Chapter 9: Animation Cancel

In front of the training dummy, Shesmu held his sword with one hand. However, this wasn’t a change of posture made so that he can strike the dummy more effectively. In fact, he wasn’t planning to strike the dummy at all. At this moment, Shesmu was waging a more decisive war, and its battlefield was in his mind.

Taking a deep breath, Shesmu replayed the sequence of attacks he just did in his mind. As if his mind was a Slowmo camera, he saw himself making that attack slowly. He noticed every detail, every breath he took, the speed by which his sword was moving, its angle and more. The sword kept slashing and Shesmu kept observing, from the flow of his sword Shesmu knew that he still needed around 0.3 seconds before he should activate Empowered Slash.

Counting under his breath, Shesmu reached 2 before the green energy started gathering on his abdomen.

Stop-

Stopping his imagination dead in its track, Shesmu felt his hands become slippery. Cold sweat dripped down from his forehead and the palms of his hands. He shortly gasped for air before looking at the training dummy.

I mistimed it, let’s do it again.

Once again, Shesmu took hold of his sword with both hands, gripping its handle tightly. For the second time, Shesmu swung his sword diagonally towards the dummy. As the sword closed in, Shesmu once again activated Empowered Slash.

“Shhh!”

Once again, a big red 90 appeared above the dummy’s head. Looking at it, Shesmu saw a gash on the training dummy’s neck before it got instantly healed. That was considered a weak spot, as the dummy was representing a humanoid creature, thus the higher than standard damage.

“Tch, missed it again.” Shesmu clicked his tongue as he missed the timing for the second time in a row. But this time, he knew that he was close, he felt it.

Third time's the charm, let’s do this.

For a third time Shesmu took hold of his sword, and with both hand raised it at the level of his forehead. He swung it diagonally, and as the sword closed on the dummy, he activated his skill.

“Swoosh!”

A bright green light in the form of a slash appeared in the air for a second before dissipating. A gash bigger than ever before made its way through the dummy’s neck before slowly healing. And, most surprising of all, two numbers appeared above the dummy. A small blue 45, and a big red 90 were on top of each other.

At this sight, Shesmu sighed in relief, a rare smile appearing on his face.

Well, now I got working this at least.

Recalling back the events that just transpired so as to burn it in his memory, Shesmu entered a trance once again. At first, he raised his sword and swung normally. It was a normal slash attack, albeit a little bit sloppy by Shesmu’s standards, but it wasn’t too bad. The real trick came much later when he activated his skill. The goal that Shesmu was striving for is not only to hit a normal slash attack but activate Empowered Slash and deal its damage on top of the normal slash attack in one hit. This would have been hard enough of its own he would need first of all the damage of the normal attack to register, then activate Empowered Slash and only then will the second damage be registered by the system.

This whole endeavor was one of extreme difficulty, not only was it hard to time it well due to the short timeframe, but it was also extremely taxing on one’s mental concentration. But for Shesmu, this scenario would have been easy, extremely so. The reason for this is that the reality of the situation adds another layer of complexity to the technique. Empowered slash gathered energy from Shesmu’s stomach area and distributed it to his arms and by extension his sword. This process takes time, a lot of time for Shesmu’s taste. This makes it impossible when doing the technique for Shesmu to wait until his normal attack connected before activating his skill. There was simply not enough time. That’s why Shesmu has to activate his skill before his normal slash even connects to have a hope of connecting both attacks.

From this one can easily tell the insane mastery needed to consistently pull off this trick. However, the results were worth it. Shesmu’s slash cut through that training dummy like butter dealing 150% the damage someone would do with a normal empowered slash to the neck.

“Clap, clap, clap.”

Snapping out of his reverie, Shesmu turned around to the sound of Leonard clapping.

“That was a marvelous technique. May I know its name?” Leonard said respectfully, his usual joking tone nowhere to be seen.

To this question, Shesmu pondered for a second. The move did have a name, but it was more popular among players and he never heard an NPC say it before. In the end, he just pushed those thoughts to the side and answered.

“This move is inspired from a type of techniques called animation cancel. This one specifically shall be named Empowered Slash Cancel.”

“Interesting name, Empowered Slash Cancel, I’ll keep it in mind.” Leonard looked like a student taking notes from his professor as he said those words. However, just as he set this serious tone with his speech, he broke it as quickly as he created it.

“But that’s that and this is this, you still need to learn Empowered Thrust and Dash before qualifying as a warrior. The world is big and you still have much to learn young’un. Haha!”

As Leonard continued laughing like a madman, Shesmu resisted the urge to facepalm.

This dude, I really can’t predict what he is gonna do anymore…

“Haha, so let me show you. This is how you do an Empowered thrust…”

Suddenly, Leonard’s words fell into deaf ears. Shesmu no longer cared about whatever he had to say. He already knew everything that had to do with these two skills, and his new experience already told him that he can’t do most of the stuff that he knew about these skills. This made him a little bit depressed. He was also mentally tired from the strain that consecutive Empowered Slash Cancels put on his brain. In his heydays, a skill like this was something akin to eating and drinking, not tiring at all. But now, even a few made him exhausted. He needs to build his mental strength all over again.

By the end of Leonard’s demonstration, which Shesmu completely ignored, he gained two skills.

The description of Dash barely gave any information, but Shesmu knew that the skill had many limiting factors. For example, the skill didn’t work well at the edge of its radius when the terrain is not even. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Someone probably already knew the specific details regarding this in his past life, but Shesmu couldn’t bother at the time looking it up, and for sure won’t bother racking his brain for an answer now. As for Empowered Thrust, it was basically Empowered Slash, but with a thrust. Not really that exciting.

“Now that I’ve taught you the basic skills of a warrior, you can go to the clergy at the reception outdoors to learn some of the basic skills needed to survive in this world, and to register as a citizen of the Great Pliyx Stal Kingdom. Now, my job is done. I wish you good luck in your journey, you of the golden generation. I’m sure that I would start hearing your name in these streets before long. Haha!”