Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 9 - Chapter 2

Spring of the Sixteenth Year

Troupe Play

Just as human civilizations attained greater productive power through a finer-grained and more rigid division of labor, a party of adventurers can grow stronger through finding a niche that they are uniquely suited to. However, an adventurer only has one body. Should a player find themselves unable to participate in one scene due to priorities elsewhere, they may take the reins of an affiliated NPC to smooth things over.

There was something about watching grown men deep in their cups in the middle of the day—most likely a holdover from my past life—that left me with a despondent feeling.

“Now who ze ’ell are you?! Zis ain’t no place fer brats!”

“Ze fok ya doin’, slinkin’ ’round ’ere?!”

The mindless raging of these men—I’ve taken several liberties transcribing the sounds that came from their mouths—only served to cast the sorry state of the scene in a fouler light. That said, it wasn’t their fault. It’s not like they were making an effort to be unintelligible; they had simply picked up the Imperial tongue as a second language, and between the thickness of their accents and the occasional unpredictable slip back into their mother tongue, anyone would have had a hard time keeping up.

They’d made a worthy effort at being intimidating—top marks, really—but they were a ways out from “soil yourself” levels of terrifying. I gave a sidelong glance to Siegfried, who was somewhat taken aback by their blatantly antagonistic behavior. Come on, my guy, you’ve thrown down with bastards five times scarier than these souses. Stand proud!

“Excuse me, gentlemen. Is Mister Franz here? My name is Erich. I am here on business.”

I had taken the advice of my seniors on board and thrown myself into taking on aboveboard jobs. Naturally, my clients were straitlaced ilk—you know, the “help the honorable poor and strike down the unjust strong” kind of spiel.

“Ain’tnever’eardzename!”

The guy’s speech was so distorted and badly enunciated that I wasn’t sure for a moment what language he was speaking...if it even was one. Mostly, he seemed to treat speech as a vehicle for shouting. I could feel a headache coming on.

I wondered if these gentlemen and their interesting way of speaking was some western dialect? Or maybe they were from the peninsula that stuck out into the Aquamarine Sea? Their vocabulary seemed to have a common root with mine, at least, and their grammar held up, but it was hard for me to parse. Anyway, I had the inkling that they were telling me Franz wasn’t here.

“Then how about Mister Franciscus? No? Mister Francis? Mister Francois? Ah, maybe Mister Firenze?”

Names in Rhinian took on different phonetics in different languages. I decided to throw out a few similar options for the gentlemen.

“Zefock yachattin’ f’lishk rap, ya sackoshit! Ain’t NO freakin’ piezoshi tlyk himeer!”

Please, for the love of hygiene, stop spitting at me. Get your face out of mine and talk more slowly. And by all that’s good and squeaky-clean, you stink. Brush your teeth! Take a bath!

“Man, this is getting boring. You wanna take over, Sieg?”

“C’mon, don’t just give up like that! You’re kinda necessary on this mission! For starters, I can’t read the note!”

Yeah, I know, but these guys are a pain in my ass to talk to, let alone communicate with.

I would’ve been happy to resolve the matter with pure, naked violence (cause of and solution to all of life’s problems that it was). Unfortunately for us, our client had political connections and an image to maintain, so that method was off the table.

“Well,” I said, “whatever the case, I’ll read from the report. Ahem. ‘Mister Franz engaged in property transactions with a certain Mister Manuel of East Street. However, the tax inspector, Mister Simon von Armhold has acknowledged in summary court the objection that Mister Franz has not only made threats against the client, but has also claimed a number of falsities during the purchase of the property. Therefore—’”

I wasn’t able to finish. The thugs at the table had gotten up and were itching for a fight.

Of course it would end like this...

“Time to— Gwugh?!”

“Your breath stinks. Shove it.”

One of the thugs had the audacity to spit on me, so I capitalized on the infuriating couple of inches he had on me by delivering an uppercut into the soft tissue where jaw met throat. I took a half step forward to avoid the drops of blood and dislodged incisors. What was that blackish-red thing, though? The tip of his tongue...?

“Now then, where was I? ‘The representative has gone through the proper channels with the Adventurer’s Association of Marsheim.’”

Finishing my half step, I gave a swift chop to the thug’s exposed nape and snatched away the dagger dangling at his waist as he dropped. Since he’d hung it from his belt backward, it came out nice and easy.

What a nice present. We’d come empty-handed, as I had expected a nice, peaceful little message delivery—and we hadn’t wanted to sully our client’s image by showing up armed to the teeth—so a little field procurement was a huge help. Then again, it was starting to look like we’d have made our point more effectively if we had come loaded for bear; this was not a crowd that seemed terribly receptive to civil discourse. It was tough playing “good cop, bad cop” when the party you’re negotiating with would have preferred “dead cop, also dead cop.”

“Oy, Erich?! So we are gonna do it this way after all?!”

“‘I am here to report that our client demands that Mister Franz return the deed to this house and pay the legal fees owed to Mister Manuel.’”

“What are you, a monk lost in his chants?! If we’re doin’ this, put some kick in your voice, you lazy ass!”

Despite his complaints, my comrade was readying himself for battle. I was sure glad he caught on quickly. Just as I closed in to impart some physical justice, he knocked over a nearby chair and the thug atop it, rendering his attempts to draw his dagger futile. Then Sieg administered a swift kick to his chin, sending him straight to naptime. Evidently Siegfried’s experience in the ichor maze had taught him just how important it was to get in that finishing blow ASAP to avoid any trouble down the line.

“‘You are permitted to refute this claim within three days from the day of notice. If you acknowledge the claim, or if our client does not receive word that you refute it—’”

I deflected a swing from a longsword from one of the thugs, sidestepping him and severing the tendons in his armpit as I continued to read out the notice.

“‘—then he is, in the name of Margrave Marsheim, permitted to use material force or foreclosure to complete his claim.’”

Phew, all done. Now no one can complain.

The lengthy notice was a claim that the property in question had been bought unfairly by a would-be land shark. Tax collection in Rhine was enforced by officially appointed collectors, not small-time state employees hired from the general population.

In this case, an official complaint and report had been filed in regard to illicit property purchases, and so, as expected of any Imperial citizen, the collector had stepped in to help protect the law.

I got goose bumps thinking how well the taxation system of our fair Empire was implemented. It was true that outsourced tax collectors were as hated as loan sharks and crooks, but I was glad that the Empire wasn’t like medieval Europe, which used “fairly calculated” taxes as a front to drain their subjects dry. The Empire even had people like us making sure that both parties would be treated fairly by delivering a notice. I felt like a true paragon of justice doing things by the book in a way that gave the other party—if they were willing—a chance to make a case for themselves.

Now that I had read the notice, we wouldn’t get slammed for using force down the line. For adventurers in this line of work, if you made the right connections, then you had the legal and moral high ground. If our crooks here had graciously signed the notice declaring their guilt, that would have been a win. If they chose to bring the fight and we had to restrain them with force, booyah. If they signed and then brought the fight and were punished for violence, then great. Great for me, great for the government, great for the swindled party. A triple win.

As I folded up the notice, I ducked clear of the hammer bearing down on the side of my head. With no meat target to stop its momentum, it kept going until it crashed into one of the tavern’s pillars. Oof, talk about a fumble. Thanking my assailant for this guaranteed win, I made two quick thrusts to the backs of his knees, leaving him hobbled. As he fell backward, I tag-teamed with gravity and rapped on the back of his head with my borrowed dagger’s pommel.

Hm? That didn’t feel great... Maybe I hit a little too hard. Let’s hope his skull’s not actually broken...

I wouldn’t have minded sending a bunch of rent-seeking crooks straight to the lap of the gods, but as I often told my pals, an alive crook fetches more coin.

“Gah, Erich! Beating them up won’t...grah...pad out our paycheck! So why...hah...are we doing this?!”

“Gurgh!”

As Siegfried complained, he deftly struck another legbreaker in the throat with the blunt end of a broom; the goon crumpled to the floor. Look at Sieg! No hesitation to aim for the squishy spots when the going gets rough! But man, that’s rough to see, even when it’s some punk. A jab to the throat like that’s gotta hurt a hell of a lot more than my little knife tricks.

“Why?! Good question! We need to protect the reputation...of our good government! And if we hand them in...we get some pocket money!”

“Yeah, but...is it worth the effort?!”

Siegfried and I were chatting as we fought—I had just plunged my dagger into one of the fool’s shoulders, and Sieg had used a spear he’d picked up to strike at his foe’s gauntlets first before knocking them down. Between the two of us, we’d racked up a body count of six. Man, these guys sure were tenacious for a bunch of two-bit roughnecks! We’d taken down a third of their number. Why weren’t they backing down? I would have expected them to start making morale checks somewhere around the twenty-to-twenty-five percent mark.

“We all win...if social order improves!”

“We’re improving social order...by cracking heads?!”

Our battle lasted until twelve of the bastards were on the floor unconscious. The only ones left standing in the tavern were me, Siegfried, the barkeep crouched behind his counter, and a waitress cowering in the corner.

“Erich! The number ain’t addin’ up! There were fifteen in here when we arrived!”

And then...

“Gwaaagh!”

...a cry came from behind the tavern. Not just one—a splendid trio of wails.

“There we go,” I said.

“R-Right...”

We headed to the back exit—kicking the weapons away from unmoving hands in case anyone were to suddenly lunge at us—and found quite the sight.

One of the crooks had a rope around his neck—not quite tight enough to asphyxiate—and was struggling to break free. He must have set off a trap while rushing out. Another was stuck on the ground, affixed fast in some birdlime, looking like some mochi that had fallen in the gutter. The third and final crook was simply lying face down on the ground. Half of his face was embedded into the pavement, which made for quite the gruesome sight.

“You two were sloppy. How could you let three escape you?”

Enter my wonderful childhood friend. Our party’s scout, who had just leaped down and taken up a new position hanging from my neck as she always did, had been sent to lay a trap by the back entrance and watch it just in case.

“They were livelier than I expected. Oh, and this notice was way longer than I was planning around.”

“Shouldn’t we have just used the allergy potion?”

Yes, Siegfried, it would have made it more efficient, and I’m just as annoyed we had to fight as you, but we live in a society with rules. Although we weren’t acting publicly, we had received orders from the government, and that meant we had to play everything as tight-assed as possible. I was just as irked by the hoops we had to jump through, but complaining was akin to doing a bad job, so I bit my tongue. And in any case, this sort of tight regulation on our government’s use of force meant we could avoid the typical pitfalls of your usual authoritarian state, happy to drag innocents into our cause and call it a day despite civilian losses while talking up our unimpeachable moral character and the ontological evil of the Enemy.

“Listen. I read the notice from start to finish. That puts us on the legal and moral high ground. We fulfilled our job to the letter and no one can fault us otherwise. It’s annoying, but it’s important to keep our business orthodox and decorous. That’s half the reason you need to be amber-orange or above before they let you do this stuff.”

“Ortho what and deco...what?”

“It means doing stuff by the book.”

Siegfried muttered that it was probably because notices used such hoity-toity language like this that they pissed off your typical crook with no education to speak of. He was right, yeah, but unfortunately our job wasn’t to draft up notices that people of all levels of literacy could understand.

“Now then.”

I poured some of Kaya’s bespoke anti-birdlime potion on the ground and set about tying up our bounty heads. I was a bit worried that we would run out of rope—I hadn’t envisioned so many fighting back—but we just about made do. I lined them up, taking them down to their skivvies to be absolutely sure they had no concealed weapons, then moved on to pinning down which one of these men was our Mister Franz.

“Barkeep?”

“Y-Yes?!”

“I would like your signature as a witness. Just to verify that we had delivered the notice as agreed. Not to worry; you won’t be in any danger. They’re all headed for the cells.”

They attacked us—unarmed workers out on behalf of the tax collector—and had tried to take our lives. They were destined for hard labor in the mines or, if they were subject to an unkind gaoler, the death penalty. They wouldn’t be harming anyone again.

“O-Of course.”

“Also, do you recognize the name ‘Franz’?”

The jenkin barkeep was crouched behind a barstool as I questioned him. It seemed like the gang had made this tavern their hideout, but hadn’t roped the owner into their illicit schemes.

“The name Franz isn’t ringing any bells, but the mensch who had collapsed in the middle of the room had a similar name,” he said.

“With the beard?”

“Y-Yes, him.”

Apparently their accents had been difficult for the barkeep to parse too—he wasn’t completely certain—but it was a useful step in the right direction. I rifled through Probably Franz’s clothes and found some keys among the dross he kept in his wallet. The barkeep told me one of them was for a room upstairs.

I was grateful that things were going so smoothly. If the key had belonged to some safe house on the other side of town, we’d most definitely have more fighting waiting for us in the pipeline; I really didn’t want to pick a fight with an entire mafia today. This job was only going to net us twenty-five librae for the four of us, and it was already draining my reserves.

“What’s up, Erich?”

It was Siegfried. I had taken one step up the stairs when I stopped.

“Are we legally allowed to raid his room? I think it would fall under our foreclosure clause, but...” I said.

“I don’t bloody know! Shut up and move it. If you mention any more of these stupid rules, you’ll be fighting me next!”

I nodded, happy that my bestest buddy would totally take the fall if we got nailed on this during the debriefing, and proceeded to climb up the stairs, jauntily jangling the keys in my off hand.

[Tips] It isn’t rare in the Trialist Empire of Rhine for the authority in legal issues to be entrusted to a third party in potentially hazardous conditions. Maintaining public order falls under the jurisdiction of those of the knight class, with their subordinates making up the patrols around local areas. As such, the government is perpetually short of personnel with the ability to enact legal measures.

We handed in our fresh-caught pack of wastoids to the guards a little before lunch. We had to file a small pile of paperwork before we finally received our payment, and by the time our business was dealt with, lunch had come and gone. If we ate now, we’d spoil our appetites for dinner. But! We were four teenagers—there was no way we would grin and bear it until evening came.

We raised our glasses together as we dug into a delightfully late lunch.

“Aww, yeah! Thaaank you, government!”

Siegfried was rubbing his hands together as he licked his lips.

I was in the same boat. The tax office held sway even here in Marsheim, and perhaps thanks to this discretion, we received our payment before our catch had even been dealt with by the higher-ups. Thanks to their foolish decision to try and snuff us out, we had received a hearty forty librae boost on top of our base pay. Our honest property manager—he was duly interviewed and looked into as well, just to make sure the whole operation was on the up-and-up—who hadn’t shrunk in the face of their dealings had gotten his property back, the government maintained their reputation, and we adventurers had received a nice reward.

It was a bit touch and go, but this was a good job. I have my seniors to thank for their generosity. Yup, friends and connections are worth their weight in gold.

“Dee, are you going to be able to eat all of this?”

“Hell yeah I am! That exercise worked me up an appetite!”

Kaya’s concerns weren’t misplaced—the table was jam-packed with a veritable cornucopia of dishes. There was black bread—a staple in the Empire—with fatty wurst and sauerkraut to accompany it. We had splurged a little bit and gone in for some smoked herring and braised vegetables. It was a spread fit for a hardworking adventurer.

Now, reader, as you might have realized from the fact that all four of us were eating together, we were not in the Snoozing Kitten anymore.

Whereas Shymar’s cooking had an Imperial flair and used spices from the isles, here the food was seasoned in the style of the northeastern crescent peninsula up in the polar region. Their bread was unique in that it didn’t have a single grain of wheat in it, making it quite sour—and cheap—but it paired perfectly with smoked herring and dairy products.

All of these culinary delights from across the northern sea were made by the owner of the Snowy Silverwolf in an attempt to recreate the flavors of his home. There were a number of ingredients that were near impossible to procure—such as reindeer meat or fresh salmon—but being here really gave you a taste of the wider world while filling you up.

We had decided that we would move our base here for a while. The nice ladies at the Association had recommended us here, since it attracted a lot of rookie adventurers and maintained a good reputation. Now that we had found solid ground once more, it was time to engage in some social interaction.

Siegfried understood immediately that it was bad for us to have such a tiny social circle, and so he’d agreed that the Snowy Silverwolf was a good location to meet decent people. Although when we first showed up, Mister John, the owner, had recommended we leave—in his words, “amber-orange adventurers should head someplace else”—but he gave his okay after we reasoned that we’d only been adventurers for a year now and as such were rookies at heart.

Mister John must have had some soft spot for greenhorns; he kept his prices sane and his rules ironclad. The man himself had long, wavy black hair that joined into a long and magnificent beard. He was surely still in his twenties, but his face was rough and chiseled. I got the impression that he’d been aged beyond his years by pretty grim circumstances.

I imagined that he had quite the history with roughhousing too. The inn had a huge fireplace—despite Marsheim never getting that cold—and above it hung a crossed sword and axe. They didn’t look like display pieces; they were at least as weathered as their owner. Here sat the symbols of a man who’d come by all his cold winters in the far north honestly.

Anyway, the cost of our dinner had been bumped up by twenty percent due to our higher earnings as amber-orange adventurers, but we were more than happy to set up shop here as we did jobs and got to know the people around us.

