Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 7 - Chapter 1

Winter of the Fifteenth Year

Party Formation

Adventurers come in every shape and color: wannabe heroes from the countryside, impoverished beggars looking for better lives, exiled criminals, disguised nobles, etc. Anything goes, to the point where those who can freely speak their background are relatively reputable for that fact alone.

Dissimilar PCs each built to their own player’s interest can come together as a party at a bar, by taking the same quest, or—when the show must get on the road—because they all happen to be childhood friends.

The autumn festival was held every year just before the harsh winter months; it was an exercise in abundance to offset the meagerness of the dried rations that would follow. As a result, there were scant few things left to be served for the young man’s unexpected homecoming.

Still, the folks of the canton scrounged up whatever they could while the leadership of the village, forced to oblige their citizens’ enthusiasm or else lose face, bent and offered up more to fuel the festivities. Every family’s home had its share of sauerkraut fermenting in jars, which they brought over unreserved; the villagers had picked fruits and vegetables symbolizing the last hurrah of autumn which now lined the town hall tables; and of course, key to any good imperial feast, a mountain of wurst was stacked up for all to share.

There was also enough alcohol to build a lake, but that was primarily the work of the up-and-coming Johannes and his family. In backwater towns, the well-off were ever under pressure to share their wealth, so as to excuse themselves from accusations of hoarding. To their fellow citizens, this wasn’t a fancy rich person putting on airs: anyone who treated others with enough booze to black out on was a bona fide hero.

“Argh... I really missed out.”

While the youngest of the flock circled around the heroes of the night, asking crass questions and booming with laughter, the women hung around the corners of the room, leisurely enjoying the unplanned food and drink.

“Mmmm? Missed out on what?”

“On Erich, duh. Who would’ve thought he’d come home all rich?” Like everyone else in eyeshot, a young mensch girl named Hilda found herself absolutely plastered. She fumbled around with her fork, poking at a bit of wurst, and her blush was bright enough to plainly announce her drunkenness on its own.

“Oooooh... Yeah. I didn’t even think he’d come home at all.” Beside the drunken girl was another of her ilk: her mind marinated in mead, her floresiensis friend Alicia was just as well done.

The two of them were Margit’s age, but curiously enough, that wasn’t their only similarity: they were all unwed. Although love was easier for canton-dwellers to seek than it was for the nobility, it was not as free a pursuit as it was for the common urchins of the city streets. Merely finding a boy was not the issue, but rather finding one who matched their social castes; thus they had yet to pair off with anyone.

That said, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Hilda was the only daughter to farmers successful enough to employ several sharecroppers on their property; her distant relatives would fork over a good second or third son in due time. Alicia’s household was one of the few certified to raise silkworms, and as the eldest daughter, she would no doubt receive bids for her hand from prosperous merchants sooner rather than later.

Yet that didn’t change that they were single. Yes, they could tell themselves that the timing hadn’t lined up or that they hadn’t gotten any good offers, but to be unmarried at eighteen in the Empire was to be just shy of seeming unwanted. In two more years, they’d be considered to have missed their chance. At times like these, they envied the freedom afforded to those beneath them in class.

Those who came from small-to-middling farming families could grow close and drift apart of their own accord. Nuptial taxes meant they couldn’t quite tie the knot without thought, but they had few barriers when it came to societal expectations among fellow peasants—something that weighed all too heavily on the relatively privileged girls.

The peasant farmers never sent their romantic attention upward, and so the canton’s elite never looked downward. In fact, the daughters of more successful families tended to look down on such emotionally driven relationships...except one.

Guaranteed a stable future was the eldest daughter of the magistrate’s official huntsman: Margit.

Within Konigstuhl, Johannes was of respectable stature, but was ultimately only a middling farmer—he didn’t employ any sharecroppers. His fourth son would ordinarily be a very difficult sell for someone of Margit’s level.

Had Erich been a normal boy for whom the arachne’s affection was based solely on a flight of fancy, dozens of others in the canton would begin to protest: why should she settle for a mediocre farmer’s youngest when their second or third son was right there? Marrying into a family that received its work straight from the magistrate was a powerful draw.

Yet the boy had enough going for him to expel all doubt. At five, he’d learned the hymns at church; he had enough talent for woodworking to support his family with it; he was so smart that he’d learned the palatial tongue not by attending school, but simply from his childhood friend’s personal tutoring.

But he was best known for how he’d managed to stick with the Watch’s infamously harsh training, to the point where the people of the canton were unequivocally convinced he’d one day be taken not as part of the reserves, but as a full-time watchman. Though the boy didn’t seem to be aware, he’d left a strong impression on the authorities of Konigstuhl as a good, capable kid.

It was a fairy tale come to life: a young boy bravely conquers every trial, winning the right to stand by his first love. But alas! Fate is cruel, and She tears the pair apart. How could any mere peasant hope to return from his servitude in the capital?

“I wonder how much it costs to study magic under a noble...”

“Ummmm... Maybe five drachmae?”

“That’s like loose change for a noble. I heard that it’s harder than the magistrate’s school—so hard that you get to be a bureaucrat if you graduate. An imperial officer! Like, you’d be the one ordering magistrates around!”

“Whoooa. Then maybe...ten drachmae?”

“No, I’m sure it’s so much money that us country bumpkins can’t even imagine it. And, like, you have to pay for food and stuff too. Living like a noble has to cost money just to breathe, I bet.”

Although the pair didn’t have any concrete numbers, their perception was on the money. To apprentice under a noble with the promise of becoming a noble oneself—the caveat of attaining professorship notwithstanding—cost a fortune so massive that a farmer wouldn’t ever be able to afford it, even if they could reattempt their whole life as many times as they wanted to.

Truth be told, the outfit tailored for Elisa’s high-society debut alone had cost significantly more than the taxes of every household in the canton combined. A decent chunk of that expense originated with the influential and enthusiastic Lady Leizniz preparing the very best for the young magus-in-training, but still.

In other words, the people of Konigstuhl knew Erich as the boy who can earn that much money. He’d come home wearing high-quality clothes, with neatly kept hair, and atop a majestic horse, for crying out loud—his return was more triumphant than the knights in shining armor that graced sappy love stories.

“So you know, I was kinda the nice older girl for him too. When we were kids, I used to play foxes-and-geese with him, right? And we were the mom and dad when we played house sometimes too.”

“Ohhhh, so that’s what you mean when you said you missed out.”

Alicia watched her friend sulkily jab her fork into a weiner and was overcome with a strange sense of pity. Hilda wasn’t a bad girl. She was just a little too well-off, and her frustrations had convinced her in retrospect that she’d missed a big catch when, in reality, she hadn’t cast a line to begin with.

The boy was simply an egg of Columbus. How could anyone have known that the fourthborn son to a farmer would earn a sum of money literally unimaginable to his peers in three short years?

“I wonder if I can’t try getting closer to him now... I mean, he’s gotten really cute.”

“Ooooh, I get that. He always did look a lot like Miss Helena.”

So, while the boy was stuck with his rowdy brothers, the single women watched over him like hawks. They didn’t know why he’d come home, but if he was going to stay for a while, this could be their chance.

Well, it could be, but it wasn’t.

“Whatever might you two be chatting about?”

“Eep!”

“Wah!”

A silent specter had sneaked into their midst. Appearing as if from thin air, a head poked out from between Hilda’s and Alicia’s, with an arm sliding over each of their shoulders. A dreadful chill pressed into their necks as steel blades... No, wait, those were just tin mugs, cooled by the winter air.

However, for a moment, the pair truly believed the cups were daggers; they felt no different from deer and boars ready to be hung up as game.

“M-Margit!”

“Tonight is a merry night,” the arachne said with a rapturous smile. “It would be such a waste to spend it gloomily poking at cold sausages. Shall we drink?”

Cold sweat ran down their backs as realization struck. Looking around, the other unwed girls and young widows who’d been gossiping much the same as them were now silent. In their place were tables quieter than those at a wake.

The dots connected instantly. Someone was going around dousing passions before they could even be kindled, and they had been seen as an ember.

A faint jingle rang in their ears. It came from the pink earpiece the huntress always had on—one shared by the central figure of tonight’s party.

“H-Ha ha, ha. Oh, please, Miss Margit. Ours was hardly a conversation of much note, now was it?”

“I-Indeed. Frivolous talk, truly.”

Sporting forced smiles and retreating into unprompted palatial speech, the pair tried to worm their way out. Alas, Alicia had made a mistake in her choice of words.

“Frivolous, you say? Then surely you won’t mind me intruding. After all, the three of us have been friends since childhood, haven’t we?”

You idiot! Hilda shot her friend a glare.

I’m sorry! Alicia squealed in her heart.

[Tips] No matter the era, people will sing songs about the romantic freedoms of those who have nothing.

The day after my boneheaded welcome home, I found myself chopping logs in the front yard of my house.

“Oww...”

Rubbing my aching knees between every swing, I loaded log after log onto a stump so I could turn them into firewood with my hatchet. Sitting on one’s own feet was traditional Rhinian posture for a guilty party being yelled at, and my legs were currently dead after hours stuck in the pose.

I’d learned that Emperor Richard himself had popularized this tradition by forcing it upon his vassals—something about lessons being harder to forget when they were beaten into the body—but I couldn’t help but feel like the Emperor of Creation had done us a disservice. Rhinian mensch were not built to sit like that for long periods of time, dammit.

I doubt there was any need to explain, but my father, brothers, and I had received a proper lecture from the women of our house—and man, had they been ready to serve it.

My mother first said she was happy to see me, and then started shouting that she didn’t raise me to be the kind of blithering idiot to go off drinking before setting down my luggage. When I tried to pipe up to defend myself, she got even more upset, asking me what kind of adult I was if I couldn’t even stand up against peer pressure. She was right, so I obediently accepted my scolding for the rest of the sermon.

Looking back, a lot of my worst episodes had been the product of my not setting my boundaries firmly enough: everything from Lady Agrippina’s miscellany to the events on the road home could apply. In hindsight, while I would’ve had to go back to the town hall eventually, I definitely could have shaken the drunks off by demanding that they let me go home to change first.

As a matter of course, my father and brothers were then chewed out so thoroughly that it made my lecture seem cute in comparison. Their wives mercilessly berated them with questions like “Is this the example you want to set when our fourth child is on the way?” or “Do you understand what it means to be a father of five?” Though I’d never been in the parent’s seat, using their fatherhood against them seemed to be a serious hit on my dad and Heinz.

But, hey, those two had dished out money to make the celebrations even bigger than they would’ve been. I couldn’t cover for them even if I wanted to.

The twins had it no better. Statements like “And you think you can call the village chief family?” and “Maybe you should quit your job under the magistrate before you embarrass yourself with something like this” slammed them to the point where I felt major secondhand embarrassment. The worst part was that everything was based in truth, meaning we couldn’t even make a peep to defend ourselves.

We really are family, I thought. When memories of my past life had flooded in as a child, I’d thought that my emotional development was complete; but it turns out that I truly did draw the same blood.

Just look at how we all let ourselves get caught up in the heat of the moment only to suffer the consequences of our actions later. We were spitting images of each other. Blood was ever thicker than water, I guessed. Some might protest that my rashness was a character flaw I’d brought with me across worlds, but, hey, we were literally related. It probably ran in the family. This wasn’t just me making excuses, I swear.

Digressions aside, the scolding had begun first thing in the morning and had gone on and on for hours. Both my mother and sister-in-law understood that funding the party went a long way in boosting our family’s reputation, but they also knew that any word of praise would just go to our heads. They’d cracked the whip hard, and I’d lost all sensation in my legs near the end.

I had only gotten away because the lecture had pivoted to the topic of Elisa, and I’d used the opportunity to mention that I’d brought gifts picked out by our family princess. As guilty as I felt using Elisa’s goodwill to leave my dad and brothers behind, I seriously couldn’t have taken it any longer.

Even that hadn’t been enough to erase my wrongdoing, though, so here I was hard at work the day after I returned. The others were still stuck inside to make quite the peculiar scene: two successful heads of their respective households, a bridegroom to the village chief’s family, and one of the magistrate’s personal secretaries kneeling on the ground. I doubted they’d be able to walk straight for the rest of the day.

Thank goodness we’d possessed the good sense to go shopping for nice fabrics and pretty hair accessories before I’d left Berylin. Paired with Elisa’s handwritten letters and an oil portrait from Lady Leizniz—I’d been genuinely disgusted when I’d asked for one and she’d answered that she’d prepare as many as I dared to ask for—the gifts had improved everyone’s moods considerably.

Elisa and I had regularly written back, so it wasn’t as if they were hearing from her for the first time, but being able to literally see how much she’d grown was an experience all its own. The men gooed and gahed over the painting as proof that their little girl truly was the cutest on the planet, while the women were proud and excited that she’d grown up to be such a great lady that she could have artwork commissioned.

My one reservation was that the oilwork wasn’t the product of a painter inspired by her beauty, but that of an undead vitality glorifier. Just as every commoner had dreamed of being taken under their magistrate’s wing, every woman had indulged in fantasies of a Prince Charming spotting their beauty from within the crowd to whisk them away.

Not that an average Prince Charming would make the cut, of course. Her hypothetical white knight would need to, at the very least, be able to wipe the floor with me in a duel, pamper her harder than Lady Leizniz, and protect her with more political might than Lady Agrippina.

Tangents notwithstanding, the painting would surely get my mother and sister-in-law excited about how Elisa was doing. Everyone had been too preoccupied with my return yesterday, but seeing a postcard-sized cutout of her in a stylish black evening gown with gray frills would certainly drive home that she’d grown up to be a lovely lady.

As far as the men’s gifts...those could wait until tomorrow. I had hoe and plow heads from a high-quality manufacturer in the capital, alongside some daggers for self-defense. But those aside, I very much doubted that bringing out rare foreign liquors would do them any favors in the middle of their scolding.

“Phew.”

After chopping up what seemed like enough firewood to be off the hook, I felt a faint tingling sensation. I wanted to upgrade my Presence Detection with how useful it was, but I had other places to allocate my experience; it’d have to wait for now.

Today, I turned around with a good bit of leeway to see my old partner bundled up in a stuffed coat and mid flight heading toward me. Realizing that I’d seen her coming, her expression was a mix of confusion and surprise as I caught her. Holding her by the armpits, I swung her around clockwise like one might a child until all the momentum was dissipated; otherwise, one or both of us might get hurt.

“Good morning, Margit.”

“Eager to chalk up your side of the board, I see.”

I held her with a satisfied grin while she pointed her lips in a disappointed pout. While the expression would look unmannerly on most, she just looked plain cute; it was hard to believe she was two years my senior.

“Were you going easy on me because you thought I was hungover?”

“As if the spirit of liquor has ever overstayed its welcome for you. Besides, I never hold back, you know?”

Before I could set her down, Margit slipped her arms around my neck and perched up as she always did. The weight on my neck felt lighter than it used to. As small as I still was, I’d grown considerably since when we were kids: she’d used to come up to the top of my hips, but was now only as tall as the split in my legs.

Also of note was her cute sense of fashion. Arachne were weak enough to the cold that I’d seen her all fluffed up many times in the past, but this was the first time she’d appeared wearing individual leg warmers on each of her spidery limbs. I wondered whether she’d made them herself in the years I’d been gone.

But more than that, I wondered why she was all bundled up to come visit so early in the day.

“Well, the gentlemen kept you all to themselves last evening. I thought today would be my turn to hear all about your travels.”

When I earnestly asked, she answered, just as free of affectation. Last night had indeed been for the boys, with most of the women present just nibbling on snacks and sipping on drinks. It had been blatantly obvious that Margit had given me space to goof off with my brothers and old friends.

If she was here now to catch up, then I was more than happy to oblige. That said, the house wasn’t exactly the most hospitable place right now, so I took her over to the stable.

We walked in to see our old farm horse Holter relaxing next to the Dioscuri. Neither Castor nor Polydeukes was the rough and rowdy sort, so they got along just fine.

“Looking at them again, your horses really are majestic. If I’m not mistaken, they’re warhorses, aren’t they?”

“That’s right. They’re, osten...uh. They’re some kind of military breed.”

I vaguely recalled being told that they were a mix between the brawny horses from the central reach of the continent and more laid-back horses from our region in the west, but this was all secondhand knowledge I’d learned at the College stables. I’d been more focused on actually working, so I couldn’t quite remember it all clearly.

“How many gold coins does it take to buy a steed like this? You must’ve been hard at work.”

“Actually, these two were a gift from my master—er, my former master. They used to pull her carriage, but now that they’re over ten years old, she decided...”

Taking a seat next to the stable, I used some of the firewood I’d chopped to begin setting up a bonfire. I felt a bit chilly in spite of the cotton in my clothes, so Margit must’ve been freezing. Thinking about it, having her right on top of my lap was a rather daring seating arrangement, but I didn’t feel a hint of embarrassment from it. I suppose it was a bit late to be worrying about such things between the two of us.

