Trainer Activated

Despite the simulated nature of my current predicament on this gray hellscape platform, the body horror foes lined up against me certainly drove up the adrenaline as if the situation was completely real. The Empusa, a morbid and gangly fusion of three human bodies twisted to take on ant-like qualities. Despite the fear inducing appearance, the dozen lesser demons pose little threat even to the me of yesterday. The shambling horrors lack aggressive instincts and even when provoked attack slowly. Even an average person can get away from these creatures so long as they don't panic and run right into them.

To the me that exists today though, they are nothing but training dummies.

I experienced an incredible upgrade after signing on with The Company even if I'd been slapped quite hard with the new intensity system and further restrictions from my Patron. While an idiot might complain that the prior versions of the Waifu Catalog were more user friendly, I was smart enough to shut up and enjoy my power fantasy opportunity even if it came in a more thorny form than it did for those who got in before me.

Danger Rating 9 and Intensity 10 are scary concepts, being only a step below inbound apocalypse and with a slew of restrictions that take away the idiot proof nature of the Waifu Catalog further compounded by the Isekai Genie, the executive who extended this opportunity to me so long as I accepted his conditions. Isekai Genie caters to an audience who desire real adventure and drama, so he disables the capacity for his contractors to summon 'Waifus' from the catalog to carry their lazy and incompetent asses. In return he enables the selection of multiple additional missions though he intends for me to earn those extra slots by locking me three grand mission missions starting in a location that put me right into the fire of my new Danger Rating 9 homeworld without any OP PLZ NERF options.

Despite that I'm pumped.

A Danger Rating 9 world provides almost 1600 company credits as a signing bonus, but Intensity 10 cranks that bad boy down to 335. If I knee jerked and started to buy all the Defense options to make me feel safe from all the 'very scary' methods of danger egress then I'd end up getting destroyed by all the basic firepower that gets chucked around in my new world.

So I chose violence.

Despite that and the many other restrictions to my user experience, the catalog let me build my power fantasy regardless. I took up my inseparable greatsword, a perfect trinity of three powerful weapons and readied myself for the grind, slotting in the basic Fighter job class from my new homeworld, Overlord (LN). Between the Fighter and my body's own abilities as Turin Turambor melee combat felt more like riding a bike again rather than a new and anxiety producing major life event.

I closed the distance between me and the first of the shambling horrors, swinging my greatsword in a simple but powerful downward slash. Trinity - my weapon's new name - hacked through the disgusting demon with barely any feedback from the connection. I think we both needed a moment to realize the monster was already dead.

My active mission rewarded me with 5 points for completing its first optional objective: Defeat a foe for the first time. I looked around at the scores of similar creatures hobbling towards me and smirked. It felt nice to know that I'm not stuck on this platform with them, but that they are stuck here with me. Despite the large number of the enemies and the time I took completing the tutorial like nature Template Stacking made of my Fighter job class, I made quick work of the first Floor of the Bloody Palace and my first template. All I needed to do to advance the class was complete all the skills granted by each level once. Each stance, block, and strike felt like I'd practiced it a thousand times with a single attempt.

It took Gazef years of grueling effort to finish his Fighter job class, and I finished it with half an hour messing around with living attack dummies. I didn't actually gain any useful skill from the Fighter Class as Turin's body came with more skill than the class provided, but the class boosted my baseline attributes. Turin already would rank somewhere around baseline Gazef or Brain Unglaus levels of attribute performance in the Overlord (LN) world, and that is completely without the stat gain off job classes. With them I'll be quite the menace.

The completion of the first 'floor' (more like platform) of the Bloody Palace Opened a portal to the next floor, but I took a deep breath and used the Xanic Shroud to generate a stone bench for me to sit on while forming a crystal chalice in my hand. The black sable fur sleeve of the Primal Shroud reached around my shoulder and filled the chalice with a rich and sweet milk. I had nowhere to be currently, and no need to push myself just yet.