I had earned my moniker ages ago by now, but we still hadn’t really made much headway in our social network. Margit and I had lived quiet lives in the Snoozing Kitten and Siegfried and Kaya had been living in their own home, and we’d paid for it. I was starting to finally feel like our peers could put faces to the names.

After explaining our situation, Mister John could see that although we might have had some talent when it came to jobs, we were still wet behind the ears in many ways. I was honestly really grateful that he took the time to explain some basic things.

All that was left was to build some friendly connections. If we could form some links with people who could keep us clued in on the rumors flying around adventuring circles, then we could prepare more spontaneously and efficiently.

Siegfried tore off a hunk of bread and started layering various delicacies atop it while I set my knife and fork to heavy work. Although I preferred Shymar’s cooking, it was a good portion for the price and suited our big stomachs.

“It’s kinda weird,” Siegfried said, “I think our big payouts early in our career have made normal wages seem a bit small.”

I agreed. We’d been plugging away at a number of requests from our Nanna-approved mediator, and the sum they’d won us wasn’t paltry, but it didn’t arouse any excitement either.

Three days ago we’d been called in to deal with some thugs who were swindling locals. They were squatting in a building that was due to be torn down as part of the area’s redevelopment plan, but refused to answer any of the requests to move. The original owner had moved to another new property built by the same landowner, but these crooks had pounced on this opening and wouldn’t budge, simply asking for more and more money to get them to move someplace new.

Two days ago we were hired as bodyguards to help a distressed barkeeper whose tavern had been overrun by unsavory sorts. As soon as we arrived, they broke out into a small riot, which we subsequently solved. They were your typical low-rank, unorganized thugs. With a bit of gentle, kind, totally nonviolent persuasion, they left Marsheim for good.

And then there was today.

Each day had netted us twenty to thirty librae, which was a huge improvement compared to our days in the Infrared lane, but they required both a flexible mindset and skills to put ne’er-do-wells in their place.

After my big payouts from handing in Baltlinden alive and delivering a literary morsel to a voracious bookworm, these jobs just felt like pocket change.

“It’s not just that; I dunno, it doesn’t really feel like adventurin’.”

“Remember your soot-black days, friend. Would you class gutter cleaning and sewer inspection as ‘adventuring’?”

“He’s right, Dee,” Kaya said. “This feels far more like adventuring to me. We’re actually helping people with their problems.”

“Yeah, I guess so. And call me Siegfried! C’mon, we’re in public...”

It was easy to forget that adventures didn’t just roll into your lap while you sat lazing about, mouth half-open during an afternoon nap. In all honesty, if a regular old adventuring party had found themselves confronting the cursed cedar ichor maze, they would have either run back home to ask a big-time adventurer like Mister Fidelio to fix the problem, or simply become a statistic to be tallied later for the academics to make a comparative statement on just how bad we all let the situation get. We had found our way out with our wits, our skills, and a couple miraculously lucky breaks, but the fact was such ichor mazes wouldn’t come our way every day.

Our seniors had built their own systems to maximize their intended gains. Mister Fidelio searched for prey that would be worth battling before making the proper preparations for his quest. Miss Laurentius had created a format that would bring foes to her. These were the results of years of work.

It was natural that us newbies had to submit to the grind and pile up menial jobs. No one would send the most dangerous jobs to a scrawny group with no real street cred. We needed to mill through the proverbial goblins and farm for xp before heading out to take down a basilisk or a legendary sword-sworn dragon.

Everything came in its right order. If we wanted to hear the lines “You must save the world—you’re our only hope!” then we needed to have the rep to back it up. If we got lax now, we wouldn’t simply be one-hit wonders—we’d earn a reputation as lazy layabouts.

Plus, who could say? If we stuck to the straight and narrow, maybe a big job would come our way. The fun didn’t just lie in character advancement—the small tasks that built up to greater ones were part of the joy too.

“Anyway,” Sieg went on, “I guess it’s better than running yourself ragged just to scrape together fifty assarii. Before we were cramming jobs into every daylight hour, so there was barely any time to train.”

“Indeed,” Margit said. “There are many adventurers who end up destroying their bodies through malnutrition and lack of sleep because they can’t even afford a decent bed. We should be grateful that we have what we do.”

“Exactly. Let’s stick to the plan and take tomorrow off. We can stop by the Association on the way home today and check if there’s anything good in the foreseeable future.”

Siegfried was right. If you had a lifestyle where you lived hand to mouth, hoping that the next job would buy you one more night’s sleep, then you couldn’t train, you couldn’t afford decent gear, and you’d mentally and physically exhaust yourself.

As I was pondering just how many poor rookies had got caught in this awful, endless cycle, I noticed the sound of measured footsteps. I looked up and saw a single adventurer weaving between the tables, approaching us.

They were a huge audhumbla. Their fur was black and sleek, and their horns were healthy and pristine. To anyone from Earth it would look like someone just stuck an ox head atop a well-built frame; a mensch like myself was unable to assess their gender, let alone age.

Unlike an ox’s, an audhumbla’s eyes were set forward on their face so that they could see straight ahead like mensch did. However, their large snout, jaw, and hooves were decidedly unmenschly. As someone who wasn’t used to seeing them, I didn’t know what to look out for to distinguish one from their peers.

What I could say about this adventurer was that they bore few scars and that their air exuded a certain immature naivety to it.

The adventurer’s hooves clicked with solid steps as they approached us. There was a faint trace of tension in the air due to my Oozing Gravitas, but they had managed to overcome it. They had a courageous heart, that was for sure.

It was spring now, so perhaps this adventurer had come from a nearby canton to make their name? In place of a necklace, I caught a glimpse of an adventurer’s tag from the collar of their unfitted (seemingly) secondhand shirt. It was black. Aha, so we’re his seniors, then.

“You Goldilocks?”

“I am he. As you can see, I’m currently enjoying a late lunch. What do you need?”

“Heh, what a surprise. Didn’t think you’d be this small. Guess the poet didn’t lie in that regard.”

Audhumbla usually measured over two meters in height, and this one showed off the difference by standing right up in my business. There had been no formal greeting, just idle comments and an appraising glare. Rather rude, if you asked me.

Their voice was a little high, so I was right in my guess that they—he, probably—were young. His voice had finally dropped, but he didn’t have the booming resonance that Stefano Heilbronn did. My estimation that he hadn’t come of age as an audhumbla seemed to be on the money.

“Yeah,” he went on. “I see why the song was all about your freakin’ hair. You’d be better suited to weavin’ than fightin’, no?”

I retract my statement. He’s not “rude,” he’s a churl.

Being a multicultural nation, the Empire’s political rights were not so tied to gender—evident in how Lady Agrippina was a count, not a countess—but differences in physique and social consciousness meant certain jobs still carried pronounced gender markers.

Weaving was “women’s work.”

In summary, this newbie had come up to me without even saying hello and mocked me for (to crib a little from my past life’s old social media habits) “being kind of fruity with it.” Anyone else would have knocked his lights out. I was an adventurer, so naturally I refrained from violence.

“Oy. What’s the big deal interrupting someone’s meal, eh?”

As I contemplated my next move, Siegfried snapped. He had gotten up with enough force to rattle his chair; before I could even say anything, he’d stood between us.

“Don’t you know a lick of manners? What’s your rank, pal?”

“So you must be Siegfried the Lucky. Hah! Yeah, that’s probably the only thing you got goin’ for ya.”

I could hear the air shift at that moment. It wasn’t a palpable change, broken by the sound of a sword scraping in its scabbard, but a minute alteration in the air that my honed swordsman’s senses caught.

Siegfried’s anger was about ready to boil over.

I couldn’t blame him—the comment would be enough to make anyone pop off. After all, a man he had never seen in his life had just said all he was good for was an asset completely out of his control.

I could see the muscles in my comrade’s arm twitch as his hand grabbed a nearby fork. It was wooden, but it could cause some serious damage if used correctly.

“Sieg.”

“Huh?”

I stood up and placed my hand on his elbow to defuse his rage. His arm was tense. I felt that if I had placed my hand elsewhere I might not have been able to hold him back. I had been putting in the hours with my training, but I couldn’t look down on my pure frontliner in the event of a physical scuffle.

“Cool it. You could kill a man with that.”

“What’s the deal, man? He was chattin’ shit about you too! Why’d you stop me?!”

The audhumbla had taken a step back. I could see the thought playing through his head: If Goldilocks hadn’t stopped him, I’d be mortally wounded or worse right now.

From Siegfried’s bloodlust, I guessed he was planning to go for the eyes. It doesn’t matter what kind of thing you are; you can’t train those to be any tougher.

“Siegfried, I’m happy that you got angry for me.”

“What the actual—?! Like hell I’m getting angry for you!”

My comrade grabbed my shirt, but seemed to realize something in the face of my easy smile. He had watched me get mocked, got mocked himself in defense, and was about to resort to fisticuffs. There was no way he couldn’t realize that I was right.

Ahh, I made a great ally in you, bud.

Siegfried’s face went beet red, and he let go of my shirt with an aggressive push.

Thank you for this deliciously endearing tsundere moment. Doesn’t matter if it’s a girl or guy—it’s cute either way.

“But listen, Sieg, the important thing is that if we make a scene, Mister John won’t be happy.”

I pointed to the bar counter, and there he was—glaring over at our table with narrowed eyes. Siegfried had been in the frying pan with me and knew what would come of ticking off a seasoned warrior.

“Oh...crap.”

Mister John was a dab hand at concealing just how strong he was. I myself had no idea at what depths his strength lay. One thing was clear: he was bad news. At any rate, it wouldn’t be good to get kicked out of this place after only ten days, especially after all the effort we went to just trying to get in.

There was something else. The most important thing, in fact.

“Order is important, Sieg. My turn comes before yours.”

This adventurer had picked a fight with me first. I preferred it if my friend didn’t steal my first dibs.

“Fair ’nough. Go on.”

“You, me, behind the bike racks—er, to the yard now. If we settle this outside, then Mister John won’t mind.”

I didn’t wait for an answer and made for the yard immediately. Just like almost every other inn, the Snowy Silverwolf had a shared open space for hanging up laundry. Many adventurers used the space to train or to cook their own meals.

“Now then, you seem to have some qualms about my appearance, so why don’t we settle this right away?”

I spotted some kindling on the ground and kicked it up into the air. It was just a mite longer than your average dagger, but shorter than a sword. It would do.

“C’mon hoof ’n’ horns, draw your blade,” I said as I caught the kindling and thrust at the audhumbla. “You’re the one who came to me with a sword hanging at your waist. Or is it just for show?”

It wouldn’t be cool to let him proverbially walk all over me. More importantly, we were adventurers. We weren’t like bureaucrats who decided a pecking order based on rhetoric; we were thugs who let our blades speak for us.

“Or are you all bark and no bite? If you’re going to mock me for my appearance, then allow me to do the same—I think you’d be better suited to pulling a plow than fighting.”

I couldn’t let this younger adventurer forget that if you were going to dish it out, you had to take it too.

“You cocky little—!”

“Go on. Take it out. Or is a little piece of kindling held in a weaver’s hand really so terrifying?”

It seemed my verbal insults had finally got to him. He drew the longsword from his belt. It was shoddily made and poorly sharpened, but it was a hefty thing that would take all the might of an average mensch to wield. He had a strength befitting his size and held it easily in one hand.

He looks the part, but he’s lacking. If he’s holding it one-handed, then he should have one foot forward and one back. That or support the blade with his left hand, to help drive it forward.

In my eyes, he was wide open, begging me to strike anywhere.

“When I strike you down, don’t forget that you asked for it, shorty!”

“No worries, jumbo. It doesn’t matter how strong the weapon is if it doesn’t hit. Now come on if you’re hard enough.”

I placed my left foot back and stood ready to take him. I spun the kindling in my right hand and made a beckoning gesture with my left. Young and quick to anger, he charged at me. His first strike was a simple downward swing. Self-taught, most likely.

I parried it easily with the kindling and grazed the tip of his nose as he went tumbling past me, his sword burying itself in the dirt. In an easy second movement, I grazed his wrists.

“Whuh?!”

“If this was a real fight, I would’ve sliced clean through your tendons. You’d never hold a sword again.”

“You cocky piece of—!”

Unwilling to accept defeat, he pulled the sword out of the dirt and swung again. I ducked beneath it and gave his shin a quick jab. He curled forward in pain, so I decided to meet his jaw with the kindling.

“Gurgh!”

“I would have smashed right through your jaw. It would have been bye-bye tongue and so long solid meals for the rest of your life.”

“GRAAAH!”

Filled with rage, he came at me once again with attack after attack, which I easily deflected before striking him—explaining each time what had gone wrong.

He’s picked up some bad habits. He’s been relying on his size and hasn’t worked on his technique much at all.

Most adventurers who were twice the size of your average mensch and with the arm span to match could probably have made use of this extra range to win. Relying on stuff like this would not have flown in the Konigstuhl Watch’s training sessions.

If Sir Lambert were here he would say this adventurer needed to learn everything from scratch before submitting them to the hundred practice swings hell—he would make you do it a thousand times if need be—but I was a kinder soul.

“You swing too wide and you don’t step close enough. Do you want someone to cut your inner elbow when your arm’s stretched out like that?”

Some races were born into this world stronger than others, but the truly strong could overcome this natural advantage. Anyone swift enough could step right up close to him and turn his big body into one big target.

“Stop exposing your neck like that. I doubt it would hurt too much, but your life could be snuffed out with one simple stab.”

Not only that, it felt like he was letting the weight of his sword propel him forward. He was focusing on his weapon and his weapon alone.

“Good—when you get disarmed, pick it up right away. No one will wait for you in a real battle.”

A sword fighter’s weapon was their entire body, including the sword. Yet this audhumbla just let his left arm hang there, not grabbing at me or anything. He didn’t even attempt to kick at me. He was just obsessed with trying to strike me with his sword. To be honest, it was a crying shame that he was so unrefined. If it came to a pushing battle with crossed blades, he could easily use his weight to overpower his opponent. Why wasn’t he making use of any of it?

To someone like me, who constantly longed for a bigger, burlier build, this was an offense of the highest order. He had an amazing weapon at his fingertips, but he simply let it go unused and wasted!

“Oy, Erich! Stop playin’ around! I’ve noticed you ain’t moved your left leg this whole time!”

“Don’t spoil it, Siegfried! I wanted him to notice himself that I hadn’t moved my pivot foot!”

“Ahh, silly boy,” Margit said. “Erich was doing it on purpose, you know?”

Don’t show your hand so early, Sieg. I was still warming up!

As Siegfried had so uncouthly pointed out, I hadn’t moved a single step from my original location—my left foot had been planted firmly on the ground this whole time. I could twist left and right, but I had chosen my left foot, as I was right-handed. Fighting like this wasn’t just for fun or to tease my opponent.

“Gods dammit all!”

But, having realized he was being played with, the audhumbla lunged at me with his biggest windup yet. He openly lunged at me with an attack that was less of a tackle, more of a rampaging charge. I couldn’t tell if he would hit me with his sword or his body first. What I could see was that he had finally started to treat his sword as something with a sharp edge, not just a metal bar.

“Very good.”

I finally had to move both my feet. It wasn’t a jump; it was a paper-thin slide out of the way. I ducked through his gaudy attack and struck at his torso as I went past. I admired this gutsy move—an attack that would’ve got me if I had no decent weapon, no equipment, and nowhere to reposition.

“Urgh!”

I knew little of him aside from his immature age, but under the skin there wasn’t much difference between him and any mensch. My attack would have cut through someone’s side, but since it was just a piece of wood, it struck at his unprotected stomach.

The rash adventurer had left so many openings this whole time, but I decided to repay his first decent attack with a proper one of my own.

“Yep, with this one, if you didn’t have some decent armor, your guts would be spilling out all over the floor.”

We were adventurers, not soldiers killed like chaff, so we couldn’t count on the simple arithmetic of “one troop, one enemy, two kills.” Adventurers were honed fighters who could eliminate the enemy on its own turf with a small force. A decent frontliner had to be able to be able to break the zero-sum game of traditional warfare over their knee.

“But with a strike like the one you just pulled, your opponent will become desperate too. If you don’t have a way of striking back or dodging, then you’ll be mincemeat. Adventures are full of give and take.”

I squatted before the audhumbla, who was wheezing on the ground with his arm around his stomach. I held out a hand to him.

“I won’t cheapen what you did by saying you’ve got ‘talent.’ What you showed me was determination and intent. When you truly commit to something—that’s when your resolve is tested.”

It didn’t matter what the impetus was. This thing had started because the person he taunted had taunted him back and given him a solid thrashing afterward. But if your body could keep up with your emotions, then you might be suited to this game.

“You’ve got the right stuff.”

“I...do?”

“You do. Although you need to start from how to hold and use your body. You rely on your muscles and your natural strength too much. You might as well be swinging around a stick.”

In a daze, the audhumbla took my hand—his was way bigger, but for the sake of my mental health I won’t write how many inches—and I used his center of gravity and my own to help him to his feet.

I wouldn’t say he was on the path of the sword or anything so stuffy, but I wanted him to know that if he worked at it he could do what I did with his eyes closed.

