Chapter 94 93 - The New Team

After Milo finished up at the guild headquarters, he made his way back to his apartment to inform Corinna and Krista of what his job at the guild would be. They were both happy for him as he had gotten exactly what he wanted. Not only that but since he'd be going through their new recruit program, if he came back to the Incubus Guild after graduation, he'd possibly be able to skip and go straight onto a gatecrashing squad.

Milo continued to rave about all the facilities he'd be able to take advantage of and even more about the guild and what he had experienced when touring it. Eventually it became night and he decided he should get some rest before the start of his rookie training the next day.

Waking up the next morning, Milo packed a lunch, made sure he had all he needed and headed to the guild headquarters, when he entered he got his picture taken and was given an ID badge that would allow him to enter the facilities and use the elevator. Looking at the card, it was black in color and showed the photo they had just taken, along with his rank, and name. Next to his photo was the guild logo, a white skull with blood red horns. He walked to the elevator and scanned his card going up to the gym floors.

He did a bit of weight lifting and when entering he was one of many other people taking advantage of the equipment. He considered talking to David about getting a dedicated trainer, but first wanted to test out just how strong his strength stat was making him. He made his way over to a barbell and slid a 20 kilogram weight onto each side, he decided to just do deadlifts as it was an easy and quick way to test what the max weight he could lift was. He picked it up with ease and dropped it. Since it was way too light, Milo added 2 more weights on each side, bringing the total weight to 60 kg on both sides, and did another deadlift, it was still too light so he placed it back down and added more weight. He eventually got up to 150 kg on each side of the barbell where he started to need to push himself a bit. He could still lift it but he guessed that if he added another 50 kg on each side he'd barely be able to finish the dead lift.

Some of the other gym goers were wide eyed seeing the 17 year old continue to climb in weight. Most of them would struggle with just 200 kg on the bar, but Milo made that weight look easy in comparison to what he was lifting right now, at 300 kg. Milo decided not to test any more max weights for different workouts, as he didn't want to strain himself before training. He did a light workout in the gym and then headed up to the training rooms on the higher floors to practice some more combat with his chain sickle.

While practicing, Milo couldn't help but feel that there were some ways he could improve the weapon he was using, as he felt that the sickle had too small of a range for him. He'd have to talk to Avery at some point to see if she had any ideas. After practicing for a while he took a shower in the gym locker room, and made his way up to the floor and virtual reality booth that his new squad would be training at. He was 15 minutes early and was the first to arrive. Eventually David had also arrived and was happy to see Milo so motivated to get to work. Eventually more people began to enter the room, all of them different in one way or another.

Soon aside from Milo, the nine other team members had all gathered. David then told everyone they should introduce themselves, and started with a large man who was to his left. The man introduced himself as Harvey, he was huge, even taller than Milo who was 6 foot 3 and had a bald head. He stated that he would be filling one of the tanker roles, and stated that he had an ability called Stalwart. His ability significantly raised his defense in exchange for preventing him from moving.

The next team member was a woman named Helena. She was a healer who used a healing aura ability, similar to the GAA member who had come on the in-field experience. Third was a pair of twins named Conner and Cameron, they were both dealers who had an ability called Power Link. It allowed them to buff their stats by touching hands with other people who had the Power Link ability, and because they were brothers, the two of them had plenty of chemistry in combat. The pair seemed a bit cocky but aside from that didn't seem like bad people. Milo was the next to introduce himself, and when hearing that he was still a student at the Academy, Harvey, the large man who was a tanker, clapped him on the back in surprise. He has a bit of an intimidating appearance but Milo could tell based on how he acted that deep down he was probably a big softie.

The group continued to introduce themselves one by one, until everyone had gotten a turn. David then gave everyone a login ID for the virtual reality machines. The new ID was specifically for guild use and would be used every time they went into the simulation for training. David also stated that he would be spectating their training, and after their first gate they'd meet to come up with a specific plan for their squad including formation, battle strategies and more. Before logging in he allowed them to have their equipment scanned and tied to their account so that they could use their own equipment in the simulated gate.