Just the ten levels of the Fighter job class provided a noticeable jump in my power, so I slotted in the next job class Mercenary and considered my gains. Fighter focused on strength and toughness - HP and Physical Defense - out of the nine Yggdrasil stats. Fighters had one job in battle stand and bang, with basic attacks, defenses, and combos for its skills. It gave me a solid journeyman skill set for sword and board combat, but had nothing exciting considering what I received from my new body. The experience itself felt like playing a tutorial from an action RPG video game, except the little exp rewards for learning how to look up and down and side to side filled a whole level up. Cheat Activated.

I walked to the glowing energy portal which presented me with the option of moving on or repeating the floor, and since I was stuck running tutorials nine more times the slow Empusas made for fine training wheels. I selected repeat and got to work on my new class.

Mercenary had a very even stat gain between strength, toughness and agility with the skills being more creative and exploitive, looking to alway capitalize off perceived weaknesses for critical hits. The actual basic fighting skills were worse than those of my prior class, but Mercenary offered little tips and tricks, fight hacks, and brutally cunning tactics that Fighter lacked, and I'd give a Mercenary great odds in an urban environment or dense forest. In the open, not so much.

I took my time to complete the template again rather than rush the process, and after another clear and another break slotted in my first advanced class, Berserker. Advanced classes offered better skills and abilities, but came with prerequisites to unlock.

Berserker boosted physical attack using the Rage class skill on top of brutish stat gains, and many athletic abilities for getting the Berserker closer to an enemy such as Enraged Sprinting, Swimming, Leaping, and Climbing. A great supplementary option for an already well rounded warrior that spits on the idea of anyone running faster scared than they run angry. Athletic Talent shined brightly as I finished this job class.

With three job classes down I stepped into Realm of Heroes, a transcendent state few manage to achieve. Those who enter the Realm of Heroes are now beyond the limits of their racial power, but the difference between those at the start - level 30 - and those who've been there for a while is massive because stat gains are now greatly increased per level. Someone at level 35 will absolutely thrash someone at level 30, far more than someone at level 20 will thrash someone at level 15. More importantly, post level 35 Heroes are no longer capable of being taken down by non-heroes regardless of numbers, equipment, and tactics. The game switches at that point from Mount and Blade anime edition to Dynasty Warriors. I celebrated this momentous achievement by slotting in the Champion class and repeating the floor again.

Champion had some crossover with the Bard class in the form of buffing shouts such as 'To the Limit' which when shouted could give me and those around me a second wind and 'Shake it Off' which could break us out of negative moral effects like terror. Stats wise Champions were physical damage tanks meant to stand at the fore of battle, hit hard, and keep the line from breaking. I had to put in a few more training rounds to finish Champion as Gazef was a bee's dick of training away from finishing the 9th level of the class. An effort of only a few hours with Martial Talent augmenting my efforts.

Executioner put all its eggs in one basket. Slash DPS. All the stat points went into Physical Attack, and when using slashing weapons cut deeper hemorrhaged more. Executioner was based as fuck, and very chunni, denying all combat technique but maximum edge. It reminded me of my old Warframe days and Slash meta dominance.

Completing Executioner put me at level 50, meaning I'd left the Realm of Heroes behind and landed myself among the godkin and their unnamed rivals, the descendents of the Yggdrasil players who became known as the Six Great Gods and the Eight Greed Kings respectively. These are incredibly rare, and male godkin are bred like stud horses in the hopes that future generations will exhibit the exemplary traits of the bloodline. The fact that you'll find more qilin horns and phoenix feathers than these guys made me look into buying the Stud Service Lure for 10 points once I start taking this palace seriously and start clearing more objectives. Soon they'll feel every ounce of my breeder superiority and despair.

My final mundale class was Master Fighter, which felt like a misnomer, as no single class provided mastery of anything. Master Fighter certainly built off the former Fighter class, and added far more skillful techniques to the mix. Despite this I wouldn't call it a mastery of fighting. Certainly an expert as the class taught counter cuts, feints and traps, parries, and grappling. All things that put meat on the skeleton of the Fighter Class.