“Now then, introductions are in order, no? I’m Erich of Konigstuhl, fourth son of Johannes. And you?”

“Etan... Youngest son of Evrard of Bertrix.”

“Good. I won’t forget it, Etan of Bertrix.”

There we go, lesson over. I had a vague memory that the phrasing I’d used was meant for talking to your seniors, but, whatever.

“Right. Let’s get back to our food. You’re satisfied, right, Siegfried?”

I smiled over at Siegfried, who was holding a broom that was about the same length as his spear. I expected that he had followed me out here with his own intentions of showing this young rookie his place after I was done. I wouldn’t stop him, but I felt our man had learned his lesson.

“Tch... Ugh, fine, whatever. Ain’t cool to kick a fellow when he’s down.”

Very good. Bertrix was a city quite far north of here. You’d waste an entire day if you got annoyed at every single rash adventurer who had come from the countryside. We had been on missions with our weapons recently, but people often assumed they were just for show.

“Ugh, but the food’s gone cold. Nothing’s worse than a cold wurst.”

“Agreed. Let’s get Mister John to reheat some of our spread.”

I clasped my arm around Siegfried’s shoulder and made to head back inside, when suddenly my free hand was grabbed. I had sensed him approach me, but Margit hadn’t stopped him, so he must not have intended to scrap again.

“Yes, Etan?”

“Erich... No, Mister Erich... No! Master!”

“Ex...cuse me?”

Turning around, I saw him looking at me with an expression that I had never received in my life. I’d been around the block, and I’d been the object of looks of all kinds—parental love, disinterest, hate, fear, bloodlust. But this...the nearest approximation of it I could dredge from my memory was the expression I’d see on the kids back in Konigstuhl when I did my little magic trick routine. It was admiration with a dash of awe.

“Please... Please take me as your apprentice!”

What on Earth was he saying? Master? Apprentice? I was only amber-orange, so why ask me? I still couldn’t properly look after my own affairs!

Etan’s grip was strong, and I could sense that he would never let go until I nodded in assent.

Seriously? Why? What’s going on? Why me?!

I looked at Margit and Siegfried for help, but she shrugged her shoulders, and he just let out an exasperated sigh.

No, hold on! Don’t just leave me hanging! I didn’t see this happening, I promise!

[Tips] Spring sees an influx of newbie adventurers. Solo adventurer-hopefuls head to a bigger city where they can make it on their own and go in search of party members or masters to take them under their wing. Not everyone is so lucky to set off from their hometown with close friends or partners.

Mister Fidelio’d told me to get along with my peers. He was completely right. Even I knew that some lateral connections would pay out in the long run. Still, I felt that the four of us made an efficient enough group. Plus, I was pretty sure that if we started dragging around a bunch of greenhorns, it’d damage our cred with our prospective clients. I really wanted to limit all this networking to picking up acquaintances.

“Don’t swing with your arms, swing with your torsos. You need that push to cut through properly.”

I didn’t want to be like Miss Laurentius, with her gaggle of followers all hidden comfortably in the shadow of her titanic sword skills.

“Yes, sir!” came a chorus in reply.

Yet here I found myself looking after some young adventurers. Not long after Etan had taken a weird shine to me, the number of starry-eyed newbies clinging to my coattails had jumped to four. It hadn’t even been that long since we moved to the Snowy Silverwolf...

I still didn’t get it; it’s not like I was outfitting them or managing their finances. They had chosen this inn because Mister John had a reputation for mentoring rookies, so why was I standing here teaching them the basics?

This whole situation got ahead of me before I could get a word in edgewise.

After the incident in the yard, I invited Etan to enjoy some of our late lunch. I thought that once he’d gone home and cooled off, he would come to his senses and forget about the whole “master” thing. I was completely wrong. As the days passed, his passion burned as brightly as ever, and on any given day that he wasn’t busy with his own gigs, he’d be waiting in the main room of the Snowy Silverwolf until we came back. He had constantly bugged Mister John, asking when we’d be back, which ended up blowing up in my face. In the master of the house’s words, I could sleep under his roof again as soon as I sorted out my new acolyte.

Thinking about leveraging my social skill purchases to brute force him out left me with a little pang of nausea. It turned out he was only twelve, in spite of his truck-like physique—I guessed that was just normal for audhumbla. Anyhow, I figured for my conscience’s sake, I’d take a page from Mister John’s book and show the kid the ropes.

The gist of what Mister John had told me was that if you trained someone in the basics, then it would improve your own fundamentals. He was right, of course, and so I found myself feeling as if Mister John had skill-checked me into saying yes to Etan. I wasn’t even anywhere near being the kind of adventurer I dreamed about, yet here I was with a disciple.

Then one thing led to another...

While I was walking Etan through his sword form, a goblin called Karsten came along and asked me to teach him too. He had watched my scuffle with Etan, and seeing that the audhumbla was now under my tutelage, he wanted in on it too.

Karsten had come up to Marsheim last winter, but something had happened in the time since which had dealt a big hit to his self-esteem. The conclusion he had drawn from this incident was that there was no way someone from a smaller race like him would ever attain glory through swinging a sword. But seeing some mensch take an audhumbla to school in the back lot had made something click for him.

“It’d be totally spineless of me to give up just because of my race!” he’d said to me. How could I say no to that? I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.

Two swiftly became three. The werewolf Mathieu had approached me in pretty much the same vein as Etan. He, too, had come to size me up after another round of tales of my exploits reached him, much to my embarrassment; he’d busted out laughing as soon as he saw me. Etan was present this time. I guessed seeing a walking reflection of his past self got under his skin. He and Mathieu ended up slugging it out.

Watching them brawl right there in the tavern, I could feel Mister John’s furious gaze burn a hole into the back of my neck. I stepped in and ended the fight with one quick blow. Mathieu wasn’t too happy about getting knocked out by a sucker punch, so he challenged Etan to a second bout as soon as he was on his feet again. He came to in the yard after we gave him a good splash with a bucket of cold water. The way he jumped right back in, passions ablaze, impressed me.

Audhumbla and werewolves ranked among the larger humanfolk species. It was a hell of a thing watching them trade blows. We’d stripped them of their weapons. Rockheaded greenhorns like them could settle their business with their fists until they’d proved they weren’t a threat to themselves with anything deadlier. As I watched them fight, the economically minded part of my brain almost considered setting up a wrestling ring—it would have been a big draw.

The rest hardly needs explaining—the fact that Etan and Mathieu were practicing their swing side by side should tell you everything you need to know.

The fourth newcomer to my little parade was a mensch named Martyn. He was from a farming family in a nearby canton, and I felt a little kinship with him. Apparently he’d been forced out of the family home when the eldest son succeeded the household. Instead of finding other work in his canton, he’d decided to make it big in Marsheim. His situation wasn’t too different from Siegfried’s, and so my comrade had taken a shine to him and suggested I train him too.

Martyn was a big guy, but had a shy temperament. He had managed to make it to the city and register, but was struggling to find any allies. It must have taken quite some courage to call out to us when he saw us all together practicing in the yard.

It seemed like I had been buoyed by their passion, and in spite of myself I found myself taking care of these four. It was completely unlike when I gave advice to Dietrich—she had the basics down and fundamentally different anatomy—and I found myself struggling somewhat.

“Etan, you’re still relying too much on your brute strength. If you want to swing the sword like a hammer, I suggest you put it down.”

“I’m sorry!”

It was still early days, so I was in the midst of teaching them basic swordplay—mid-height swings, diagonal slashes, and thrusts. We could cover the more technical stuff once they’d absorbed their fundamentals. Everyone needed to start with a blank slate. If not, they’d lose all the important elements of the trickier or flashier techniques you cribbed from a real pro.

I couldn’t help but think of an older friend from my old world—I hope he’s doing well back on Earth—who gave some advice to some younger friends for a game they’d never played before on how to trivialize just about every officially published enemy. He might have gone a little too far, because although we finished that campaign, it lost a bit of its heart along the way.

Learning from this experience, I tried my best to teach these rookies the basics without muddying the waters too much just yet. I wanted to do things the proper way, but a small part of me was tempted by the memories of steamrolling every encounter along the way...

All four of these newbies had missed out on joining their local Watches for one reason or another, and so had spent their days working on their own unique styles. This, in turn, meant they’d picked up some bad habits. That was what made it so much harder.

“Mathieu! Your step forward is two beats behind your sword swing. Werewolves have got crazy lower-body strength, right? It’s all for nothing if you don’t make good use of it.”

“Sorry!”

I had used my blessing to improve the speed at which practice improved my skills, so a lot of what I did was mostly just based on instinct. In other words, it was difficult to turn my actual method into actionable instructions. Here’s a thought experiment for you: try explaining how to ride a bike with words alone.

Ever since my first days training with the Watch, swinging a sword had become as natural as breathing. Now, with it put into perspective, I was stuck in a thought loop of being like, “But a vertical slash is a vertical slash!” It was extremely unsettling, like finding yourself contending with the vastness of space lying in bed at three in the morning.

“Karsten, I want more from your steps forward. You’re a small fighter like me, so if you don’t close the gap, you won’t be able to strike your foe. You’re agile, so use it to move quickly.”

“S’rry!”

Dear reader, have you not ever had a similar experience? Those nights where you suddenly wonder how it is we breathe? Trying to sleep on your side and feeling acutely aware of your arm, even though you slept normally the last thousand nights? Being suddenly really conscious of where your tongue is? We move our bodies without thought and without much understanding of how it’s put together; when we think about it, it feels really weird.

It was a strange feeling, being unable to verbalize something that was so fundamental to my way of life. I supposed it was a type of philosophy. The philosophy of the blade—“the sanctioned action of this world is to cut,” “there is no such thing as a sword,” “reach heaven through violence,” yadda yadda yadda...

“Martyn! I want you to feel like you’re throwing your body forward when you swing! You’re holding your sword as far as you can from your body, but that’s no good! If you’re scared of your enemy, then you can’t get the power in there.”

I had moments in battle where my sword skill had so shocked an enemy, akin to making them lose a Sanity check, that it actually gave me the edge. Whenever it came to a life-and-death situation, I would make use of any methods at my disposal to make sure my position was superior to my enemy’s.

In other words: proudly do stuff that your enemy’s going to hate.

By dissecting my skills and abilities here, I was able to understand some of my own weaknesses and realize how to avoid certain traps along the way. It was a real satisfying relief to finally understand the theory behind all those things I’d just done by instinct! Thanks to that, my path after finally attaining Absolute Charisma had become clear.

Teaching was a way of knowing yourself—Mister John’s advice had seemed offhand at the time, but it was incredibly valuable. I’m sorry for thinking this would be a drag at the beginning, world.

A range of experience could invigorate my own ideas and thoughts; anything could be looped back to the ultimate aim of enhancing the adventuring process. Not only that, this was a huge step toward the promise I made to the cutest little sister in the world, Elisa, that I would become a cool adventurer.

I had been so self-absorbed! I wanted to get down on my knees and apologize to Mister John, but I knew he would just be taken aback, so I bit my tongue. All the same, I always thanked him internally whenever I saw him.

One’s thoughts were the basis of one’s ego. As Aristotle had said, one’s reason takes shape when one puts one’s thoughts into words. This whole episode had been such a lesson that it made me feel closer to him than to Descartes.

All that aside, I was also just jazzed because I’d finally started following through on Mister Fidelio’s advice.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t making much headway in building connections with anyone other than these four. Despite moving our base to the Snowy Silverwolf, I still felt that other people kept their distance from me. Siegfried and Kaya were still the only people who I could count as friends. It puzzled me. No matter how much I churned these thoughts, a clear answer wouldn’t come.

What I did have was the blade, and what the philosophy of the sword had to say in the matter was simple and predictable: the problem could be solved with a continuous cutting motion.

[Tips] Too many NPCs can cause a scenario to grow unnecessarily complex. Most capable GMs will limit the number of characters so that the story doesn’t grow too bloated, but in the real world, people will approach you of their own free will. As such, there are very few cases where a party of a small few will achieve truly world-shaking feats.

Etan was a bona fide, squeaky-clean, Level 1 Fighter.

All the same, he had always been confident in his skill. However, life in his hometown of Bertrix hadn’t always been easy. He was a farmer’s boy, and his prowess in the fields meant that he was held back from seeing the world until he was twelve—two years after coming of age. He was blessed with a rare strength, even for an audhumbla. This was no mere bit of wishful thinking on his parents’ part; where the strongest ox or horse strained against the weight of the plow, Etan pushed along breezy and unbothered. This physical prowess meant that the landlord was reluctant to let such an incredible talent go.

He was valued for his incredible labor in the fields, but it didn’t seem to earn him any exceptional trust in him as a person. He was treated as little more than an especially pliant and efficient piece of farm equipment. It didn’t take a genius to see why this youngster would want to leave his canton, at least in the broad strokes.

There was no one keeping him home. His parents had passed from illness well before he came of age. He had no friends. The mensch children had kept him at arm’s length ever since he accidentally broke one of his peers’ arms while playing, simply unaware of his own strength.

No one hesitated to force any and all tasks upon the young Etan. While it could be said that the landlord took care of him, the fact of the matter was that from the age of seven, Etan was worked to the bone with barely a single day’s break, and paid only in food.

It didn’t take too much for Etan to see the appeal of an independent life, with only a sword at his waist as an ally. It just seemed so cool. The uneducated youngster had been so easily swayed by a poet’s tale that he made the move to Marsheim to become an adventurer.

Yet things in life do not go as easily as one might wish. The only gigs where he could apply the strength on which he prided himself were boring day jobs transporting goods. It was a far cry from his dreams of heroism.

Another reality he had to face was the pain of rent. With the bulk of his income consumed by his need for a place to rest, starvation loomed at his doorstep mere days after his arrival in Marsheim. Prices were just so different in the city. Back home, he had cooked for himself, and food had come easily to him—like little else had.

Here in Marsheim a good day’s work would only amount to fifty assarii. If this had been enough to sate an audhumbla’s stomach, then there would never have been a refugee encampment in all Ende Erde.

As the days dragged on, Etan began to believe that perhaps heroes of the ilk sung about in songs in fact did not, could not exist. His head full of such thoughts, Etan was sitting on a bench near the Association by Adrian Imperial Plaza when he heard a nearby poet singing a certain tale.

The accompaniment was on the shoddy side, sounding as if it had been hurriedly copied from someone else, but the details of a young adventurer achieving glory struck at Etan’s unsatisfied stomach and weary mind. Propelled by nothing but his needling hunger, Etan decided to see this hero in person.

Reaching the Snowy Silverwolf, Etan was surprised when he saw Goldilocks in the flesh. It was easy to spot him—at a table of four, he spotted someone who seemed different. He seemed out of place; there was too much glamor on him compared to the humble character of the tavern itself. His clothes were patched-together old things, but he had a grave aura more suited to a tax collector passing through the canton than an adventurer.

Goldilocks sat with a perfectly straight back, but still seemed to leave zero openings. He held his knife and fork gracefully and silently. His hair, for which he had earned his namesake, reached the small of his back. It was well taken care of, its sheen putting even noble ladies to shame. Along with his sparkling blue eyes, he seemed almost womanly, somehow.

All the same, his easy smile and posture weren’t weak in the slightest.

Etan could sense the narrowing of those baby blues and the fierceness that lay behind them as soon as he drew close to Goldilocks. It was an aura cast by Oozing Gravitas—something that prevented almost anyone from even approaching him. But Etan’s sense of better judgment was worn down enough by hunger to let him ignore that blazing aura.

Erich moaned that adventurers his age hardly ever talked to him, but this was thanks to his own choice of passive abilities—he’d yet to fully grasp the consequences of his build.

Etan crossed this line and confronted Goldilocks.

What came next does not bear repeating. Etan was a changed man. There was no chance that he would not be shaken by this fellow who had taken time out of his time off to not only satiate his thirst for a fight, but to share his lunch with him. Etan surmised that he just didn’t understand how normal adventurers worked—just as how a dog could never understand a wolf. After all, before Etan, Siegfried, too, had been antagonistic with Erich.

Goldilocks had an intense aura about him that was so at odds with his appearance that it viscerally dismayed Etan. Then there was his measured palatial speech, only barely familiar to the average country mouse. To top it off was the fame he had earned in toppling a name that everyone in Marsheim knew: Jonas Baltlinden. If you had gone to see the Infernal Knight, even one look would have filled you with fear—even with his tendons cut and strung up on a cart, Baltlinden still had a terrifying aura about him. It wasn’t much of a leap to see just how incredible Goldilocks must have been to have bested him.

All the same, Goldilocks didn’t seem to even register this feat—although, in truth, Erich had forgotten most of the clamor surrounding the event, as he didn’t bother going to the public execution—and his disciples were kind enough to not point out the incongruence of this aspect of their master. If someone brought it up so brazenly, then their ignorance would come off as mockery.

“Now that dinner’s over, let’s head to the baths.”

Erich had given his new students a meal of daunting size.

“Uh, really?” Karsten said with confusion.

To these poor adventurers, the baths were a luxury. Since when was looking good necessary for the job? they thought.