The conversation over how I came about my horses then moved to the time immediately after I left the canton. One by one, the memories resurfaced and spilled forth—each too vivid to ever forget.

Now that I was talking about them, I had to ask: why the hell was I still alive? None of this business was even close to the sort of bullshit a twelve-year-old should be surviving.

Pushing past how palpable my rotten luck was, I packed together some leaves and twigs to act as a fire starter—when epiphany struck. This was my chance to surprise Margit: after all, I wasn’t going to hide my magic from my partner.

I told her to keep her distance and then wove together a simple firemaking cantrip. A spark not unlike the tiny embers at the end of a cigarette jumped onto the dried leaves and gave rise to a small plume of smoke.

“My!”

“Heh heh,” I gloated, “isn’t that cool?”

“It’s marvelous! You won’t ever need a tinderbox!”

Forget magia—mages from the nearest city would scoff at this parlor trick. But it was enough to wow Margit, since she knew nothing of magecraft. I announced with a smug grin that I’d learned to use magic while juggling blocks of firewood with my Unseen Hands.

Her competitive side thoroughly stirred up, she reached into her coat to pull out a necklace. It was a simple accessory: just a fang with string slipped through. Yet the tooth jutted out from her small hand like a massive dagger. Few animals could grow teeth longer than an adult man’s index finger. This had to be...

“A great wolf’s tooth. The leader of its pack, of course.”

The huntress proudly handed me her trophy; that it was on her person was proof enough that this had been her own handiwork. Upon felling a particularly difficult mark, hunters were prone to taking a piece of their kill with them, as if to lay claim to the strength that had given them grief.

Judging from the size of the fang, the wolf it had come from must’ve been as big as a full-grown mensch, if not bigger. Scarred by legends of the infamous Gray King, the Trialist Empire had a history of hunting wolves with prejudice. Nowadays, the only ones left were the especially strong and clever. That she’d taken down such a daunting foe was genuinely astounding.

“It had wandered into the shelterbelt near town. The children love to play there, so I was determined to hunt it down with haste.”

“Wow... Come on, don’t leave me hanging.”

Margit regaled me with the story of how she’d tracked down the beast, and in my excited state, I returned the favor with tales of adventure from the capital. We went back and forth, never running out of things to share even as the fire began to dwindle. We talked and talked and talked, as if to bury the time we’d spent apart; we lapped up one another’s every word to quench an insatiable thirst for companionship.

Yet the end had to come eventually. The Sun, hurried to make His winter rounds, was already directly above. Smoke began to billow from the chimneys of Konigstuhl as everyone prepared their lunches; we would need to head in for a meal too.

But with my vocal cords all warmed up, this was a good chance to tell her something important. No matter how long we’d been together, no matter what promises we’d made, and no matter how sure I was that she knew what was going on, there was something I had to say—not because the world expected it of me, but because I expected it of me.

Cutting off our merry chatter, I stood up with Margit in my arms and placed her down where I’d been sitting.

“Whatever might be the matter?”

The question was fueled not by confusion, but by anticipation: how would I entertain her next? Evidently, a past life’s worth of experience still didn’t suffice to get the upper hand against her. I guess dumb, bumbling men were ever a step behind ladies in the realm of emotional literacy.

Had I been speaking to my old chum in the capital, I would’ve put my brain in high gear to speak with great drama, but while Margit understood sophisticated turns of phrase, she had no love of pretension.

So let me speak from the heart.

I got on my knees so that I could look up right into her eyes. Her amber gems were half covered by a playful squint as she cheerfully watched to see how I’d dance in her palm.

I steeled myself and asked, “Do you remember the promise I made you when I left the canton?”

She let out a ringing laugh and teased, “You’ll have to remind me.”

I’d left at twelve and come back at fifteen. She was now seventeen—on the cusp of being forgotten and unwanted. Fifteen to seventeen was the average window of marriage in the Empire, and anyone approaching twenty would have all but missed their chance; I had made her wait in these precious years of early adulthood.

It would be all too easy to think that, since she’d waited for me until now, surely she would spoil me a little longer. But I couldn’t do that: to take advantage of her would be to destroy the trust we shared. It takes two to lean on one another.

She was kind, but she did not coddle. When it came down to it, there was a line she wouldn’t cross—that she wouldn’t let anyone else cross either. Margit was a strong, strong woman.

How else would she have me so smitten?

“I finished my servitude early, just like I promised.”

“Oh, I do recall something like that.”

Looking down on me with a joyful giggle, she added another provocation: plenty of people had come to her family for “talks” in the past three years.

Of course they had. She was a wonderful woman, and that wasn’t even her only draw. Sure to succeed her father as the magistrate’s personal huntsman, she boasted a bountiful future. Rumors on the wind of someone not even in town would hardly be enough to deter someone wanting to make a pass at her.

Yet she had found me before anyone else. What more reason did a man need to hold his head high?

“But you waited for me to fulfill my promise. So Margit, won’t you let me ask you again?”

I wasn’t so uncouth as to mention that she’d been the one to make me promise. At the end of the day, I’d done so of my own volition, and I’d come home to see my word through. To take the initiative here was what it meant to be a man.

“I want you to watch my back forevermore. Won’t you go on an adventure with me?”

I tucked down my head and extended my hand. It was all but a proposal.

The giggling grew into contented laughter. A moment of silence dragged on, long enough for me to feel the embers burn me where I stood, until at last, she took my hand.

“Good boy. Leave it all to me.”

“...Thank you.”

I really had lucked out with my childhood friend.

“I shall lend you my strength. So that perilous shadows will not tread on you; so that you will not tread on perilous shadows. I will go on ever ahead to drive away danger; I will stay ever behind to watch over you in sleep.”

“Then I will follow closely so that no blade will reach you. I will stand in front to fell your foes; I will stand behind to shield your rear. No sword, no arrow, shall ever fall upon you.”

“Well, then,” she said with a giggle, “with one oath fulfilled, how about we make another to take its place?”

Jumping to me with the footwork of a dancer, she came down to match me at eye level. Her eyes stared into mine, just like they once had on that fateful evening—when we’d pierced our ears on that twilit hill.

“Swear to me that you will give it your all—that you will live the adventure you truly dream of.”

“I swear to you. I haven’t changed since the day I was twelve. I will become an adventurer—I won’t break or bend.”

“Can you promise me that, even if you’d die the moment you break it? Even if I were to kill you with my own two hands?”

“You don’t even need to ask.”

Her usual mischievous grin faded away, leaving only the gentle smile of a loving mother. She repeated, “Good boy,” and scooped up a bit of my hair, placing her lips to it.

“Then I’ll go with you,” Margit answered. “To the ends of the earth in the west; to beyond the Southern Sea; to the snowcaps of the north; to the desert sands covering the east.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sure anywhere in the world will be wonderful with you leading the way.”

And so, I came to find my first party member. Inseparable and hard to come by, ours would be a grand adventure.

[Tips] The average age of marriage in the Trialist Empire is said to be fifteen to seventeen, but this is generally only true for firstborn sons and daughters who will not inherit their family business or title. Depending on occupation and stature, this figure can shift slightly.

As we basked in the warm afterglow of our precious oath, a biting gale whizzed by, making Margit sneeze.

“Dear me,” she said. “A single bonfire really isn’t enough, is it?”

“O-Oh! Sorry, Margit, let me add some more wood! Er, wait, would you rather I block off the cold with magic?!”

Shoot, I totally lost track of the cold! Margit had told me long before that arachne suffered aching joints and overall lethargy in the winter elements, even when properly geared for the weather. I should’ve set up a climate-controlled barrier instead of just starting a fire. Ugh, I’m such a dolt.

But just as I began weaving the spell together, she daintily dabbed at her nose with a napkin and hopped down, taking my hand in hers.

“No, this is the perfect occasion to change scenery. Won’t you come with me somewhere warmer?”

“Somewhere warmer?”

“But of course. After all, these sorts of talks are best paired with a greeting to one’s parents, aren’t they?”

Huh? Before I could so much as cock my head, she dragged me off to the edge of the canton with astonishing strength.

“W-Wait, but this is—”

“Come, come, in you go. It’s much too cold outside. Snowy days are unbearable no matter how much cotton I stuff.”

I’d been led to a small, sturdily built house. Most homes in Konigstuhl were simple stone structures, but this was one of the few that boasted a mortar-coated exterior—a flame retardant that signified it was primarily fashioned out of wood instead. Reinforced wooden walls gave space to stuff insulation in between the two layers; this sort of architecture was popular in the Empire among the races weakest to the cold.

Yes, we were at Margit’s house.

“Stop, wait, hold on—I haven’t planned out what I’m going to say yet!”

“Isn’t it rather late to be worrying about that? Just speak plainly and explain the reality of the situation.” Margit opened the door and announced, “I’m home!”

While I was shaking in my boots trying to think of how best to break the rather significant news, she pushed on without a care in the world. I guess it was ever easy to be laid-back in one’s own home.

“My, my. Welcome home.”

Margit’s mother, Corale, greeted us as we entered a room hot with hearth fire. She looked young enough to be Margit’s sister, and the way her hair was tied just below her neck gave off a gentle impression...or at least, it would have, had she not been wearing traditional arachne garb that exposed vast swaths of skin and accessories.

She had at least twice as many ear piercings as her daughter, not to mention the dangling piece on her navel or the litany of intricate tattoos snaking across her bare shoulder and stomach. In particular, the one curling up to cradle her navel piercing looked like a symbol of lust. Back when I’d first seen her, I’d been terribly spooked: her copious inking felt like bizarre fetishism and clashed severely with the impression of her features.

Corale was one of the huntsmen of the canton. Famously, she’d fallen in love with Margit’s dad at first sight and immediately quit adventuring to woo him.

“Oh dear, oh my—if it isn’t little Erich. It’s been so long. I had heard you’d come back, but I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“L-Long time no see, Miss Corale. You’re exactly as I remember you...”

No, seriously, it was scary how little she’d changed. That she was the same age as my own mother had to be some kind of scam; she had to be an outlier, even among jumping spider arachne, right? I knew that physical decline tended to affect their bodies rapidly near the ends of their lives instead of being spread out like mensch, but she was so incomprehensibly unchanging that I had my suspicions she was an immortal.

“Oh, look at how big you’ve gotten, you. I can’t call you a little boy anymore, can I, young man? No wonder I’ve been feeling so old lately; you know, I found a gray hair the other day and—”

“Mother,” Margit cut in, “I don’t think we ought to keep our guest standing in the doorway.”

“Oh my, how rude of me. I’m sorry, little Erich.”

I was offered the only mensch chair in the house; despite my reservations, I sat down. Seating arrangements in the Trialist Empire were no different from my past life: the deeper into a house the seat was located, the more important the person was...which meant that this spot belonged to the father of the house. It looked like he wasn’t in right now, but Margit’s father Mister Heriot must ordinarily have sat here.

Speaking of Mister Heriot, he’d grown gray enough—for what reason I refused to ask—to look two generations removed from Miss Corale, but remained an active huntsman to this day. There was a reason Margit considered both her parents as teachers of the hunt: he’d earned the magistrate’s trust long before meeting the arachne adventurer. I had no cause to doubt her impression.

“I’m sorry we don’t have anything to treat you with. You know how winter is.”

Yet despite her words, my partner’s mother dexterously skittered to and fro and up and down on her spidery legs until a wonderful tea set was ready to serve. Out came the Rhinian classic of red tea alongside a very, very tough bit of wheat-based winter bread. To make the bread edible, it was paired with a watery stew of candied fruits; with an almost totally black sheen, this classic countryside ration was probably made from nearby raspberries.

“So, what brings you all this way? It isn’t every day someone comes knocking on a huntsman’s door during hunting season.”

The fruit jam was incredibly sweet, probably to help pack a lot of calories when on the hunt. The tea had been made on the bitter end, and with the bland, hard bread, the three paired perfectly. So perfectly, in fact, that the flavor distracted me enough to knock me off tempo.

She’s good. Although Miss Corale had a sweet smile on, she was a cunning woman. By whittling away at my guard with an air of friendliness and scrumptious snacks, she’d found her timing to steer the conversation to her own design. As a former adventurer, she no doubt had ample experience in negotiation—in fact, she might even have been the face of her party.

“I came here today because I have something very important to tell you,” I said.

“Oh, you have me all giddy. But I’m sorry, dear, I already have Heriot.”

“Mother!”

Suffering an unexpected racy joke from a taken woman nearly had me spit out my tea. Her daughter went red with anger and embarrassment, but Miss Corale herself displayed her maturity by keeping a cool smile throughout.

She’s really good. I can’t let my guard down. After holding back a cough with sheer force of will, I nonchalantly wiped the bleb of tea at the edge of my mouth. Sitting up, I looked into the woman’s eyes; they were the same amber as my partner’s.

The news I was to deliver wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. All I had to do was hold my head high and say it.

“Miss Corale, I—”

Was it thanks to my diligent training, day in and day out? Or was it my long nights spent working in the shadows and waiting for ambushes?

Either way, I managed to catch the throwing knife that had come flying at my face.

“Mother!”

Thankfully, the dagger was still sheathed; I wouldn’t have died no matter what. Still, a failed reaction would probably have seen me break a front tooth or two—it had been thrown that fast.

I’d sensed next to no intent, and Miss Corale’s windup had been practically nonexistent. She’d gone from sipping tea in a relaxed position to attacking in an instant. This went beyond natural prowess: she’d personally honed these skills.

Even though I’d known she was strong, her abilities surpassed my expectations. In the specialized field of assassination, she was even more masterful than Miss Nakeisha. Had I not already been nervous—or even had Margit not warmed me up with an ambush this morning—I doubted I would’ve been able to counter.

“What do you think you’re doing?!” Margit shouted.

“What does it look like? I’m having a little taste to see if he’s man enough to whisk away my eldest daughter.”

“A...taste?”

“Look at this face,” Miss Corale said, turning to me. “There are only two things you two could be here to talk about looking so serious: either you want my daughter or you’ve gotten her pregnant out of wedlock.”

The statements just kept getting more scandalous. At this point, the surprise of being attacked out of the blue was completely gone.

But come to think of it, I mean, she wasn’t completely wrong. Our promise had, in some ways, basically been a proposal; that thought kept me from responding right away.

“Oh? If you aren’t answering, does that mean it’s the latter? My husband and I won’t cause a fuss over you two seeing each other before marriage, but to dress her up for the ceremony with a baby aboard will certainly be a challenge...”

“Mother! Would you— Agh! Please, just leave it at that! The only one who’s allowed to toy with Erich is me!”

Yeah, you tell— Hey. Wait a second, I don’t know about that last part.

“Well, jokes aside, you managed to catch the dagger. Very well. You’re here to take away my daughter, aren’t you?”

“Miss Corale...”

“I still remember how you were preparing to become an adventurer before you left the canton. And how you were sweet-talking our precious heir in the process.”

Though I felt like “sweet-talking” was a bit misleading, I couldn’t say anything back. It was true that I’d told Margit I’d feel more confident with her by my side, and our episode on the twilit hill definitely approached that level.

“To think a boy from a nice, respectable family would take yet another girl from a good family and run off to be a sellsword. I suppose blood truly does flow from parent to child.”

“Mother...”

“I was an adventurer, and Johannes ran away from home to become a mercenary. Between the two of us, I’d figured at least one of our children would carry on the torch, but I never would have guessed it would be his most well-behaved son.”

Miss Corale placed a hand on her cheek and sighed; she must’ve had her fair share of tribulations as an adventurer. Her expression betrayed her worry as she looked at the two troubled children in front of her.

“I won’t complain, though. My daughter’s getting up there in age, you know.”

“Can you not put it that way?” Margit cut in.

“But you are. You’re one step shy of being an unwanted bride.”

“An ungranted bride! The truth is shameful enough as is—don’t make it any worse! Are you doing this on purpose?!”

“Of course I am.”

“The nerve of you...”

“I am your mother, after all.”

Her smug smile was just like her daughter’s, and I could easily see where Margit had learned to tease others.

Evidently, the dagger was the extent of my trial; Miss Corale’s attention had shifted squarely to Margit. Frankly, I had no gripes with the test. Had I been in her position, I would surely have brought out a wooden sword or the like to gauge my strength too. Who could blame her? This was her kid’s future on the line: she couldn’t just entrust her daughter to some idiot—especially an idiot who couldn’t even block a hit when she was going easy.

Yet while the mother’s evaluation of her daughter’s partner was over, now she had to confirm whether her daughter had the will to back up this decision.

“And because I’m your mother,” Miss Corale went on, “I have to ask: you aren’t just letting a cute boy string you along, are you?”

“Do you truly think I’d be so flimsy?” Margit asked back. “You must take me for some kind of fool.”

