Instead of cavern slow crawl, Imush decided to travel where the winds would take him. At first he thought about dropping off the 10 hoods he had collected/had been hoboing at his home hilllock. This was 3 world map tiles away in the opposite direction of an eastern kobold camp, so he left everything else at the fortress tavern and ventured back into the world with just iron mail shirt, chain leggings and trogd leather armor on. No need for the boots, gauntlets or cap.
Imush went eastward to the kobold camp where he thought he might have a look at their pilfered goods and say hello to whatever dragons might be in residence. Go where the game takes you and take what unfolds. Here in this case it meant crossing a river at late morning, swimming to adequate and getting into a brawl with a non-adjective laden carp with only shield equipped so as to have 5 possible grips as Imush was standing.
This was just the granular/deconstructed version of wrestling with a pack of wolves while holding several shields. Except here there's just one shield, and since carp are non-aggressive, escalation needs to occur one carp at a time. Where this sort of thing becomes powerleveling is just an issue of magnitude.
Once fighter advanced from dabbling to novice via punching/blocking/gripping, Imush released the 5 grips he held, and moved directionally into contact with another carp who was quite fat. This allowed the first carp to attack 9 times. Then Imush got onto the ground to have 9 grips available, 4 for the first carp and 5 for the fat one. As they had become inactive offensively, Imush released those two and moved towards two other carp. The benefit of being on his back at under .200 speed just multiplies the tick count for the directional move which would normally be 9-10 ticks at 1.000 speed, and this increases defensive opportunity.
Once Imush had striker/wrestler reach novice and fighter reach adequate, with shield user just under adequate and armor user still at dabbling, it was time to go. It's good to get some (vaguely time-consuming) manual work in, not so good to auto-attack/powerlevel and reap too much gain.