Testing the New Skill

Leandro was taken aback by his speed, and received a devastating punch right to his gut. His punch sent him sliding across the tough carpet they stood atop, and a spear of rock was thrusted right over Leandro as he bent over.

The attack was sudden and unexpected, so Emmerich couldn't totally move out the way in time. The spear had clipped him on his cheek, but he grabbed the spear before it could reach far enough away from him.

From his other skills, Emmerich knew that this rock spear wasn't going to remain a physical object much longer and so, he slammed the blunt side of this spear right onto Leandro repeatedly.

On the fourth slam, the spear fragmented and vanished into a translucent cloud of green energy that soon dissipated.

Leandro was already bleeding out his nose and had fallen to one knee, then Carson rushed past him to make sure that he wasn't hit again. He could tell that Leandro was on his last leg and wasn't going to do much in the bout now.

POW!

Carson landed a powerful initial punch, and the two began to exchange blows. Emmerich could keep up with Carson's speed easily, while he also matched his strength.

It was surprising to see Emmerich outpunch somebody that was so much larger than he was, but his greater height gave him much more range.

He could keep Carson at bay with several straight punches, which blocked him from blindly rushing in to close proximity punches and kicks.

Carson was starting to get furious as he was struggling in this fight, and didn't want to seem like he was to the growing number of surrounding spectators.

"Intense Impact!" Emmerich roared, slamming his palm right onto his face.

His impact sounded akin to a shockwave and he was hurled back several metres. He fell to the floor and rolled once, holding his broken nose. Blood was starting to flood out of the wound that he had just received, and Emmerich stormed over to him.

"This is what you get for hurting Rhys!" Emmerich declared, standing over him with fury in his eyes.

However, with his arms by his side, Carson suddenly jumped up and threw a rock boulder straight into his torso. He was lifted right off his feet and couldn't make contact with the ground once again. He crashed into the floor while the boulder was still on him, causing him to almost remain planted near where he had landed.

Struggling to remove the boulder from over him, he could feel a fracture in his ribcage after receiving that attack. Struggling up to his feet, he turned to face Carson who charged at him with his right fist that was coated in rock.

BOW!

Landing a punch straight to Emmerich's face, he felt quite stunned by this sudden forceful impact and stumbled back onto a knee.

He slowly touched on his jaw and moved it, feeling sharp pain as he did so.

"Come on then, Emmerich! Show me what you're made of!" Carson shouted, with blood dripping down from his nose and over his mouth.

Emmerich soon stood up, and the two fighters faced each other daringly. They rushed ahead, and clashed once again. Their attacks beat each other down greatly, and the fight was certainly bloody.

Their HP was starting to deplete at alarming rates, and soon both fighters were not only gravely injured but heavily fatigued. Facing each other with pants, they both decided to stand down and backed away from each other before running off.

"I will get you Carson, I promise you that!" Emmerich vowed to himself, wiping part of the volumes of blood gushing out from his nose and mouth.

Hiding behind one hallway, Carson wiped some of the blood across his face and began typing away on his phone. He was focused on texting a certain someone, and cracked a menacing smile as he did this

"What do you want, Carson?"

"Greetings, Giovanni. This guy Emmerich tried to beat me up after me and Leandro clowned Rhys yesterday. Could you please do him in?" Carson pleaded.

"Oh, he's much stronger than Leandro and he's going out his way to do all that? I'll show him what happens when he tries to help those that are below him. He's the Emmerich Bergmann in our year, right?"

"Yes, yes that's the guy."

"Brilliant. I'll make a good example of him. Thanks for informing me." This mysterious individual said.

"No problem."

There was no reply, but this was a good enough sign. His call had been answered.

Seeing these texts, another student slotted his phone right into his pocket. He had long dark blue hair with a similar hairstyle to Emmerich. It was tied in a ponytail, with some strands coming over his face, and he was much smaller than Emmerich was.

He was an average 5'9 and was just 175 lbs, with an athletic but slim physique. However, he cackled upon hearing this message.

"Let's get this job over and done with." He said to himself, giving off a smile that went from ear to ear.

During this lunchtime, Rhys felt eager to test out the new skill that he had gained. He didn't want to just use it and punch air. He wanted to actually punch something to see how much stronger he was.

Throwing a random punch wasn't going to tell him much about how strong he actually was.

Approaching a punching bag that was several hundred kilograms, he circled around it. After entering dungeons, humanity had learned to produce heavy equipment from the materials that they had discovered so that superhuman individuals could train just as easily as weaker ones.

This meant that punching bags like these had to be bigger, heavier and tougher.

Throwing his usual punches, he just wanted to remind himself of how strong he was now. What surprised him was that he felt much, much stronger than he was before. His punches flew with new intensity, and he was rattling this punching bag.

He had finally breached the barrier of human strength from before the emergence of systems and dungeons. Now that he had warmed up a little, he moved on to using his skill.

Just as he thought about it internally, he could feel the speed of his punch being amplified. It whipped through the air and slammed right into the black punching bag ahead of him, caving it in.

BAM!

*rattle*

The chains that held the bag up rattled as he landed this blow, and it felt even stronger than Emmerich's debilitating Intense Impact skill.

He looked down to his fist with surprise. He almost couldn't believe that he was the person that had done that. There were a handful of students scattered around this large training facility, and they turned and gave perplexed gazes.

Many of the students hadn't even paid attention to Rhys, due to his weakness. There would be no reason to pay him any mind and he didn't even make much noise from his training either. However, now, he seemed to have landed a punch that was clearly stronger than they had expected for him, and he wasn't even enveloped in any form of mana cloak.

The lunchtime soon ended, and they headed over to the training facility that they were once in before. Rhys met his friends, Emmerich and Lewis. He could see dust and dirt across his clothing, and immediately knew that something had happened.

He didn't want to ask any questions, as he could tell that Emmerich didn't look as calm and upbeat as he usually was. What more information was he going to take from an interrogation?

He was already quite certain about what had happened.

"Greetings again, class. Now, that you have sparred amongst random people close to your strength, I would like for us to move to the section of this building behind me so that you can all practice sparring together. You all should be old enough to pick productive partners amongst yourselves, and I will be watching over you all and critiquing you as you go." He explained.

There were large double oak doors situated behind him, and he walked out from under the globe in this somewhat compact training hall. Opening the doors, they were revealed to a hanger-like training facility, with numerous square white canvases across the floor.

There could be more than a hundred people using this room, and now they knew why the building for this facility was so large.

It wasn't a tower but had an incredibly wide base.

The students swiftly occupied the different platforms, then Emmerich and Rhys decided to start a light spar together. Lewis was going to spar one of them after the students were to switch around, and he just found another weak student to also face.