Specialty: Trench Rat's Bite

After quickly rehydrating, Lance set down his waterskin, turned, and picked up the iron-rimmed wooden shield hanging on the wall along with the heavy training sword.

This sword was weighted a third heavier than an ordinary shortsword, meant to better refine his force-generating technique.

Among the many basic combat skills available at the time, Lance had chosen Castro Swordsmanship at a glance for a very simple reason.

It was an exceptionally pure sword-and-shield discipline.

It did not pursue flashy lethality. Instead, it placed extreme emphasis on switching between offense and defense with the shortsword and shield, with only one core purpose: maximizing the user's chances of survival.

For someone like Lance, who valued his own life above all else, there was no better introductory swordsmanship.

Lance walked up to the wooden dummy, which had already been hacked full of dents and pits.

He bent his knees slightly and lowered his center of gravity. His somewhat sluggish left foot stepped half a pace forward, hiding most of his body behind the shield.

The shortsword in his right hand was drawn back behind the side of the shield, its tip angled toward the ground.

This was the most standard opening stance of Castro Swordsmanship.

His lowered center of gravity rooted him to the ground like a nail, making it difficult for him to lose his balance and fall even when struck heavily.

After adjusting his breathing, Lance's gaze sharpened.

The muscles around his waist exerted force in an instant, like a stiff bow suddenly releasing, driving his whole body violently forward.

There was no flashy windup to this strike. It was extremely brief, yet explosively powerful.

A sharp whistle of tearing air even rang out.

During his first battle in the forest, he had used this seemingly plain thrust to precisely claim that Goblin's life.

After thrusting out, Lance immediately drew his sword back into a defensive position without pausing.

Then he stomped forward, using the momentum of his charge to slam the shield clad in thick iron plating viciously into the training dummy before him.

With a muffled bang.

He then quickly retreated, resumed his stance, and began repeating the entire sequence.

Thrust, shield bash, withdraw sword, defend.

He put all his strength into every thrust and every shield strike.

This sort of high-intensity burst rapidly drained stamina. An ordinary person would likely be gasping for breath within minutes.

But Lance's unusual Constitution began to show its effects. The stamina he expended started recovering rapidly within just a few breaths.

Castro Swordsmanship had originally been created for entangling battles in narrow spaces such as dungeon corridors and tunnels.

As such, this swordsmanship contained very few broad, sweeping slashes.

For one, slashing consumed several times more stamina than thrusting. For another, in cramped terrain, a swung sword could easily be caught by a wall or blocked by an enemy.

Yet these simple, vicious thrusts could pierce an enemy's leather armor in an instant with the smallest possible range of motion.

The entire training session passed in the constant repetition of these mechanical movements.

This tedious, high-pressure training placed an enormous burden on the mind.

Normally, after about half an hour of continuous training, beginners would begin losing focus and their movements would deform.

But Lance was like a tireless alchemical puppet, maintaining intense concentration throughout.

This, too, was thanks to his special Constitution.

[Hvergelmir's Boiling Surge] granted him more than stamina recovery. It also gave him powerful resistance against all abnormal conditions, naturally including mental fatigue and pressure.

As the training neared the two-hour mark.

The sweat-drenched Lance suddenly felt a flash of insight cross his mind.

At the instant he thrust, he instinctively made a slight adjustment to the angle at which his wrist exerted force.

The training sword, which had grown somewhat dull, plunged deeply into the hard wooden dummy this time with a wet pffft, as though slicing into butter.

It sank a full three inches into the wood, and even pulling it back out took considerable effort.

Almost simultaneously, a familiar translucent window appeared across his vision.

[Castro Swordsmanship Proficiency +1, LV3→4]

[Constitution +1, Strength +1]

Seeing his attributes rise, Lance felt delighted.

Sure enough, as the level of his swordsmanship increased, the related basic attributes would increase along with it.

Although Castro Swordsmanship appeared to focus on nimble thrusts, its core force-generating technique still relied on instantaneous explosive power.

Naturally, this sort of explosive training repeated tens of thousands of times had the most obvious effects on Strength and Constitution.

What surprised him, however, was that the notification window did not vanish when the swordsmanship reached Mastery level, LV4. Instead, another line of small text appeared.

[Through tens of thousands of repetitions, you have completely mastered the secret of instantly twisting your whole body's strength into a single force and concentrating it at one point on the sword tip. You have gained the Specialty: Trench Rat's Bite.]

Trench Rat's Bite

Specialty Level: Ordinary

Prerequisite: [Castro Swordsmanship] reaches LV4 (Mastery)

Specialty Effect: All your swordsmanship thrusts gain an additional 5% physical penetration.

Lance looked at the newly appeared entry in surprise.

He had not expected that reaching Mastery level in a skill would produce an additional Specialty.

This made him realize that a large part of a profession's strength in this world was actually concentrated in the skills they had painstakingly trained.

Even professionals of the same level would likely differ vastly in actual combat strength depending on the number and levels of the skills they practiced, as well as the Specialties derived from them.

If grinding skills could earn him Specialties...

Then couldn't his Talent help him quickly grind out a batch of useful Specialties to strengthen himself in every aspect?

Lance instinctively glanced at [Levin Archery] on his panel.

As long as he ground this skill up to Mastery level as well and saw whether it granted a new Specialty, he could verify this conjecture.

Thinking of this, Lance was in an excellent mood after finding another safe and reliable way to improve his strength.

"But this 5% penetration..."

Lance stroked his chin and decided to immediately test what differences this approximate bonus could make.

He drew a deep breath, raised the training sword in his hand, and thrust once more at the battered wooden dummy.

This time, rather than simply pursuing power, he carefully felt the feedback when the sword tip touched the target.

It felt very different.

He had thought a 5% increase would be negligible, but he had been wrong.

This time, the blunt sword still slid smoothly into the training dummy.

"I understand."

Lance withdrew his sword and stood still, a glint of realization flashing through his eyes.

The greatest effect of this 5% enhancement was not actually an increase in damage, but a vast improvement in the "stability" of his thrusts.

The greatest weakness of thrusting attacks was that when they struck something hard, they could easily glance off or get stuck due to factors such as angle, force, or the curve of armor.

That was why Castro Swordsmanship emphasized conserving stamina and using repeated rapid thrusts to ensure armor penetration.