“Didn’t we already splash ourselves down with the well water?” Etan said.

“Listen guys, appearances are important,” Erich said with utmost patience and kindness. “Remember the stories! Can you recall any hero who was famed for being grimy and wearing filthy clothes?”

The four soot-black rookies looked at one another with expressions that said, Now that you mention it...

The heroic tales they had heard occasionally put the lens on their hero’s tidy appearance, but hardly did they ever describe them as filthy. Sometimes a wandering hero may be described as cutting a ragged figure, but generally poor hygiene was reserved for the descriptions of villains.

“The Imperial baths are only five assarii. It would be a waste to try and save five assarii today and miss out on fifty tomorrow.”

Erich used a real-life example to explain the importance of hygiene to his new students. He wasn’t asking them to smell like roses, but advised them to head to the baths every three days and to make sure they wore clean clothes. Even this small change would do wonders in their negotiations with clients. It reflected poorly on a person to judge on appearances alone, obviously, but basic cleanliness was an absolute must for work as customer-facing as adventuring.

Between a bad personality and an offensive odor, the latter was far more easily controlled and had far more direct ramifications on business—so why not scrub up as best as possible? Promotions didn’t come to those with bad reps.

“I’m not asking you all to go out and burn incense, but make sure you don’t smell of sweat, your hair’s not too greasy, and your beard is shaved or trimmed. Just doing that can really change how people view and treat you. Who knows, if you keep it up, you’ll get personal requests soon enough.”

Now that Goldilocks had decided he would look after these strays, he wanted to do the job properly. As such, he taught not only the basics of swordplay, but tips to expedite their journeys toward fame. It was important to teach them what to do on the job and how to protect themselves, but dealing with people was just as key to the trade.

“Unfortunately, I would say that most people base the better part of their first impressions off of looks—eighty percent, maybe?—and the rest off personality. If you want people to take a chance and realize just how great you are, then you first need to grapple with how they’ll view you.”

It would take an absolute genius and inimitable talent to rise through the ranks without doing so. Erich also chose not to force the matter—if their values were impinged upon too much, it would no longer be education.

“Keeping myself neat’s landed me free meals, little day-to-day pick-me-ups—you should never overlook the morale boost of a little something sweet from a client—hell, it’s even won me a little bonus pay here and there. There’s nothing to lose.”

“Seriously?!”

“Seriously. If you greet your client in a graceful way, then they’ll look on you kindly from the get-go. I’ll teach you some basic palatial speech next time. It doesn’t cost a single libra to learn how to be polite, but it can get you so much. I mean, don’t you feel respected when people talk to you politely?”

The four rookies could only nod along as the germ of the idea took root in them. It would do no good to act too high and mighty, so Erich had toned down his palatial speech to be more familiar. With the right diction, he had created a sense of amity among the group.

“Decorum’s like chain mail,” Erich went on. “You cover yourself in it, and it soaks up a fair bit of the hurt that comes your way without you really even trying. No one wants to be slapped by a noble just because they accidentally offended them, do they?”

The four rookies were making mental notes of these critical and entirely novel lessons. However, none were confident they could ever reach Goldilocks’s level—cutting his food and eating it without a sound or a drop of sauce on his shirt seemed beyond them. The fact that he could do simple acts like pushing his chair back and standing up without a single sound spoke of the world in which he had lived. Each among them couldn’t believe that Erich was simply the fourth son of a farmer and had never been to a private school before.

“That’s not all. Some say it helps with chatting up the ladies...” Erich said. He gave the rookies a cheeky smirk. Then his hands froze and the smile dropped from his face. A ripple of fighting spirit ran down his knife. The four rookies all froze in fear, realizing that Goldilocks could cut through any of their rib cages as easily as he did the meat before him.

“Eep!”

There was a cry from near the door—the visitor must have sensed Goldilocks’s bloodlust too. Their hood obscured their face, unmoved as they trembled at the threshold. Goldilocks had sensed something the rookies had not: mana waves.

“Goldilocks, please.”

“My apologies. A bad habit.”

The tension had registered further than Goldilocks’s table. A few others in the room with a sense for these things stood up or accidentally knocked their drinks over. John barked at Erich from across the counter in reprimand. The problem was that Erich simply couldn’t remain at ease when he could sense the vestiges of magic from someone blessed with the power of ornithurgy.

He knew this register of mana too well—the Baldur Clan’s very own Uzu had come calling. The fact that she was here on her own meant she must have come with a request of the utmost urgence.

Uzu approached the table with tottering steps, still traumatized by her first run-in with Erich—although it was Margit who had dealt the painful blow. Goldilocks pulled out a napkin seemingly out of nowhere and wiped his mouth as he adjusted his posture. It was a smooth movement that didn’t seem to indicate anything in particular, yet it was like a metaphorical sword at the neck—I hope what you show me is worth my time.

“A pressing matter, I presume?”

“Y-Yes... I-If possible, please respond immediately,” Uzu said as she pulled a wax-sealed letter from her pocket.

From his seat beside Erich, Etan could see the crest embedded in the wax: a crow holding an eye in its mouth. Even a rookie who had only come to Marsheim this past spring knew the emblem of one of the town’s most infamous clans.

Ignoring his disciples’ surprise at this unexpected connection, Erich opened the letter and began to parse the difficult court process letter and its measured handwriting.

“I’ll be with you in two hours or so.”

“Th-Thank you.”

Erich watched off the mage, who practically fled the scene, and balled up the letter before putting it in his own pocket. Evidently disgruntled, he stood up.

“Apologies everyone, something’s come up. Use this to settle the bill.”

With an easy, silent movement Erich drew out five silver pieces with such dexterity that no one could see where he had pulled them from. The message was clear: tell no one what you saw. Head to the baths after dinner as if nothing had happened here.

A nervous sweat broke out on the foreheads of the four rookies present as they gave an uneasy nod.

[Tips] In a monarchy, the easiest excuse that higher-ups can give to those below them is to tell them that their manners were poor. There is no coherent metric for etiquette, and even a third party has no way of refuting such a statement. As such, it is a popular and oft-used excuse.

It was a day off, so no one had plans, but dealing with clans was entirely my job—back when I’d first introduced Siegfried to Miss Laurentius, he’d been pretty clear with me that he didn’t want to handle meetings with anyone as scary as her or as shady as Nanna again— so it didn’t take long for me to get prepared to head out.

I slipped into some clothes—slightly fancier than my usual garb, but nothing too unadventurous—that I had bought in case I had to take on a noble’s request through a mediator, slipped on my freshly shined boots, affixed Schutzwolfe to my belt, then made for the Baldur Clan hideout. Before I’d even stepped through the door, I could sense an uneasy aura emanating from behind it—it felt as if the manor itself were a catalyst for its owner’s rage.

“This is going to be ugly...”

I couldn’t help but scratch my head—it messed up my hair a little, but that didn’t matter anymore, considering the circumstances—at this sign.

I entered the manor, walking face-first into a heinous atmosphere. This was no metaphor—the very air was thick with a richly colored smoke that hung about my ankles. It seeped through the room like a theme park’s haunted mansion, and a number of clan members caught in its miasma were zonked out, frothing at the mouth. Ghastly technicolor froth crusted their lips.

I worried that their lives might be in danger, but seeing as they were just left there, it couldn’t have been anything too life-threatening. I was a bit concerned by Nanna’s cavalier attitude toward her people; they were lying on the floor like discarded furniture. Surely she was obliged to treat them with a modicum of decency? But, well, she was a madwoman whose drugs played with our perception of reality in itself—normal she was not.

“The b-boss is waiting inside...” Uzu said with her usual faltering tone.

“Thanks.”

If Nanna’s valued student was this terrified, the situation must have been pretty bad. Her patience must have reached its limits a long time ago. I walked through the door behind Uzu and into a veritable cloud of the unnerving smoke. My Insulating Barrier was keeping me safe, but I couldn’t help flinching.

“You’re here.”

Couldn’t you at least have pared your latest project down to red and blue pills, and spared me this garish clown-vomit palette? Heaven knows your dollar-store philosophizing would go down smoother if we were all in leather trench coats and mirror shades.

“Greetings. I thought it might be prudent to ask what might prompt such—pardon my impudence for saying so—nakedly unchecked mana flow?”

My barrier protected my lungs, but it didn’t actually stop the smoke from circling around me. It made me feel queasy to look at; I fanned it out of my face as I made my way to her side. I understood that Nanna wasn’t one for manners, but her obvious anger was awkward to be around.

It wasn’t as intense as the icy chill that emanated from Lady Leizniz when she met Lady Agrippina at the College entrance, but this physical manifestation of her rage would have made a regular person drop on the spot. Uzu had collapsed behind me as soon as the door had opened, and she had built up quite the resistance to Nanna’s various failed concoctions. Just what was she smoking right now?

“That’s just...how untethered my anger has become.”

As she spoke, the smoke got thicker, flowing with her breath. It carried a sheet of paper toward me. No, not paper, although that was the closest description for it. It caught the light, played with it, and let it go like crystal. I had heard that a magus somewhere had once demonstrated his prowess with material conjuration through crystalline sculpture. I wondered if it had any relation to that.

“What is this?” I said.

As I looked at the postcard-sized “paper,” I saw that lines ran across it, allowing it to be ripped into pieces about the size of a postage stamp. It was pretty and kids would probably squeal with how much it looked like it was ripped straight from some fairytale, but I highly doubted it was meant to replace a wax seal. Wait, if Nanna was showing it to me—I mean, I guess it has to be more drugs.

“It has many names. Crystal Blood...Ice Breath...and...Kykeon.”

Of course! Ugh, and I touched it...

It was filthy in more ways than one. I threw it onto the table. I made a mental note to wash my hands later...

“So I imagine you rip off a piece and ingest it?”

“You do. Have you...seen this before?”

“No, but I can make an educated guess. What are its effects?”

I could almost see the venom amid the smoke as Nanna huffed. A deep resentment was twisted into each and every word of her explanation.

“The hallucinations and intoxication are the same...as Elefsina’s Eye. Yet this one...robs you of fatigue. It sharpens your senses...to make you feel omnipotent. It even...transforms the pain of hunger into pleasure.”

“Sounds incredible.”

“Incredible, you say?!”

Another intense purl of smoke rippled through the room, like the shadow of a dragon.

Crap, she’s got mana for days! My barrier whined in response, and I pumped more of my own mana into keeping it and myself intact.

“It only lasts...four to six hours...at best! And then it gives you an awful delirium, withered nerve endings, and an enfeebling addiction! Get hooked...and you’re nothing more than a wasteful sack of meat!”

“Okay, okay! I get it! So please, calm yourself! My talisman’s going to shatter!”

In line with Lady Agrippina’s request, I’d told Nanna that my barrier came from an item, not my own spell, so I needed to at least keep up that pretense.

All the same, she’d told me something quite unbelievable. What she’d described was pretty much an amphetamine! What kind of hell am I in to have to deal with a cocktail of two dangerous drugs in a matter of weeks?! They were both alkaloid-based, but hallucinations and delirium? Being robbed of any bodily discomfort? Was someone trying to manufacture an army of fearless junkie soldiers?!

“What I’m aiming for,” Nanna said, her anger still not fully quelled, “is freedom from the constant pain of living! Freedom from the traps of the senses, indistinguishable from a stone on the side of the road! This...this...filth, this base vehicle for sentiment... I can’t even label it a failure! It’s garbage!”

Nanna’s terrifying rage came from a completely different place.

I suddenly remembered something Nanna had told me once. When she was still a magus-in-training, she’d wanted to create a potion that would elevate all of humanfolk to the same level as methuselah—perfect organisms, immune to time and hunger. Around this time, she had studied the workings of the brain to help a friend who suffered from acute color blindness. Yet she had fallen into a great despair and resignation when she came upon the high wall between our senses and our cognition.

It was no surprise—Descartes himself had never managed to solve the mind-body problem.

Our physical bodies contained the mind and created feelings of pleasure or discomfort based on outside stimuli. That meant there was no way we could move this internal function out of our bodies. Pain would always be painful; joy would always be joyful. Of course, there were discrepancies in how each person took in information and what feelings came out, but at the end of the day people could not rid themselves of their sensory system.

Many rationalist philosophers had tried many methods to solve this issue in my old world, but no answer had been found—at least by the time of my death.

That said, I had to acknowledge that the future Buddha Maitreya’s predecessor, Siddhartha, had achieved enlightenment. The teachings that led to his enlightenment had passed through so many translations that its meaning had become somewhat obfuscated, and so it would take 5.6 billion years—if I remembered what the future Buddha said correctly, that was how long it would take him—for normal people to realize what enlightenment really meant. In the meantime, they would kind of just attempt to clear their minds and realize that all emotions were false on their journey to nirvana.

“It simply destroys the brain and squeezes out every last drop of ‘pleasure’! It’s fake concentration, pure evil! Ecstasy based on pure fallacy! My failures...only serve to bring the pain of the world into relief...but this, it...it...!”

Nanna worked herself into another panic as she spoke—her hands scraped at her head and she kicked out at the table with the Kykeon on it. I was surprised just how much force her kick had for such a fragile-looking frame. If she had drugs that strengthened the body, I guess it was no surprise that she’d taken them for herself already. Her cute looks in her youth had pulled her into the School of Daybreak, but I started to wonder if she would have lived a happier life if she’d studied in the School of Setting Sun...

“I won’t stand...for such filth!”

At any rate, our conversation was going nowhere. I avoided her flailing arms and legs and pushed her back down into her seat, where she wheezed for a few moments.

“Calm now?”

Despite her physical strength, her body was as light as it looked. I had put in a little too much oomph and I had ended up falling a little bit forward too—my face was right up in hers, taking both barrels of her crazed expression. Technicolor smoke gathered into whirlpools in her eyes. Prismatic bubbles bobbed to the surface, bursting every now and then, forming jittering congeries of concentric circles. Nanna’s pupils were unfocused. Something in my brain told me to look away from those eyes. The alarm bells grew ever louder as I stared. I kept my gaze focused on hers, and eventually she regained her focus. The swirling rainbow rings followed suit.

“I apologize...for behaving like that.”

“It’s fine. If I’d found out that someone was mass-producing god-felling swords, then my pride as a swordsman would probably propel me to the same.”

Anyone with a real attachment to something would probably lose their head, knowing they lived under the same sky as something blasphemous to that affection.

Nanna let go of my wrists and readjusted herself in her seat. By the time I had returned to my own seat, Nanna had regained all of her usual lethargic coolness.

“Now then...the reason I called you here...was because I wish to make a strenuous effort in eliminating this thing. One scrap costs you ten assarii. One whole paper of eight scraps is discounted to seventy.”

Nanna went on to tell me that the market had been softened by Elefsina’s Eye, and whoever was behind this was trying to ruin the economy for good. The people behind the scenes weren’t in this to get rich—they were here to numb the brains of everyone in Ende Erde.

“I still haven’t...worked out what it’s made from. I can say that quite potent magic has been used. Even if the original ingredients are cheap...labor and distribution must be astronomical... They are very much underselling it.”

“So they don’t want to make a profit.”

“It’s an attack on Marsheim. That’s probably the correct estimation. Because it’s so cheap and abundant...and the dealers are so badly informed...no one can grasp where it’s coming from.”

Are you for real? This is like a mini version of Qing dynasty China in the throes of the Opium War... Dulling a town with drugs is so not on the table for a fantasy world...

“It’s not just the city. It has been spotted in farming cantons...across Ende Erde. I want you and your clan...to help me collect information.”

“I’m not against helping if it’s for the sake of— Hold on. Did you say ‘clan’?”

Yet again I was stumped by the things that came out of this woman’s mouth. I didn’t have a clan. Yes, I had a few rookies who called me “master,” but we were just a training group, really. I wasn’t some mafioso who wanted to rake in stacks of bills. I was just helping them a bit with lining up better gigs than the dirt-tier assignments they’d been picking up. I was only amber-orange! I wasn’t even out of the realm of a low-rank adventurer! I had no backers, no influence in my area—nothing.

“It isn’t about what you think... It’s about how others view you.”

The only thing I got from Nanna for my quip was a dry laugh. She went on to explain that my feats in felling a big name who had been plaguing the region for over a decade and my acquisition of four underlings had been more than enough to position me as a clan head in the eyes of others. She then told me of all the rumors about how Goldilocks Erich was making connections with Marsheim’s biggest clans. In short, despite my every intention, word had got around that I had started a clan.

Ahh, crap... Where did I go wrong? No, I’m the one who said I wanted more numbers, and Mister Fidelio’s advice was totally right. But seriously, a clan? Why?! A party’s fun, but I didn’t think things would end up like this!

“Your head count will surely go up, no? Then...I advise you accept your situation.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to start taking money from rookies.”

In truth, Nanna was probably right. I had four already; a fifth would crop up before long. Our party had a talented scout and mage—there were sure to be cowardly newbies who wanted to hide in their shadow. The logic held that it might be better to set up an official clan before things got too out of hand. It would be better than the vague gaggle that we had now.

