PATRIARCH FOWL
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Casual Heroing, Chapter 154
🕑 Added 2023-07-31 18:24:49 +0000 UTCNext chapter comes out Tuesday, August 1st!
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Chapter 154 - Lightweight, Baby
Progressive overload is one of the most popular concepts in any gym. Even a guy with a middle school diploma can probably explain what it means: add a bit more weight each time instead of adding too much weight at once. And while it’s deceptively simple, it does take a lot of training to actually always lift more and more weight once you hit the intermediate threshold—that is, once you have had your easy gains, it becomes exponentially harder to make any progress.
Lifting a 260-pound sword and easily swinging it around is most likely impossible, even for the strongest lifter in the world. It is also true that most of those lifters would pay their weight in gold for the kind of magical gear Magister Mulligan has drawn across my body.
On top of that, the man has taken out a serious amount of steel equipment. He straight out bent and shaped metal as if it was chewing gum. Across the majestic colonnade, there’s now a rather modern-looking series of dumbbells, barbells, and machines whose sole purpose is to make it less likely for me to die miserably during this trial.
“Muscle isolation,” the old man mused as I sweated buckets over some simple wrist curls. That means taking a barbell and flexing your wrist up and down. You can switch the grip above and below the barbell to hit all your forearm muscles.
“Yeah,” I grunt. “If you want me to swing that thing around… I’ll need much more than normal strength in my legs and such. That’s why it’s best to start training the forearms. Otherwise, I’d be doing deadlifts only.”
“Dead-lifts,” Magister Mulligans chews on the exercise’s name. “Peculiar, young Luciani, but nonetheless fascinating. I can see how these exercises might complement the normal training of a Vanedeni and, in your feeble case… bring you up to speed, as you would put it.”
I do the last set of fifteen and stop. Whatever Magister Mulligan did to my body genuinely increased the recovery to an insane amount. I did not need any breaks whatsoever as long as I could withstand the pain.
“So, these Runes won’t run out, nor will I need to eat any food? How does that work?” I say while massaging my forearms. What’s a bit scary is that all the skin above the muscles I’ve been working out is bright red now, as if I had fallen asleep with my forearms out in the sun.
“They will need me to power them up again, perhaps once a day—that would usually require less maintenance, but I have gifted you with Runes that are much more powerful than what a normal Vanedeni would have needed… Because of your lack of strength, that is.”
Magister Mulligan adds the last part a bit in a huff, enough to make me raise an eyebrow but not enough to have me care more than that.
“Ok, can you add 10 pounds to this?”
“Done,” the old man says after snapping his fingers. Immediately I feel my shoulders dropping slightly lower as I hold the barbell. It was at 25 pounds of weight for my wrist exercises—yeah, I know, I’m weak. Now, it’s 35 pounds to pump some biceps.
“You know what,” I say, putting the barbell on the ground. “Give me one second. This is absolutely necessary to improve the rate of training.”
After a minute, Magister Mulligan looks at me with a frown.
I have cut up my shirt into a roughly made tank top with very thin strips of fabric holding it together over my mostly naked shoulders.
“What? It’s how you are supposed to train in the gym, you know. Gotta keep the sides open for when you spread your wings! GRAH!” My bodybuilder pose doesn’t seem to impress the old man, who just looks at me plainly.
Ignoring the non-believer, I simply start doing bicep curls with the damn barbell. Now, the pain is there. It’s a constant hum in the back of my mind, like a slow-building pressure that wants to pop both my eyes out; it burns the muscles I exercise—as in, it actually burns. Not burn as in, ‘Oh, bro, do you feel the buhrrrnnn?!’ but more like, ‘Oh, shit, have I just caught on fire?’ kind of burn.
“Your body’s inflammation has been magically enhanced. It is my understanding that in your world, inflammation contains the word ‘flame.’ Without the Runes, your body might have just collapsed because of the heat. The energy, instead, is slowly being converted into stronger muscles, bones, and tissue.”