Everyone then took a station and logged in, before all joining a room that David was hosting. Milo was using lent gear for the stuff he didn't have, including boots and leg armor, but currently was the equipment he owned as well. A helmet wasn't required, and Milo figured a helmet would mess with his field of vision anyway and would be more of a hindrance than a help anyways.

Unlike Milo, all the other gatecrashers had full sets of equipment already, ranging in rating and type. He noticed that the support members were mainly wearing robes of some kind, something that allowed for movement so they could flee if necessary, in contrast the tankers all wore heavy gear that made them appear even bigger most likely to protect themselves as best as possible, the dealers were wearing a sort of middle ground between the light armor of the supports and the heavy armor of the tanks so that their movement wasn't too obstructed.

Milo could then hear David speak, "To start we'll send you into a randomly generated C ranked gate, remember the basics you learned in your gatecrashing course, we'll go over specifics after your first run." David then activated the gate and went into spectator mode to watch them.

Milo could then see his vision warp a bit as the interior of a gate seemed to be built around them within the simulation. Harvey decided to take up a sort of leader position and helped decide on a basic formation that had the supports in the middle the tanks up front and the dealers on the sides and their flank. This would protect the supports from all angles and when combat commenced they'd move to the back. And the dealers would assist the tanks up front, aside from the ranged attackers who'd stick close to the support members.

Everyone seemed to agree to this plan and began to move forward. Eventually they got into their first combat situation. There was a bit of disarray due to the group not having fought together but they were able to come out of the encounter mostly unscathed. As a gate's rank increased, so did the size of the groups of beasts one would encounter. Each member was forced to take on 2 beasts each, but because 3 of the members were focused on being non combatant and 1 was a raged attacker the close combat fighters were forced to face 3 to 4 beasts at once. The tanks were able to pull most of the aggro luckily, which freed up the dealers a bit more to kill off the enemies one at a time.

The tankers took the brunt of the damage during the fight and after being healed back to full by the support members they continued on. The gate continued in this way until they got to the boss room. The boss was a massive scorpion that had other smaller scorpions that acted as guards, and it was the first time that the group found difficulty.

Because it was their first time working together, their communication and chemistry wasn't very good and a few stray arrows from their ranger accidentally hit one of the tanks. Along with this, one of the two twins seemed to be a bit overconfident and charged in without any assistance from a support or tank and took what would've been a fatal attack in real life, when the scorpion spit a stream of poison out of its tail, hitting him in the chest. It almost seemed like they were attempting to show who the stronger of the two twins were and it backfired horribly.

Their formation also collapsed a bit at one point as well, which forced Milo to swap to more of a mage role, using ice spears to protect the support members who were being attacked by the bosses guards. By the time they had defeated the massive beast, they had lost a total of 3 people, one tanker who Milo recalled as being their brawler, and the two twins who were dealers.

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After the boss was killed the group was warped back to the room that acted as a sort of lobby and the entire team was back alive. David then went on to critique some of the things they could've done differently that may have resulted in them preventing their teammates from being killed, as well as ways to prevent the formation from falling apart. Overall, he said they hadn't done a bad job but recommended that they work in the training rooms with some of the other team members to practice combat in tandem with one another, as well as to help increase their chemistry as a group. He also made a point of telling the team members to act as if it was an actual gate and to not try and show off, which drew looks towards the twins who smiled in embarrassment and scratched the backs of their heads.

He said that they would conclude the training there for the day and everyone logged out, because it was a C ranked simulated gate, it was much larger in size and complexity than the E ranked gate he closed on his in field experience. Back then it took their group around 4 hours to close the gate, and for the simulated gate, even though they had double the number of people closing it, it still took them close to 7 hours to kill the boss. The next day they were to meet in one of the office floors to discuss strategy a bit with David, and there they would find out who their team leader would be and also would discuss a formation that would work best for their group due to Milo acting as a hybrid mage and close combat dealer.

Milo was satisfied with his training thus far, he got to meet more people who were somewhat new to the guild like him, since the rest of the members of his team were new recruits. He was surprised about a few things as well, such as the range in age among his team members but knew that they'd be a great group to learn more from. He returned home that night with many different things on his mind. The majority of these thoughts were focused on what formation would fit them best, who would be selected as the squad captain, and finally what changes could be made to his weapon to increase his combat strength.

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