I could do things differently from how the clans around me ran things—I wouldn’t take a cut, and I’d continue to train the newbies. By successfully doing jobs with capable members, I could deepen my bonds with those in power here and elevate myself away from all the unnecessary parts of life.

It was a Marsheim-y, adventurer-y way of doing things, but it felt...dirty somehow.

All the same, if it was the thrill of adventure that I was set on, then I couldn’t look down on building connections to elevate my fame. Logic demanded I should recruit some more people. If I just helped them during the hard first days, then sent them on their merry way, I imagined that they would hate me for being heartless.

As they said in Japan, “Fish will not live in water that is too clean.” In other words, if I chose to be too upright, then folks would give me a wide berth. That was the long and the short of it.

“Even if people crave solitude...they cannot avoid forming bonds with others. Then they can share...the pain and suffering...that plays out inside their minds. Sharing this pain is the way of the world.” In the time that Nanna spent raging, the kindling of her water pipe must have died down; she was puffing into it to relight it as she muttered. “Wherever you go...the world only exists...under this pathetic layer of bone. The hell outside our minds...only seeks to make the one inside our minds...ever worse.”

People could not live without others—even methuselah who live endless lives without sustenance or vampires who need blood to survive. There could be no exception. This went especially for us mortal folk, who could change our character on a dime if denied the stuff of life. We were complex creatures, as fickle as insects coming and going with the slightest change in the air pressure.

I didn’t share Nanna’s antinatalist perceptions, but she was right in describing her own situation as hell. It was easy to sweep things under the table by saying it was all about how you took it, but there was no liberation for the soul of the Baldur Clan’s leader, who couldn’t even find lasting relief through her drugs. If such platitudes could save her, then she would never have gotten to this point.

“So many rookies, too, are easily dirtied...trodden down by the despair that their dreams...are so at odds with reality.”

The water pipe had returned to life, and the magically enhanced smoke seeped back into her wracked brain.

“You’re not wrong,” I said. “Twenty days of gutter cleaning and other menial chores is enough to make even the hardiest newbies start to lose hope.”

“Do you take pity...on me...and them?”

I couldn’t say anything too righteous. I wouldn’t say that I had zero complaints or issues, but I was truly fortunate, really. If I had nothing keeping me going, then I’d surely have given up hope somewhere along the way. If I didn’t have loving parents, kind brothers, the cutest sister in the world—maybe my life would have been much less hopeful. And then there was the biggest boon I had all to myself—if I didn’t have the freedom to shape myself as I willed, then how would my life have gone?

I had been born with a metaphorical silver spoon in my mouth; I was in no position to be proselytizing to other people about my philosophical ideals. I was blessed with a guarantee that my hard work would result in something concrete. Someone like her, who’d snatched all her gifts from the jaws of a spiteful world, would feel nothing but scorn for such a wondrous gift. All I could offer was an open ear as I puffed on my own pipe.

“How cruel you are... Most would laugh...or offer empty sympathy...even as I am lost...to sentiment.”

Dammit, I thought, even I’m not so ruthless that my heart doesn’t twinge at this, however much I’d rather be anywhere else. There’s not even anything I can do for her.

“In return...would you mind...trying this for me?” The dispirited woman pointed her pipe toward me. “I will be fighting for my own beliefs this time...not simply in the name of my clan.” Her words were heavy with her emotions—almost as solid as smoke as they reached my ears. Her resolve was clear. She had forgone all lies and compromise. “As such, it’s only fair I warn you...”

If you held something that you would never concede on, then there would come a time when someone or something would clash with it. For Nanna, that was her foul drugs. She wasn’t a good person, that was certain—she crafted potions that showed you sweet dreams and in turn swiftly left you unable to sleep at night without it. She wasn’t like the unknown foe before us, but in her own way she glutted Marsheim with her own mind-altering medications, all to peddle her own twisted dreams.

“If you continue to pursue things without compromise...soon you will hit a wall. I wish...to use this to see...if you can overcome it.”

“A wall, huh.”

“Exactly. Human life becomes hell when one comes upon...the walls and pits that mark its outer bounds. My own hell...is as deep as the ocean...and I tried to fill it with a medicine spoon. But what about you?”

Nanna’s question was clear. If I chose to stay in Marsheim, I was bound to end up right in the middle of the inevitable breakdown of its tenuous order. I was free to flee from it, but I was also free to face it. The problem was if my resolve was lacking, then I was bound to be crushed by whatever lay on the horizon.

What Nanna wanted me to do was take a puff from her water pipe. After I had, she could make a judgment on my answer to her question. It was a litmus test—albeit one founded on principles and measures I couldn’t wrap my head around.

Man... This is just not my idea of a good time.

All the same, if she lost the battle that was to come, things would turn sour fast. It’s all well and good to kill the birds that get into your seed stock, but you had to accept the result that the bugs they ate would proliferate in turn.

I had chosen to stay, and that meant I was making a gamble.

Fortunately I had Lottie on my side. If the smoke took too severe a toll on me, I was sure it was well within her power to help me out.

I finally took her pipe from her and eyed its lip, stained a deep, dark red from Nanna’s own lips. I wasn’t thinking anything as stupid as “My lips are going to touch the same thing her lips did”—I was merely curious as to what you would have to mix together to create rainbow-colored bubbles.

I plucked up my courage and brought the pipe to my lips. I took a drag and let the smoke fill my mouth. It looked poisonous, but it was sweet on the tongue. After the first honeyed taste, it gave a cinnamon-like kick. I drew it into my lungs, then puffed out. It left a complex flavor, like a perfume or cologne.

I cocked my head in confusion at the lack of any effect when it hit me—my vision started to grow hazy, like a TV on a broken channel.

Enveloped in a rainbow smoke, I could make out...an all too familiar sight. It was that little cave where I spent most of my college days, rolling dice.

It was a twelve-mat room which had once been used by a small business. There was no way that a simple reincarnation would let me forget something this foundational. It was all there—the furniture in its usual place, the broken plasterboard after a friend tripped, the broken light in the back that no one had bothered to fix.

I had chosen this place with my friends for the sole purpose of making my lifelong hobby ever easier, and we would use it even after graduating college, whether it was just for a few drinks together or a full-blown session.

The smell came back to me too—that musky, bittersweet smell of a group of college friends crammed together. The “rug” was a series of foam squares that you could attach to bring it to the desired size; it was as old and worn as ever.

The shelves that lined one wall were full of rulebooks gifted by fellow students or recent graduates. The three low tables were covered in tokens, dice, and playmats.

There were binders in all sorts of colors, filled with various systems and rules, as well as endless character sheets lovingly kept after their campaigns had come to a close. Printouts of various scenarios lay inside, ready to be used by other friends.

What a nostalgic scene this was.

There was a man at the table, reading a book, tapping a pen to his forehead as he leaned on a knee in thought. He was of average height and build, the sort of guy who you would lose in a crowd. He was a student in that time of his life where he could wear whatever he wanted every day, but he was dressed in a suit. This wasn’t because he had any particular affinity for looking smart—it was just because a suit was appropriate for any occasion that might surface in his daily life.

On the table before him was, naturally, some sort of character sheet. From the layout it looked to be for some kind of modern setting, not the usual fantasy fare. The book in his hand—a rulebook—was full of sticky notes. He looked at it as he tapped figures into a calculator.

There was no way I could forget who this man was.

I had seen his face in the mirror on dreary mornings, in the reflection of the company car at work, and in the windows at night. He was the man who was to one day become Erich of Konigstuhl: Fukemachi Saku.

Not one hair on his head had gone gray yet, and it would be some time still before the disease to come left his cheeks sallow—he was a young, healthy college student. This was me during the most happy and easy part of my life.

I was the only one with the key to this place, so I would often come when I was between lectures and ponder my next scheme to make my damage output so wild that my friends and the GM would ask me to run the numbers again.

I walked around the room, seeing all those old things that had brought me such joy. As I touched a rulebook that was particularly special to me—where the creator of the world, a sword, was so hell-bent on getting us to use its creations that it half drove the campaign off the rails all on its own—I heard the sound of a pen being placed down. I turned around.

Saku looked at Erich. He smiled as he rolled two D6s in one hand.

Seriously? You don’t use those dice for this game! Even I can remember that.

Oh. Right. So that’s my dream.

It wasn’t a bad dream. It was a dream that would keep on going whether I was awake or asleep. Whereas you there—once you leave college and get a job, you’ll moan about not having time to idly sling dice and chat, about not having the chance to show off the character sheets you scribbled up. And then, waiting at the end of it all, there would be that bed, that unfamiliar ceiling, the chemo... But in some twist of fate, I had been handed a new character sheet. One with a situation that only the kindest GMs I had known would cook up—a new world with no link to my old one, a new life, generated straight from the random tables in the back of the book.

So yes, my daily life was truly like a dream. A dream that I was excited to be living, every step of the way.

I raised my arms, filled with longing and with jolly camaraderie, and presented Erich, myself, before Saku.

So, how about it? From your perspective, is my build satisfactory? Or are you going to tell me I need to respec?

He looked me up and down, then gave a smile. It was the same expression I had made when a friend defeated a difficult boss with laughable figures from a nigh impossible combo. It seemed like my build was worthy and interesting enough to earn my past self’s faint praise.

I gave a smirk back—you’re damn right—when he did something unexpected. He held out the D6s before me: snake eyes. What a foul provocation to make. I clucked my tongue at him and flipped him the bird.

Fukemachi Saku erupted into silent laughter before sending the dice clattering across the table. It was a wonderful sound.

Just as they scattered to a halt, I felt my consciousness being pulled back into the Baldur Clan’s visitor room.

“So...how was it?”

“It was a little nostalgic, I’d say.”

I handed back her pipe, trying to convey without words that I hoped she was satisfied. The mage took a long drag herself and let out a puff of that wistful smoke around us.

[Tips] Chasing dreams or being chased by dreams—these two things look the same from the outside.

Not even Nanna knew the exact formulae behind the rainbow bubble-inducing smoke that she enjoyed. What she did know was that it had come to her while she was meditating, praying even—a decidedly unmagusly pastime—as she contemplated the figurative hell that resided in her mind. Her newest and proudest creation was less an invention and more a veritable divine revelation. And yet, and yet, its effects were still far removed from her ambitions.

It drew up and fulfilled every passing fancy and deep-held ideal the imbiber had ever held, casting them into a phantasmagoria tailored to their own mind. Yet at the end of the day, it only sharpened the abject misery of life in the waking world for Nanna.

Its effects would have been more than satisfactory to others. A psychonaut gifted with a measure of calm could find real joy in watching the unattainable images of their past fancies play out in the distance.

“Calm” was not one of Nanna’s assets.

Despite the comforts she enjoyed thanks to her artificial semblance of a Methuselah’s physiology, she despaired at the cloying, unshakable confines of her soul, her nervous system, and the rigid bounds of time itself.

Where could salvation be found? What could she do to ease the pain inside her head? Kierkegaard posited that truth could be found in autonomy. Sartre argued that existence preceded essence. Yet if these philosophers were in her world, could they have possibly saved her?

Though she lacked the formal armature to put it in familiar terms, she knew too well the mortal terror of the condition of absolute freedom put forth in Being and Nothingness. If she could simply have embraced the touch of the void, she might not have been so stymied by the question of what “essence” was in the first place.

In all the world’s creation myths, it is said that the gods contributed Their best qualities in creating sentient life. If such were the case, then what could possibly explain the gaping lacuna in her brain? She could try and talk around the black box of her consciousness—map out the negative space with analogies and hypotheticals—but at the end of the day, she was chasing a mirage in the vain hope there might be water somewhere in it. At once compelled to pursue and achingly aware of the futility of inquiry, who wouldn’t find their enthusiasm for life ebbing away?

The madwoman, burned and famished by her own dreams, watched the adventurer before her, deep in his private haze. This drug was unique among Nanna’s repertory in that it possessed none of the expected habit-forming properties, allowing her to give it a little test run with this unlikely partner.

In the past, many an adventurer had found new depths of misery in the high; their inability to square their real lives with their dearest dreams made manifest caused them agony. Many in turn sought refuge from the pain by venturing deeper, letting the drug strand them in their fantasies for hours at a time with each drag. Uzu and her peers, textbook hard-luck cases to the last, took one puff of the stuff and decided to spend the next two days straight away from reality.

People were incomplete beings, living so far from both truth and ideals. What sort of caring, benevolent pantheon would author a world so rife with suffering, that even within the confines of one’s own brain one can stumble into tortures that stretch out to the end of time?

What was she to make of this swordsman, knowing all she knew? Nanna pondered just how long he could bear seeing his own ideals played out inside his head. That said, she was trying not to hang too much on the outcome one way or another. It was just one more baited hook beckoning her deeper into the suffocating horror of the sober world.

After half a minute or so, Goldilocks returned to the waking world. Nanna didn’t know how long it had been in his head. He set to fixing his hair. He’d mussed it inadvertently while he’d been away.

“So...how was it?”

It was a miracle that Nanna managed to keep her voice calm. Could someone truly remain untouched by despair as they became a plaything of the world around them? What sort of creature could witness their perfect world and still choose to return so easily? Surely that wasn’t allowed. Goldilocks simply adjusted his posture as if nothing had passed at all. The time he spent in a daze, the ease by which he readjusted to reality—it spoke well enough of his character. The man was mad. He was a fool, dreaming even as he worked, rutted, and killed.

“It was a little nostalgic, I’d say.”

He sounded so casual—if he wasn’t mad, Nanna would off herself where she stood. In spite of everything, she clung to the hell she knew among the living rather than risk some worse discovery, some faint chance that she might retain some scrap of self on the other side; she could never allow herself to believe in earnest that Erich was sane.

And why shouldn’t he have been? Mad folk had thrived in Ende Erde for as long as there had been an Ende Erde. Nanna was certain he would prove to be a great asset in ridding her turf of her competition and their poison. In turn, she would put everything she had behind this invincible philosophical zombie that had fallen into her lap—if only for this one project.

[Tips] In worlds where gods exist, philosophy is a dubious weapon to take up in defense of one’s psyche.

“I’ll kill ’em all myself!” Siegfried knocked over his chair as he stood up, his eyes burning with rage.

I wasn’t all too surprised that he was this mad. After all, I had just told him that our home was on the cusp of being consumed by the drug trade.

It was the day after I had received Nanna’s “house call.” I spared my friends the unnecessary details as I passed Nanna’s intel along. Their reactions were all the same—fury at the crooks flooding Ende Erde with illicit junk.

I had brought back a small sample of Kykeon, and Kaya had dabbed a tiny amount to her tongue before she spat it out—one taste was plenty for the heir to a long line of distinguished herbalists like her to get the picture. “What a loathsome piece of work,” she said, her words dripping venom.

“It’s a potent cerebral stimulant—much too potent,” she went on. “There are mushrooms with some medical value that operate along similar channels, but you know how it is—the dose makes the poison. This garbage will eat holes in your brain just slowly enough to ensure your dealer still gets to squeeze all the profit they can from your creeping dependency on and habituation to it. Whoever made this, I don’t want to know what they were thinking.”

Kaya’s explanation was icy calm. Her test run confirmed that this wasn’t just a passing paranoid fancy of Nanna’s.

“So? Where’re they makin’ the stuff?” Siegfried returned to the matter at hand, still visibly angry.

“Cool it, Sieg. It’s not that easy.”

“Beg pardon?”

I felt bad—his anger came from a righteous place—but the time for action was still a while off.

“You said it isn’t yet clear who’s manufacturing it,” said Margit.

“That’s part of it, yeah. The bigger problem is that it’s not technically illegal.”

“You’re shittin’ me.”

Even though this drug plainly caused nothing but harm, medical legislation moved slowly, and so neither usage nor possession of Kykeon, let alone dealing, was illegal within the eyes of the Empire. The issue was that even though they could make the actual substance illegal, they couldn’t ban the catalysts that triggered the effects. This loophole was most likely a holdover from some College iatrurge who had loosened the laws to help treat a noble in the throes of agony on their deathbed. The result was that brand-new drugs didn’t fall under the remit of the law.

It was kind of a similar phenomenon to the hoops involved with legislating against synthetic cannabinoids in my old world. At any rate, the big picture was that loopholes like this were part of the cost of having any kind of functional health-care system—you could hardly issue a blanket ban on the same goods herbalists and doctors used day in, day out.

Nanna had promised me that she would engage in talks with Marsheim’s nobles to make it illegal as soon as possible, but it was going to be an uphill battle. This stuff was ten assarii a tab—cheaper than Elefsina’s Eye—and so it wasn’t seeing much traffic in middle class circles and above. In other words, it was hard to get nobles to care. Most didn’t give a rat’s ass if the plebeians led themselves into ruin.

So it would take a while for the stuff to be made illegal, and even if that succeeded, the manufacturers would just take another page from the synthetic cannabinoid industry’s playbook (however inadvertently—but who knew, maybe the architect of this whole scheme was some bald creep from New Mexico a universe or two over from my old one who’d been cut the same break I had) and mix up the chemical composition just a bit to slip through the cracks. We needed to bring our best game plan to avoid playing Narco Whac-A-Mole.