Paladin (Genius) served as the foundation for my more esoteric job classes, though still focused on up close and personal battle, the Paladin excelled as a tank with excellent magic resistance, healing magic, area buffs, and attack spells like Holy Strike. The (Genius) modifier made me particularly adept at manipulating this divine magic into new spells making the basic Paladin class far more promising than nearly all my other classes.

The Holy Knight class looked at the tankiness of the Paladin and told the Paladin to do better. It provided little offensive might, but cranked up toughness and magical resistance extremely and provided cantrips to further boost defenses and to resist evil and corruption. Very similar to the Champion class but vs magic.

The Inquisitor was yet another anti physical anti magic tank, but instead of the Paladin Spells and Holy Knight Cantrips the Inquisitor had Castigation skills, capable of weakening magical abilities, increasing the cost of magic, and causing spell failures. It made a lot of sense that these three faith based classes were hard specced for combat uptime. They offered great group utility and enemy debuffs, and thus needed that extra staying power to maximize these advantages. It's not like they didn't have DPS gains, but if a Fighter rated 10 attack points and 8 defense points, a paladin rates 8 attack points and 11 defense points.

Learn that life is unfair and that breakdown makes more sense. Not all the classes provided the same base stat gains, which is why at level 100 you can have such a wide gulf of attribute points such as between Shalltear Bloodfallen and Pandora's Actor of almost 200 total stat points.

For my capstone I took the prestige class Evil Slayer, which unlike the other faith based classes forgoes defense and puts all its power into conditional offense. The holy magic of the Evil Slayer inflicts massive damage on anything with Evil moral alignment, and always on demons, devils, and the undead. This damage resists healing, deals additional holy damage over time, and debuffs the victim, making drawn out encounters with the Evil Slayer suicide for anything evil, terrifying for anything neutral because if you're not good you're evil, while not doing anything to those aligned with the good.

The Evil Slayer was the only class I took that I did not have a mostly finished Template to follow as Remedios barely had the class unlocked. Though this didn't bother me as I was in no rush to leave the Bloody Palace and many of the enemy types offered here will trigger the class and let me grind exp, exp multiplied my Martial and Soul talent.

Despite the slow down, my company smart phone displayed my status as a 7th Tier power, and I still had more in the tank considering I hadn't even touched the pool of Martial Arts offered to me by my Templates, nor the Warform transformation offered by the Primal Shroud. Something I intended to rectify while grinding my Evil Slayer class.

I burst through the levels containing Devil May Cry demons quickly when I stopped holding back and started exploring New World Martial Arts: transcendent abilities gained through a warrior's dedicated quest for martial perfection. Wild performance buffs, wuxia movement abilities, special attacks that are anime as fuck like making six strikes at once out of sword light. Gazef could juggle six of these balance breakers at once with his level 29 stats. I'd gotten to level 93 fighting the demonic hordes on each platform before I arrived at the portal to the tenth floor and could activate all the Arts I currently had at once. When channeling my various buffs from Martial Arts that boosted my stats, reaction speed, counter attacks, movement speed, defenses, and weaponry I transcended the 7th Tier like a Xianxia protagonist, though the company phone listed me as 8th Tier while empowered so I wasn't going to do any 'face slapping' within The Company by hiding my power level.

I wasn't greeted with another dreary gray platform with a horde of enemies on it for the tenth floor, but instead arrived at a devastated urban environment. Before me stood a gargantuan beast at least forty feet tall, standing on two hairy reverse joint legs thick as oak trees with two long gorilla like arms bearing clawed hands like a pair of mining shovels on the end of it's Popeye wrists. It's jagged horned head sported a wide maw of fangs splitting its crumpled leather face, but no eyes. Instead many glowing orange eyes sprouted down its torso, also split by and even wider maw of gnarly fangs.

It was quite the beast.

But so am I.

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