The young huntress squinted her eyes. Her glare gleamed with animosity beyond what a child could muster for their parent. This wasn’t a tantrum predicated on being belittled: her anger was that of someone whose beliefs had been trespassed upon, down to the innermost recesses of their heart.

All at once, I realized that in all our years together, we had never once put to words how we felt about each other. We’d played together so much that being with one another had become our default state, and we’d sharpened our skills together; but above all else, I had relied on her a great deal.

Formally educated and two years my senior, Margit had known much more about the world than I had in my early youth, and she’d gone out of her way to share that knowledge. She excelled in ways that I could never replicate, no matter how hard I tried, and that had seeded massive respect for her in me.

Yet I still didn’t know why she’d taken a liking to me.

I had an extra lifetime of experiences and a blessing from a future Buddhaesque entity, but other than that, I was a normal guy. I was no more creative than the average two-bit commoner, and my dreams for the future were so childish that they were literal fairy tales.

Only now did I realize that I didn’t have any concrete reason for why she’d come with me. I know it was strange to ponder this after all but proposing, but what was I to her beyond being the little boy in the neighborhood?

“I’m not taking you for a fool, nor am I looking down on you. But what I wanted to question wasn’t your feelings for him, but your resolution for life. We will be family forever, but once you set off as an adventurer, you won’t ever be a part of this household again. Do you understand that?”

“...Of course I do.”

For a split second, Margit’s brow pulled up.

This world lacked the bounty and social welfare of my last, meaning that doting parents still couldn’t afford to coddle their own children. Kicking back at home while trying to hit it big as a musician or mangaka was a fantasy, even by noble standards. Everyone had to earn their keep. Dependents weren’t tax exemptions, but tax liabilities. Forget being a shut-in, simply returning home after leaving the nest was an unwelcome affair.

My father had only been able—more precisely, been forced—to give up the mercenary life for his family’s farm because my uncle had passed away young. These were the sorts of extenuating circumstances that had to be accepted once one put their hometown behind them.

“I’m sorry”; “I messed up”; “I want to take up the family trade after all”—these were impossible requests. By the time a departee returned, their family was usually rearing their replacement, even if that meant adopting a child.

“Then the house will go to your sister,” Miss Corale said.

“That’s perfectly fine by me,” Margit replied. “I may come to visit as family, but I won’t come to be spoiled as a child.”

The mother and daughter stared into one another’s eyes for minutes on end. I could hardly breathe with all the tension in the air. Between the freedom of a fourthborn son and the expectations laid upon an eldest daughter was a vast chasm; it felt as if that difference had become a thick smog weighing down my lungs.

“And a huntress never goes back on her word?”

“You must be looking down on me to ask me that, mother. Even should I fall lifeless on a desolate road, I will be content so long as the corpse of my chosen lies beside me. How is that for resolve?”

The path of an adventurer was not for the faint of heart. I’d only managed on my way home because I had the means to protect myself. Some of those issues had been caused by my rotten luck, but an average person could still expect proportional misfortune. Lying on the side of a road with one’s skull exposed to the open air was, in truth, a merciful end. There were plenty of fates worse than death.

Margit knew what could await: if the day came when we didn’t have what it took, we could very well be subjected to the worst the world had to offer. Yet she’d made up her mind all the same.

If you asked me whether I could forgo hatred and vengeance in my final moment to use the last of my breath for Margit, I would answer yes in a heartbeat. Her glare, directed straight into her mother’s eyes, was a wordless declaration that she was ready to do the same.

To be cherished so dearly tightened up my chest and lit a fire below. I’d grown accustomed to the heart-pounding thrill of facing battle-lust, but I was unimmunized to this emotion. Is this...death by wholesome?!

“Hm,” Miss Corale said. “Very well. I’ll allow it. If you’d said something as trite as ‘I won’t regret it,’ or anything else that even begins to take your inheritance into account, I would have beaten the sense back into you. But it seems your determination is real.”

“Mother...”

As the daughter tried to process her emotions, the mother smiled a gentle smile and leaned forward to pat the girl on the head. It was as if she were caressing a baby. No matter how old the little arachne got, she would always be her mother’s child.

“When did you grow to be such a splendid huntsman? Listen well: never let your prey escape. Once you sink in your fangs, make it yours forevermore.”

“I don’t need you to tell me that.”

“Hee hee, look at you being all cheeky.”

Miss Corale ran through her daughter’s hair so thoroughly that Margit’s head tilted to one side and her pigtails came loose. Yet she didn’t resist one bit. There was something between them that I couldn’t see—something that must’ve made her mother’s palm feel warm and gentle. Of course she wouldn’t put up a fight.

Being patted on the head was a heartwarming thing. I’d forgotten all about it as an adult, but it had all come flooding back now that I was a child again: the joy of being accepted, the happiness of being worried about, and the gentle warmth of a loving hand.

It was a beautiful scene. So much so that I almost felt bad for sitting in on it.

“By the way, when will I be getting my first grandchild?”

“Mother!”

But it came crashing down all too quickly. Oh, the irony: the woman who’d created this precious moment had destroyed it with her own two hands.

[Tips] It is incredibly difficult to reclaim an inherited position after moving out of the home. Not only does one require the current head of household’s signature, but they must endure distrust from other members of the community, who will be skeptical of why they have returned.

Blocking is one of the foundations of battle, but blocking alone cannot be the end of things. If it is, then that isn’t defense—it’s fleeing.

I caught an all-out attack with an angled shield, twisting as I thrust forward; not only did I stop my opponent’s sword, but I sent it crashing into his own shield. Taking advantage of the opening I’d made, I lunged with my own blade to gently tap at the top of his inner thigh.

“There goes your main thigh artery.”

As a key pivot point, this spot was impossible to fully armor, despite having a major artery running through it. One deep cut could cause enough blood loss to knock a man out after another breath or two, especially when his heart was pounding from the heat of combat.

Mensch could hope for a few extra minutes to wallow in their last moments, while smaller races would just die outright. Sturdier folk like dvergar or the beastlier demihumans might manage to mount one final offensive before they went down.

Defense and offense are two sides of the same coin: the wooden slab in my hand had enough mass to give me some real play in how I approached things.

Crying out like a hawk on the horizon, I cut off another foe. He had his sword to one side, and I stepped forward to intercept his approach. By squatting down and bringing my shield to bear in a rising diagonal arc, I managed to scoop up the edge of his shield with mine; naturally, I sent it in the direction he’d postured his weapon in, making sure he no longer had a course of attack.

All that remained was to sweep him off his exposed feet and bop him on the head with my sword.

“Right between the eyes.”

As illustrated, the shield was a powerful ancillary to a fighter’s main weapon. Not only did it divert the current of incoming danger, but it served to herald the approach of one’s own deathblows. For a true master, it was just as dependable as a sword.

Another opponent approached, more cautiously this time. He slowly crept up while gauging our distance, so I crouched low and tackled my shield into his out of nowhere. His form crumbled, and I took the opportunity to trace the tip of my blade across his midsection.

“Your stomach, gone.”

So long as I followed the seam of his armor, my weapon would cut true. Whether a blade could make it through the chain, underarmor, and flesh that waited below depended heavily on the user’s skill, but it was a hell of a surer shot than trying to cut through that and the sturdy outer layer of leather. With the arc of this particular strike, his torso would no longer be able to hold back his innards and would no doubt pack the inside of his clothing with a stuffing of pure gore as he journeyed on to the heavens.

Another man tried to catch me by surprise with a shield bash of his own, but he’d picked his angle of approach unwisely. There was a science to it all, and in its absence, I had no reason to fear that he’d create an opening in my defenses. In fact, a half measure was more dangerous than doing nothing: I slid across the surface of his buckler to smack his head in cross-counter fashion.

“Skull smashed.”

Rimmed with metal and built of solid wood, a shield was more than enough to crack someone’s head wide open. A crushed brain suffered no thoughts. Whether they died instantly or not was irrelevant—flooded with excess blood, their head wouldn’t be in any condition to issue commands to the rest of the body. From there, it was a more trivial affair than quartering a pig strung up for slaughter.

Ah, but of course, one can never forget about the simple beauty of just shoving an enemy. One more came at me, so I pushed him into one of his friends. Nothing was quite as juicy as getting a foe to block for you and whittling away at their numbers at once.

“Grah!”

“Whoa?! Sorry, Kurst!”

Ooh, ouch. That one’s gonna sting deep in the shoulder. He hadn’t broken a bone, but the poor guy would probably struggle to bring his arm up higher than a ninety-degree angle for the foreseeable future.

But the fellow lowering his guard because he’d accidentally slashed his friend wouldn’t fly; the correct answer was to redouble his efforts against me and make up for his misstep with a vengeance. Chaotic brawls were the natural endpoint of battle, and this sort of minor misfortune was a given among mercenary circles.

I slid the flat of my blade over the edge of this unready fool’s shield to gently glide across his neck.

“Jugular severed.”

I had no need to explain how lethal a strike this was. The bloodways fueling the brain had tremendous throughput, and once busted open, they spewed into the open air with enough force to generate red mist. A loss in blood pressure became a loss in consciousness, which then became an eternal slumber. Even ogres—leaps and bounds more robust than any mensch—had no recourse once their heads were gone; this weakness was one to make note of.

I’d already used a shield on my way home, but boy, was I getting to like it. It was perfect for a one-handed swordsman like me.

Blocking was a Dexterous endeavor, perfect to abuse with Enchanting Artistry. But while that alone gave me more mileage than I could expect to see otherwise, I’d also taken six levels’ worth of Shield Mastery. Add to that some specializations in Parrying and Shield Bashes, and I had a delightful little build where the attacker could expect to do zero damage and die for the trouble.

Though I couldn’t exactly say I’d gotten a worthwhile rate of return, my year of toil had, if nothing else, given me a lot of experience points to play with—that, and the episodes on my way home.

Evading hot-blooded foes, kicking them down, cutting them up, and throwing in a shield bash when it struck my fancy—this was how I’d spent the past thirty minutes. Half an hour of this was quite the workout: I was hot and sweaty, and could feel the high of adrenaline starting to approach its peak...

“All right,” the captain barked. “That’s enough.”

...but I guess I couldn’t keep going if there were no more foes to fight.

“Thank you very much for the bout,” I said with a bow.

In unison, the Konigstuhl watchmen on the ground returned my pleasantry in voices that sounded like groans from hell.

I doubted I had to elaborate that this hadn’t been a real battle. Although my selection of mortal weak points might have painted the picture of this snowy plain dyed crimson, the truth was that we’d been sparring with wooden swords and training shields.

Being as free as I was, I’d taken the chance to join in on a Watch drill, only for Sir Lambert to get a funny idea in his head. “Since you’re here and all,” he’d said, “why don’t you give the boys a taste of what they serve in the capital?”

So started my melee against the entirety of the Konigstuhl Watch. Our hometown sparring sessions were structured like freeplay machines at arcades: you could continue past a game over as many times as you wanted to so long as you had the will. Hell-bent on taking a point, my old compatriots had gotten up again and again and again; it had been an exhausting bout, considering how little I’d invested into Stamina.

At first, my old seniors had been eager to show me up, and my new juniors—the boys who were still in the selection process—had been excited to test themselves against their rumored predecessor. But once they’d begun losing, they started to hound me with dogged desperation. By the end of the session, every single one of them had been so desperate that they were ready to work themselves into the dirt if it meant scoring a hit.

Man, could I sympathize with the poor soldiers who had to fight defenders in a siege. Once backed into a corner—whether physical or mental—people could muster an infinite surge of motivation. The Empire’s policies against undue slaughter and looting were probably in place because the powers that be didn’t want to deal with enemies like this.

“Wonderful. You’re good. Here I thought you might rust under a noble, but it looks like you’ve only gotten sharper.” As I wiped down my sweat, the font of mayhem we called a captain leisurely clapped at my performance.

No skin off my back, though. Everyone here had the fundamentals down, so this scuffle made for a good bit of exercise. I was sure Sir Lambert had pegged my strength at a glance and determined that a one-versus-all fight wouldn’t put me in danger.

Or rather, he’d probably realized that I wouldn’t be able to let loose all my spare energy otherwise.

“I’ll have you know that I didn’t exactly spend my days in Berylin taking it easy, Captain.”

“Sure, but as an indentured servant? I figured you’d have been too busy with your chores to keep up your chops. But looking at you now...what kind of hell have you been through?”

His sunken eyes were as menacing as ever, but there was a curious twinkle in them now. In a tremendously good mood, he grinned from ear to ear.

Come to think of it, he was right. How many times had I nearly died since leaving home? No normal servant ought to have experienced as many near-death... Hey, wait! A normal servant shouldn’t be nearly dying at all.

“That’s confidential,” I said. “You’ll have to let me off on that one.”

“Ha ha ha! Figures! But you look like you know your way around a shield better than you do silver spoons and lacquerware. Can you blame me for being curious?”

Laughing heartily, Sir Lambert walked around with a pail of water and splashed scoops of the stuff onto his fallen men. It was meant to shock them awake while also helping them rehydrate, but man, was it a rough time in the winter. Seeing him do so with a big smile was enough to confirm he was as terrifying as ever.

“Well, there was...a lot that happened.”

I’d spent a lot of time with just a sword, and I’d been worried for a while that it would take me a long time to get used to using a shield. Thankfully, that hadn’t been the case. Small bucklers didn’t get in the way, and were made specifically to take advantage of a user’s Dexterity, as opposed to larger ones that relied on Endurance or Strength.

Better still, my mystic catalyst was a ring, so I didn’t need to keep my left hand free in order to cast spells. Covering it up with a shield just played into the surprise factor when I switched from being a basic swordsman to weaving in magic. My old boss really did have a good head on her shoulders.

Actually, in hindsight, Lady Agrippina had been quite the data cruncher herself. With the way she analyzed information, I bet she would’ve been an incredible munchkin had we ever gotten the chance to roll dice at a shared table; no doubt we’d both have recoiled at how unsavory the other’s build wound up being.

What a pity. If only someone could invent TRPGs here, we could put her talents to use. For all her grumbling about how she hated people, she had a soft spot for the people she let into her life; if we had a usual crew, surely she’d make for a great GM...

My meandering train of thought was pulled back into reality by a sudden sensation of hostility. I jumped back, whirling around to face the source, only to find that our captain had brought out his own wooden sword.

Holy shit... It wasn’t as if he’d actually attacked me while I wasn’t looking. He’d just gotten ready to fight, and that was enough to make me want to turn tail—what kind of crazy build did he have, anyway?! How was an average soldier supposed to do anything while debuffed by his intimidating aura?

A perilous gleam flickered in his menacing eyes. He had a look only a career soldier could project: rent flesh and spilt blood were how he bought his next meal, and his gaze betrayed a hunger tempered only by rational thought.

His form was just as I remembered: a long two-handed sword in his right hand with the blade resting on his shoulder. Despite basically standing upright, he didn’t have any openings to note.

Palm up and pulling toward himself, he beckoned me with two short waves of his left hand—the imperial classic. This was about as overt an invitation to throw down as one could find in all the lands.

Fair enough. I didn’t know whether I’d live up to his expectations, but I was up for the challenge.

Zweihanders were a weapon reserved for literal professionals. Nearly as long as its wielder, the tremendous weight and unwieldiness meant it was a liability to oneself and one’s allies in the hands of an amateur.

However, in adept hands, it boasted finer control than a spear, as well as the option to cut through polearm shafts with overwhelming strength. Draftees across the world feared the mercenaries of the Empire: a conscripted soldier’s only redeeming quality was the number of his peers, but Rhinian mercs were infamous for turning untrained enemies into clouds of guts skirring across seas of blood. The zweihander was their trademark weapon, perfectly tuned for the chaos of a battlefield.

But their awesome might and skill with the blade were not the only reasons our nation’s mercenaries struck fear in their enemies. Most of all, it was because the style required the user to put his life on the line, and they always did without a second thought.

They threw themselves into lines of spears with nothing but a sword. They broke into enemy ranks, cutting down the myriad of deadly attacks trying to stop them. Naturally, many failed to parry every attack and lost their lives because of that, but without fail, they marched straight into the lion’s jaws to bring the battle into a chaotic melee that only the most seasoned could navigate.

Theirs was not the courage of brutes; it was that of heroes, willing to put their life on the line to unlock peerless prowess.

Those were the sorts of hellish landscapes a mercenary endured...and yet Sir Lambert had managed to grow old enough to retire. Pair with that how he’d been directly invited to serve under a noble, and it was plain as day to see how monstrous he really was.

I put up my shield and dashed to the right; being right-handed, it was harder to put power into my offensive if the enemy was on that side. Keeping my blade dangling low, I aimed for a stab: if I could hop into an uncomfortably close range, I could make use of my smaller frame and steal a knee or ankle hit that would knock him out of commission.