“It means we can’t eliminate them yet,” I said. “First of all, even if we rounded up all the dealers, they’re at the fringes of the operation. It’ll only make our enemy more wary.”

“So you’re sayin’ do nothin’?!” said Siegfried.

“No, I’m not. The dealers are most likely repeat offenders or crooks looking for a cheap gig. If you bump into one, don’t hesitate to do some questioning.”

“But...even if you shake a tree of all its leaves, it won’t die,” input Margit.

“Yeah. The whole thing needs to come up root and branch.”

It was just as she said, the clever little minx—dealers were at the tail end of the food chain. Who knows how many times they were outsourced; we could be looking at a chain of distribution five or six layers deep.

Even if we shook a few leaves off and torture—ahem, interviewed them, all we would get is the name of the small-time crook playing middle manager who’d roped them in, not the big cheese lurking in the shadows. It would be even worse if we pushed too hard and ended up being fed bogus info.

“What we need is the strength and influence to win this,” I said.

“Influence? You...ain’t talkin’ about rank, are you?”

“Right on. We need to expand our influence throughout Marsheim as a whole.”

“Whoa, whoa, wait a sec. You’re sayin’ you want to start a clan?”

Siegfried must have put two and two together from watching me recently—he was on the money. I was glad to see it wouldn’t take too much coaxing to get him up to speed. Befriending Sieg felt like one of the luckiest breaks I’d caught in ages.

“Not in the way you think. I won’t take a cut of people’s pay. I won’t charge an entry fee. What I will do is create a collective of adventurers to whom I can assign jobs through a mediator and from whom I can gather information.”

“Uh, sounds like a clan to me...”

“Yeah, but it’s important to note that the structure’s going to be different. I just want talented folks who want to be part of what we have. That means I want to focus on helping us grow, not on profit.”

It was as Nanna said—it was likely that people considered us four and the four disciples under me a proper clan now. It was fine for a cat to pretend to be a tiger, but the opposite invited nothing but trouble. The solution? Play the role of the tiger to the hilt and convince folks that we had a generous minimum safe distance.

It was true that taking and raising up disciples wasn’t your usual TRPG fare, but I was a flesh-and-blood adventurer; it wasn’t too far from what I considered an adventurer’s life. I needed to strike the occasional bargain between my ideals and reality to make a living. Not only that, Mister Fidelio had taken the time to teach me. It made sense to pass that good along.

“Although I’m going to be fair—not too strict, but ready to give praise where it’s due. They won’t be paying me in money, but in terms of keeping up our rep.”

“Sounds pretty tough if you ask me. Won’t we get a bunch who call it quits?”

“Pretty much guaranteed, but it’s a screening process. We don’t want people who want to borrow our name in an effort to play big man on campus.”

“Yeah, that kinda crap’s for a story’s minor roles,” Siegfried said. He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair to stare at the ceiling.

Siegfried’s own heroic idol was known for his solitude—refusing to become anyone’s master or teach anything. I expected that my comrade was a bit conflicted between wanting to emulate his hero and joining in on teaching rookies.

“It sucks, man... I wish Siegfried left behind his own teachings... Then I coulda joined the school that taught his sword style...”

There was no joy waiting at the end of this train of thought. There were many things in our world that bore Siegfried’s name, but his swordplay was not one of them. It was only natural, considering he never once led a party and never took on a single student.

“Yeah, good luck with that,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a version of the Siegfried lore where he was super keen on sharing.”

There were a few schools across the Empire that taught sword styles that could be traced back to heroes from the Age of Gods. Some only took on the name for clout, but there were some which could genuinely trace their roots to living legends from thousands of years in the past.

Unfortunately, Sigurd, the famed hero who slew Fafnir, only really left his story for future generations. Even his legendary sword, Windslaught, was said to have been lost in the waters that swallowed him. Other retellings veered off in other directions, but Sigurd’s love was only ever for divine beings, and he had no offspring. His jaw-dropping martial might, which had let him fell a true dragon and ancestor of drakes with nothing but straight up muscle power—was lost to the annals of time.

Mostly you could chalk it up to his tragically early death; the world lost out on a lot that day. Even in the heavily reworked retellings, Siegfried’s sword style was an inextricable feature. Willfully suppressing such benign traditions was a crime against future generations.

“If it did exist, I’d totally have signed up,” Siegfried went on. “Then, if I found Windslaught after learning all his skills, I’d be in the kind of stories nobody forgets, ever!”

“You think normal people could learn it? We’re talking about a guy who went toe-to-toe with a literal dragon with nothing but his muscles keeping him going. Seems to me that it’s asking for stuff a regular old person couldn’t do.”

“There’s one sword style from the Age of the Gods that folks figured out how to adapt for mortals, isn’t there? I always thought the founder’s sagas were real damn annoying, so it’s not like I’m gonna try picking it up, but still—you know what I mean? It’s that super uncool one that uses a thin sword...”

“Oh yeah... Uh, Camy... Camyu...”

“Camulo Agrippa Style. I mean, can you even do any damage with that style?”

As Siegfried said the name it began to ring some bells. There was a hero from the Age of Gods named Camulo who wielded a mighty sword that was lauded as the Bridge Toppler. It was a hefty thing, the same length as a longsword but with three times the heft of a hatchet. Camulo wielded it using his own unique sword style too.

Just by the weight of the weapon alone, this style was beyond any regular person’s ability to even imitate. However, there was a school that carried on the techniques, reenvisioned for use with rapiers. The result was that Camulo’s style—it was easy to view it as one of those “smash first, ask questions later” styles for meatheads—had taken on sophisticated and elegant trappings. Certain nobles kept the practice alive in the present day.

“Yeah, it’s a style that wouldn’t shine on the battlefield. I saw it in Berylin. You need to be a real pro to stab into your opponent’s unarmored spots. Only the most skilled practitioners could put it to work in a practical setting.”

The style was full of techniques your average person couldn’t do, so as it was passed down, it lost something of its original power. No one had truly mastered the style since Camulo’s five personal disciples.

For someone who used hybrid sword arts, where every part of your body was a weapon—even treating your weapon and shield as disposable if need be—it just seemed like too much flash for too little bang. I was sure that truly honing the way of the sword could lead you to greater heights than my hybrid sword arts, but I just wasn’t sold on the efficiency of that investment.

“To be fair,” I went on, “my sword skills aren’t all that ‘honorable,’ if you get me. I don’t mind teaching, but it won’t win any awards for panache. It’s a mercenary’s way of fighting.”

“Ahh, yeah. You have zero hesitation when it comes to smashing a guy’s face with your sword pommel or kicking him in the shins...or grabbing him and throwing him on the ground before impalin’ him... Yeah, that’s not really anyone’s idea of a traditional ‘school.’”

Now, far be it from me to claim that I was rocking the Conan look, much as I wanted to, but my sword style was a hundred-percent barbaric. It was conceived with the understanding that the point of violence was making sure the right people were turned into corpses with the least amount of fuss.

“Seems we’ve gone a bit off track. I was thinking I could teach the sword and you could teach the spear. Then we could cover the basics of long-distance expeditions and raise them up into a decent little unit.”

“Yes, a little expedition seems like a good idea,” Margit said. I gave her a little smile-and-nod action.

Our party had suffered in the cursed cedar ichor maze last winter in no small part because our supply lines were compromised and we’d not done enough to prepare emergency rations. A larger group needed more consumables; we would need a carriage if we were to go on any longer excursions.

There was a huge benefit to this larger setup, though: increased coverage. Cooking and lookout duties split between only four made even the simplest trip exhausting. However, if we were able to split lookout into three shifts, it would do wonders for our stamina.

With more people fit to move out on command, we could leap straight into the fray basically as soon as we knew what we were doing.

Saint Fidelio’s party hewed to the opposite model. With only the four of them, they had to be extremely thorough and meticulous about prep, meaning they only managed about one adventure every season. Even if they received a call from a nearby canton for aid, it would take them three days to muster properly before they could even set off.

When you considered this whole angle, suddenly founding a clan didn’t seem like a recipe for hauling around a bunch of dead weight. This way we could preserve our strength and tackle the endgame of any adventure at peak performance.

Of course, I was plenty aware that Nanna hadn’t recommended we start our own clan purely out of the goodness of her heart. She had everything to gain from her favorite source of plausibly deniable muscle turning out stronger and more flexible. If I didn’t go about the whole process properly, I’d risk losing the upper hand in our relationship to her.

“Hmm... Right, then. Why wait? Let’s get to it,” said Siegfried. “But won’t we need a name?”

I was stunned for a moment—since when did Siegfried roll that well on an Insight check? I had applied a bit of Persuasion to bring the gang around; I hadn’t been prepared to have the tables turned on me by such an obvious question. As was my eternal flaw, I just wasn’t the most creative guy.

“We could use someone’s name,” I said. “I know! How about Clan Siegfried?”

“H-Hold it, why me?! No way! Why not you?!”

“Clan Erich? Sounds a bit dumb to me... I’ve got quite the common name.”

“Now that you mention it,” said Kaya, “we don’t really have all that much in common thematically.”

“Agreed,” Margit said with a sigh.

Your average adventurer needed to be as much a salesperson for their own skills as much as anything else. If we couldn’t pin down something as simple as our brand identity, we’d never pin down a good moniker.

It was a surprisingly difficult task to find a memorable, relatable, meaningful name. It would be totally easy if we were a store dealing in physical goods. We could riff on whatever it was we were selling. But adventurers dealt in somewhat more mercurial goods. Some clans used their biggest figure, like Clan Laurentius. Others used the founding member’s family name, such as the Baldur Clan or the Heilbronn Familie. These were the usual methods. The Exilrat—a bit of a highfalutin term shared between Old Rhinian and a couple of neighboring languages, translating to something like “the coalition of vagabonds”—was bit of a showy choice, meant to reflect how their large numbers had found one another, despite being strangers to each other and their adoptive nation. We were only a small group of eight at the moment—something that overblown would make us look like assholes.

“I-I shall report to you all should I come up with something!” I said hurriedly.

“You’re kickin’ the can down the road, buddy...”

“Go on then, Sieg! Why don’t you come up with something cool, catchy, and meaningful! Go ahead! You’ve got ten seconds!”

“Huh?! Uhh, you suggested the clan! That means it’s your responsibility to sort out a name! Them’s the rules, right?”

Ugh, but all my ideas suck... I had come up with a few possible candidates, but each and every one sent me back to my middle school years—when what we thought was cool was anything but. I trashed every idea and purged them from my memory. I would think about it later. I mean, I was already part of the Trialist Empire of Rhine’s Department of Lost Writing Retrieval—I did not want to add more fuel to leave future generations with the impression that I was some edgelord punk too big for his britches. My spirit wouldn’t be able to rest if I went down in the history books as the scholarly community’s favorite punching bag—labeled an agent of a treasonous cabal bent on world domination, suspected of hoarding lost relics... I’d end up finding myself in the pages of some conspiracy theorist’s writings instead of the sagas I dreamed of!

It was quite the big ask, and none of us could come up with something decent, so we put the issue of a name on the back burner...

[Tips] Deciding on a group’s name shouldn’t be taken lightly. It can affect how a scenario is replayed and might even invite jokes that are more cruel than funny.

Real experience was the only way to improve skills that would be used in the field. On the other hand, you can’t count on a bunch of greenhorns not to injure themselves if you push them to try more difficult techniques, even with practice swords. Naturally, one of the most common solutions to this dilemma was demonstration. Especially in full-contact arts like swordplay, you can’t overstate the instructional value of “monkey see, monkey do.” A great dancer, a great singer, and a great killer all owed a debt to the people who modeled the form for them.

“I’m ready anytime,” said Goldilocks.

“You bet,” replied Siegfried.

The two adventurers stood facing one another in the yard of the Snowy Silverwolf; a small crowd of four had gathered to watch and learn.

Erich stood straight on with his wooden sword held up at shoulder height. Siegfried was standing with his left shoulder forward, his wooden sword poised ready to go.

Erich’s stance was known as “vom Tach;” it was the basic form for the Empire’s standard style, designed to receive incoming enemies. Erich favored lower stances, but was happy to take up this slightly higher stance for educational purposes. It was part of the fundamentals, and as such, fatal to ignore. There’d be nothing to gain at this phase from teaching anything too technical with recruits this raw anyway. Erich’s usual style looked superficially like it left him open all over, but it was only thanks to his honed techniques and parallel trains of thought that he could manifest it. If a rookie with only the barest grasp of the basics tried to copy it, all those superficial openings would translate into actual openings.

Siegfried, on the other hand, had taken up the Zornhut stance—the natural pose of any old fool you could grab off the street and foist a long weapon upon in a mad rush to repel an invasion. The stance used the whole upper body, twisting it out of shape and into a brutal windup—almost like a baseball batter’s swing from Erich’s old world. This stance allowed you to put a lot of oomph behind one big blow at a time. It was suited for quick lunges.

If he was in the right stance and timed his slash with his step well, he could easily cut through someone’s armor right to the skin. However, the sword’s rest position was behind his back—although it looked like it was suited for a mad offensive, it also allowed one to repel a blow as much as dish one out. The blade could receive simple swings from the front; if the opponent stepped forward to attack, the sword could be swung around from the side to deliver a hefty counter.

“Yaaah!”

Siegfried was playing the role of attacker. He leaped forward. His slash and battle cry were filled with so much vigor that it was easy to forget this was being done for instructional purposes. A hint of bloodlust came through in the slash.

Erich, on the other hand, didn’t tend to reinforce his slashes with a battle cry. This time, too, he received Siegfried’s attack without a sound. The two swords clashed—if they’d had metal blades, the pair would be locked in a press, but these wooden swords merely clacked together. But this was only for demonstration—it was more than enough to show them how Erich accepted the blow.

A moment after the swords met, Erich drew his sword close to his body to destabilize Siegfried’s stance. He then stepped forward and used that momentum to twist his sword round in a half circle. Using this leverage to step behind Siegfried, he dropped his sword before clasping the hilt of Siegfried’s own sword with his left hand and the “blade” with his right.

“Ngh!”

Even in a serious fight, a sword was only of any use if one had the momentum to move it. This was especially true if you were wearing gauntlets. Erich had grabbed Siegfried’s sword and caught him in a pin from behind. He kicked the backs of Siegfried’s knees and simultaneously drew the sword down toward Siegfried’s neck.

It was an agile and effective tactic—one that none of the onlookers would have concocted themselves. It seemed unthinkable for a swordsman to drop his sword to close out the bout with his empty hands. It was particularly useful if your sword was worn down by battle or dulled by blood and grime. Against someone who relied on their sword more than their physical prowess, you could cut their throat before they knew what hit them.

Here, then, was the most elemental form of murder by hybrid sword arts.

“Tch...”

Siegfried gave a loud tut as he smacked Erich’s elbow to indicate the demonstration was over. Erich knew that Siegfried was on the attacking side, but he thought his comrade might have moved a little too quickly. He let his friend go, thinking it might have been better for their disciples if he went a bit slower and telegraphed his moves more clearly.

“This is a useful technique if your opponent is using a longsword. My old master called it the ‘neck cutter.’ It can be used with whatever kind of armor you’re wearing—or not wearing, as the case may be. Surrendering your sword in the heat of battle shakes up the established terms of the fight; if your enemy’s gotten comfortable fighting blade-to-blade, you can break their focus, throw off all their predictions, and scare the hell out of them,” Erich explained.

It would be no good to show and not tell. His disciples were starting to get the basics down, so Erich needed to explain the deeper theory behind his “anything goes” swordplay before he threw them into a proper fray.

“In this case, would I have been at a better advantage if I’d let go of my sword after striking yours?” asked Siegfried.

“Yeah, one way out—if this happens to you—is to drop your sword before they get behind you. Or if they do grab your sword, you could get your gauntlets up to protect your neck before falling backward; then you just let gravity do the work to ground your foe and knock the wind out of them.”

“Huh. So if your foe’s real keen on doin’ this neck-cutter thing to the T, you could grab your dagger and stab at their kneecaps or something?”

“Exactly. You can always counter a move—don’t forget that. Even if it looks like magic from the outside, in your own head, you’re constantly weighing predictions and taking calculated risks.”

The pair worked through a few more sets, punctuated with more verbal breakdowns and play-by-plays. Erich had chosen to make Siegfried the attacker because that was the role less at risk of getting injured. All Siegfried had to do was move his sword and body as Erich ordered.

Siegfried had learned the principles of mounting a defense and the requisite tax upon one’s reserves of courage from a number of real-life battles. However, every time he saw his head fly off in these demonstrations—where in real life it would be far too late to take notes—he couldn’t help but grow despondent at his relative incompetence. A fleeting moment made all the difference in battle. One death was plenty to ensure you’d never learn from the experience.

“We go into battle with the blade beside us. We serve it as it serves us, but you should never grow overly attached to it,” said Erich. “In a battle where you have to swap between the offensive and defensive at blinding speeds, it can take real courage to know when to drop your weapon. I want you to remember that.”

As Erich warned that mistakes were only permitted in practice, Siegfried felt that his comrade was so, so far from him. No matter how many times they crossed blades, he felt like he would never win. He wasn’t so proud or foolish to deny the overwhelming sense of a foregone conclusion, even as it frustrated him.

