After his first time beating the Mayor's dinner party dungeon, Olivia explained to him that every path he took would increase in difficulty the more times he failed them. While the increase in challenge was still manageable in the easier dungeons, Olivia had made it clear that in the harder dungeons, an increase in difficulty could have disastrous implications for him. It wasn't just an issue of the run getting harder, there was a chance that the dungeon would become impossible to complete unless he got a significant power-up out in the real world. Because of this, Greg had been forced to rethink his approach to the dungeons. While going in blind did heighten the sense of adventure, it was also a habit that would come to bite him in the ass when he attempted the harder dungeons. He needed to be more strategic in the way he went about his dives and try to do everything he could to maximize his chances of success.
After three days of thinking, three days in which he didn't delve into the dungeons, he concluded that it all came down to information. First was information about the target area. In this first dungeon, it was the city of Torrin. In other dungeons, the area of interest would be different. Greg had thus spent a whole two weeks just walking around the different districts, familiarizing himself with the various roads, pathways, and alleys. Where the significant landmarks and buildings were. What roads the city guard patrolled and so on. Once he had the lay of the land and could move about without losing his way regardless of which part of the city he was in, Greg moved on to the second step, which was gathering information about his targets. Their, schedules, their mannerisms, their allies, their foes, and so on.
Depending on who his target was, this step could either be easy or incredibly hard. For example, getting information about the potion-maker, Lady Andreya, wasn't that hard. She wasn't that secretive an individual and was well-known throughout the city. Greg wasn't the first person to be curious and ask around about her so he doubted that it even came across her radar that he was asking around about her. When it came to someone like the spider queen, however, every step had to be taken with extreme caution, lest Greg find himself the target of the spider gang's ire. In fact, it was in the process of trying to gather information about the elusive woman that Greg had discovered the illegal fighting den. This had in turn led to the discovery of what Greg was now calling the dynamic areas within the dungeons.
Greg had assumed that all of the dungeon was a constant repeat of the same events, over and over again. As such, one could imagine his shock when he came back to the fighting den a second time and found a different set of fighters from the ones he saw the first time, duking it out in the ring. Greg had thus kept coming back to see if it was a fluke or if he'd stumbled onto something significant. And true enough, the fighters kept on changing every time he came back. It wasn't until his eleventh time returning that he saw the very first set of combatants that he'd found in the ring the very first time he visited the den. In other words, the fighting den had a ten-day cycle in which the fighters kept changing. The changes, however, weren't just limited to who was fighting. Even the outcome of each fight would change from one match to the next. An attack that was used in one match wasn't in the next. A defense that failed in one match, averted disaster in the next, and so on. In other words, this small part of the dungeon wasn't just a static repetition of the same events ad infinitum.
Once Greg discovered one dynamic area, it wasn't long before he discovered others. They varied widely in both range and scope, from insignificant details like who was standing behind him when he walked into the city at the start of the dungeon run, to more important details like which guards were in patrol in which district. The one thing that all the dynamic areas had in common was that, while the length may vary from one to the next, they all eventually looped back around to the start. Greg had found loops that kept changing back and forth every two days to one that lasted a whole seventeen days.
These dynamic areas made his attempt at collecting information about his targets a bit more challenging as there was no telling what would change to influence them one way or the other. Greg, however, didn't mind all that much, this was after all more realistic and would be more applicable out in the real world. Some people would maintain the same routine every day whereas others would be unpredictable day to day. If Greg could adapt to the dungeon, he'd be better suited to adapt to the real world.
The third and final target of Greg's information collection was also the hardest and most elusive. That was the dungeon itself. The first time Greg had beat the dungeon, his actual rating had been just PASSABLE. But because of hidden rules that he hadn't even been aware of, that score had climbed to a PERFECT rating. Things like hidden missions and path difficulty adjustment were the things that the rating revealed. Greg, however, doubted that this was the end of the list. If he could discover the underlying logic of the dungeon, he'd be better able to operate within it and leverage it to his own benefit. But digging out the dungeon's secrets, however, was far more difficult than any of his other targets. It was akin to trying to figure out how a TV worked by watching a movie on it.