But, evidently, my choice of action very much struck Sir Lambert’s fancy, because...he gripped his sword’s handle with two hands.

In all my life, I’d pretty much only seen him carelessly swing with one hand. His weapons were heavy enough that I used to think they were purely ceremonial, and yet he managed feats like cutting the wick off a burning candle with one hand. If a guy like him used both his hands, what do you think would happen?

“Whoa?!”

This. This is what would happen.

The slantwise slash of his sword split the air, the blade coming at me with such speed that I couldn’t track it with my eyes. As he descended upon me, he threatened to crush me flat. I intercepted with my shield, just barely managing to adjust the angle so I wouldn’t be sandwiched between his sword and the ground. Though I jumped back to alleviate the pressure, the force of impact made it seem more like I was being blown away.

What a blow. Had he used a real sword, that strike could’ve cleaved straight through any armor in its way to chop at flesh. It wasn’t just brute force either: his ludicrous strength was being guided by intellect. Anyone who couldn’t match his skill would be run over without so much as a chance to roll for reaction.

The famous saying went that it was best to be water, to not be rigid. Yet here stood a man whose rigidity could cut through even the formlessness of water. Sir Lambert’s strength wasn’t predicated solely on impeccable swordsmanship, but came as a holistic package. Behind the scenes, I suspected he had traits that gave him a sturdier frame, thus increasing his overall firepower. I knew I already had it good, but oh, what I would give to peek at other people’s builds.

“What’s wrong? Already done?”

“...As if!”

Well, I guess asking for anything else would just come back to bite me. Expelling the thought, I amped myself up and reentered close quarters.

The captain’s tip-heavy blade made for rapid swings, and he was deft enough to cover a lot of space without opening himself up. Pinpoint attacks aiming for the edge of my shield—as opposed to its face—particularly vexed me as he tried to peel away my defenses; his wherewithal to kick away my quick counters to cover his few openings was beyond annoying.

To be fair, I was evading his attacks too, and purposefully positioned myself in ways that made it hard for him to turn into his swings, so I might have been just as obnoxious on his end. But being locked in a flurry of attacks where a single missed perception check could mean eating an unblockable hit was not very conducive to my mental health goals.

Weary of weathering the storm of steel, I made some space between us—only to unconsciously sense something coming right toward my face.

Had I not brought up my shield on instinct, I would have lost then and there. A stinging shock assaulted my left forearm as the rock I’d batted away shattered into pieces.

He’d launched a stone at me. As soon as he recognized that I’d left his range of attack, he’d dug his sword into the ground to fling a rock my way, the bastard!

Stone throwing was one of the few long-range options a fighter had, but I’d never seen it employed so seamlessly. Not only had the captain kept his form similar to a regular swing to ambiguate his intentions, but he’d launched the rock with enough force to make my arm go numb. If a backline mage ate one of these, they would certainly die.

It only made sense: at war, there were always going to be mages trying to apply the principle of death at first sight. Any warrior who’d racked up a history of successful battles was sure to have a means of dealing with the enemy’s pesky rear guard.

Barring few exceptions, the range of any spell was limited by the caster’s view of the field. Firing off a big AoE with blatant disregard for life was one thing, but anyone trying to avoid hitting their allies would need to be able to have clear sight of their foes.

The Trialist Empire and its mercenaries were famous for plunging the front lines into pandemonium and then excelling amid the discord. A middling mage would struggle to find opportunities to cast spells without fear of friendly fire; if they had the courage to get closer, that would be when Sir Lambert would blast them with a rock.

It was the perfect way to pick off the back line. Judging from how accurately he’d aimed for my face, he could probably land the mark with ease so long as nobody cut off his line of fire; with how hard the impact had been on my shield, an average spellcaster’s barrier would do no more than slow it down. Being hit by a stone, even a lightly tossed one, would break their focus and interrupt whatever spell they were preparing. If it broke a nose or something, then they’d be in too much pain to concentrate on weaving anymore.

You’re a sly old fox, you know that? Evidently, the veteran had a way of dealing with anything that might crop up on a battlefield.

“Good save!” Sir Lambert exclaimed in good humor. “Well, then. Let me get a little serious!”

I knew he hadn’t been giving it his all, but was he actually going to push me any harder for a training duel?!

My surprise was cut short when his sword vanished.

No, wait. It didn’t disappear... It’s just out of view!

Letting my sixth sense take the wheel, I raised my sword; an invisible strike came zooming toward my face. Upon making contact, I jumped with the momentum to earn myself space.

Churning my dizzied mind, I reevaluated the situation. He hadn’t magically poofed away his weapon; the effect was achieved through pure skill. He must’ve read my blind spot from the movements of my eyes and planted his attack right where I wouldn’t see it.

Mensch—or rather, any race that shared our eyes—were invariably burdened with a terrible flaw. A small patch of our retinas lacked photoreceptors, thus creating a blind spot. Although the brain automatically made our vision seem whole, there was a slice of space about fifteen degrees temporally and three degrees below the horizontal in which the image we saw was unreal filler. In essence, there was a piddling five degrees of vision where we couldn’t see what was right in front of us...and he’d thrust his sword squarely in that region.

“Not bad,” he whistled. “Can’t believe you parried that!”

“How the hell...are you still talking?!”

Held toward an eye, even a massive sword only appeared as large as it was thick. No matter how small my blind spot was, a blade fit comfortably inside. Being able to watch my eyes in the thick of combat and perfectly aim his sword with all his usual speed and power was straight out of a stunt book. I’d been getting a little full of myself now that I had Scale IX swordplay, but facing this was enough to knock me down a peg.

“C’mon,” he barked, “block it properly! Even with a wooden sword...”

“...your attacks are strong enough to break my skull open! I know—would it kill you to hold back?!”

“You’re one to talk, Erich! Your parries would break my fingers if I didn’t have a solid grip, so fair’s fair!”

Argh! To make matters worse, his sight-reading skills weren’t just for his own attacks: he kept shifting around to make it harder for me to focus on his weak points!

Had I lacked the Insight to broadly perceive the whole of his form at once, I wouldn’t have been able to deal with it at all. Some poor mage trying to get a lock on him in a war zone never would’ve stood a chance. Magia could weave extra targeting spells to automate their attack spells, but the kinds of normal sorcerers found in military skirmishes almost always had to aim manually. Besides, tracking spells were difficult and costly; those who could use them would try not to unless there was a mounted enemy whom they absolutely needed to hit.

The man knew his stuff. Offensive magecraft was predicated on delivering incomprehensible death at first sight, and the other side of that coin was the grave danger that followed if the first strike wasn’t lethal. Sir Lambert had the ability to both dodge the initial blast and return the favor with something just as deadly—he was a certified witch-breaker. How many spellcasters had had their spirits broken by this walking maelstrom of violence?

What a monster... Seriously, why the hell are you running a canton watch out in the middle of nowhere?

“Haah, ahh, ugh...”

Damn, I’m running out of juice. Part of my exhaustion was thanks to the multiman melee with the other watchmen, but the brunt of it was from the absolute focus I needed to keep up with someone of Sir Lambert’s level. For a squishy guy like me, every single exchange whittled away at my mental fortitude, meaning a battle of attrition put me at a heavy disadvantage.

But this was so much fun. It was awesome! As someone who’d spent my whole life building up my own strength, facing off against someone who could really turn a fight into anyone’s game wound me right up. Trampling the strong with the stronger was refreshing, to be sure, but there was nothing in the world like a fight where everything rode on the final roll of the dice!

It was a true shame that these were wooden swords. If only he had his real weapon—what sort of hideous beast would I get to face then?

I was sure he’d have what it took to fend off a fleet of Unseen Hands equipped with swords. The gear he’d looted over the years had to include some kind of counterplay against magic. And what of his men? In tandem with a commander like him, what kind of absurd challenge would they provide?

How I loathed this fragile body of mine. I would have liked to keep going forever, but alas. I had no intention of losing, so it was time to force the end.

After sliding a diagonal slash across the face of my shield, I stepped into range and thrust my blade at his face. He jerked his neck to one side and countered in fractions of a second by trying to knee me with the tree trunks he called legs. I dodged by a hair’s breadth and rolled back to avoid the follow-up he made with his sword.

I leaped to my feet and blocked another sideways slash...only to be met with the earsplitting sound of my shield being reduced to wood chips.

“Wha?!”

Simple as they were, these shields were well-made, boasting an arched design and metal rims. They were more than enough to use in conjunction with wooden swords, but it seemed that rule failed to hold true after soaking up dozens of attacks from Sir Lambert.

Dammit! We were just getting to the good part!

“Gh...”

On the captain’s end, his weapon had also given out. Maybe a blunted metal sword could’ve handled his strength, but a wooden one just couldn’t cut it. I had to admit, though: I would be very pleased if any of that was due to my skill and not his brute strength.

“Ah?! The captain broke another one!”

“Oh, crap! The smith’s gonna chew us out again!”

“C’mon, Captain! How many does that make?!”

“Wha— Me?! It’s not my fault!”

With the Watch mired in budgetary concerns, the watchmen’s cries signaled the end of our match. Saved by the jeers of those who’d recovered enough to sit up and watch, I shook out my left arm and breathed a sigh of relief.

[Tips] Canton watches receive stipends from their magistrate, but they usually aren’t all too hefty. Many watches are supported in part by the canton they serve.

As he watched the melee unfold, Lambert found himself in a good mood—perhaps his best in months.

Many tryout sessions ago, one boy had gotten up among the crowd of bawling brats. Built like a dainty little girl, the runt of the litter had gotten up again and again, until at last he’d even picked up a stone to try and defend himself. Lambert remembered the scene well.

Talent was a fickle thing. Who would have guessed that those delicate fingers, all but made to carve wooden statuettes, would be so at home around the handle of a sword?

The Konigstuhl Watch was well trained—so much so that its captain was convinced they’d hold their own against his old mercenary crew. In a full-on skirmish, he had confidence they’d be able to soundly win against any enemy so long as they were only marginally outnumbered. That, to him, was enough to feel satisfied as an instructor.

Yet Erich had always been cut from a different cloth. He soaked in new teachings as a rainless field did water, blooming into a teeming flower patch each time. He’d cultivated his own unshakable logic as he studied the near barbaric hybrid sword arts, to a degree hardly even seen among Lambert’s old crew.

Such was the boy’s propensity for the craft that Lambert had tutored him personally, rather than casting him in with the rest of his men. A thorough defeat at the hands of a ten-year-old boy was enough to shatter the toughest of egos.

Before so much as setting foot outside the canton, the boy had been strong. Jealous onlookers would grumble that it was talent at work, but there was a level of strength unattainable by mere talent: the mercenaries and knights who’d survived repeat scuffles with Lambert were prime examples. Some individuals shone amid their peers, and then went on to lead them to glory: every so often, the world simply produced a character that was unreasonably strong.

Lambert knew, not as a point of pride but one of fact, that he was one such individual. He was a blood-tested champion who’d rallied men against armies twice their size and won. His enemies had planned foolproof stratagems that had all but laid victory in their hands; what else could he be to them if not an affront to reason?

The young man who’d returned from the capital was another such example.

Lambert was proud of his hardened crew of veterans; the younger among them would only need a bit longer to join their ranks; and the boys in training weren’t good, but they had gusto. Altogether, he’d drilled them into one contiguous mass of military might.

Yet here was his pride and joy being tossed around like a plaything. Today’s spar focused on the chaos of a melee, meaning that they didn’t have the spears and bows to put their numbers to proper use; still, one would expect a single sword to at least graze their target. This was a practice match where they weren’t even allowed to participate: watching them eat hits to the vitals without any fight at all was downright comical.

Perhaps the biggest joke of all was that Erich still seemed comfortable. That was the calm carriage of someone who still had a trick or two up his sleeve. He likely had some means of breaking through if his opponents ever managed to surround him.

Eventually, his men could go on no longer, and Lambert’s curiosity grew too large to contain. Weapon in hand, he beckoned the young swordsman on; despite just having run amok in an exhausting one-on-many fight, Erich responded with enthusiasm.

Today’s opponent was not someone Lambert could flatten with a half-hearted swing of his blade. For the first time in ages, he placed a second hand on his sword: this was not a spar meant to instruct, but a duel meant to crush.

Yet Erich did not fall. Lambert had swung with pinpoint precision—an unblockable attack that would crush the boy between blade and earth. But with an ingenious angle of his shield, Erich had managed to jump back in the nick of time and use the momentum to build space.

Quick thinking, Lambert noted. The kid had a good head on his shoulders tying together his overall technique.

How long had it been since he’d last done this? The captain’s smile twisted into a wicked grin as he prepared to go all out.

Controlling his blade with polished mastery, the man took ruthless aim at Erich’s vitals—if the boy didn’t dodge, that was his problem. This wooden replica wasn’t quite the same as Lambert’s trusty zweihander, but that was fair enough; Erich wasn’t used to his weapon either.

The boy was no disappointment: unwilling to allow a hit after a mere handful of exchanges, he parried with gratifying precision. Attacks that would inevitably have torn down a thoughtless fighter came thundering down one after another, but he dealt with each one in a display of peerless elegance.

He’s grown up to be a good swordsman, Lambert marveled.

Men were creatures of talent: one’s greatest strength was sure to be another’s direst weakness. All too many of them began their training without taking this lesson to heart. How many boys had Lambert seen take to massive weapons carried only by the brawniest of men, only to discover that the heftiest of arms chose their wielders with great scrutiny? Skill alone could not compensate for the physical necessities of mass, and a disheartening number of prospective fighters ruined their potential by walking paths unfit for them.

But Erich had found his calling. Though he was still growing, it was evident that he wouldn’t be a big man by any metric; as such, he was best off striking a balance between speed and weight.

The transcendent detail was that he hadn’t merely given himself to natural disposition: his style had a twist unique to him. Always dancing just out of reach—or in reach, but in a spot that wouldn’t allow for a full swing—quickly grated on the nerves of any foe. In spite of that, he used the relative shortness of his blade to facilitate strong offensives even when he was in tight quarters.

The kid makes for an annoying opponent, Lambert thought. Then how about I test him?

The captain began unveiling his secret techniques—ones which he’d developed by feel over years on the battlefield and hadn’t once shared with his watchmen—but to no avail. He slung a rock lodged in the dirt at the boy; he slipped into his blind spot. These tricks had won him the heads of skilled enemy soldiers, their faces permanently warped in surprise.

But Erich kept up. Seeing through these surprises couldn’t just be a matter of talent or skill. The only thing that could take a warrior to the next level was instinct, and the only thing to hone instinct was raw experience.

The experience needed to sense murderous intent and keep it at bay with snap reactions could only be earned on the bloodiest of battlefields. It was an indescribable thing that seeped deep into one’s body.

Three short years. How had he been blessed with so much violence in that time? As ashamed as he was to admit it, Lambert couldn’t help but envy the boy. The opportunities for a warrior’s mettle to be tested were few and far between—treasures to be unearthed.

Oftentimes, a tour of war would only bring trifling opponents. Boring enemies could become coin, of course, but they would never sate the ambition of those who sought the summit. That his protégé had gotten so lucky in such a short span filled Lambert to the brim with envy.

If I had gotten those same opportunities, how high could I have climbed?

Whether the self-scorn had gotten to him or not, Lambert decided to step into Erich’s range. Punching or kicking a man down to open him up for a fatal slash was one of the old merc’s favorite tricks. Every part of the body was a weapon, and mastery of them all was the mark of a professional, after all.

Kicking the boy off-balance, Lambert forced an interaction where the next strike couldn’t be dodged or blocked. He brought his blade down slantwise from above, making it as hard as possible to parry.

Okay. Show me what you’ve got.

After a brief moment of recoil, Erich caught the attack not with the face of his shield, but just on its edge, letting the sword glide across its surface. While it would’ve been easier for him to put his weight on the blade to pin it down after initial contact, he’d made the smart call to avoid any potential follow-ups below the belt.

Sending the strike back up at an angle, though, was tremendously difficult. He would need exact control of his core and an immaculately gentle touch, or he’d be crushed, shield and all—Erich had both.

That the shield splintered into pieces was an unfortunate inevitability. The watchmen manhandled the thing every day in their training exercises, and it wasn’t exactly the highest-quality equipment to begin with. Rather, it was a miracle he’d been able to deflect such monstrous blows at all.

In his mind, Lambert sighed in awe. He’d positioned himself such that his lethal strike could be instantly followed up with another from the side, but the blade in the corner of his eye told him that wouldn’t be happening.

The captain’s wooden sword had bent out of shape from being knocked away. Made of refuse lumber, it was as shoddy as the shield...but this wasn’t the work of the man’s ludicrous strength. No, it was the result of an absolutely perfect parry.

Embarrassing as it was for a grown man of his age, the veteran mercenary was bitter. Being stopped by a fifteen-year-old kid when he had been giving it his all left an unwelcome aftertaste in his mouth. A stinging thought simply wouldn’t leave the back of his mind: How strong was I back when I was his age?