“Right,” I grunt as I do my curls, “but you haven’t answered my previous question. What about sustenance? Can I just go without food?”
“Oh, no, you’ll have to eat, but we can fetch you some quick rations so that you shall not interrupt your training for something as trivial as cooking meals.”
“Excuse you?” I say after finishing the first set of fifteen reps. “Are you kidding me? I am a trained Chef, and you expect me not to cook anything? You know, there are a bunch of recipes I pretty much put together with almost no effort. Plus, where are you going to fetch the food from? Do you have some century-old super-crackers full of anabolic drugs lying around or what?”
“I can just teleport the required supplies from some [Merchants]’ storage.”
“OH, stealing now, are we? Great…” I start my second set, and immediately, the barbell does feel slightly lighter.
This stuff is actually amazing, I think to myself as I curl the weight. But I’ll need to push it more than this if I want to make it before the duel.
“Yo, can you put another ten pounds on this? I want to push it a little.”
Magister Mulligan snaps his fingers without saying a word, and the barbell immediately becomes heavier.
“Oof,” I moan in pain as I do my first curl. “This is right about at the limit of pain, I think,” I grit my teeth. “Put another five pounds on this.”
Magister Mulligan raises an eyebrow but increases the weight without protesting.
“Alright, that’s more like it,” I say with pain straining my voice and pushing air out of my lungs as I do each curl in enough pain to make you think that someone was hacking at your biceps with a machete during the exercise.
Now, every rep has become hell—but a bearable, contained hell. Unlike trying to lift a massive sword at once with my whole body using too many muscles at once, this is allowing me to train my muscles at the best possible pace without fainting from the pain.
After my seventh set, my biceps had turned as red as my forearms, and I relented.
“Can you shrink the barbell a little and make it, like, 10 pounds lighter? I don’t know how much I can lift with my triceps,” I tell Magister Mulligan.
The old man does as I tell him, but this time, he also asks a question.
“Why are you switching exercises instead of increasing the weight on the exercises you just did?”
“The rate of improvement slows down when the skin turns this red. It probably means it has reached the maximum growth speed for now, even with your magical Runes doing the, huh, heavy lifting. It doesn’t make any sense to continue if it’s not improving—especially if I’m not doing compound lifts but isolated ones. Getting all my muscles up to speed this way will take longer than if I just did four compound lifts. But if I did those… well, first of all, I wouldn’t be able to bear nearly as much pain as I can right now, meaning my muscle growth would be mediocre across all of my body instead of extremely focused and great as it is now. Secondly, I would need to wait for all my muscles to recover. This way, instead, I can focus on one group at a time while the others rest. Sure, biceps and triceps exercises also stress my forearm muscles, but not nearly as much as a direct exercise would.”
“Fascinating,” Magister Mulligan replies, stroking his beard. “Young Luciani… your weakness might have just opened a new path forward for you. As such, I wonder if we should even call it a weakness.”
I start doing some triceps curls over my head with the lighter barbell with so much sweat in my eyes I basically have to keep them shut.
“Oh, and by the way, steal the food from the barracks of the [Soldiers]. Take their best produce, meat, and whatever looks expensive. I just worked up an appetite, if you know what I mean.”
Magister Mulligan, instead of being offended by my proposition, actually laughs for the first time since he shuttled us to this place.
“Also, you know what I call this?” I say, banking on the already laughing [Archmage] and hoping he has looked through the exact memories I’m about to reference. “LIGHTWEIGHT, BABY!”
…
I keep doing my exercises, finally reaching some back exercises that require me to also engage my arms. What I notice, though, is that the redness has slightly gone down, and the Runes on my body are vibrating and moving slowly, coiling like a snake.
Looking at them, I get a prickling sensation in the back of my mind. These are thousands of layers of magic that got condensed onto my skin by an unfathomably strong [Archmage], who forged a legendary grimoire of Udemy-like magic.
But then, why do I get the feeling that I should stare at these Runes for just a little longer?