“Gods dammit...” he muttered.

Siegfried was still so distant from his namesake that he aspired toward. That legend whose lone sword and mighty stature swept away everything in his path—it seemed like such a faraway goal.

“Now then, Siegfried. For this next one, mind swapping to a spear?”

“Huh? Oh, right.”

Next in the itinerary was combat against polearms. As requested, Siegfried fetched a wooden training spear. It was an infantry-standard length, and had been left in the Snowy Silverwolf yard for rookies to practice with. It must have seen a lot of use; it was a bit battered, but all the same, it felt good in Siegfried’s hands.

The hero-hopeful gave it a few practice spins to warm up and then struck it on the ground, using the recoil to set it spinning the other way. Siegfried sent it twirling round under his armpit and set it ready for the practice—the movement came so naturally that it seemed as if the weapon could do no harm.

“Whoa...”

A chorus of amazed voices rose from the rookies after Siegfried’s little demonstration. Siegfried was merely warming up his muscles to ready them for the difference in how a spear handled. He couldn’t see what was so impressive about it. The movements were just an extension of the kind you used with a spade or an axe. It was easier than a sword, in the sense that you simply needed to not mess up the placement of the point or get the balance wrong.

In all honesty, Siegfried was resentful that he could use it with more ease than the sword. He didn’t want to make light of the weapon—it was far more useful when working with a unit, and his greatest feats so far had been achieved with the spear. The biggest purchase he’d ever made for himself had been his prized spear. He admitted he had an affinity for it, but something wouldn’t let him choke down how at odds it was with the dreams he had held since he was younger.

Siegfried had left Illfurth with the dream of becoming not just a hero, but a legendary swordsman. A spear was a strong, practical choice, but it just didn’t carry the romance of a sword in his private little world. It was a silly emotion, but to the young lad, the sword was just so much cooler than the spear.

Others would probably remark that he was being childish and sentimental, but such emotions were necessary if your occupation risked your very life. The difference in morale it could make could seal your fate, for better or for worse.

“We’re going off script with this one,” said Erich. “I want you to show them some basic moves with your spear. Show them how it puts you at the advantage.”

“Sure, got it. Don’t hurt yourself now.”

The pair didn’t need any clear signal—after seeing Erich take on his usual posture, holding his sword in his shadow, Siegfried charged with all his might. It was a simple stance—his right hand gripped the spear and his left took up a position further down the shaft to help guide it.

Siegfried made some quick jabs as he twisted the spear’s end in a feint. In battle, it never made sense to simply rely on one quick strike to the heart off the bat. Goldilocks had taught him to make small jabs at the enemy’s feet to maintain the ideal distance.

“Oof...” said Erich as he hopped backward.

Siegfried wondered if Erich had purposefully acted badly here to show the disciples the wrong thing to do—he was moving directly backward, as if fleeing from the spear strikes. Erich moved swiftly back from these shallow jabs, still fleeing as Siegfried stabbed at various other places—the knees, the torso, weak points in the joints of his armor.

The hero-hopeful didn’t make any sweeping blows. Faced with someone as tough as Goldilocks, they would strike in retaliation and make use of the spear’s momentum to knock it out of the way. In a one-on-one bout, bold movements were unsafe.

If it was a battle between two spear wielders, it would call for a more varied approach from both as they jockeyed for position—even the weight of their gauntlets could be used to the attacker’s advantage—but fighting against a close-quarters sword fighter, the best strategy was to simply bar their approach.

One or two strikes was enough to snuff your opponent’s life out, or at least slow them down. Siegfried could do a flashy arcing swing and knock Erich off his feet, but this was a practice bout, so he stuck to orthodox moves that wouldn’t garner much applause.

“Oops!” Erich had been pushed against the wall of the yard under Siegfried’s steady assault. “Get the picture? If you’re scared of what’s in front of you, then you can run out of places to run. One more step from Siegfried and the gap’s closed.”

“Yeah, but only chickens would be scared of constant pokes like that. If you’re me, look, one stab to the heart and it’s all over.”

“Exactly. Which is why you need to do this...”

Goldilocks changed his stance in the next moment; Siegfried reacted quickly, letting out a quick stab himself. Erich had chosen the half-sword stance, clasping the middle of the “blade” in his left gauntlet. This was a stance reserved for only the closest of close quarters.

Siegfried’s spear deflected off of Erich’s sword, his strike arriving where Erich’s head had been a moment earlier.

Siegfried clucked his tongue. It was hard to pull off a swipe if he didn’t have the momentum to start it up. This went double when trying to deal with the half-sword stance—a stance designed to deal with the spear. Unless you had some real muscles behind you, you would be knocked down by the sword’s quick movements.

Now that they were in close quarters, the spear put Siegfried at a great disadvantage. He chose defense over offense. He reversed the grip of his right hand to hold the spear in a protective posture. He watched Erich’s sword close in, pushed back, and despite his uneasy footing, kicked with his right foot.

He was aiming for the stomach. Armor would prevent a simple kick from doing any damage, but it was a good place to strike if you meant to knock a foe off-balance. But Goldilocks saw it coming. He shifted his arm, blocking the kick with his elbow. Now off-balance and still at risk of catching a sword blow, Siegfried dropped his spear and rolled forward to distance himself from Erich.

“I thought I had you with that,” said Erich. “I must say, you are a real pain to deal with as a sword fighter.”

“That meant to be a compliment?”

Siegfried had done a few rolls to open the gap as much as he could in the shortest amount of time, but as he stood up he realized he didn’t have a weapon hanging off his waist—the wooden sword didn’t use a scabbard.

“Well, yeah. You deflect all my hits. You keep me in check when I think I’ve cinched it. You’ve got good eyes, don’t you think?”

“Seriously? It’s mostly just instinct... When my gut tells me it’s gonna be bad, I stop. When I feel like I can push, I push. That’s it.”

The hero-hopeful had learned the basic movements, but everything on top of it was essentially pure instinct. He could sense the precise direction and intention of his foe’s bloodlust in the air; he felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck when things seemed dire. It was this visceral reaction that had saved his life during Jonas Baltlinden’s onslaught and the battles in the ichor maze. It wasn’t something he could really explain with words, so he felt no need to hide it.

“If I hadn’t gotten out of the way, you would’ve toppled me and we would’ve gotten into a scuffle. Spear won’t help you there, so I dropped it.”

“And you were going to continue the fight with your spare equipment, I see.”

Erich flexed his neck as he stood in awe of Siegfried’s amazing instinct—or perhaps what could be described as his good luck. It was true he wasn’t going all out, but his sword skills were still Divine level—he was amazed that the world was such a big place that there were people who could spar with him based on gut feeling alone. It also reaffirmed how much real luck could affect whether you could get those critical hits out and how different it could be from person to person.

In a similar way to how snake eyes could enfeeble even the highest-level adventurer, so too could boxcars unleash amazing strength. It was true that some of the best could cinch a miraculous critical hit at the climax of a campaign, but to think someone could so reliably get them out in a practice session like this!

Even with the power granted by the future Buddha to see through to the hidden data of this world, it seemed that things within it could overturn even these values.

“Hmm... Standard practice is to lower that critical rate or give him more dice to play with...”

“You say something?”

“Nothing. Just some idle grumbling.”

Goldilocks gave a bitter smile as he kicked Siegfried’s spear up into his hand before tossing it over to his partner. He turned to the group of starry-eyed rookies behind him—in awe that they got to see such an amazing bout, of a kind that they had only known in a form perpetually abridged and muddled, never laid out plain, in the heroic tales that had drawn them to the adventuring life.

“Now then, I hope you’re all ready to learn firsthand just how important it is to keep your distance from a spear. I’ll go lightly with my strikes,” said Erich. The rookies all froze in fear. Erich grabbed the other training spear and warmed up; he was plenty ready to use it in training, even if the sword suited him better.

“‘Learn how scary it is through pain’ is your method, huh?” said Siegfried. “Man, you are seriously gonna get stabbed in the back one of these days.”

“If that’s enough to kill you, it means you didn’t put enough work in. That goes for me too, obviously.”

Erich spurred the disciples to grab their weapons. Their two trainers were skilled. Neither had a bruise on them. With such a talented set of trainers and so many strapping members of the group, they would be safe from any real injury.

“Make sure you don’t break any bones, Siegfried.”

“Yeah, yeah, course. Though I bet this bloody spear’s gonna snap if I hit Etan or Mathieu with any real force.”

But, unfortunately, there was no painless way to learn these lessons. Any belief that they had learned the fundamentals during the demonstration would be worn down through real and painful sparring. The battlefield was complex and worked in three dimensions—nothing was quicker than baptism in the flame of their seniors’ experience. The rookies prayed that they would improve quickly as Goldilocks Erich put on an evil smile, ready to lead his disciples straight into hell. 

[Tips] Experience from a life-or-death battle engraves itself on your heart and can boost your skills and reflexes.

Not once in my life have I managed to start or close out a major chapter of my life without the weather deciding to piss all over my parade. My big trip home from Berylin was baptized in a brutal downpour. The day after I registered as an adventurer, Marsheim got hammered just the same. Sure, the capital was wetter and more temperamental than anywhere else I’d lived before, but after today, well—“twice is a coincidence; three times is a pattern.” Somebody out there just loves to put a damper on my big days.

“Hmm...” I said, “I think someone’s bad luck is rubbing off on the group.”

“Uh, it’s totally you, man,” said Siegfried.

Clad in the biggest rain cloak I owned, I stood outside the Snowy Winterwolf with Sieg, who was similarly outfitted.

“Ouch.”

“For real though, remember what happened during our job in Zeufar? The one that was sent to you? You’re the unluckiest guy in the group. Face it.”

“Seriously?”

I looked around to Kaya and Margit, hoping they would give me their full-blown support, but they awkwardly avoided my gaze.

“I hate to admit it, but I have to agree with him, Erich,” said Margit. “Do you remember how many times we were attacked on our journey to Marsheim? I think we should be grateful it’s raining water and not arrows.”

“Ha...ha ha... I have nothing really to add on top of that,” said Kaya.

Traitors, the lot of them...

“But it sucks... I wanted a fun send-off for our new carriage,” I said, pouting and letting my shoulders slump in despondence before I could catch myself. It hurt seeing my new two-horse carriage get soaked ahead of its first outing. Couldn’t at least one of them lie for the sake of my suffering mental health?

My Dioscuri were rigged up in front of a covered wagon of the usual make you saw in the Empire. I had specified some tweaks here and there and had it fitted with a steel frame to ease up on the suspension and improve its long-term survivability—it was a real beauty. Although it looked the same as any old carriage from the outside, it was nothing like the cheap things I’d ridden in my time working the caravans. Those glorified apple carts left the average thrifty commoner, to cite the slang of the age, “viciously bumbasted”—sore of ass in a fearsome way; this baby, by contrast, was fit for noble rears. We were set to ride easy.

“Man, I gotta say, you really splashed out. How much did you say it was—ten drachmae?”

“It’s an investment with huge returns once you think about how much better it’ll handle on long excursions. We’ll be able to pitch tents without getting soaked and carry bread with us without it getting soggy. Also, think about your back! You were complaining the whole way back from Zeufar about how heavy your knapsack was.”

I’d dropped a veritable fortune on this in the name of adventure. The price might have amounted to two years’ worth of my old home’s earnings, but the value was worth every coin. We could load up everyday supplies that we wouldn’t need immediately, sparing ourselves the back pain and keeping our stamina up. Now that we had a guaranteed means of transport, our choice of gigs was blown wide open.

“Um...”

“Yes, Mathieu?”

The young adventurers we’d recruited had shown up on time and fully prepared. The werewolf, Mathieu, had called out to me with his hand raised. He had only been out in the rain for a short while, but the downpour had left his fur slicked down. When his coat was dry and rippling, he cut a striking, gallant figure, but now he reminded me of a dog caught out in the rain. I fought to keep my mien sober and respectful.

“Are we really gonna go out in this weather? On, uh, a long-distance training expedition?”

“Of course we are,” I said. I could tell that everyone else was silently grumbling at the choice to head out in such inclement weather. “Look,” I said as I threw something over at Mathieu. “Sorry to break it to you, but I was lying when I said this was training. That bag I just threw you? That’s a dowry. It’s jammed full of diamond-studded mystarille rings—no expense spared, every jewel immaculately formed and cut. Every single one’s been loaded up with custom strength-boosting enchantments by thirty College magia. Practically and aesthetically speaking, that package borders on priceless.”

“Wha—?!”

“We need to set out today to deliver them or we’ll miss the wedding. The father of the bride got in a huge fight with a baroness just to get hold of them, so the bride definitely wants them on time. We’ve got a good rep for tricky jobs, so they tapped us specifically.”

I was lying when I said I was lying—the bag was full of coins, worth about fifty assarii all together. Not worthless, but not a big deal if it got stolen.

“It will take four days to reach our destination by horse—and that’s riding hell-for-leather. I left us a little wiggle room in our itinerary, but with all this rain, that’s pretty much hosed. But if you’re worried about getting a little wet, then, sure, we can delay our journey.”

“Huh?! N-No, I...”

Mathieu fumbled with the bag in a complete fluster. I gave him a smile and took it out of his hands.

“Calm down, I’m just posing a what-if scenario. It’s just loose change.”

Look at them, I thought, all cute and flustered! These newbies sure are sweet in their naivety...but Siegfried, why do you look surprised?!

“C’mon man,” Sieg said, reading my expression. “It’s you. I wouldn’t be surprised if you actually did get a request like that outta the blue.”

“If we were heading out for anything that important I’d tell you!”

Sieg, please don’t give me that look! I can’t stand you being this disappointed in me twice in one day! Just how little do these people trust me?!

“Hah, as if. I bet if someone came to you late last night with an awesome adventure, you wouldn’t hesitate to drop real hell on us in moments! I bet you’d say it was ‘for the good of the group’ or some crap.”

“Urk... Well... I dunno...”

“Now you’re doubtin’ yourself?! Quit pussyfootin’, dammit!”

Ngh... Got me there, bud. You know me better than I give you credit for...

He was right—if a request like the one I’d made up had come to us, I probably would have said yes. How could I turn down such a tantalizing challenge and such huge potential gains for the party? I was fully aware that it was poor form to play the “always better to ask forgiveness than permission” card so often, but the allure of adventure could be too strong sometimes.

“I bet if the reward was two hundred drachmae per person,” Siegfried went on, “you wouldn’t hesitate to drag us straight to hell!”

I could only let out a pathetic squeak at his verbal crit.

“See! I was totally right!”

Margit shook her head in exasperation at the little comedy show Siegfried and I were embroiled in before leaping up into the carriage. It seemed the eldest member of our party was too mature for two boys’ childish games. I cleared my throat loudly in hopes it’d clear the air; the air, undeterred, remained full of rain.

“In any case, while I did indeed indulge in a little white lie, my point is that I could very well have meant it. We’re adventurers! It’s in the nature of the work that we don’t know what our clients will drop in our laps.”

“Oh yeah,” said Siegfried. “When we went to Zeufar, the client said they wanted us to sort things out before winter was done.”

“Exactly. When you’re a lower rank, you’ll get less leeway in your gigs. Whether it’s raining or hailing, if you’ve agreed to a job, you’ve gotta beat feet!”

Of course, I didn’t want their first real fight and request to come like a bolt from the blue, so I’d cooked up this little excursion to get them used to what a life of adventuring would entail. None of them had traveled further than the distance from their homes to Marsheim, so it was important to get them used to some off-road orienteering.

“This time I’m completely serious. You can leave your gear in the carriage, but I want all of you to walk. We’ll be covering a minimum of forty kilometers a day, so get prepared.”

“Forty?!”

Every single rookie—and Siegfried, again—cried out in surprise.

Unlike your modern-day sedentary Japanese person, we were pretty used to walking everywhere. In this world, every other form of transportation was costly—it wasn’t like my old world, where you could buy a bicycle by saving up enough pocket money. Walking was crucial, vital, inextricable. Due to this, a thirty-kilometer march wasn’t so bad if you were going along well-maintained roads. After all, we weren’t unfit desk jockeys. My disciples were trained young men. If they were going to complain about the distance then I evidently hadn’t been training them hard enough.

The problem was not in the distance, but our occupation. Adventurers carried their armor, their weapons, their tools, and their food. Not only that, but our jobs would take us to distant cantons and towns that weren’t connected by roads. If you couldn’t get to your destination across rugged terrain without getting lost, then you couldn’t become a legendary hero. It sounded like I was being totally unfair, if not positively abusive, but those were the breaks. You couldn’t make a trucker out of somebody who panicked every time they had to merge on the highway; you couldn’t make an adventurer out of someone who couldn’t handle a long, rough hike.

“Ugh... Carrying my sword the whole way? My back hurts just thinking about it...”

Karsten’s sword was a normal size by mensch standards, but in his hands, with his goblin stature, it looked like a veritable zweihander. He looked at his sword with the utmost distaste. All the same, it was the one tool he could not leave behind. You couldn’t ship it there and pick it up on arrival either—it was the final bastion between you and death.