That, and also how he’d wrecked another piece of equipment.

“Ah?! The captain broke another one!”

“Oh, crap! The smith’s gonna chew us out again!”

“C’mon, Captain! How many does that make?!”

Neither of the two could continue fighting. Lambert turned back to bark at his men, swallowing the impossible urge to one day face the boy in a real fight.

[Tips] Earning their bread through battle, mercenaries in the Trialist Empire are soldiers in all but name. Specialized in joint operations—particularly those held in messy and confusing conflicts—they are well-known for their strength and organization. Farmhand draftees are only useful in battle when in formation with a spear, and Rhinian mercs excel at breaking down the structure of combat.

However, earning their bread through battle also means they are unlikely to accept bad odds or long, drawn-out sieges. Not only does this pose a logistical challenge for strategizing generals, but it comes with great risk: send them to a losing fight, and who knows how their loyalties might shift?

Prices often vary between the city and countryside, but my Earthling sensibilities and I can’t seem to get over how the rural side gets higher prices.

I supposed it should’ve been obvious considering how both manufacturers and distributors were based in urban areas. Take a simple plank of wood: its price depended on the scope of local forestry industries, the scale of nearby manufacturing plants, and the number of merchants ferrying goods around. All these factors were tailored to meet demand, so it was only natural that the countryside would see its higher costs factored into the final price.

Ugh, I should’ve bought up more stuff in the capital. How was I supposed to know it’d cost twice as much here?

On this sunny winter afternoon, I found myself hauling overpriced wooden planks into the stable; I didn’t want to get wood chips all over my family home, of course. Today’s arsenal included not only my trusty whittling set, but also a catalog of carpentry tools and a special bottle of ink.

I still couldn’t get over the price: I hadn’t really gotten the opportunity to buy stuff as a kid, but it shocked me to think that everything other than food cost far more here than the city. All the workers’ associations in Berylin—and the thaumalogical advancements shared by the College—had gotten me used to much more palatable prices. At this rate, I was going to have a hell of a time trying to find catalysts for my spells.

Expenses aside, at least I’d found what I needed. Giving up was a skill, and it was time to let go of my yearning for one-click delivery. I needed to clear my head and just be happy that I could trade for everything with money in the first place.

I sketched an outline onto the slabs of timber with a piece of charcoal. Once satisfied, I picked up my carving knife...

“Boo.”

“Eep?!”

...and promptly dropped it when a breath tickled my ear.

Whirling around with a hand on my ear, I found Margit looking at me with a mischievous smile. Dammit, that marks another loss for me...

“Thank you kindly for the adorable reaction.”

“Hey, that’s dangerous. I could’ve hurt myself in a panic.”

“Why do you think I surprised you before you began working?”

Between the lines was the news that she’d been watching me for a while now. Man, builds specced for racial bonuses were so unfair. All we mensch got was a clumsy, frail body with two eyes that only worked in substantial light.

In contrast, jumping spider arachne had night vision good enough to see in pitch darkness; forget balancing on uneven ground, she could cling to vertical walls and even ceilings; and no matter how high up she was, she could slow her fall with a well-placed thread of silk. Being one of the lowliest rungs on the humanfolk ladder, any one of these traits was enough to make me green with envy.

I supposed I could begrudgingly make do since I had one such arachne on my side. Margit alone sufficed to ward off the danger of an ambush, so it wouldn’t make much sense for me to invest in her role.

Magic that let mensch exceed the bounds of their species was as expensive as it was difficult, not to mention the abundance of side effects. If I could get away with delegating something to a party member, I was best off doing so. As much fun as it would be to be adept at everything, any build that had me questioning whether my experience points were being put to good use wasn’t one for me.

“And?” Margit asked. “What exactly are you building? This is a rather grand design to be a mere piece of furniture.”

“Just a little something,” I answered.

My experience points had better uses. This box I was making was a catalyst for my new Matter Transmission spell—that’s right, I’d brought my space-bending magic up to Scale IV.

I’d touched on how expensive the madam’s specialty was in the past, but I’d been shaking upon confirming the investment. A year’s worth of experience boosted by Limelit—which ended up being more than I’d anticipated, though I didn’t understand why—had vanished, along with everything I’d earned on my journey home. After all that, I could finally move inanimate objects through spacetime.

But even then, I had some major restrictions. I could only transport things that were small and light enough to carry in one hand, one at a time, and most restrictive of all, I could only open portals to set locations. This was an achievement considering the level of transport available in this world, but still.

Personally, I had a theory that the steep costs associated with space-bending magic were put in place by the gods Themselves. The proliferation of transport and communications technology was sure to push civilization forward by leaps and bounds; it felt as though the world itself had put in a fail-safe to make sure that it wouldn’t see undue advancement.

If true, then the plan had worked: Lady Agrippina had claimed that the practitioners of the craft grew fewer in number with every passing generation. Everyone who studied magecraft knew it to be the pinnacle of convenience, but there was simply too much to learn—too many barriers to free usage. Most simply gave up on the field entirely.

I simply couldn’t think of any other explanation as to why the future Buddha’s incredibly lenient blessing would be so stingy here. Just getting to Scale III had cost me as much as maxing out Hybrid Sword Arts. This had to be the universe itself trying to limit the ways in which it could be fundamentally broken.

Not that I couldn’t relate: wanting to limit things on the level of space-bending magic made sense for anyone trying to build a cohesive world. Every GM has had a moment where they’ve thought to themselves, Oh, wait. This spell totally invalidates the whole story. I’d seen mind readers break whodunits and teleporters whisk clients safely from one town to another, all while skipping the campaign’s worth of story beats that had been planned for the road there... I’d left open a lot of holes in my early campaigns.

So this was how it had to be. A world that worked against the GM was sure to crumble eventually. Unfortunately.

Getting back to the actual space-bending, I’d successfully managed to move matter through a wormhole—though that, too, had been quite a challenge. Boring out an extradimensional hole in the fabric of reality with raw mana was, to put it lightly, hard. Making a subnanometer-thin slice of space reach into the back of spacetime was difficult enough; the arcane mathematics required to let physical matter pass through without deforming in terrible and irreversible ways was beyond complex. So intricate was the process that any living being adjusted to inhabit a piddling three dimensions would have their brain obliterated by the surreality in an instant.

All this to say, my great investment had only given me the ability to pass inanimate objects and spells through. I’d hesitated a lot even just to get to this point: the promise of adding to my arsenal of incomprehensible violence with Scale IV space-bending magic was good, but was it better than sitting on Scale III with a huge pile of experience for a rainy day?

As it turns out, my answer was yes: I wanted to let non-space-bending spells pass through my own portals.

This provided its own set of challenges. Lady Agrippina had made it look like an everyday affair, but weaving one spell in the midst of another was akin to shooting a bullet out of the air. It was all but physically impossible.

Weaving together complex formulae into one single system belonged to a dimension of its own. The scoundrel was a freak of nature for being able to casually improvise these sorts of spells, and my more ordinary capacities left me stuck barely cracking the threshold of convincing the universe to turn a blind eye.

But while the ability to send magic through a portal didn’t sound as flashy as ferrying a whole person, there were some tricks to be played. I had some neat ideas I’d need to test out later.

The real downside was that, for all my investment, the magic was still woefully inefficient. I’d bolstered my overall mana capacity and I still risked running dry after a single poorly thought-out cast.

This box was going to solve that, though.

My arachne partner found herself a place to sit and cheer me on as I began whittling away along the charcoal outline. Once it was carved out, I took the special flask of ink I’d readied in Berylin and coated the edges with its contents.

Mixed with all sorts of arcane drugs, the ink dried quickly, resisted decay, and was waterproof; but more importantly, it contained my blood, making it mystically significant when used as a catalyst.

By lining an enclosed space with magic circles drawn in this concoction, I could boost the precision and efficiency of my portals all at once. I’d built a chest about two sizes bigger than a coffin so I could pick out what I needed from inside with ease, and the catalyst would mean I could probably use it ten or so times a day without issue.

Basically, the most difficult part of the spell was trying to locate the point in space I wanted to make my portal at, and specifying that point in thaumaturgic terms. By limiting my target to a simple, marked box, I could cut corners on the most difficult part.

As an aside, this particular design had been given the green light by Lady Agrippina herself. She’d graced me with the oh-so-privileged impression of, “But why would you need to do such a thing?” but beggars can’t be choosers. Though she’d remained skeptical of its necessity until the end, her assistance in the planning meant I was sure it wouldn’t fail.

I carved out the inscriptions—only on the inside, since I didn’t want it looking like a cursed chest—in about two hours’ time. Just to test it out, I put the box together and threw some random branches inside.

“Hey, won’t you tell me what it is you’re making already?”

“It’ll be easier to show you. Give me just another second.”

I activated the spell. Unused to the disgusting feeling that accompanied large mana expenditures, I was hit with a wave of nausea that I had to swallow back. For a moment, my ring seemed to groan—until the blue gemstone wedged into it began to glow. I’d calculated things such that the lunar ring alone would suffice, but things were proceeding even more smoothly than I’d expected. It seemed Helga’s memory was lending a hand.

Once upon a time, there had been a girl I’d wished to help; though my attempts had proved futile, her wish to help me in turn took form within my palm.

I’d grown used to the sight under the scoundrel, but looking closely, the tear in space was chill-inducing. All it had done was spit out a few sticks, but the instinctive and absolute realization that the metaphysical hole led to a land that could not be returned from struck me with fear.

If I was going to feel this distressed, I wouldn’t be able to employ these in battle for the foreseeable future. I’d need to either improve my casting efficiency further or simply get used to the discomfort that came with mana expenditure.

“Goodness!”

Still, Margit’s surprise helped improve my mood, and I opened the chest to prove that this was no sleight of hand: the branches were gone.

Honestly, that went without saying. Otherwise, it would’ve meant they’d somehow duplicated instead—now that would be a real glitch. Who knew how the world would’ve reacted if I’d pulled that off?

“To think you can just...do that,” Margit said in awe. “Magic truly is amazing.”

“Right?” I bragged. “With this, we’ll be able to travel without lugging around heavy and breakable stuff. Instead, we can just shut it away somewhere safe and call for it whenever we need it. Worst case, I can summon the whole container.”

“In that case,” she said, cocking her head, “can you summon me as well? This chest looks as though it’d fit a person or two. Would we be able to bring along anyone we wished on our travels?”

Ahh... Yeah, I should’ve known she’d go there.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t feasible yet. Space-bending involved linking our reality with one totally different in physical make. Trying to transport something alive without accidentally delivering it in a deceased state was a much more complicated process.

Taking into account all the add-ons and the raw commitment to space-bending magic the task required, I could maybe have figured it out by now if I’d dedicated every single point of experience I’d earned in my entire life to it...I think.

Ah well, that was just how it went. Teleporting people was a ticket to wrecking every campaign ever to have been written. I couldn’t blame the universe for trying to keep things balanced to some degree: we GMs employed contrived antimagic zones to achieve a similar effect all the time.

“I see magic has its own set of caveats,” Margit said.

“I’m glad you understand. Lots of people tend to think that mages can do pretty much anything.”

Thankfully, my childhood companion was of a reasonable mind. Magecraft was the art of convincing reality to be generous in its interpretation of physical laws; breaking them outright wasn’t part of our repertoire. Nothing could not birth something: a crumb of bread couldn’t become infinite loaves, nor could a fried fish be resurrected.

Yet for the layman, it certainly could be seen as a do-it-all field of study. Perhaps my master had been right to bid me hide my ability: being asked to do the impossible out of ignorance sounded like a nightmare.

“Thank goodness you’re the one who’s come up with this spell.”

“Why’s that?”

“Think about it. This means you can sneak anything into any city. Anything.”

Margit’s last word sent a shiver down my spine.

My old boss might have used these portals for the equivalent of picking up a television remote, but I couldn’t let myself forget how unethical they were. These were a smuggler’s ticket to peddle any illicit substance under the sun; they were a maximum-security prisoner’s gateway to easy freedom.

No wonder the cranks of Polar Night were always working on their counterspells and antimagic barriers. Smuggling was cute compared to the other terrible things space-bending facilitated. One could abduct national persons of interest and ferry them off to foreign lands in the blink of an eye. Or worse...what if someone could open a portal above an enemy capital and send Great Work polemurgy in from afar?

The answer was that things would go to shit. It suddenly made so much sense why this alone would be enough to justify a professorship.

Margit and I looked at each other and made an oath: this box would be a secret that stayed between the two of us.

[Tips] The space-bending box is a wooden container made by Erich for the purpose of making his portals more cost-effective.

In my memory, slipping out of the house after dark was inextricably linked with a stop to the nearby convenience store. Feeling the cool night air and sinking my teeth into a cheap piece of fried chicken had a special place in my heart—knowing the snacks had been bad for me made them all the tastier.

Alas, I found myself far removed from the colorful glow of those neon signs; I slunk toward the forest as if chased off by the moon’s light. The unhealthy grease-juice of flavorful karaage, the saccharine sweetness of milk coffee, and the sticks of tobacco I’d picked up later on in life were nowhere to be found.

Here was a world inhabited only by me, the round moon, and the steel instrument of power gripped tight in my hands.

I practiced the basic stances over and over again. As improvisational as the Hybrid Sword Arts were, the style still had form: a stance for parrying, one for pushing forward, another for baiting an easy counterhit... I conjured up opponents in my mind’s eye as I swung to my heart’s content.

The Konigstuhl Watch’s training sessions made for great exercise, not to mention how the real possibility of death when facing Sir Lambert made it a great source of experience. Frankly, it was absurd how polished he was at his craft; I simply couldn’t wrap my head around how a man on even ground with my Divine swordplay and Dexterity had found himself back in this idyllic town.

Truth be told, I wasn’t entirely confident I’d win if I challenged him to a serious fight with just the blade at my hip. I had a hunch that a true confrontation wouldn’t come down to our raw stats, but rather a contest of who had more cards up his sleeve...that, and whom fortune favored.

War was a callous realm where men’s lives were whisked away like straw, proud knights fell to stray arrows, and the greatest of warriors vanished in the face of collateral mystic violence. That the captain had participated in serious military campaigns meant he must’ve come across real polemurgy during his career; the serendipity required to survive such an environment to the age of retirement was something I couldn’t help but envy.

Yet to begrudge a bird begot not flight; jealousy would earn me no luck of my own. It wasn’t like resentment at others’ pulls had ever made my gacha rolls better.

So I would simply have to kill him with my own style—I wasn’t going to let my magical talents just go to waste.

Warmed up from my practice routine, I began to rev my engines. Imagining a target a middling distance away, I chucked Schutzwolfe as hard as I could. Though she wouldn’t fly as true as a throwing knife, three kilograms of spinning steel would hurt whether I hit with the blade or the handle.

“Eins.”

Crutched up on an incantation and a snap of my fingers, I activated my magic. Reality tore, and the first of my pretagged swords—I hadn’t bothered tagging Schutzwolfe since she was always on my person—appeared in my hand. Slightly longer than my main weapon, this blade was one I’d won from the bandits who’d ambushed me and Mika on our trip to Wustrow.

I summoned an Unseen Hand and caught the flying Schutzwolfe and wielded her from afar. Fueled by Independent Processing, my style was closer to summoning a second swordsman than it was to dual wielding.

After going through a few more routines, I once again threw my sword at my imaginary enemy. Finishing off a cornered opponent by throwing one’s weapon was a pinnacle of beauty and style.

“Zwei.”

One by one, I summoned more blades to the mix and kicked it into higher gear. Next came three, then four, as I rotated through a whole arsenal of disposable weapons. Nameless though they were, the sturdy swords I’d won in battle over the years served me well: a handpicked selection produced far better results than the impromptu variant of this combo I’d developed in the ichor maze.

I’d used it again when fending off Viscount Liplar’s goons, but I still hadn’t coined a name for it then. If I had to come up with something, I supposed “the Order” would be an apt title.

No matter how tightly I packed the blades together, they had free rein to strike without clanging together. Greater numbers had few weaknesses, but one of them was the risk of friendly fire; the unfairness of conquering that had been soundly proved at the Liplar estate, I felt. Anyone who managed to block the first attack would be assaulted by a second and third from ordinarily unimaginable angles. Aiming for these unavoidable weak points would be all the more disorienting for those who were experienced in normal combat.

Eventually, I reached my limit, having pulled enough swords out of the box to cap me out on Hands. Throwing the final blade, I reached into the empty air and called the accursed name in my mind; rousing from her slumber in an infernal plane, the sword came to me singing her twisted songs of love.

As her edge split the air, I was hit with cries of rapture—to be called was her purest joy. For the Craving Blade, nothing could compare to being sought as a weapon. Her unblemished black body was the same as ever, down to the chilling carvings of incomprehensible ancient letters. In peak condition, the metal’s darkness seemed to soak in the light of the moon itself.

