T/N: By mistake, I mixed up chapters 31 and 32, but now they’re separate.
From now on, I’ll be using the term ‘transcendental’ instead of ‘extraordinary’ as I did in the early chapters, and I think it sounds better.
Chapter 32: The Weapon Master Bloodline
Following the underground passage, Asker arrived at the red team’s training ground.
Pushing open the door, he saw gladiators scattered in the corners, each training on their own. Some were practicing sword slashing, some were practicing spear thrusting, some were holding shields and defending against their companions’ attacks, and some were hitting themselves with sandbags, revealing large muscles with a bronze tan.
Asker picked up a piece of mail armor from the rack next to him and put it on, then changed into iron boots and helmet, and took a two-handed greatsword from the weapon rack.
All the gladiators in the room turned their eyes to him.
“Hey, chick!” A muscular man walked over. He was a strong man about 1.85 meters tall, shirtless, revealing well-developed pectoral muscles and six-pack abs. “This is not the place for you! Go back to your mother and drink milk!”
“I’m a newly registered gladiator for the red team.” Asker said lightly.
“Registered? Our red team is already full! Cedric, Cedric!” The strong man immediately shouted.
“What’s the noise!” After about half a minute, the middle-aged man who was at the counter earlier ran over quickly. “Theotis! Your red team is already full, you’re going to participate in the gladiatorial fight in half an hour, why aren’t you taking your men to warm up?”
“My brother asked for leave, how can the red team participate in the gladiatorial fight!” Theotis retorted angrily. “And what’s going on with this new chick?”
“Our arena doesn’t have such a thing as asking for leave, it’s clearly written in the employment contract.” Cedric, the receptionist, said coldly with his arms crossed. “Since he’s not coming today, he’ll have to wait for a vacancy in the team next time! Or he can participate in the single gladiatorial fight.”
“That’s my brother!” Theotis’ eyes widened, revealing a furious expression as if he wanted to eat someone alive. “How dare you, how dare you kick him out of my team!”
“Even your grandfather wouldn’t work! If your brother asks for leave for a year, will your red team not participate in the gladiatorial fight for a year?” Cedric sneered and looked at Asker. “And if I find out that you beat up or killed this new teammate in private, you know what will happen to you. Every inch of this place is covered by surveillance cameras.”
He closed the door and left. Theotis looked at Asker, who seemed indifferent, his facial muscles almost convulsing with rage. After more than ten seconds, his anger turned into cruel and venomous hatred, and his gaze at Asker became like looking at a dead man.
“Go back to training!” He turned around and said coldly to everyone. In this place full of cameras, Theotis still didn’t dare to attack on the spot.
So the other gladiators also returned to their original positions sparsely. They didn’t dare to provoke Theotis, who was furious, and they weren’t interested in Asker, the new recruit who was sure to die. For a while, the sound of swords clashing and muffled groans of blows landing on flesh echoed in the room again.
Asker swung the two-handed greatsword, familiarizing himself with the weapon’s usage, while calculating in his mind.
The next potion for “Weapon Master” was “Sharp Weapon I,” which would allow him to be familiar with the use of all sharp weapons and know the data attributes of any sharp weapon like the back of his hand. If he remembered correctly, the reward for the “Daily Champion” of this arena was the “Sharp Weapon I” potion.
For example, if Asker took “Sharp Weapon I” now, even if he had never used a two-handed greatsword before, as soon as he picked up this weapon, he would know that its length was about 170 centimeters, its weight was about 4 kilograms, where its center of gravity was, how to hold it, and how to slash or stab the enemy.
Of course, being automatically familiar with the usage method was not the same as being proficient. Just like knowing how to use Photoshop didn’t mean you could be a good graphic designer.
It was enough to become a swordsman with the transcendental ability of “Sharp Weapon I,” but to become a “highly skilled” swordsman was a pipe dream. The experience of fighting to the death, without personally killing people on the battlefield, was absolutely impossible to obtain.
It was precisely because of this that the potion formulas for “Sharp Weapon I,” “Blunt Weapon I,” “Projectile I,” “Block I,” “Dodge I,” and so on, possessed by the arena, had almost become unwanted garbage.
They couldn’t greatly enhance the transcendental being’s own physique like the Cornerstone Sequence or the Bloodline Sequence, nor could they give the transcendental being strange or powerful killing abilities like the Spirit Sequence or the Arcane Sequence.
Their only function was to help you master the basic combat experience in a certain field, and it was only “mastering” not “proficient.” They also occupied one of your transcendental characteristic slots, conflicted with potions of other Sequences, and prevented you from switching to other bloodline paths…
Therefore, in the early stages of the game, whenever a newbie mistakenly took a potion from the Gladiator Sequence and came to the forum to ask what bloodline it corresponded to, a large number of players would reply below:
“Congratulations, your account is ruined.”
“Achievement: You have discovered the malice of the game designers.”
“Honey, come and watch the account deletion.”
Later, it turned into ridicule and abuse of the game design team, especially the Iron and Fire balance team.
As everyone knew, “Iron and Fire” had always wanted to transform from a multiplayer RPG online game to a professionally balanced e-sports game, so similar public voices soon reached the top management of the game.
So in the next few versions, the Gladiator Sequence began to be continuously strengthened, such as weapon data visualization, etc., but the players never bought it.