The city of Torrin and the people in it were one instance of the dungeon but not the actual dungeon itself. He'd need to somehow pierce the veil of each dungeon instance to figure out the secrets that cut across every dungeon. So far, apart from the dynamic areas, Greg had discovered that so long as he didn't directly pick a path to try and achieve the main objective of the dungeon, the run didn't get any harder. In other words, so long as he was in information-collecting mode and not actually pursuing any path, then he didn't have to worry about the dungeon getting harder. But other than these two relatively small discoveries, he'd thus far been unable to pry any other truths from the dungeons. Greg suspected that he'd have to attempt other dungeon instances aside from the Mayor's dinner party before he discovered more.
'You did well by pushing through the pain, and you even managed to avoid the temptation to go for your opponent's head despite him so obviously baiting you,' Olivia's continued evaluation of his fight broke Greg out of his thoughts. 'Unfortunately, you are still too lost in the moment. Like I've told you countless times before, the ability to think just two or three steps ahead will enable you to beat opponents that would have otherwise overcome you,' she stated.
After a while of visiting the fighting den, Greg decided to try and learn how to fight. Part of him had been unsure whether it would be necessary given that he would soon be able to sling spells. His familiar, however, had disabused him of the notion that he could always call on his magic to save the day. Not only were there several instances where mages fought until they were out of mana but it was even more common among lower-tier mages. The higher one's tier the more mana they had and thus, the harder it was for them to run out. Still, it did happen from time to time, even among the mid-tiers and sometimes even higher! Sure, his awakening method meant that he would have the mana capacity of a third-tier mage as a first-tier mage, but that didn't change the need to know how to go on fighting even after he was wrung dry of mana. Getting arrogant because of his one advantage was almost certain to land him in hot water and so he put everything into the effort.
Greg had asked his familiar to help him in his task of training. He wasn't sure if she was any good at martial arts but saw no harm in asking. He'd been expecting some sort of militaristic training where he was put through grueling exercises first to condition his body. He, however, had still been stuck in his old-world kind of thinking. All the familiar had had him do was buy a tacky-looking, bronze bracelet from the Magic shop and put it on. Over the next few weeks, that bracelet had become the bane of his existence. Simply called a CONDITIONING BRACELET in the magic shop, the thing had only one function. It made it harder to move any of his muscles. The thing didn't weaken any of his muscles, it just made it so that he needed to use twice the strength to move any part of himself. Even the very act of smiling actually required him to expend conscious effort to achieve. And just to ensure that Greg didn't lie down like a log after his lessons with his teacher and his work as a healer to avoid the strain, his familiar would take him through a set of stretches that worked every muscle in his body and lasted about an hour every day.
The first one that Greg bought was a low-grade tier-one bracelet that could only double the load on his muscles. After two weeks of using this, when Greg had grown relatively used to it, Olivia had him buy the mid-grade tier one. This one could increase the load up to five times. Which is what Greg was now building up to. After four weeks of using it on three times the load, Olivia had adjusted it to four times the load, which is where he was still on. The strain from the bracelet wasn't something that was immediately noticeable. The first few minutes that one had it on would leave one with the illusion that it was trivially easy to bear. However, over the following hours and days, the strain of having to expend twice the effort to do anything would creep up on you. Before you know it, even just getting up from a seated position became an endurance exercise.
This, however, wasn't the extent of his training with the familiar. The other, half was something that Greg had chosen to call the theory of combat. Rather than show him how to throw punches and kicks, Olivia had set out to first ensure that Greg had a theoretical understanding of what he was trying to do whenever he entered combat. According to her, he was free to fight as much as he wanted within the dungeons, but it wasn't until he was able to move comfortably under five times the load of the bangle and he also understood the core lessons of her combat philosophy that she'd start sparring with him out in the real world. There were three lessons that Olivia wanted Greg to internalize whenever he found himself in any fight.