The thing had been badgering me this whole time. Hurry up and call for me if you need a sword, she’d said. Let me enjoy the sweet touch of your hand, she’d said.

So I obliged. As her full-throated songs of deranged love played on, I danced a waltz of blades. My body was but a machine to do battle, and this was where I was to test it; I held nothing back, ready to push myself to my absolute limit.

“Here it goes...”

It was time for my new technique’s pilot run. Pulling swords out of thin air and throwing them around was mere setup—a practical application of my abilities that let me unleash my full strength from the word go. Letting things end here would be such a waste.

Thus, my brand-new idea.

All of my Hands threw their swords at the imagined target and dissipated. In their place, I mustered a new fleet to reach into a new portal: they grabbed dagger after dagger from the box on the other side and pelted the invented enemy with a barrage of knives. The attack came from every angle except straight down; even then, a Hand could maybe sneak up to strike from under someone.

I’d realized that if spells could pass through my portals, then they could also serve as nozzles for long-range attacks; this was just the simplest way to do so. Much like an infamous vampire—ignore the part where I couldn’t stop time—I could blast my foes with a maelstrom of projectiles from every angle. Even the most battle-tested veterans would struggle to fend it off, and mages with half-hearted barriers were sure to crumble.

On that second point, I knew from experience that physical barriers had two potential weaknesses: a blow strong enough to break the whole thing at once, or a sporadic burst of attacks concentrated in a short time window. The masked nobleman’s ludicrous sevenfold barrier had still failed when I began pounding with the back of my sword as if I were splitting a pumpkin. Alternatively, I’d read about airbagesque barriers that could pop themselves on impact, but they purportedly triggered on very weak stimuli. No matter what I ran into, a means of dishing out several small hits in quick succession would do me no harm.

Besides, this came with its own upside: used against a crowd of weaklings, this produced a lot of half-dead suckers.

Critical wounds that left victims too weak to make noise—not to mention those that outright killed them—were okay, but the groans of one’s comrades suffering personally imaginable pain did wonders to snap morale.

On top of that, it solved the problem of my magic being unfit for urban areas.

I’d developed my mystic thermite to work off hedge magic in order to keep the mana costs low, but that meant it let off sunlike heat in an utterly indiscriminate manner. Let that loose in town, and I’d be dragged off as an arsonist. The same went for the napalm.

The Daisy Petal spell didn’t even need a mention. Forget innocent passersby, the thing was liable to burn unaware folks just relaxing nearby at home. The day I used it without consideration for my surroundings would be the end of me: I could just imagine a GM with a self-righteous smile asking, “By the way...do you happen to remember where this fight is taking place?”

We were going to become adventurers. How could I forget to pack an ace in the hole for urban campaigns?

My frenzied dance blurred the boundary between flesh and blade until a stinging pain shot through the back of my brain. I was close to bottoming out on mana, and this was my body’s warning. Any more and I’d drop.

This was as good a time as any to end my experiment on how long I could keep up my maximum output. Though the process had me drenched in sweat, it had been worth it to know my limits. It would be quite the unfunny joke if I pulled it out in a real battle and knocked myself out cold, after all.

All things considered, I was satisfied with the result of my theorycrafting. Although I was still far from rivaling Lady Agrippina’s absurd power, I felt like I was strong enough to subject any who had to fight me to a brutally unfair experience.

That said, it would probably be more efficient to just pull the whole box out if I ever knew I needed to go all out from the beginning of a fight. I also felt like that might be more intimidating than summoning each sword on its own.

Furthermore, I’d need to build another box or two once I could get my hands on the materials. In the middle of my test run, my rummaging had gotten the inside of the container so messy that I’d nearly fumbled while looking for my next weapon. I didn’t want to scramble to pull things out of my interdimensional pocket like a certain robot cat beloved by toddlers.

For tonight, though, all that remained was to clean up, grab a drink at the well, and go to bed—but wait. I’d almost forgotten something important.

“Huh. What should I name this combo?”

I could hardly believe I’d forgotten to come up with a name for my portal-box attack. Since reading out every skill that combined to achieve a given effect was too tedious, grouping actions together with shorthand nicknames was common practice for tabletop gamers. Some chose to go with simple labels like “Combo One,” “Combo Two,” and so on, while others made names that sounded like they’d get an evil arm or eye twitching—whatever the case, I found it to be an important step.

Not only did it save time, but more importantly, the true charm of TRPGs lay in the ability to express oneself with a bespoke cool factor. Nothing could match the feeling of rolling dice while shouting out a smooth one-liner.

The Craving Blade wept in disappointment as if to say, “Are we done already?” Ignoring the wailing, I thrust her into the ground—I had more important things to ponder.

[Tips] Combo names serve as shorthand references to a predetermined list of skills. A player may inform their GM of the combo’s cost and effects ahead of time to skip long clerical exchanges in the heat of combat.

Players are free to choose names that sate their inner middle schooler or make total joke names. At the table, anything goes so long as it makes the experience more fun.

Snow rarely piled up in the southern parts of the Empire, but on one such occasion, we found ourselves huddling around the fireplace like ladybugs trying to brave the winter.

It was cold. Stone and wood didn’t exactly make for the warmest houses; though it was better inside than out, it was still bad enough to risk frostbitten digits. First the rain on my last day in Berylin, and now the snow at home in Konigstuhl—why did the world have to throw a wrench in everything I did?

The warmest spot right by the hearth was reserved for the baby. Children were frail and needed all the warmth they could get, lest they travel back to the gods’ laps. My newborn niece peacefully snoozed away in her cradle, enveloped by the fire’s glow.

The next best spot went to the pregnant matron of the house. In the Trialist Empire, a woman carrying the future of the nation was second in importance to none; though she wouldn’t be tucked into bed to rest at all hours, she could expect to enjoy the first pick in everything from meals to seats by the fire. Knitting tiny little socks for my sleeping niece—and for her little brother or sister on the way—my sister-in-law gently rocked her chair with a blissful smile.

Next came the head of the household: my father took the last open seat, with my mother snuggling up against him. All together, they formed a wall that soaked up most of the heat and left us brothers fighting over whatever radiated through the cracks.

...Hey, wait. Heinz was supposed to be the current head of household. Why was he over here with us? Don’t tell me he was still living out the consequences of drunkenly celebrating my helmet-splitting on his wedding night. If so, I felt kind of bad for setting him up for failure.

Swallowing my guilt, I held a little wooden statuette up to the light to scrutinize my work. For most canton-dwellers, a side gig was all there was to do during the wintertime. Since the biting gales kept us indoors, we swallowed the tremendous cost of heating with tears in our eyes, toiling away at secondary crafts. The fields may sleep, but a farmer knows no rest.

The Harvest Goddess was said to take the form of a beautiful woman with luscious wheat-blonde locks, but the depiction in my hands was so-so, I’d say. With Dexterity worth touting as Divine Favor, my technical precision in whittling was top-notch; but my Aesthetic Taste told me that, despite being a masterpiece in form, it was all form and no substance.

I figured this was as good as I could get without dipping into more specialized skills. These carvings could fetch a respectable price, but they would disappear, forgotten to history, like so many millions of other pieces of art.

But as a side hustle, that was more than enough. A bit more polish, and this could pay for my lodging until spring.

Just as I spent every winter whittling wood, my brothers repaired our farming tools and my mother and sister-in-law busied themselves with needlework. With how expensive fabrics were, common women bore the important responsibility of making clothes for their families to wear or, if they had time, to sell in the city. In fact, it was even said that a girl’s skills in cooking and sewing were her sexiest qualities—facial features sat all the way down in third place.

“Hah... You know...” In a house full of tedium, Hans was occupied with perhaps the most monotonous job of all. Speaking as if straight from the heart, he sighed, “I wish you’d come home every winter, Erich.”

He looked up from the fanciful calligraphy he was transcribing to a piece of parchment, seeming rather affected. I supposed this wave of sentiment had been spurred on by the magic ball of light floating in the center of the room.

“Honestly. We save so much on firewood this way...”

My mother put a hand to her cheek and sighed, expelling a clinging exhaustion that only a housewife could know. To her point, the fireplace wasn’t running on wood: it was a simple cantrip that turned mana into heat energy, basic enough to make a College affiliate cry with mocking laughter.

“Not to mention how the laundry’s already done.”

“And the roof’s finally all fixed up.”

Though their hands remained busy, Miss Mina and Heinz joined in. The other day, I’d been so bored that I’d gone around casting Clean on everything I could find; a little before that, I’d used an Unseen Hand to repair the edge of the roof my father had failed to all those years ago.

“No wonder the nobility employ mages. My wife’s place alone has two helpers, so I’ve always wondered how the real bigwigs manage to keep their giant mansions clean.”

Why thank you for offering alternative insight, Michael. By the by, are you supposed to be here right now? The elder twin was coming home more often than not to “listen to my stories about the capital,” but here he was slaving away with the rest of us. He did understand that he’d married into a good family, right?

Er, wait, no—that wasn’t what I needed to be focusing on here.

“Can you not treat my goodwill as the work of a convenient manservant?”

Yet in spite of my retort, I wasn’t actually upset. This was no different from how my old mother had lazed about on the couch when I’d come home and helped around the house; it was this special feeling of being taken for granted (in a good way) by one’s own family that truly made home feel like home. After all, these kinds of jokes wouldn’t even be coming my way anywhere else. If I were a guest, I’d promptly be sat down with a cup of tea and asked not to bother with anything; that was uncomfortable in its own right.

Here I could relish in the fact that this was my home and these were my people—something I would’ve never gotten had I taken Lady Agrippina’s offer. Living a life where I had to wait for someone else to tie my shoelaces would have been unbearable.

“Besides,” I went on, “sorcery isn’t just some tool to speed up housework, you know.”

“But it sure does help with it. Right, Mina?”

“It really does. I wish I could use magic myself.”

I’d figured it wasn’t right to keep my family in the dark, but I might have laid out too much of my hand. Not that I was too beaten up about it, though: they hadn’t fallen into the trap of taking magic for granted in their everyday lives, but rather were just airing out how much of a pain normal chores were going to be after tasting this level of luxury.

“You think Elisa’ll come home with these sorts of spells?”

“Oh my, then maybe she’ll be able to help around the house like Erich is.”

“Please, Mother. Weren’t you listening to what Erich said the other day? By the time she’s free to do as she wants, she’ll be a bona fide noble. If she ever comes to visit, she’ll have to stay with the magistrate so they can house her retainers.”

Michael and my mother leisurely voiced their fantasies, but the youngest of my brothers had a far less idealistic take. Scratching his temple with a quill in hand, he’d studied up on the ways of the upper class in preparation for his induction into the magistrate’s cabinet this upcoming spring. He knew the simple truth that the haves and have-nots were irreconcilably different.

Even ties of blood did little to bridge the gap between those who rose to the top of society and their families. Whether related or not, a noble was to be addressed by their rank—such was the decree of the nation.

Any individual noble could wish for intimacy, but society would not allow it. Cracks would form in the nation should the idea of class distinctions ever come into question; what then would become of the Empire’s claim to power?

At most, a noblewoman could drop her airs and speak to a layperson plainly in isolated rooms with her servants shooed away. For a girl who had loved her family more than anything else, it was a cruel fate indeed. But, well, there were sure to be ways of getting around that going forward.

“I guess using magic the way Erich does is the best after all.”

“Magic?!”

My sister-in-law’s melancholic mumbling was punctuated by a high-pitched cry coming from the toddler who’d been snoozing on her lap. The firstborn son of our next generation, the boy cradling his unborn sibling was the first to bestow the title of “uncle” unto me in this world.

His name was Herman. With his walking and talking close to stabilizing, the three-year-old bundle of vitality spent every waking moment busily worrying us with his antics. Despite inheriting his dad’s bottomless energy, he was the delicate Miss Mina’s spitting image. Had he been born on Earth, he would have been a shoo-in to be ferried around as a child actor; here, though, his heart had been taken when I’d first cast a spell for him.

At every turn, he toddled over with his twinkling little puppy-dog eyes and begged, “Unka Erich? Magic please?” It was too adorable for my grown-up heart to handle; I could swear on my life that he was second in the world only to Elisa. Naturally, I’d done what any uncle would have done and showed him all sorts of little tricks.

As a direct consequence, Herman was incredibly sensitive when it came to the word “magic,” and our constant use of the term had roused him from his comfortable slumber on Miss Mina’s lap.

Looking up at the gentle glow hanging from the ceiling, he gasped in amazement and stared for a while—he really was precious. Being looked up to so unconditionally left me a bit ticklish, but it warmed me up from the bottom of my heart.

I’d crafted the ball of light to mimic the luminosity of a forty-watt light bulb: my family only knew candles and oil lamps, and this made it incomparably easier to see. It never flickered, nor did it cast inconvenient shadows on account of its high position. Although similar mystic tools were relatively inexpensive in the capital—by noble standards, at least—it was a real marvel in the southern countryside.

Seeing as it was getting such good reception, I figured I’d put together a mystic lamp for them before I left.

“Wow, Unka! You’re super!”

“Really, Herman? Why, thank you very much.”

Herman ran into my leg and hugged me with a wide-eyed innocence that reminded me of Elisa when she’d been younger. Back when she’d first learned to walk around, she’d clung to my legs like this too. Though we’d begun holding hands instead once she’d gotten a bit older, being relied on with a full-bodied show of affection was one of my favorite memories of being a big brother.

My nephew had a fixation on magic, so I planned to make him a wand once I was finished carving this piece. I wanted to add a simple enchantment so that the tip would glow when the wielder shouted out and swung the thing around—I’d gotten my niece a toy just like that a lifetime ago.

Ah, but wait: I didn’t want his friends getting jealous. Maybe I was better off making a whole set with swords and shields like I’d done for my brothers back in the day. One prop weapon wouldn’t even take an hour for me to make at this point, so the work would be worth it to let little Herman play adventurer with his pals.

A cool sword paired with a hefty shield; a long spear that could make anyone look like a knight; a stylish and mysterious wand; and an impressive but stringless bow. If I could put together an arsenal with all of that, he was sure to be the most popular kid in town.

“Unka, I wanna magic too.”

“You do? Well, then, how about I make you a wand? And I’ll build some weapons so you can go play with your friends.”

“Really?!” he yelped with sparkling eyes.

“Your uncle never lies,” I laughed, patting his head.

I’d brought home some inferior gems thinking that they might make good catalysts for something, and making a fancy toy for my nephew was as good a cause as any. With that, I could probably have the thing make sounds too—but on second thought, I didn’t want his toy to be too much nicer than his pals’.

Toys could define the pecking order between kids, so I had to be careful. I didn’t want him to get bullied because I’d spoiled him too much.

“Oh? Is your nephew the only one getting a present from you?”

“Of course not, Sister Dearest. Shall I make a doll for our sleeping beauty in the crib? I’ve dabbled in needlework myself, you know.”

True, it wouldn’t be fair if I only made something for my nephew. I’d ask for some scraps of cloth and stitch together a doll sometime. While I’d have to forgo expensive cotton stuffing for the cheaper straw, I was sure my niece would have a fun time playing house if I could copy the fancy designs I’d seen in Berylinian shops.

“But Unka! Me! Me first!”

“Don’t you worry, Herman. Your uncle’s good with his hands, see? I’ll have your toys ready before you know it. In fact, I even made the toys that your dada and I used to play with.”

“Heh, that takes me back,” Heinz said. “You know, I’ve still got that sword you made me when you were five.”

“Huh? You do?”

“Course I do. It’s sturdy enough to use again with a new coat of varnish. I’d been keeping it for when I had a son...but, well, looks like Herman’s more a fan of mages.”

My eldest brother had been a diehard fan of swordsmen, and he seemed a touch disappointed to discover his son wasn’t following in his footsteps. But personally, I was moved to hear he’d kept my amateur work this whole time; perhaps this would become one of my favorite memories of being a little brother.

“Aw man, the spear you made for me broke...all ’cause mother kept using it to prop stuff up.”

“Oh yeah, I remember that. You were bawling back then, Michael.”

“Shut up, Hans. Don’t forget that you were the one who lost the tip of your wand and hid it from Erich for as long as you could.”

Ha, I almost forgot about that. Not only were we a bunch of dumb kids who didn’t know how to take care of stuff, but I hadn’t been nearly as good a craftsman in my childhood. I’d fixed up those old playthings more times than I could count.

“I can remember us four going out on adventures like yesterday,” I said.

“Come to think of it,” Heinz responded, “you always played the mages and priests even when we were kids. I was more of a swordsman type.”

“That was only because you three always took the coolest roles.”

Any family reunion worth its salt was sure to include a trip down memory lane, complete with all sorts of biased revisions. Nostalgia washed over me: we’d spent so many days venturing into the forest in search of the fabled fairy coin. Though we never managed to find it, the memories were worth more than the most sterling gold piece.