In the 6th expansion, the “Weapon Master” bloodline was added, but it was ridiculed by players as “Acrobatic Master,” which even caused the head of the design team to argue with players on the official forum.
Then in the 7th expansion, the game element of “Ethereal Blade Art” was introduced, and a new transcendental swordsmanship called “Celestial Ninefold Strike” from the Dragon Kingdom in the Far East was added.
Thus, the Weapon Master bloodline and the Gladiator Sequence potions immediately rose to prominence, and the game’s popularity began to expand rapidly.
In the words of the player forum, before you learned “Celestial Ninefold Strike,” the Weapon Master you played was from the Dark Souls series; after learning “Celestial Ninefold Strike,” the Weapon Master you played became the Assassin’s Creed series.
Within the first two months of the new version, even 30% of the new accounts chose the Weapon Master bloodline, so the balance team hurriedly nerfed “Celestial Ninefold Strike,” mainly by greatly increasing the learning threshold of this swordsmanship…
Finally, Weapon Master became a profession that was easy to play but difficult to master, and whether or not one could learn “Celestial Ninefold Strike” also became a watershed between professional players and skilled players.
As for whether one could master “Celestial Ninefold Strike”… Besides himself, Asker really couldn’t remember any other professional player who could master Celestial Ninefold Strike, because this transcendental swordsmanship required a lot of practice, experience, and intuition.
He continued to swing the two-handed greatsword a few more times, then found a cushion and closed his eyes to meditate.
Theotis, while furiously training his sparring partner with a greatsword, glanced at Asker out of the corner of his eye, revealing an undisguised sneer.
This new recruit was also equipped with a greatsword. To be precise, it was a classic greatsword forged in the city-state of Milan, characterized by its weight, thickness, and length. The trick to using it was one word: brute force.
However, what followed was not a single gladiatorial fight, but a team gladiatorial fight. In a single gladiatorial fight, you could still rely on brute force with your weapon to kill your opponent, but in a multi-person gladiatorial fight, it was often about being “conservative.”
Equipping such a greatsword with its own eye-catching attribute was tantamount to telling the opponent, “Hurry up and kill me, otherwise I’ll kill you with my greatsword.” In team fights, it was always the target of being besieged first.
He, Theotis, dared to use a greatsword because he had the whole team to cover and cooperate with him. What did this new chick have?
When they entered the arena later, he would directly command the team to isolate him. Would the opposing blue team come and fight his team head-on? Or would they attack this isolated chick first? It was a no-brainer.
…
“Damn, so many!” In Asker’s ancestral home, Kieran exclaimed in his hometown slang when he saw the transcendental characteristics lined up on the desk.
He really wanted to ask if they had wiped out the branch of Dreamland Paradise, but he managed to hold back and didn’t ask. Nuo chuckled beside him, not explaining much.
So this was the advantage of the recruitment system! Kieran sighed. If the Life School still followed the apprenticeship system, then the apprentices would have to stay by their masters’ side all the time, working for their masters in exchange for potion formulas and materials, and they wouldn’t have time to go out and adventure.
Such a lucky encounter of harvesting more than twenty transcendental characteristics at once would naturally be impossible.
If the apprenticeship system was fishing, then the recruitment system was casting a net. In the time it took to catch one fish, many nets could be cast. Maybe this time the net would only catch small fish, maybe the next net would be full.
After a brief discussion about the price with Nuo, Kieran readily bought all the level 1 and level 4 transcendental characteristics at a unit price of 100 pounds and 1200 pounds respectively, and also copied and collected the level I formulas for Dream, Shadow, and Mind at a price of 120 pounds each.
For a sect, low-level formulas of other Sequences were never too many. The Azure Longsword Mercenary Group Fund instantly received 7760 pounds.
“We’re rich!” After Kieran left, the girls looked at the numbers in their bank accounts on their phones, and only one thought remained in their minds.
“I thought of something, everyone.” Nuo suddenly said seriously. “Peggy? I heard that the burned-down house next door was your former home, right?”
“Hmm.” Peggy replied lightly, a hint of sadness in her eyes. Since there were no “living” immediate family members who could inherit this homestead, the house and land she grew up in had been taken over by the Constantinople municipal government and put up for auction.
“I plan to buy this land.” Nuo said, “And turn it into a warehouse.”
“Warehouse, you mean…” Medea immediately understood what she meant.
“Yes.” Nuo said, “Next, we will buy a lot of building materials and transport them to the warehouse next door for storage. Then, every night, we will secretly transport the building materials from the warehouse to Furnace Island in the semi-plane.”
Furnace Island was the name the girls gave to the island in the semi-plane fragment sealed in the book “Absurd Dreams.”
The whole morning when Asker was away, they spent a few hours wandering around in the semi-plane. When they looked down from the top of the mountain, they could see that the southern coastline of the entire island was relatively smooth, while the north shore had three irregularly protruding headlands, like the shape of a furnace, so they called it Furnace Island.
“And then, we build our own house?” Eleanor said in surprise. “That’s a great idea, Nuo! But we don’t have civil engineers and construction workers, the house can’t just rise from the pile of building materials, can it?”
“You forgot what my major is?” Nuo smiled proudly. “Military nuns have civil engineering courses in their undergraduate studies. As for construction workers, of course we all work together! After all, we are all transcendental beings now, we should have this much physical strength, right?”
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