Chapter 38: The Winning Strategy

This time, he started by finding a safe spot and ran there at his full speed, after which he slowed down and dodged the sandbags that attacked him by moving back and forth in the same spot without much movement.

He had planned to do this until he found another opening in the formation to run towards at full speed once again; and then repeat this cycle till he successfully reached the end of the sand bag formation.

While in the midst of avoiding sandbags flailing themselves at him, Eric was able to find an opening and made a run for it at his full speed.

As he bolted from his initial position, Eric was able to make it about half way to his destination before he got struck by a sack filled with sand and was forced retreat back to the start.

While focusing too much on making a run for the opening he had spotted, his attention got diverted from his current position and path for a couple seconds, which led to him getting caught off guard by a sand bag in his path.

Even though he was still far from making it to the end, using this mixed strategy; Eric was able to make it quite further than any of his three previous attempts.

He had made it a few meters farther than his the other three times he tried the course and if he had paid a little more attention, he could go way farther than that.

'This is better than what I was doing before. With a little tweaks here and there and quite a lot of practice, I am pretty sure I will be able to make it across to the other side of this sand bag formation quicker and easier than just brute forcing it.' Eric said to himself, pleased by his new and more successful method.

And so, Eric began the cycle of repeating the same process again and again continuously without stopping. Some considered this insanity, while others called this dedication. He ran into the formation and dodged the relentless attacks from the sandbags while looking for another opening to move to one time after another.

Sometimes, he was able to get to the second spot, while a lot of the times he ended up getting hit by a sand bag which he didn't see or expect. Sometimes he got hit right as he started to move, while some other times he got knocked back right in front of his destination.

Albeit all these setbacks, Eric still continued to run into the sand bag array and try to make it as far as possible in the quickest time.

He kept at it with this strategy for the rest of the two hours that he had left and by the end of it, there was a bit of improvement in his results compared to his initial first measure of length: 10 meters.

Now, he made it up to at least 15 meters every time and there were even some attempts where he made it to 20 meters; which was two times his original distance and quite an impressive level of improvement for only two hours of attempting the sand bad formation.

This sounded like a lot of improvement, but it wasn't as great as it looked at first glance. The first ten meters were almost effortless as he started safely outside of the formation, but after that, every time he wanted to move to a new spot, he had to constantly keep on avoiding the swinging sacks while scouting a destination and even keep at it while running towards the place.

If those initial ten meters which were a given every time were to be subtracted from his final distance, he was only able to make about 5 to 10 meters of progress compared to how much he would be able to accomplish by blindly running without any strategy involved.

He was at max able to make one small bit of progress after all the times that he had tried today. He didn't even know if he could move to another empty space in the sand bag section while dodging the sand bags two times consecutively. In order to reach the end of the 100 meter section, he had to move about 10 times in total.

Even if he were able to do that, it would only be one third of the whole obstacle course. The second section and the third section were even harder than the first as the parts of the obstacle course became progressively harder.

If it took him one third of the month to complete only this one section of the whole course, it would be incredibly difficult for Eric to finish off the other two in similar amounts of time. Due to this, he had decided to make his training as efficient as possible so that he could finish the first section as quickly as he could so that he didn't lack time for the other latter stages of the obstacle course.

In the grand scheme of things, Eric's progress this first day wasn't really that impressive. He still had to improve a whole lot in order to complete the obstacle course within a month's time.

While thinking about his progress, Eric realized that he had only a couple minutes left before he had to go and meet with his dad, so he decided to quickly wrap things up and leave the training room.

Before he left, though, Eric remembered that he had to absorb a Qi Gathering Herb, so he opened his inventory in order to take one out. While looking at the system, Eric noticed that there was a notification, which he checked.

Based on what he had experienced earlier in the day, Eric assumed that he had gotten some sort of quest or achievement and therefore excitedly opened his notifications in order to check what he had gotten.

As he opened the notification, a window opened up and revealed yet another quest.

'How many quests will I get today? Well, it's not really a bad thing, is it? Let's see what this is going to be!' Eric thought in his mind as he started reading the quest on the quest window that had just appeared in front of him.