat at the bar, watching the people enjoying themselves.

After a few more drinks they managed to loosen up and actually join the dancing people. Joining them in not caring what others thought. Certainly, they didn't look very good while dancing, both of them just trying to copy what they saw others doing, but they enjoyed themselves.

They spent most of the night like this, every now and then one of them would go and try to talk to a girl. Only to be quickly rejected, luckily they were here together and didn't get bothered too much by the rejections.

At the end of the night they left and headed to Eldrian's, where Erik had decided to crash for the night. While the night had been nerve-racking for them, they both felt they had learned much. They had also managed to enjoy it, mostly. Rejection was certainly never fun, but the dancing was.

At home, Eldrian made some noodles for both of them. After which they crashed on his couches and watched some TV. While chilling they talked about the night, laughing at some of the fails the other had made.

In the end they decided to certainly go out again, as it was a nice way to unwind from their normal routine.

...

Waking up Eldrian's first thought was about how weird it was to actually wake up. He had gotten so used to waking up by leaving the game, this normal way now seemed strange to him. He felt far more lethargic and tired than normal.

Leaving his bed he went to get himself something to eat, finding Erik still sleeping on one of his couches. Eldrian decided not to wake him yet, seeing as it was only eight.

Eldrian thus took his bowl of cereal and went back to his room, where he climbed onto the forums. He felt optimistic about today, believing he would be able to finally start truly learning magic. As such he did some research on what other players had experienced with skills and spells.

Most of the information was useless to him as he felt certain it would be different for him. He also visited his forum for High Elves, finding that the number had been decreasing. While the decrease was slow, he could clearly see that people were losing hope.

This made him contemplate if he should write about how he was learning magic. In the end he decided to wait a bit more, as he felt the method was certainly extreme. He also had no idea if other mages would take players in as Dave had him.

Around an hour later Erik woke up. After Eldrian helped him get something to eat they started talking about the game.

Erik had managed to get into the last group of Beta players, his headset was due to arrive at two today. As such Eldrian took the time to explain some things to him, greatly excited that he would have someone to talk to about the game IRL.

Around 12 Erik left and Eldrian started working on his assignments, hoping to finish them today. This will allow him to use tomorrow to study for his coming class test.

Before logging in Eldrian read the announcement posts, something he had started to do. Even when he wasn't in the mood for the forum, he made sure to at least look at the announcements and ranking posts. This gave him an idea of where the rest of the players were at.

On the announcement post there was indeed a new post, indicating that a minor update had been completed. This update was aimed at making the system interface easier to use, allowing people to gain access to a select part of the internet. The reason for it being a select part was because the company still needed to determine the impacts this would have on the game. They also mentioned needing to determine the bandwidth impact this would cause the servers.

They didn't explain what was selected and excluded, but players would quickly find out when trying to access the internet.

In conjunction with the interface update was a stat update. With this update the developers explained that there were cases where something might die even when its HP was over 0. Or the inverse, where something could survive when being at 0 HP.

They explained that this was due to the system being balanced towards mid and late game, leaving a slight oversight early game -Where magic was still rare.

The fix to this wasn't explained, but they did say that the damage values would be more driven towards the severity of an injury than by the strength of a weapon.

Naturally this post had its share of negative feedback, with players complaining that the developers were again making the game more difficult to play. Yet they couldn't overcome the decision by simply complaining, while there was also a chance that this might be a good improvement.

Due to this most players only complained a little, willing to give it some time to see what the effect of this update would be.

After browsing the forums Eldrian realized that he hadn't exercised today, knowing that he could already log in he had an internal conflict before decided to go for a short run. After which he logged into the game.

...

Entering the game Eldrian knew it was too early for Dave to be ready and unlike yesterday he didn't want to go bother Dave by waking him up. As such he jogged to the training fields, wanting to spend his first few hours training there.

From all the training he had actually managed to rank up his spear proficiencies quite a lot. He was currently at Rank 1, level 3, 128/400.

Eldrian didn't really know the importance of this, but he felt the proficiencies have a reason to be present. Yet he had lost interest in them since he started learning magic.

'Maybe it is a limiter or boost?' He thought while doing his normal routine.

After an hour of spear practice he changed to a short sword and shield, spending half an hour with it. After which he went to bow practice. Trying to beat his record of 10 hits in an hour. He felt certain he should be able to do it.

After the first few shots he knew that he was correct. Knowing how to use a bow and now having gotten used to this one he managed to hit every fourth shot. By the end he even managed to hit 7 out of 10.

Happy Eldrian decided to end his training, looking at his bow proficiency which was now only a few hundred away from reaching the minimum to try and rank it up.

'This one took sooo long to train.' Eldrian thought as he pulled his arrows out of the target. By now the sun had risen and Eldrian felt it was time to go back to the magic tower. He had likely made Dave wait by going weapon training before magic training.

Entering the magic tower Eldrian saw Dave standing at the circle reading a book.

"Hi Dave, sorry to keep you waiting."

Closing the book Dave looked at Eldrian in surprise, not having expected Eldrian to come from the main door.

Seeing his surprise Eldrian spoke again, "I woke up early and headed to the training field for some practice. I have been neglecting it recently."

Dave simply nodded and indicated for Eldrian to stand in his position. Soon they were both inside the magic tower's dungeon again.

"Dave I think I will manage to complete the first part today." Eldrian said after sitting against a wall.

"And what is the first part?" Dave asked, curious. They hadn't spoken much about the training, as there was nothing to fall back on. Dave's aim was to allow Eldrian to feel the movement of mana by forcing mana to move through him. Yet he hadn't sensed Eldrian approaching this at all.

"Keeping my spell module intact of course." Eldrian replied, to which Dave nodded. He knew that Eldrian's spell module normally broke under the influence of the Magic crystal. He had no idea what the effect of keeping it together was going to be for Eldrian.

Normally when someone's spell module broke their spell would either simply disappear or explode. Yet Eldrian's had never done so.

"Let's see what happens when you manage that then." Dave said, curious about what was going to happen.

Nodding Eldrian concentrated and created the spell module. Taking a deep breath to calm down, he said the spell's name; "Anthos".