I went on and on throughout the whole night using my Barrier ability in front of me, under me, trying to find unique shapes that I could form it in. I was still upset. The encounter with the noble boy kept pushing me towards anger, but I had to breathe and remember that this ability that the Architect gave me was not an accident and I had to find every way I could be of use to my future team and how I could use it independently of a team too. I would prove him wrong whether he acknowledged me or not.

  Looking at my Interface, I saw that it would be morning soon, but the progress in my practice couldn’t be ignored.

  I went from 15% to 34%, the largest short-term gains I had seen so far. The things that pushed my experience up the most was when I began to figure out Barrier’s limits: the maximum height was 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide. I could play with different configurations of that, but if I tried to make it any larger it would break apart. I could make it 6 feet wide and 3 feet tall, but again, it had to fall within those size parameters. I could make it into a circle that got close to that, but I lost out practical surface area and I could make it as small as I wanted, but I didn’t really know what good that would do me.

  I also found that whatever size I activated Barrier as, that was the size it would be until it dissipated or was broken. There was no changing it once the barrier came into being.

  I saw two big jumps in my experience when I tried using Barrier as stairs. I remembered how I had used it at the obstacle course part of the evaluation and wondered if I could make steps for myself. It was tricky getting the timing down because I couldn’t have more than one active at a time, but eventually, I was able to climb up a ‘small’ 4 step staircase of barriers.

  There was a lot of utility in being able to make your own stairs. While they were small and had less uses right now, as I gained levels and attributes, it could lead to getting height advantages on enemies or accessing hard to reach places.

  The other jump came from when I curved my Barrier to look like a half moon shape and laid down on it like an eclectic lounger chair. I slid out of it because the angle was too steep, but it gave me an idea. I climbed on top of my bed frame and made my Barrier into a steep slide sort of shape, with the same kind of curve as my ‘lounger chair’. I jumped and the barrier caught my weight and my momentum and went flying onto the floor. My butt kind of hurt from hitting the floor hard, but I hardly expended any Mana from the force of my body hitting the barrier. Normally, when I stepped on it or Barrier received any force, a chunk of Mana would be expended as it broke or absorbed the blow, but since it was redirecting my force instead of just catching it, it used very little. It was another weird application of my Barrier, but these were the sorts of things I needed to understand and try to find the limits and the full use case of my ability.

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  I did sleep, but obviously as I stayed up late, I woke up pretty tired. John and I got breakfast before heading to our classes and we got into a rhythm. I couldn’t find other Mage class students that wanted to train, so I just started showing up to John’s Warrior group of students that trained regularly after dinner.

  I just turned myself into a training dummy to get as much experience as I could with different weapons and abilities being used on my Barrier. It was on the third day after being attacked by Sterling that I got my first level. I had been training with John and our friends. I had asked two of them to attack me at once and blocking their attack at the same time pushed my experience from 97% to 100%. I immediately felt a rush that brought me to my knees. It hurt and felt amazing at the same time. I felt my muscles bulge and the cold feeling of Mana rushing through my whole body gave me goosebumps. My head felt clearer than ever, almost as if I had been in a fog before this moment. I instinctively knew I was stronger in both mind and body, but I definitely felt that strength as well. It is hard to describe, but I knew that my Barrier would be much stronger and I would have more Mana to use with it.

  John ended up leveling an hour after I did and I did feel a bit more proud than I should have for beating him to gain the first level, but when he leveled, his muscles really did grow. It looked as if he had gained 5 lbs from the Strength and Vitality increase alone. It was rare that anyone had noticeable visible changes with levels, but I was convinced he had.

  As a Mage, I grew more in Intelligence, it increased the overall power of my ability. It was hard to quantify exactly how much stronger it was, but if I had to guess, it was about 20% stronger from the 2 Intelligence attributes I gained from the level. The Wisdom increase felt even more ambiguous, but I definitely was growing in the size of my total Mana pool and how fast it replenished.

  In our Interface class, Instructor Brook laid out the general progression expectation for first year students.

  “Generally, students come to the Acacia Academy between level 1 and 3. The expectation is that your first 5 levels from your personal training and classes would come within two months. Once you are level 5, that is when we would assign you to a team and begin sending you out to train on the rifts with lower level monsters. There is only so much experience you can gain at the academy or training by yourself. You have to be facing true enemies from the Twisted Realms to gain the most experience and to also aid in the ultimate battle of humanity.” she said with a stern expression.

  The whole class had been glued to her every word over these last few days because almost everyone was ready to figure out whose team they would be a part of and to finally test themselves against real monsters.

  Instructor Skidd’s class had really helped me and I think most other students with the initial fear of monsters as most of the lower leveled ones really were quite simple in how they functioned.

  There were the Malice Mushrooms, which we had seen at our first class and others that looked like little slimy balls that shot out a weak acid. They were called Green Slimes. The biggest danger from the slimes were if multiple jumped on you and smothered your body in their acid, but as long as you kept your distance and targeted one at a time, they were fairly easy to deal with. One of the other common low leveled rift monsters were these wooden stumplike creatures called Stumps. They were really slow and could only cause damage if they touched you with their roots. They were very powerful, but slow, so again, not a very scary enemy if you singled them out and worked as a team.

  I still was looking forward to being a part of a team because I wanted to start planning out strategies on how I could start using my ability and my team's abilities to easily defeat whichever rift the academy sent us to for training.

  John and I were still very close, but I felt like I had become more closed off to the idea of trying to make more friends, while I focused on training. Several people, especially the nobles spent most of their free time out in the city of Acacia, while John and I with a few others never left the gates of the academy because we:

  A. had no money.

  &

  B. had no connections in the city.

  I spent some of my free time just walking around the grounds of the academy and getting fresh air, but I was really starting to get a little stir crazy. I also realized I hadn’t really thought of my family for a bit and I wondered what they were up to these days.