“Really?” Heinz said.

“Yeah, really,” Michael joined in. “You always had to be the leader.”

“Hey, come on. I let you guys lead sometimes.”

“Uh-huh, sometimes. But even then, you still had to be a swordsman!”

“I can attest to that,” I said. “Even as a kid, I remember thinking, ‘Why do we have three frontliners?!’ and choosing wands and bows because of that.”

“Unkas adventured with dada?”

“We sure did,” we said, regaling our nephew with tales of our exploits. Greatly pleased by our stories, he merrily announced that he was going to go on an adventure too. In which case, I’d need to hurry up with the cool gear so he could search for the fairy coin just like his old man.

“But our youngest’s a girl,” Heinz said. “I hope our next will be a boy so he can go out and play with Herman.”

“That’s true,” Michael agreed. “Having brothers made it a lot easier to have fun when we were kids.”

“But I feel bad for Elisa, since she was the only girl,” Hans said. “We were all too bratty to stay by her bedside and just talk... I wish I’d spent more time with her. Erich was the only one who actually stayed on her level.”

“Not at all,” I said. “Elisa loves all of you plenty. Remember how you’d always bring her raspberries and snake skins and pretty butterfly wings when you went out? Those were her treasures, and she kept everything locked away in her little box.”

A chorus of “Oh yeah!” followed as we spoke fondly of our little sister still hard at work in the capital. Although Herman had never met her, our discussion sparked a great deal of interest in his aunt.

“Your Aunt Elisa is studying in the capital to be an even more amazing mage than me. Look, this is what she looks like.”

“Wah! Pretty princess!”

In a world without photography, our stories and this small painting were all we had to share who she was. The portrait I’d gotten from Lady Leizniz truly did depict her like a princess, and Herman was ecstatic.

Isn’t your aunt cute? I thought smugly. This portrait wasn’t even embellished, so little Herman would never be let down by seeing her in person. In fact, by the time Elisa could come home to visit Konigstuhl, she would probably have grown up to be even prettier than she was now.

That said, the painting was very well done. Lady Leizniz’s high standards evidently did not end with fashion: the work was realistic, yet not overly detailed, using just the right amount of lines blocked with color to create an elegant final form. Had this picture been used to solicit marriage, any suitor would’ve been sure to have their hearts struck in an instant.

But then again, fraudulence was everywhere. Back in my time under the madam, I’d handled proposals complete with drop-dead gorgeous portraits; when I investigated the sender further, it invariably turned out that so many artistic liberties had been taken that they were basically a different person. In other words, Elisa was amazing to reach this level without undue touch-ups.

Hearing Herman innocently say, “Ann Elisa’s super too!” put me in such a good mood that I lifted him onto my lap and pulled out my pipe.

Lighting a mystic flame, I blew a puff of smoke into a cage of Unseen Hands. Shifting the invisible appendages around, I formed a smoky bird; moving them a bit more, I made the bird flap. Herman let out a happy squeak and clapped his hands together without reserve.

Out of all the cheap arcane tricks I’d shown him, this was his favorite. I guessed children of every era and world just loved seeing adults play with smoke: on Earth, I remembered my grandfather had kept me entertained with smoke rings.

Owing to my nostalgia, I took a page out of his book and blew a smoke ring and then had the bird fly through it. Seeing my nephew’s clapping grow more excited put a soft smile on my face; I could only hope that this would become a nice memory for him one day.

“I bet you could put bread on the table with that.”

“Forget adventuring, you should put on shows in the city.”

This wasn’t tobacco-based, but I didn’t want a three-year-old inhaling smoke. I sent the bird out the cracked window we’d left open for ventilation. As I did, the twins quipped at me; though, honestly, I thought they were massively underestimating how hard it was to be a performer.

“You dolts! Erich’s gonna become an adventurer to carry on our dreams! Don’t bog him down with nonsense!”

Adding to the pile, my eldest brother told them to stop spouting nonsense but was, ironically, doing just that. I hadn’t chosen my career path to carry on some torch that my brothers had left behind.

“One day, a minstrel’s gonna come into this canton singing songs of Erich’s adventures! Songs like, uh...Erich and the Holy Blade!”

“That’s a complete ripoff, though.”

“And it’s got your tastes written all over it. Come on, you couldn’t think of anything better?”

“The hell?! Brothers or not, I won’t let you get away with making fun of Jeremias and the Holy Blade!”

Getting excited was well and good, but my brothers would do well to notice how the missus of the house had begun narrowing her eyes into a glare. If they didn’t rein themselves in soon, I refused to be responsible for the inevitable storm that would follow. Any louder, and my niece Nikola was going to...

“Waaah!”

...wake up. As expected, my brother’s eldest daughter did not take kindly to having her fireside nap interrupted, and promptly began crying.

“Herman, what do you say we go outside? I can blow bigger clouds of smoke outdoors.”

“Yay! Outside!”

Wrathful lightning was about to strike, and I whisked my nephew away to escape it. This time it was absolutely, positively not my fault, so I wasn’t going to stick around. Brushing off my brothers’ betrayed stares, I stepped into the front yard and started entertaining Herman with more tricks. I was sure Miss Mina wouldn’t be able to go all out with her son watching anyway; my brothers were due for a serious chewing-out.

“Hey, Erich.”

As I chuckled at my adorable nephew toddling after the smoky sailboat I’d made, my father suddenly appeared beside me. Apparently, he didn’t want to hear the lecture either.

“When do you plan on leaving?”

“Well, I’m thinking of heading out once the snow melts.”

As much as I wanted to stay until the end of the sowing season, my destination was too far to put off my departure. Ende Erde was over a month away for those traveling light, and with our luggage I wanted at least two months’ time.

Unlike Japanese schools, there was no mandate that we begin our adventuring in spring. Yet while Rhine had no cherry blossoms, the season just felt right for new beginnings. Besides, common knowledge dictated that journeys were best started before the first seeds were sown so as not to be dragged into a whole season of work.

“I see. Just a month or two left, then.”

“Yeah... But the Goddess seems to be enjoying Her slumber this year.”

Winter was the Harvest Goddess’s respite after a year of hard work. That Her blanket was laid on so thick suggested that She’d be late to rise in the spring. That meant less time to till the fields, but it wasn’t like we could complain to our deity about Her taking a break; my family would just have to do their best. In exchange, it was said that the fall would see a harvest more bountiful than usual—such was Her way of making it up to us.

“Hey, Erich?”

“Yes, father?”

I was preparing a new cloud for Herman when my father suddenly turned to me with a serious tone. Surprised, I looked away from the little boy rolling in snow and over at him, only to find his gaze was just as serious. I stood upright, ready to hear out what he had to say.

“I think something like ‘Sworddancer’ would be good. Thoughts?”

Not you too, old man!

[Tips] Epithets, monikers, nicknames—whatever you call them, secondary titles are rhetorical ornaments that serve to quickly illustrate a famous person’s exploits. Most heroes who appear in poems and sagas have one, and those with particularly long lists of accomplishments tend to amass just as many bynames.

That said, how an individual reacts to the names society gives them is entirely up to them.

In the heat of summer, nothing could match a cold glass of fruit-infused water after a bath; in the cold of winter, though, heating up in the sauna until the brink of stroke was best capped off by a dive into the snow. Letting loose after pushing one’s endurance to the limit was simply divine. The feeling of all that heat vanishing in the blink of an eye left the mind feeling clearer than pure water.

“Woo, that’s cold!”

“Ha ha, I could get used to this!”

Even in winter, the steam baths of Konigstuhl ran at regular intervals. I joined the men of the canton—I wasn’t going to stick with the kids as a legal adult—to sweat out the grime of daily life. The rare snowstorm let us forgo our usual dunk into the river for a fresher experience in a sea of white. This was all new for me: I’d seen snow pile up in the capital, but I obviously wasn’t going to roll around in the yards of the crown’s public bathhouses.

And boy, was I enjoying myself. As obnoxious as the snow was, I could almost learn to love it thanks to this refreshment. Now I finally understood why Mika had pined for their hometown’s winters every time we’d gone to the baths. Jumping into rivers and cold baths was great in its own right, but there was this indescribable softness to the cold of snow that was totally new to me.

I, along with all the other men in the village, frolicked in the white like we’d turned into kids again. We ran around and pelted each other with snow until it got cold, when we’d run off back to the bathhouse. This was supposed to engage the sympathetic nervous system and thus help the body regulate itself—but basically, it felt good, so it was good.

We huddled around the stoves, throwing on more water to enjoy the steam that they let off. After a while, when I was starting to feel nice and cooked, someone sat down in the spot next to me.

“Oh,” I said. “Nice to see you.”

It was the old dvergr who ran the Konigstuhl smithy. He didn’t look to have aged a day since I’d left the canton. The only noticeable difference was that his beard was a tiny bit bigger.

Or, well, it had been when I’d first seen him after returning. The air was so humid here that his magnificent mane had been reduced to a squirrelly wet rag.

“You too, Erich. By the way, I finished those adjustments you were asking for.”

“Already? You work as quickly as ever, I see. Thank you very much.”

While “scratching” his back with a birch branch—he was striking himself hard enough for it to count as a flogging—the smithy let me know that my order was ready. Truth be told, one of the first things I’d done upon making my way home was to swing by his shop and ask him to look at my gear.

My armor wasn’t totally trashed or anything: I’d just grown a bit taller and had begun feeling some tightness around my shoulders. I’d asked him to tweak things to match my current proportions, and he’d finished earlier than I’d expected.

It went to show that his experience crafting for adventurers and mercenaries in the city wasn’t just for show. When I’d taken my beaten-up armor to get repaired after that sewer fiasco a couple of years ago, the man at the Berylinian smithing union had been thoroughly impressed with his work.

Although the materials used in my armor were run-of-the-mill, the repairman had been wowed by the smithy’s commitment to not cutting corners; he’d likened the neatly uniform chain links to the smoothness of cloth.

I hadn’t been able to appreciate the craftsmanship as a layman in the field, but apparently the curves of the leather were incredibly precise and perfectly suited to deflecting oncoming blades. This was, according to the man, as good as it got for unenchanted gear.

Of particular note was the adjustment system. The Konigstuhl smithy had made my armor with future growth in mind, and while that wasn’t unusual in and of itself, the mechanics of how he’d implemented that had captured the repairman’s imagination. I suspected that he’d been so thorough because he’d wanted to reverse engineer the techniques for his own use.

The capital didn’t have much in the way of manufacturing, but it did have a solid number of smiths for swords and armor. The reason boiled down to a simple show of power: the crown and its army hosted grand parades every few years, and whether social or militaristic in nature, the various nobles vying for dominance put in regular orders for gear. Even in peacetime, the capital was full of master smiths.

Although the articles made there were rarely used in real combat, the armor was tuned to shield the wearer at all costs and the swords were sharpened to cut through foes, equipment and all. For a leading smith in a city like Berylin—I’d known Lady Franziska was going to put in a word with someone good, but I hadn’t expected the head of the smithing union—to be impressed by the Konigstuhl smithy’s work was telling.

“But you sure have been going at it, kid.”

“You can tell?”

“Course I can. Cuts, dents, arrow graze marks... Running my hand over the leather’s enough to tell you’ve run the gamut of every wound known to man. Hell, looks like you’ve been hit with magic! What in the Goddess’s name have you been up to?”

“Ha ha ha... Uh, lots, I guess.”

Steam bath aside, I could feel my cheeks grow red. I’d encountered many predicaments where my skill wasn’t enough to get through without relying on my armor.

Come to think of it, I really had been pushing myself.

I’d fought a daemonic ogre in the lakeside manor as a boy, then a crew of marauding mercenaries just before heading into an ichor maze created by a demonic sword—no, I am not calling for you; quit beaming thoughts into my brain—only to be dragged around the capital as Lady Agrippina’s steward, before enduring an onslaught of bad luck on my way home. Across it all, there had been plenty of hits I couldn’t block or dodge: each time, my armor was what kept me alive. Injured though I might have been, the smithy’s work had made sure I never went down for good.

The only exception had been my subterranean run-in with the high-rank crank in the sewers of Berylin...but that was an exception among exceptions, so it didn’t count. Even if I’d shelled out hundreds of drachmae for the finest plate armor money could buy, I doubted I would’ve been able to muscle through his attack.

I was a lightweight fencer type: dodging and parrying were my main defensive maneuvers, and armor was the final layer for when those failed. I couldn’t be more appreciative of what I had. With how many ambushes I’d suffered during my stint as a noblewoman’s bodyguard, those patches of leather had saved me more times than I could count. The constant threat of my many-legged rivals skittering in the shadows had meant I would’ve eaten a knife to my guts had I not been perennially equipped.

“But you know...”

The smithy grabbed my shoulder with a firm grip. Surprised, I turned to find the man eyeing my body with the same scrutinizing gaze he employed for finished works.

“Look, I won’t yap about you looking healthy and sound, but where the blazes are your scars?”

“Huh?”

Utterly puzzled, he yanked me around and checked me all over. He ran a finger across my skin as if he was trying to jog his memory.

“Like here: something stabbed you hard enough to rip through your underarmor, but I can’t see a thing on your body. Or your shoulders: the padding was so beat up that I figured you’d have a bit of stiffness in your joints, at least. But most of all, look at this left arm: the armor made me think you’d twisted the damn thing off.”

After the repairs in the capital, I hadn’t been able to tell that the armor had been destroyed at all. Yet the master craftsman’s eye was evidently keener, and he was able to see right through what I’d been through.

“Don’t even see any trace of you getting sewn up. Even magic healing leaves a mark, y’know? But you’ve got the skin of a princess, kid.”

“Well, I happen to know a good doctor.”

Indeed, I knew several good “doctors” who were rather overprotective...if whimsically doling out supernatural “medicine” could be considered an act of protection, that is. Alas, their meddling meant I lacked any impressive battle scars.

At this rate, I’d never get to do the thing: whether in the bath or the bed, I’d never get to pull out the timeless “Oh, this? I got this when...” Showing off my badassery in sexy ways was one of my dreams, dammit!

I was a big fan of subdued toughness in role-playing, so scars had a special place in my heart. To this day, I could remember how excited I’d been when the GM had remembered my PC’s scars and incorporated it into a scene. But with how things were now, I just looked like a normal, healthy boy. For all the muscle I was putting on, I was far from being shredded. Personally, I would’ve been happy to be as bulky as those interstellar marines who strapped chainsaws to their guns.

“Wait, are you talking about your adventures?!”

Apparently, Heinz had overheard a part of our conversation. Not one to be left out of any adventurous discussion, he came running over with snow still clinging to his frame.

...Huh. Looking at him now, my brother was pretty well-built. Our family’s relative prosperity afforded us a fairly nutritious diet, and both my mother and sister-in-law tended to make balanced meals. Add to that his life of labor in the fields and around the house, and he had a winning recipe for a killer body.

It wasn’t just him either: everyone on the Konigstuhl Watch looked like a proper tough guy, complete with scars that engaged a viewer’s curiosity—especially Sir Lambert. He was sitting just a short ways away, enduring the sauna’s heat in meditative fashion. Yet even with his eyes closed, he was just so much larger than life. I knew he was a good person, and it was still intimidating to try and take a seat next to the mountain of a man.

He had pecs of bedrock and his shoulders were sturdier than a steel support beam; his girthy torso laid a foundation to carry his mass, and his legs were pillars of marble to hold everything up. Scars and stitches zipped across his skin, telling the tales of arrows, burns, and painful skids. Though he sat still without a word, his body loudly conveyed the strength that lay within.

How could I call myself a boy—ignore my total age for a moment—if I didn’t look up to that?! Ugh, I wanted to be like him so badly; I, too, wanted to march around the mortal plane with the build of a god of war.

As I recounted the events that had led to the damage on my armor for the smithy and my brother, I couldn’t help but steal glances at Sir Lambert. But, for whatever reason, I had a funny feeling that someone somewhere was screaming, “Please, just stay the way you are!”

[Tips] Most arcane limb replacements leave a mark, but there are also a handful of methods that do not. Certain spells and miracles work either by transferring wounds away or making it so that the initial injury “never happened” to begin with; in these cases, there is no wound to leave a scar.

For whatever reason, the Kanda River popped into my head...but why? I had the inkling that it had something to do with my past life, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Recently, I was having a lot of trouble remembering these sorts of things; memory was quick to decay when left to sit unused.

It was at times like this when I truly envied the races with immutable notepads built into their brains, never at risk of having the ink disappear off the page. Having a term come to mind without any idea of why it was relevant felt terribly vexing.

Yet mysteriously enough, more technical knowledge seemed to remain accessible, and once I remembered one thing, several related ideas usually came to me quickly after. That I couldn’t remember this time meant that it was probably some miscellaneous fact of little importance.

