Free End Online: Volume 4 by D. Wolfin

abundantly clear how much my fitness level
has fallen.
    The shopping all goes to
it’s rightful places and I casually turn back to the V-Link. Placing the helmet
back on top of my head while lying down on my bed, I enter virtual reality
without any further issues.
    Passing through my locker
and straight into the game, I appear in a small little outcrop of acacia trees
shrouded in darkness. I spot the moon hanging high in the sky, indicating it is
roughly the middle of the night.
    “Fen,” I say to the wolf
girl staring curiously at me from the side. “Let’s fight. It has been a long
time since we practiced like this.”
    She nods in response and
several dozen shards of ice immediately form in the air. The strange thing
about companions, I happened to learn a while ago, is that they are incapable
of attacking you, no matter the circumstance. Yet, somehow, Fen doesn’t follow
this ironclad rule.
    This is possibly the best
practice for training, but I need to make sure I select the option of having a
‘friendly’ duel with her in my menu. Doing this nullifies 95 percent
of damage we cause to each other.
    She launches her ice bolts
at me all at once. I immediately send several throwing knives to intercept as
many ice bolts as possible, while nimbly dodging the rest. In an instant, I
traverse the distance between us as I charge forward at high speed.
    Perhaps the wolf girl has
come to know a little about my abilities, because she raises up a wall of ice
the moment I start moving. As a result of this and my sudden boost in speed
from having my hood down, I collide spectacularly into the wall and the
afterimage of me five meters away instantly disperses.
    ‘Tch. I guess that
couldn’t work on you forever.’  I give a
silent commendation towards Fen’s adaptability and craftiness.
    “Backstab,” I call out,
only for nothing to happen.
    Realizing I must have my
direct sight on the target and be within a certain range, I hastily jump back.
Almost as if she can read my mind, Fen flies over the ice wall at the same
time. She is holding a single shortsword of ice in each hand, poised to stab
down as she lands on top of me.  I can use my sacred arts to escape, but
it occurs to me that I should practice being able to do so without calling upon
the system.
    I extend one of my legs
and allow my body to slacken. My extended foot comes in contact with the ground
first, and the unexpected contact causes me to lose my balance. The world
revolves and I hit the soft grass with the flat of my back, bouncing awkwardly
and veering off my trajectory enough to escape Fen’s deadly descent.
    When my body finally comes
to a stop, I shakily climb back onto my feet and look toward Fen, who is
currently facing the opposite direction. Forgetting about my speed increase in
a rush to take her unaware, I push off from the ground as hard as I possibly can.
    My velocity increases at
an astonishing rate and completely surprises me. Everything in sight flies past
fast enough to turn into blurs of red, yellow, and green. Paying the smallest
amount of attention to the the blurring colours around me causes an incessant
buzzing sound in my head, accompanied by an uncomfortable feeling.
    With something so
unexpected happening, my body seizes up in shock. Fen barely has enough time to
adopt a surprised expression before I collide with her and cause us both to fly
through the trees in a tangled mess.
    We end up flying straight
out of the western side of the grove like a gust of wind. Fen and I finally
land on the dry, water deprived grass, barely losing any momentum as we slide
along the ground downhill in a tangled mess.
    We leave a path through
the knee high grass a little over a hundred meters long from our landing. I
stare at the narrow corridor of flattened grass, dumbfounded.
    “…Mpfh…” A muffled groan
sounds out from next to me.
    Rolling my head to the
side, I see Fen face-planted in the ground. Her snow white hair is a mess and
her red