Image Training

A high vitality meant Elijah's body had a higher resistance.

The amount of damage that would appear on his body was proportional to the ratio of health loss and total health. Since his body was tough, a knife wound that would have been 20 centimeters deep was only 5 cm deep.

Had it been Hachirou that stabbed him, the knife would have cut deeper.

-20 HP

-1 HP

Elijah couldn't quite take it in. His naivety made his discovery even more shocking.

When she took the knife out, a sharp searing pain torched his flesh.

The feeling of the pressure leaving, made the flesh fill the vacuum, giving the sensation of loss, like a piece of flesh was removed. This feeling made him feel weak in the knees and every other part of his body.

Before he could react, she stabbed him again the instant she pulled it out.

-20 HP

If Elijah didn't grab hold of her arm, she would have stabbed him 23 times. He gripped so hard that her arm was trembling then he twisted it until she let go of the knife in his stomach.

"Ahh!" She cried in pain.

"I tried to help you!" Elijah yelled.

He hit her face with a right hook, sending a tooth flying out of her mouth.

She was knocked out on the floor.

[You have a new skill!]

[Quest completed!]

-1 HP

Elijah didn't pay attention to the System pop-ups because he witnessed something strange.

The wife had a threat level of (--) but when she dropped the knife after his right hook, her threat level changed to (๏ᆺ๏υ).

It made sense. Since weapons and equipment can make an opponent more dangerous, the threat level detected would also change. However, he never heard of such a skill in an RPG game.

RPG games assign levels to enemies for a bunch of reasons. One could be to signify the strength or the threat of an enemy relative to the player's levels or the levels meant having a certain amount of overall ability points.

Overall ability points or attributes are scaled into discrete categories called levels. However, games usually don't explicitly state that about their enemy designs, leaving it all hidden in the game data.

In RPG games that use the latter, enemies that are lower levels than the player characters can sometimes be more dangerous than they seem. There also is no ability or function to measure a change in threat level.

What RPG games do instead to show the difference in equipment, for example, is use a generic soldier of "Falan". A level 10 Falan swordsman and a level 12 Falan spearman appear. In video games that use levels as a sign of a threat, the spearman profession or weapon is more dangerous.

In games that only cared about the overall ability points, then the level 10 swordsman could be an OP class and so is more of a threat than a level 12 spearman.

That Elijah possesses an ability that games don't have, the ability to monitor and update on an enemy's danger potential, was very useful.

[Warning: Your Health is low]

-1 HP

Blood pooled onto his shirt and vest around the knife. Elijah wandered onto the road as he frantically thought about what to do. He needed to go to the hospital, but he didn't have a phone.

He opened his status to check his health.

It read HP: 74/350

Elijah quickly added 2 more points into vitality because he was worried about suddenly dying.

He looked down at the knife stuck into his stomach and tried pulling it out.

"Agh!"

-1 HP

It really hurt.

'Forget it. I'll call an ambulance.'

-1 HP

Elijah thought about picking their pockets to find a phone.

Just as Elijah thought this, he felt something crash down into his back and knocked him down to the concrete road. He soon felt teeth sink into his neck…

***

The beast growled and glared at him. It stood on four powerful legs. Covered in dark brown and white fur. Thick white saliva dropped from its sharp canines.

He gripped onto his knife while hyperventilating, but it could not tame his wobbly hands.

"You can do this…"

He said it with determination, but he was fooling no one with the shaky voice of his.

"I can do it!" He said forcefully.

He leaped in and slashed the beast in the eyes with his army combat knife.

It roared painfully and shook its head wildly. Then the knife went into its body. It roared again. He repeatedly stabbed it, punching holes all over its body.

Blood squirted out of the wounds like water pistol streams.

Its roar became a sad whimper. The last stab was in the throat, it changed from a whimper to a gargle and dropped to the wooden floor dead.

*Clang*

The bloodied knife dropped to the floor. Bunta fell to his knees and supported himself with his sticky red hands. The fake blood was made with glycerin (sugar alcohol) which made it sticky and thick.

Bunta's image training had ended. The beast was now a cardboard cut-out that was laid out on the floor with holes. It had a tied-up plastic bag filled with fake blood stuck behind it.

The cardboard had a picture which he printed and pasted onto it. It was a photo he had taken of a Tosa, also known as the Japanese mastiff which is the largest dog breed in Japan.

We know this working dog for its athletic abilities and hails from Tosa Bay on the island of Shikoku.

During World War II, these colossal warriors were on the verge of extinction. The Tosa, which was bred to fight, is extremely protective and makes an excellent guard dog.

However, Bunta never saw them in a noble light, at least, not the tosa dogs that the Itachi family owned. Since the dogs killed his little brother last year.

"Move it Gaijin!" Said a voice from his window.

Bunta wiped his hands onto a towel and peeked through his aluminum Venetian blinds.

Two students were arguing. One he recognized as a boy who bullied him before at school. It was Hachi.

The other boy he didn't recognize and his uniform was western-looking.

'Poor him.' Bunta thought.

It didn't matter who you were as long as you were weaker than Hachi. He would bully you. The gaijin just stood out so Hachi targeted him.