“Is something the matter?”

“No, don’t worry about it.”

Margit looked at me with her head tilted in curiosity; I covered her up with a mantle and hoisted her into my arms. Dampened by the steam of the bathhouse, her ordinarily tied hair flowed straight down in eye-catching fashion. I’d hidden her away beneath a large hood to keep her shielded from the cold, but that only added to her enchanting ambience: something about the stray locks spilling out from under the cloak tickled my heartstrings. A new take on “show, don’t tell,” I supposed.

The women of the canton had gotten their turn to bathe after the men, and Margit had asked me to come pick her up when they were done. The bathhouse was placed in a nice scenic spot next to the river, which also placed it out of the way relative to the canton; it wasn’t exactly the easiest place to get home from for a tiny arachne.

Not to say that the snow was packed enough to bury her, nor that someone as lightweight as her couldn’t stay above the surface by deftly distributing her weight across all eight legs. She was contributing plenty to the winter hunting season, and I would never insinuate that she didn’t have the means to catch her footing in snow.

However, her kind’s inherent weakness to the cold was a separate matter, especially right after she’d spent a long stretch of time in a hot bathhouse. Stepping into the frigid cold after acclimating to the heat and with her hair still wet was an easy way to get sick.

As such, the natural chain of logic led her to call for someone to ferry her home. By turning me into a human taxi, she’d minimize her contact with the icy snow and get home sooner so she could dry off properly.

Just as I’d answered her call, I’d crossed paths with Margit’s father carrying his wife and the new heir of the house in his youngest daughter. As they went along, I’d received the rather insidious tip that they would be spending the night in their hunting cottage.

“Ahh,” Margit sighed, hanging off my neck and nestling into my cloak as much as her own. “You’re always so nice and warm.”

“Any mensch would feel warm from your perspective. Plus, it isn’t all me—I’ve got heating today.”

I had some hand warmers lining my inner pocket to ward away the cold. They were simple cotton pouches with heated igneous rocks inside, but a few of them did wonders to fight the elements. These were a must for anyone walking around in the winter months.

Sure, I could’ve just flicked on a magic barrier, but why waste the mana? Besides, I wanted to enjoy the fresh air on my skin on the path home.

“Really, now? But your warmth is my favorite, Erich. I’d like to take it home with me if I could.”

“You do me too good an honor, my lady... But you know, since I’m carrying you back, I think that last bit is already true.”

“Oh, I suppose you’re right.”

She snickered in my arms as I crunched the snow under my feet. Once we arrived, I would need to light the fireplace, pat down her hair with a cut of cloth, and dry said cloth by said fireplace. I could always use an add-on to Clean wet towels into being dry, but it wouldn’t do to cut corners here. A lady had asked me to dry her hair, and I was going to oblige the old-fashioned way—call it a gentleman’s hospitality.

“Hee hee,” Margit giggled. “I wonder how many chances we’ll come across to enjoy a relaxing bath once the snow melts and we set off.”

“Anytime we want, I’m sure. The crown operates public bathhouses in Marsheim, you know.”

“Oh, but that isn’t what I meant. The journey to Marsheim is to be a long one, isn’t it? Can you fault a girl for worrying about the long road ahead?”

As I marched through the snow, we began to talk about the future that awaited beyond its melt. The blizzards were still rolling through for the moment, but sooner or later the Goddess would awaken from Her slumber.

Once She did, we would be off for the frontier. Margit had given up her inheritance without any hesitation, and her mother had been similarly terse in letting her eldest go, but leaving this cozy little canton behind remained a tremendous ask.

After all, I’d just gotten back, and I was already finding it hard to leave.

For now, we’d soak in the sight of our home so we wouldn’t forget it. Slowly and quietly, lingering like the icy droplets on her hair.

[Tips] In the Rhinian tradition, a man caring for a woman’s hair is symbolic of deep trust and love.

I might not speak for everyone, but I truly believed the most fun part of any long journey was the night before it began. Packing all my belongings into a limited amount of space in as efficient and safe a distribution as possible was a real challenge, and the sense of accomplishment that accompanied it was proportional.

All the things I’d unraveled upon arriving in early winter went back into their places. The space that had once been home to the presents I’d prepared was not empty, but rather stuffed with presents from the people of Konigstuhl: dried rations and the like to wish me a safe trip. Getting everything to fit neatly had been quite the struggle, but I was just about done.

The snow had melted. Although the shortened window to sow was a point of stress for all, the canton was in a frenzy to make sure the spring festival would still run on time. In between checking their seeds and wiping the oil off their plows and hoes, the organizers counted up the barrels in the local wine cellar and went from house to house to collect from those who could afford to fund the celebrations.

This year’s spring was shaping up to be a tumultuous one. The later spring arrived, the less time to sow seeds; if seeds weren’t sown in time, even the relatively generous tax policy of a forty-sixty split—where farmers kept sixty percent of their yields—would become a painful burden.

Having to pay in both cash and crops meant yeomen were especially grave when it came to their production. An agricultural peasant wasn’t going to be hanged or have their lands stripped for missing one year’s taxes, of course, but the threat of the difference being tacked on to the next year’s sum with interest was enough to whip any farmer into shape. If one could save a needless expense just by working hard, then hard work was going to be done.

I wouldn’t be helping, though: I didn’t want to delay my departure by a whole season, and I’d already informed my family that I was going to leave as soon as the snow melted. No one had complained. I hadn’t been counted among our labor pool to begin with.

Still, it pricked at my conscience to laze about while my loved ones were all busy, so I lent a hand with the preparations. My Blade Sharpening technique was at the same III: Apprentice level that it had been since I was a kid, but I helped whet the heads of some farm tools. I also made myself useful by producing a whole bunch of wooden wedges: these were useful for supporting fences and reinforcing olive trees but quick to break, so having an abundance of them was always welcome.

Lastly, I didn’t want my family to be the target of jealousy over having a son come home with Berylinian money or having a daughter propped up to be a future noble, so I made a little donation.

The money came from all the odd jobs I’d taken on the way home. I’d packed most of it into my farewell present to Dietrich, but what remained was more than enough to fund a renovation on the dilapidated town square.

More importantly, I shelled out to commission a communal horse-drawn plow from the Konigstuhl smithy. Usually, one would be bought by several families pooling together their money, and they’d end up fighting over who was going to use it in what order every year. If we were responsible for putting up one all by ourselves, few would be willing to voice any criticism of my family.

Truthfully, this spending had my wallet feeling rather light, but that was fine: I wasn’t interested in starting my adventure with a money cheat code anyway. I’d kept enough silver to reasonably make the journey, and this was the least I could do in exchange for skipping out on a particularly busy spring season.

Man, having my back to the wall sure got me going! Taking myself as a given, the task of making sure Castor and Polydeukes didn’t go hungry was starting to sound like a fun challenge!

I giddily closed the lid of my knapsack and hauled it over to the front door when I ran into my oldest brother in the living room.

“Oh, Erich. You’re still up?”

Heinz smelled faintly of alcohol. He’d probably attended the community meeting to plan for the spring festival. Every year, the local lord and priest gathered with the heads of households to iron out the schedule, foods, and expenses for the celebration.

That my brother had been the one to go instead of our father proved that the passing of the torch was progressing smoothly. Heinz was now a capable adult with a full beard and a couple of children; our old man sending him to participate was a wonderful sign. It was all too common for this to be the breaking point in parent-child relationships, and seeing that our parents weren’t second-guessing Heinz as their heir was incredibly reassuring.

“Yeah, I wanted to get my things ready to go.”

“Ah, right... Hey, are you sure about leaving tomorrow? Why not stay until the festival, at least?”

I placed my pack in the corner with the rest of my belongings, and my brother gestured for me to sit down. I’d heard this offer a few times already, but I was dead set on leaving before the festival—the longer I stayed, the harder it was for me to go. Besides, the festivities were a reward paid in advance to honor the hard work that lay ahead. I didn’t feel like it would be fair for me to participate. Add to that the distance of my destination, and skipping town before the spring festival was a no-brainer.

At any rate, it was too late to change my mind. Today’s lunch had been a lavish going-away meal—a truly special one. My mother had remembered all my favorite dishes, and the whole menu was packed with things I liked: the soft sweetness of root celery soup, crispy fried cutlets, and the infamous sauerkraut that no two families made the same.

Everything had been wonderful. I’d sampled my fair share of epicurean cuisine at Lady Agrippina’s side, but not a single one of those dishes could even compare.

How many more times will I get to enjoy the flavors of home?

I’d gone through this once before, in my last life...but this time it was all the more true. In Japan, I’d been a few train stops away from going to visit, and I’d had enough vacation time to spend the night at my parents’ a handful of times every year, not even counting how I’d see them at New Year’s and Obon and the like. Whenever I’d wished to talk to them, I had; a few swipes and taps on a telephone were all it had taken to have a conversation. The sound on the other end might have been a mere digital reproduction of their voices, but it had been enough to feel my family’s warmth when I was feeling lonely.

But not here.

Forget telephones, there was hardly any guarantee that physical letters would be delivered reliably. To make matters worse, life was frailer here: whether by plague, violence, or accident, the causes of death were too real to forget. The safety of my faraway family wasn’t something I could ever feel at ease over.

Still, I couldn’t let myself dawdle. Dragging my feet did nobody any favors. The reality was that I couldn’t stay here forever.

“I’ll be leaving as planned. Staying here any longer would be cowardice.”

“Cowardice, huh...? Yeah. I guess so.”

This was my home. Of course it was comfortable; I’d been blessed with a loving family. But I’d found something that I truly wanted to do, and I had to take a strong first step—otherwise my leap forward would become a tumbling faceplant.

Soaking in my words, Heinz reached into his pocket and dug around for a moment, eventually producing a canteen wrapped in leather. It was a hip flask, slightly curved and intended for strong liquor. Spirits were handy for disinfecting water or wounds, so most adults who worked outside carried one around at all times.

They’d been a fad on Earth as a way of evading alcohol taxes, but here their popularity was wholly pragmatic. They weren’t props chosen for their cool factor, nor were they a convenient trinket for drunkards, and they certainly weren’t the product of some fellow reincarnator wanting to camp out and drink in style...right? I mean...right?

“Take it. Consider it a parting gift.”

“Huh?”

“You don’t have one, yeah? C’mon, no harm in carrying a flask.”

Instead of drinking, Heinz pushed the bottle onto me. Clearly full, the tin container was hefty in my hands; he must’ve brought home some of the booze they’d served at the meeting.

He was right to say I didn’t have a flask. As a mage, I hadn’t really needed one: artificially boiling water was good enough to disinfect it, and it wasn’t like I was so wiry that I couldn’t sleep without a swig.

But going forward, that wouldn’t necessarily be the case. Camping without the comfort of a roof for days on end could very well wear on my mind, and I wouldn’t be able to cast spells freely in the presence of anyone but Margit. I ran the risk of losing the little comforts I’d enjoyed thus far.

This truly was a wonderful gift.

“Plus, you know... ‘How can your travels be safe if you leave the old pal in your pocket at home?’”

As the weight of the flask truly sank in, my brother scratched his nose and blushed. This time, it wasn’t the alcohol.

“Oh... From Jeremias and the Holy Blade.”

“Er, well, yeah.”

That was a quote from Heinz’s favorite epic saga. It was a one-off line in the opening act spoken by the hero’s family as they see him off and never again, but the scene itself was memorable.

My big brother had tried to act cool, and my noticing was just making him redder. I decided not to tease him; I felt like I knew the emotion well.

Besides...this was all a little brother could ask for.

“Thank you. I’ll take care of it.”

“Yeah... You do that.”

I popped open the flask and was hit with the strong stench of liquor. It was probably an imitation of the strong stuff found on the northern archipelago; I could pick up the hallmarks of barley and peat.

Taking a swig—and wincing on account of my kid tongue—I passed it to Heinz, who did the same. We looked at each other for a second without saying a word and laughed.

“All right,” he said, turning toward the master bedroom, “I’m going to bed. Don’t stay up too late.”

His ears were still red as he walked away. As I took another swig of the stinging booze, I smiled to myself.

Heh, my big brother’s a lovable guy.

[Tips] Spirits are a cure-all solution for everything from water to wounds...or at least, that is the trademark response of alcoholics across the land who like to drink on the job. The popular barley-based liquors originate from the islands to the Empire’s north, but Rhinian distilleries make similarly potent spirits with local wines. 

However, the process is more advanced than traditional brewing, causing serious fluctuations in quality between the best and worst distilleries—some are downright undrinkable. They are also too expensive for regular consumption for the average person, and are considered a modest luxury item.

The words “Don’t go!” have tremendous power when spoken by a little child. My once-unwavering oath to not look back was being tested like never before.

I felt like looking back was the lamest thing a departee could do. It was a sign that they hadn’t steeled themselves; that they hadn’t gotten over their fear of leaving; that they weren’t ready to see through their own damn decision. Watching someone glance over their shoulder again and again was the sort of thing that would sour my mood.

But man, was it hard to fight the urge when I was the one leaving.

“Well aren’t we popular, Uncle Erich?”

“Please don’t tease me right now.”

A playful voice giggled in my ear, bobbing up and down with the gentle sway of the saddle. As per usual, Margit was glued to me like a human backpack.

We were strolling along a road a short ways outside the canton. Castor had the brunt of our luggage, while the two of us doubled up on Polydeukes; this way we could divide the load between them evenly.

“There were so many little ones there to see you off. It seems endearment comes with its own set of tribulations.”

“I didn’t think they’d cry.”

My farewell wasn’t anything so grand. Everyone was busy at work, so I slipped away mostly unnoticed.

But my nephew Herman and all his neighborhood friends—whom I’d made about three parties’ worth of wooden adventuring weapons for—had really taken a liking to me. Watching them play had been an anxiety-inducing experience, so I’d taught them a bunch of stuff over the winter: how to hold their weapons, how to angle their shields, how to roll off momentum when they got hit, and so on. Though it had ended up being like a kiddie version of the Watch, they seemed to have enjoyed my company.

So they’d all come to say goodbye. At first, they’d all said their thank-yous and good-lucks like the good kids they were, but eventually, Herman had lost control of his emotions and begun crying. As soon as he did, all hell had broken loose: the rest of them started bawling like dominoes.

Gods, that had been an ordeal. I’d pulled out every spell in the book, and nothing could get them to stop. Out of ideas, I’d raised my voice and barked, “You’ll never be real adventurers if you keep crying like this!” and they’d finally pulled themselves together.

Endearment really did come with its own tribulations. Leaving home was hard enough as it was; how was I supposed to not feel anything after that?

“Did they make you want to stay?”

“...Not really.”

“Hee hee. You never were good at telling lies.”

Apparently, I was an open book for Margit to read. Diverting my embarrassed conscience, I dug into Polydeukes to tell him to pick up the pace. We’d set off later than expected, so we’d need to hurry if we wanted to find an inn by sunset.

“Truth be told,” Margit said, “I’ve pondered the thought myself.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what would life be like if the two of us stayed in the canton?”

As it turned out, she’d considered the same things I had, imagining a future where we stayed in Konigstuhl and lived our idyllic countryside lives. I wasn’t some wide-eyed youngin enamored with city living, so I had no mind to deny the happiness that such a lifestyle could provide. We surely could have been happy spending the rest of our days here.

But I’d chosen the thrill of adventure. Come to think of it, maybe this whole thing was just me dragging Margit along for the ride.

“Don’t misunderstand me, though. I don’t have any regrets about the promise we made together.”

Yet she shut me down before I could even ask my tactless question. It was very strange: I was the one holding the reins, so why did it feel like she was the one steering?

The poets of every era and every world sang about how men were ever destined to bend at the hands of women. Ah well; I supposed this was just how the world worked.

“Thank you, Margit.”

“You’re very welcome, Erich. Now then, how long will it be to the ends of all earth?”

“Hopefully we’ll make it there by summer.”

Carried on the rhythmical clopping of hooves, we put our hometown behind us for the faraway frontier. But hey, nostalgia didn’t weigh anything—holding on to our memories and what-ifs of Konigstuhl wouldn’t hurt a soul.

“Far to the west,” Margit mused. “I wonder what the edges of the Empire are like.”

“Looking forward to it?”

“I am. I truly am.”

Whatever feelings for home we carried with us, the vastness of the future was infinitely more expansive. Bad luck and unfairness would surely rear their heads along the way, but the path to a bright future was ours to pave.

All right, GM. Give me a new record sheet.

[Tips] Those leaving their home cantons in search of work will be given a writ of identification that serves as proof of imperial citizenship. Having this writ makes it astronomically easier to find work in unknown lands within the nation.

Imperial citizenship can also be earned by twenty years of residence and taxable labor, or bought with thirty drachmae. Yet in any case, it is incredibly difficult for an unidentifiable person to gain trust in a new community.