Mocked at Level 1, I Became the Spear God

Chapter 3: The Old Man in the Yard

The dummy didn't fight back. It never flinched. It just stood there and let Nate stab it, and the clang of wood on wood rang across the empty yard like a bell tolling off boredom.

His head was full of the Basic Spearplay forms—thrust, lift, block, sweep. The game had dumped the muscle memory in there, but applying it cleanly was another story. The form in his mind was flawless. The form in his hands was some clumsy cousin.

Thanks to Spear Mastery, he was gaining a proficiency point every minute and a half or so.

**Basic Spearplay Lv1 (+1). Proficiency: 1/100.**

He kept moving. Stab, reset, stab, reset.

Then something clicked.

It wasn't a big moment. There was no fanfare. One thrust just… lined up. The spear went out like it was on rails and planted itself dead center of the dummy's forehead plate.

*Ding.* **Perfect Strike! Proficiency +1.**

Nate stopped.

Oh.

So that was what a Perfect Strike was. It wasn't luck—it was the form, executed exactly right. Maybe the cleaner the line, the better the chance.

Okay. Test it. He reset and threw the identical thrust again.

*Thunk.* Dead center, same as before. No Perfect Strike. No spark, no feeling.

Huh.

He tried it another half-dozen times. Same result. Just hitting the mark wasn't enough. There was something else to it—a timing, a weight, a snap through the hips he couldn't name yet.

He didn't get frustrated. He just kept stabbing.

Somewhere off to his left, a player had been watching him for a while. He didn't notice.

Half an hour slid by. Proficiency crawled to 25, and he'd stumbled into another Perfect Strike by accident. Deliberate attempts had done nothing but make his movements stiffer. He decided to treat it as a probability thing and stop overthinking it.

The yard thinned out fast. People wandered in out of curiosity, poked a dummy for five minutes, got bored, and left. The ones who stayed to actually grind you could count on one hand.

Two hours went by.

Nate's arms burned, and the repetition had crossed from "tedious" into a kind of rhythm.

**Basic Spearplay Lv1 (+1). Proficiency: 85/100.**

Fifteen more minutes and he hit Lv2. He was absurdly pleased with himself about it.

That was when the older man walked up.

He planted his spear butt-down on the dirt and stood like the spear itself—straight, no slouch, maybe mid-thirties, square jaw, the kind of face that had seen actual things.

"Kid." His voice was calm, gravel. "I've been watching you for two hours. You've got grit. But you're not holding that spear right."

Nate lowered it. "I'm doing exactly what the game taught me. Never touched one before today. Flatter away, man."

The guy smiled. "The form the game gives you is fine. It's just… stiff. Dead. It's missing the part where you're alive in it." He hefted his own spear. "Two hands on the shaft. Steady, not locked. Alive, not sliding. The four levels: level your crown, level your shoulders, level your feet, level your spear. Root your power in the hips. Three points aligned—the tip of your nose, the tip of the spear, the tip of your lead foot. A thrust goes straight out and straight back. Power from the lower back, driving up the shaft to the point, like a dragon surfacing out of still water."

He demonstrated.

His toe barely brushed the shaft. The spear rose into his grip on its own, and the tip drove into a dummy's forehead—and the world just… paused. The spark flashed.

**Perfect Strike.**

Casual. Like brushing a crumb off his sleeve.

Nate's eyebrows went up. "Okay. That was a demo. What the hell, man—you must be a fighter in real life."

"Ha. Family stuff. Old forms. Nobody learns them anymore. Probably dies with me." He hooked his thumb at Nate. "You've been at it a while. You like the spear? Let me fix your stance."

That was an offer Nate was not going to refuse. "I'm Wren. And you are?"

He sent a friend request across.

"Wade Granger. I'm a few years older. Wade is fine." He stepped back. "Set your stance. Let me look."

Nate planted his feet and took the grip. He tightened his hands on the shaft. This was the closest thing to a martial arts master he was ever going to stand in front of, and he knew it.

In the real world, picking up a cold weapon was half the battle. In here, the system handled the skeleton—your body did the textbook pose no problem. But making that pose flow? That was all you.

Wade studied him. "Not bad. Looks like I looked, twenty years ago. Hit the dummy. Thrust only."

Nate drove it in. Two hours of practice had paid off—the point landed square on the forehead plate, dead on.

But next to Wade's demonstration, it had no teeth.

"You're pushing with your shoulders," Wade said. He put a hand on Nate's shoulder blades. "The game tells you *where* the spear goes. It doesn't tell you *how to send it.* Back straight. The power starts here." He tapped Nate's lower back. "The point is just where that power ends. It isn't an arm thing."

Simple to say. In the real world, you'd spend a decade before it moved from your head into your hands. But this wasn't the real world—and Nate's Basic Spearplay was already Lv2, and the system was doing him favors.

He drew the spear back, turned the whole thing from the hips, and drove it forward.

*Thwack.*

**Perfect Strike.**

Wade looked at him, surprised, then laughed. "You're a natural. I said two sentences and you already felt it."

"Nah," Nate said. "System's carrying me. Out there I couldn't fight my way out of a paper bag with a stick."

They both laughed.

"Keep going?" Wade asked. It was late afternoon; he didn't want to burn the kid out.

"With you talking me through it?" Nate hefted the spear again. "I'd be an idiot to leave."

So he stayed. Per Wade's method, he drilled one movement until he owned it, then moved to the next. The afternoon vanished into the rhythm of it. Slowly, he started to feel the Perfect Strike—it stopped being random and started being something he could chase, a flicker he could catch maybe one time in ten.

When he stopped, the single thrust and the single lift had stopped granting proficiency. He'd hit their cap.

Wade wandered over. "You find it?"

"Sort of. Thrust and lift don't give me anything anymore. Why?"

Wade thought about it. "I noticed the same thing. Proficiency comes fast at low levels, slows as the skill climbs. Probably something under the hood. Try a different move—it'll start moving again."

Nate checked his sheet.

**Basic Spearplay Lv2 (+1). Proficiency: 130/1000.**

He'd meant to hit Lv2 and go out hunting. But with Wade here teaching him? He changed his mind. Lv3 needed a thousand points. At his current pace—about one base point a minute, plus the Perfect Strikes—roughly two more hours.

"I figure I'll have Basic Spearplay to Lv4 by tomorrow morning," Wade said. "Good enough to go level up. You want to keep drilling, come back in the morning and I'll walk you through the rest of the basics."

Wade had a gift—just a day and a half and he was already Lv4. That was the gap between someone born to it and the rest of the world.

"First light," Nate said.

He checked the clock. Six in the evening. "My studio's got a nightly meeting. I've got to log."

"Go on. I'll stay a while." Wade already had his spear moving again.

Nate pulled the headset off and sat back in chair fifty, feeling weirdly like he'd just had the best day of his working life.

* * *

Down the hall, in the office that wasn't on the floor plan, Cassie Reid sat across from her father.

Frank Reid was ex-Army, gray at the temples, and he'd built a decent little pile in this town over thirty years. A month ago she'd been planning her vacation. Then he'd called.

He'd made her recruit for this game studio. He'd made her play the game herself. And when she'd pushed back, he'd cut off her allowance.

"Pop," she said, "we could've hired an HR person for this. Why me? Why do I have to be in the game?"

Frank just looked at her. "Because when your brother gets back, I want him walking into something that already runs. Until then, you keep the seats filled. That's the deal."

Cassie sighed and looked out the window at the summer dark settling over the city.

She had no idea yet that kid in seat fifty was about to be the one who made the whole thing worth it.