The Grind Part 1

When Ayden logged back into game he was once more tackled by an elf girl with pink hair. "Edge!"

"I am back," Ayden said with a smile. After dinner, Isabella asked him to level up as much as he could in the next week. She even handed him a schedule that showed that out of twenty four hours of the day, sixteen of it would be in game. Besides that, he only had around two hours of free time besides eating. He had to make sure he worked out as well. Such a tight schedule really surprised Ayden, but he was also fired up for it. Just knowing that Isabella was really taking this whole thing seriously actually made him feel at ease and more motivated.

As Pam took in Ayden's scent, she revealed in the fact that he was hugging her back. She knew she was overstepping her bounds some, but she had always been alone, and Ayden was the first person she had ever taken an interest in. So she was acting quite spoiled.

"I will be hitting the auction house. Then I will be heading out to do some leveling. I need to raise my level as quickly as possible." Ayden's words were like a bucket of cold water for Pam, who always stayed inside. She knew she couldn't lock Ayden up, so she could only dejectedly nod her head. After a moment's thought, she decided on secretly follow him to protect him when he needed it. Normally she would not do such a thing, but since she was his master, she would protect her disciple!

Ayden looked down at the elf girl who was staring back up at him and lowered his head. And pushed his lips against hers. Pam readily received the kiss as her lips curled up some, and the harms that were hugging him tightened around his waist.

After an hour of keeping Pam company, Ayden finally left the house and headed toward the Auction house. When he reached the terminal, he first put his modified elven augment chips on sale for 50k credits with a buyout of 500k credits. He knew this was wishful thinking, but he still needed to accumulate quite a bit of money. He wanted a backup plan in case this whole game thing fell through, and he had to move once more. He was always one to never put all his eggs in one basket.

After setting everything up, he looked at the sales of his items and was surprised to see he made one million credits. This time though, he did not sell the credits but kept them for himself. "The injections will be used for ingame money while the mod chips are for real world money…." Pursing his lips, he decided this was the best outcome. Only when he was done with everything did he make his way to the city's exit. He planned to move deeper into the forest today in hopes of hiding some higher level monsters.

Even after he left the city and made his way to the forest edge, he did not notice a small figure following behind him from the shadows with a bow on her back. Pam had been following him from the start, even when he was at the auction house. As she was already at such a high level in a low level city, there was barely anyone who could detect her except for maybe the city lord or the guild president.

Ayden killed anything he came across as he began practicing fighting. He was trying to create a style that suited him best when fighting different kinds of monsters. Although he knew that soon he would be doing practice matches with Isabella and Pam so he could get used to dealing with players as well. While he could see the weak points on the monsters in front of him, he was not going for them as he needed to practice dodging as well.

He figured if he was not at least able to dodge attacks smoothly that he would probably end up being too slow to fight a player who would easily pick up on such flaws in his combat ability making it a significant weak point, especially for a cybernetic fists player. He was even thinking of maybe finding someone in real life who could help me train his combat ability more so he could have a better understanding of martial arts.

"I will need to ask Isabella later if she can introduce me to someone who knows proper martial arts so I can mix it into my in game style." Since he was going to go all in he would not slack on training in game and out of game. He figured if he took one of his two hours of free time to do some training, it would be very beneficial.

*Bam!*

Ayden smacked a tall green burly monster with a cybernetic body to the ground. It was two times as big as him and was called a Synth Oger. It used a much more high tech looking bat that had glowing orange lines throughout the body. "Weak points seem to only be the connection under the arms. Its body is rather sturdy. Not to mention it is also quite quick. This will be good practice."

Ayden checked its health bar and saw that it was slowly rising back up. "Also has regeneration. This makes it even better."

The synth oger crawled back up and grunted before picking up its weapon and smashing it down quickly at Ayden and as he dodged the synth oger, lips curled up as it quickly adjusted its attack direction and sung its weapon to the side, causing Ayden to have to raise his arms and block. Only the hit was so strong that it lifted him up into the air and sent him flying into a tree.

"Ouch! Shit!" Ayden cried out. He did not even have time to check his own health before he was forced to dodge once more. He never thought that trying to fight an A.I. for practice would be so tough, but then he remembered a very important aspect of this game. A.I.'s will learn from fighting as well.