Chapter 2: The Journey Begins
Many hours later, Velios woke up with a start, his clothes drenched with sweat in the blistering, unforgiving sun shining ever so bright in the morning. He blinked wildly for a second, trying to recall why he was lying on his back in the middle of nowhere. His stomach growled with hunger but he shoved the feeling away, having been used to it. He hauled his sore body up into a sitting position, gasping some deep breaths while just taking some time to process what had happened. It's not every day you get trapped in a video game, no matter how much you may be enjoying it. Velios' mind was still fuzzy and there were too many possibilities to why. Not enough water.. exhaustion.. perhaps something the game had done to him? The list went on. Honestly, he was starting to forget he was even in a game. He finally settled on a conclusion, based on the way his body felt stiff and as if his joints were stuffed with cotton wool.
He had strained himself, his body, too hard the day before. He wasn't strong enough to do that yet. In his brief euphoria, he'd forgotten he wasn't superhuman. But at the moment. It could have been the intensity of the running, it could also have been that the "natural healing" drained him of so much of the energy which was basically already fully depleted. But there would be no good overthinking things, that only wasted more energy, and right now, it was imperative to keep his mind sharp and alert. His life now depended on it. He missed out on the perfect opportunity to get the first kill on the server as the announcement flashed overhead. After all, he'd left the rest of the trapped society behind in the city. He was most likely safer staying away from others at the moment though, just until he built up his physical and mental strength. Then he would have the power to complete whatever was needed to save himself. It truly was survival of the fittest here, the weak will undeniably die. There was very little hope for them, lest Velios wish to have any hope for himself.
He pulled himself to his feet, starting to walk for the first time properly since the previous morning, since all he'e been doing was running. His legs felt stiff and wooden. Had it been the previous morning? He honestly had no idea how long he'd been out cold. But once he was outside of the big wooden gates, he tried to look around, but the forest was so dense, you could barely see ahead, the almost impossibly thick trees obscuring the view in every direction. Velios remarked this would be impeccable cover for an ambush. The canopy closed in above too, blocking out most of the light and leaving a soft and vaguely haunting misty green glow. There were no paths or signs of humans having been there. Untouched. Almost like the planet was only a big lump of ocean and forest and that these cities were dropped from the sky with the only human footmark in the city. The rest was completely unexplored terrain which put a bunch of ideas into his head. So many possibilities. But he kept on walking into the forest, with a formidable fierceness in his eyes, eager, hungry, to grow stronger.
Before starting his training he decided to at least be a distance away from the city even though no human was close just to keep himself from getting distracted. Detaching from the world, Velios told himself, was the only way to achieve true mental peak. Just like the Buddhist monks of old who sat atop mountains, numb to the biting cold and the destroying hunger simply because they were in a state of pure peace. Their minds and bodies so perfectly at one they could control and regulate everything just the way they wished.
In Velios' 'old world", he would isolate himself from the outside world by going into huge rainforests or perhaps deserts and surviving there anywhere from a couple of weeks to even months sometimes with no equipment, food or anything with him for that matter. Just living ruthlessly off whatever he could find. He wasn't afraid to kill, to do whatever it took to stay alive. He was truly a seasoned survival expert when it came to surviving, even beating the limits thought possible going without food or water respectively. He was a marvel for a boy of such a young age. Grown, adult men would struggle to complete his achievements. When Velios was finally far enough away, he started what any pro gamer would do in a survival game, punch wood. And not sarcastically. He needed to train, to build up his stamina and strength, his reflexes too. Velios found a tree that he decided to use as "equipment" to his training. It seemed the perfect circumference, density and height. He was smart enough to come to the conclusion that he should learn to adapt his way of combat to the current world for optimal results while still combining it with the sophisticated and unrivaled technique from his "old world". Adapt to survive, after all, was the general motto of humanity. During his "quest" to become the strongest, he faced many challenges and to always remain on top, he learned every kind of fighting style, martial arts and other stuff including fencing and archery. You never knew when shooting an arrow may come in handy.
Even though he was one amongst the strongest, he always faced a problem. One habit of his that was very common, which was that he frequently began excessively overthinking every scenario. Once he started doing something, he couldn't quit, he wasn't the kind of person that would go back on his word, sometimes even if he knew it was going to fail. He simply wouldn't let himself stop. It was the force that drove him. An unspoken compulsion that propelled him through life. That was one of the reasons he found himself so strong and knowledgeable but also one of the reasons he always finds himself in awkward situations that prove very hard to get out of. Hours of hard training later, the tree that he chose had nearly completed the entire cycle of life through force as Velios barely stopped moving for a second. The tree's thickness was comparable to the length of his shoulder to the end of his hand and a thick trunk sprouted from the ground and up at least 3 meters before the branches and leaves spread out high above. The tree was actually very short in comparison to others around him, but he thought it safest to not attack them. He didn't fancy being ended by a falling trunk before he'd even begun his mission. He was doing everything his brain could think of in a split second from punching, kicking, kneeing and every sort of combination he could come up with. But it wasn't exactly cost free for Velios. He soon had bruises blooming in various shades of red and purple all over his legs, feet, hands, arms, knuckles and extreme fatigue in the rest of his body. Once he had managed to kick down the final bit of wood holding the tree together, he felt extremely happy, but having stopped for even a second, his body once again had collapsed, but his mind was still intact. He knew he couldn't be awake for long, but he decided to wait until after he had woken up to check his stats and the overall damage he had caused to his body. Yet again he laid by the side of the tree that had just collapsed, and slowly closed his eyes to signal his body to finally rest.
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