“And the rain’s not lettin’ up either... Oh! If I got news that a canton near my home was being preyed on by bandits, I’d head out despite the weather,” Martyn said, holding his hand out to check the rain.

“Look who’s playin’ hero,” replied Mathieu.

“Well, yeah? Adventurers fight for justice, duh.”

Martyn’s expression had clouded over as he pondered the hypothetical situation. He was apparently from a small farming family and had come to Marsheim to make it big as an adventurer so that he could send money back home and earn enough savings to give a good life to the one he’d agreed to marry. I admired his forward thinking—someone who could imagine the dangers that lay ahead was destined to be a good adventurer.

“But man, I hate rain...”

“Huh, why? I thought werewolves’ fur was pretty water-repellent,” Etan chimed in.

“Yeah, to a limit. Look at me! My handsome mug’s ruined ’cause of it! I’m like a drowned rat out here.”

“Uh-huh...”

“C’mon, you ass! Why d’you gotta be so cold?! I’m gonna skewer you and grill you over an open fire, you thickheaded ox!”

“Ain’t my fault if your damn fur’s the only thing I notice about ya, stupid dog! You look barely any different if ya ask me!”

“At least call me ‘stupid wolf’!”

Most demihumans fared well against the elements, but that didn’t mean they had to like it. Mathieu and Etan had started to heat up as their argument gathered steam. I was in no position to weigh in when it came to what made a handsome demihuman—what guarantee did I have that my own tastes would make sense to anyone else, after all—so I was left at a bit of a loss...

“Hey, guys? Cut the chatter. Any longer and Mister John’s gonna give you a lecture.”

...which was why I borrowed the might of the tavern owner. The pair shut up immediately. It was so sudden that I began to wonder if something had happened while I was absent—this reaction wasn’t normal. It must have been more than a minor spat, that was clear. I wasn’t privy to everything that went on in their lives. Ever since they’d become my disciples, these four had formed a little soot-black job-clearing unit, so something must have happened when they were eating together. If they were told off for taking things too far, it was my responsibility to put them in their place when the need arose.

“Now then, everyone. Let’s put our backs into this! Don’t give me that look—this is easier than the real thing. Let’s enjoy our little outing.”

This practice run was a necessary part of the journey toward the real thing. Let’s get this show on the road.

[Tips] Travel is an entirely different beast for an adventurer. A civilian needs an order of magnitude less baggage.

There was a song from all the way back home in my first life that you might have heard; it was an upbeat-sounding little ditty about a young ox getting taken to market, and it depressed the hell out of me for reasons I didn’t like dwelling on. My second life had left me with a better grasp of the practical side of things—naturally you had to walk your livestock straight to the butcher’s if you couldn’t refrigerate the meat—but by the gods, did it paint a grim picture. Not that it mattered much to us. Even the basest cut of beef, king of meats, was well beyond any commoner’s budget, so we filled our plates with pork or poultry most days.

“Ugh... Again...?” I muttered.

“Put your damn back into it!” Siegfried yelled at me.

We were heading to a nearby canton to buy a pig for cheap, but I just felt so despondent. I wondered if it was because our trip reminded me of the stupid song, or if it was because we had bumped into the most pathetic, half-hearted ambush in the world.

“How many times do I have to do this? Stupid GM, get some new story beats...”

“Gee Em? Stop speakin’ in code!”

If I was being honest, I saw the ambush coming from a mile off, so it would be more accurate to call this a purposeful encounter for my disciples’ sake.

We were on a wooded road, still firmly on track. The path was well beaten by the locals and wide enough for our carriage; despite four days of uninterrupted rain, the packed earth of the trail held fast. What was the Harvest Goddess thinking? She’d overslept last year, and now this year She had woken up with all the grumbling in the world. The fields would suffer under all this abuse, and so would everyone else in turn from the farmers on up. Maybe She and the God of Wind and Clouds were having a little marital spat. That was Their business, but I wish we hadn’t been caught in the cross fire.

This was just a little excursion out of the city! I hadn’t planned around a random hexcrawl encounter like this. All I wanted was to teach the rookies the importance of marching, fetch a pig from a local canton, and show them the basics of preserving the meat. That was it! So why the unwelcome guests? You couldn’t coax a guy into smashing open some poor sap’s piggy bank for a few measly cents while he’s got a fat wallet of his own burning a hole in his pocket—not unless he was some kind of freak. I was a different sort of freak, and I craved a classier avenue for the surplus of violence I had banked.

“U-Um, Goldilocks?!” one of the rookies cried out.

“Keep your head inside! Keep that shield up and lure them in closer. Fighting with them at a distance isn’t worth the time.”

Judging by our enemies’ equipment, they were small-time local thugs, not fully-fledged soldiers under the employ of a local strongman. These folks were only moonlighting as highwaymen. They’d jumped at the sight of a plump carriage, but most likely they all put in most of their hours as well-groomed members of society. There were about ten of them, armed with spears and axes. Half were mensch, the other a rabble of various demihumans. They had no formation or sense of cohesion to speak of—just a hastily assembled gang of fools, all tripping over each other for a shot at us. Clearly they had no military training to speak of.

There was a group of fifteen behind them armed with hunting bows, old-fashioned crossbows that they must have pilfered from somewhere, and slings. This rearguard group were trying to bog us down with suppressing fire—they must have had some people with hunting experience, because they’d mounted their attack from the trees, and their aim wasn’t all that bad.

All the same, Margit had informed us of their presence before we were even close, leaving them nothing more than a brief bump in the road.

I was standing in front of the carriage and my precious horses, trying to aggro the whole gang while Siegfried and the others had formed a small unit to receive the incoming fire. I was a bit puzzled by our foes. Our side were clad in armor—some of the rookies had some secondhand stuff—and were obviously ready for battle with their weapons in hand, but the enemy were just coming in guns blazing and heads empty. Couldn’t they have seen this was a fight they couldn’t win? Shouldn’t they have just lain low and waited for easier prey to come walking by?

“Ugh, this is boring... They’re nothing better than mindless rabble...”

“C’mon, man!” Siegfried yelled. “This isn’t training!”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m drawing their attention... Although their aim is making this harder than it should be. Hey! You scrubs! If you dare hurt my horses, I’ll have your guts for garters!”

They had chosen a bad place for an ambush, they didn’t have the brains to realize we were a bad target, and they didn’t even work that well as a team. There was nothing here to get my blood pumping. There would be no glory from this battle—maybe enough small change to get a second pig.

“Wagh! My shield was hit!” another cry from my team came out.

“Cool it! Keep marching! If you turn around, you’ll get an arrow in the back! It’s safer to press onward, so do as I taught you!”

Despite the occasional worried shout, our victory had all but been decided. I had drilled in with the rookies on how to gather in testudo formation, and although it was a little bit catawampus, it was doing the job—fitting, given their motivation. The shields were cheap battlefield salvage, but they were serviceable.

Whichever side lost their cool first would lose this battle. It was true that the four rookies were still only at III: Apprentice level in terms of skill, but we had drilled them enough that they wouldn’t lose to a bunch of amateurs like this—ones who preyed on travelers too weak to defend themselves. Not only that, Siegfried was with them; maybe they would lose if a meteor were to literally streak down from the heavens directly on their heads.

That wasn’t all—the cleanup of their annoying rear guard had just begun.

“Gwagh!”

A stewart fell headfirst from a tree just seventy paces away from me, squealing as he went in the funniest way. In the next moment, a mensch holding a sling took an arrow to the shoulder and fell before he could so much as swear.

Naturally, it was the work of our beautiful scout. She was the platonic image of a spectacular spider-girl—leaping from tree to tree as she picked off the entire rear guard one by one. The sight of them all clattering into the underbrush was like a traffic accident in slow motion. I sucked air through my teeth and winced, but I just couldn’t look away. Poor bastards. I found it near impossible to keep track of Margit’s movements. If her targets didn’t make such a ruckus on the way out, then I doubt anyone would have been able to work out what was happening. From their perspective, they were living through a slasher flick—or they were, right up until they weren’t.

Our formation was a few dozen paces away when the enemy vanguard halted, the sound of their fallen allies freezing them in their tracks.

“Now, Kaya!”

“Got it! Hiyah!”

Siegfried must have sensed this was the perfect moment. As we had planned, Kaya was hiding in the carriage—safe from arrow fire thanks to her potion—and received Sieg’s signal loud and clear. She launched a brown bottle which, although it landed a mite off its mark, cracked open in a burst of smoke. Her little shout as she sent it flying through the air was cute, but the bottle’s contents were anything but.

“Wha?! Koff!”

“Waaah... My eyes! My throat!”

“Ngh... The air...it burns!”

Kudos to another batch of our party’s special sauce—tear gas. Making use of our position upwind, the haze swept over the enemy, rending through any exposed orifice—far more painful than the pollen assault that had almost killed us before the cursed cedar ichor maze.

“All right! Onward, guys—cut them down!” roared Etan.

“R-Raaah!” the other three rookies called out in response.

All of us had applied the protective salve in advance; we could walk into the AOE debuff without complaint. Kaya’s potion, which had really carried the day for us during the fray with Jonas Baltlinden, was derived pretty directly (thanks to my input) from its “less-than-lethal” relative in my world. I’d actually caught a face full of the stuff on a vacation abroad back in the day. The itching and the pain had made it feel as if my whole face, not just my nose and eyes, were on fire. It was so intense that by the time it had let up, I found myself collapsed on the floor with no memory of how I got there. This stuff was no joke.

At Etan’s cry, the unit raised their shields and started charging forward in a line. The bandits were already immobilized, and the battle was brought to a swift end. In all honesty, I felt a bit uneasy about even calling it a battle.

Clamor erupted from both sides: “Raaah!” “S-Sto— Argh!” “DIIIE!” “Gwagh...”

Even if they had someone who could brute force their way through the pain or if one of their rear guard was able to provide backup, it wasn’t enough—this was a one-sided assault. As I watched over the chaos unfurling, I could see fear erupting not only in the eyes of the enemy but also in the four rookies. There was no graceful way to engage in your first ever real-life battle.

“Hey, guys? Don’t overdo it, you hear? You’ll get more coin if you bring them in alive, and I guarantee it’s easier to drag around injured bandits than dead ones. You listening to me?”

Despite the mild pandemonium, I was glad to see that my half season of tutelage had borne fruit—everyone was swinging with good form and they held their blades steady and true. The fundamentals had been sufficiently drilled into them, and although in the heat of the moment they were letting their muscles do most of the work, they were actually using their swords as swords and not clubs.

Etan was a force to be reckoned with—as to be expected from his raw power. A bandit’s head went flying into the air along with his hand—whether held in defense or in a plea for mercy, we’ll never know.

As for Mathieu... I know I told you to make sure to finish the job to avoid a foe on death’s doorstep wildly assaulting you, but that guy’s definitely very dead already. I had imagined that he would be used to killing already, as his werewolf pack were hunters, but I guess even for him, “prey” and “people” still scanned differently.

Martyn and Karsten were pulling their weight, despite not being blessed with the immense strength of our two demihumans. Siegfried had cleared about half of the bandits, but they had managed to kill one apiece. If you asked me, as first kills went in our line of work, they were all pretty fortunate.

This was far better than being caught in a losing battle with your seniors unable to even protect you. I called up a mental map of the remaining journey to the canton. We would be able to take most of these fools with us, so I thought about how to rearrange our carriage to carry some of the bodies. It was my new lovely big purchase—I was not going to let it be stained with filth and blood from a bunch of overconfident bandits.

[Tips] Knights often let their disciples take the heads of convicted criminals in order to avoid chaos such as this and acclimatize them to blood.

At the edges of a quiet canton, four young adventurers gazed up at the sky. Nature cared little for the roiling sentiment in their hearts, the endless blue above them free of clouds, almost as if in apology for the days of rain.

Strips of salted pork crackled merrily on the fire before them, coated in a special bean and herb sauce cooked up by Goldilocks Erich. This was the real reason they had been taken on this expedition—it was meant to be a simple outing where they would learn the ropes. Unlike the chaos of the previous day, their task today was to watch over the fire, making sure it didn’t go out and that the pork on the grill didn’t start to burn. This mission was assigned to them out of the kindness of their seniors’ hearts; the rookies were still shaken by having taken their first lives in battle, despite it being in self-defense. Erich had even foreseen their anger, their consternation, the question “What kind of devil makes someone cook wurst the day after they killed a man?!” His own dark humor had helped to keep them from stewing over what they’d done.

What they didn’t realize was that Goldilocks was pondering over his own altered sense of normalcy in the heat of battle as he prepped the meat for the rookies to smoke.

“Um...” said the werewolf, his voice quavering.

“What?” said the audhumbla, not actually curious.

“I...killed them...didn’t I?”

“Yeah... Looks like it. And...looks like I did too.”

The goblin awkwardly scratched his long nose, and the mensch just looked at his hands—they didn’t know what to say.

“But...I didn’t really feel like I was killin’... It was... It was like slicing up a pig back ho—”

“Don’t finish that sentence!”

Etan didn’t let Mathieu finish his mumbling because he felt exactly the same way. He too was from the countryside. Although he was often set out to work in the fields, he too had dressed his share of livestock for smoking or drying. Meat, cut properly, all came apart in about the same way, regardless of whether the animal it came from was a person or not. Beasts wore no armor, generally. That was the sole difference of any weight in the moment.

An adventurer’s life came with certain bitter revelations. Any who held fast to the dream needed some way to swallow them. When the rush of battle had died down, you were left with the knowledge that you had stolen someone’s life, and your hands would continue to feel sticky with blood and human detritus no matter how much you cleaned them—for these young rookies, they could only sit and feel sick to their stomachs.

They almost wished there had been more resistance, more effort to it all; maybe then the reality would be easier to swallow. But Erich had taught them too well. None had imagined that an easy cut would make the truth of their deeds bear down on them heavier still.

“B-But...as I watch that meat sizzling there...”

Mathieu clutched at his chest, his ears flat upon his head, his whiskers drooping, his tail swishing slowly behind him. Such pain was the curse of his humanity: something that no true wolf would ever have to face—only a pathetic human with a functioning conscience.

Their battle had none of the glory of a heroic tale, and none of the pathos of a tragedy. Their enemies had merely cried before they breathed no more. It was a part of life—a simple act and a simple end—so why did it hurt so much? Mathieu and the others all knew the nature of the work. All of them were prepared to die if they came upon an enemy that their joined might could not best. But as newly minted killers, they were tongue-tied, in spite of all the hours they’d spent preparing to stand on that privileged side.

“Jeez, look at you all. No energy in any of ya.”

From behind the four came a familiar voice.

“S-Siegfried...”

“Keep it together—one of your fires is goin’ out. Serve us up raw meat and you might kill us all. I don’t wanna be grabbin’ my stomach for the next few days ’cause of some undercooked pork.”

“Oh! R-Right, sorry...”

Siegfried had come over to rouse up the rookies, but it had inadvertently turned into a lecture. His comment was completely apposite, of course, but he felt a little bad all the same. As he stood there wondering what to say now, four gloomy lads turned into five as he looked up at the sky, the sun still blazing cheerfully.

They stewed in this heavy atmosphere, a smudge upon the pastoral landscape around them; Siegfried picked up a piece of kindling and stared at it as he eventually found his words.

“A sword...is nothin’ more than a tool for killing.”

The sword that came to Siegfried’s mind as he spoke was the looted thing passed to him during that twilight many months ago—a sword that he still used even now. Siegfried searched for the right words as he tried to remember what he had told himself in the aftermath.

“Whether you use it to plunder or protect, you’re doin’ the same thing. A sword is a big ol’ knife that you use to cut up your enemy. Now, I ain’t sayin’ it’s uncool—it’s real damn cool.”

Everyone’s first experience on the battlefield was different. Whereas the rookies at his feet had charged into battle to secure their win, Siegfried’s first body had begged him to spare his life, tears streaming down his face, his guts crumbling out of an open wound. Even though the final result was the same, Siegfried knew that it was impossible for him to empathize with these four rookies, and vice versa.

“There’s nothin’ like the sword,” he went on. “It’s really like the songs say. When I look at its gleaming blade, I feel all sorts of fired up. It weighs ya down during the march, but that weight in your hands is like a fire under your ass.”

Before Siegfried realized where his monologue was going, he had begun making these rookies aware of what they had done. He wondered what was worse—being killed or being constantly aware of death with every waking moment? Of course there was no way of knowing.

At any rate, everyone present faced and accepted death in different ways. Siegfried knew that.

Goldilocks, on the other hand, remained ever an enigma. Siegfried still couldn’t comprehend how Goldilocks could switch into a heartless killing machine when he came to know someone as an enemy. The logic made sense in Siegfried’s mind, but it was one of those thought experiments that nevertheless turned into a dilemma in the hero-hopeful’s mind. He could not quite decide if, in a world where everyone was like Goldilocks, it would be one where wars would be rare and unsightly necessities, or one where everyone was dead.

“But what comes after swinging a sword is different from how the stories tell it. It’s fuckin’ scary, it’s filthy, and it ain’t cool. But you gotta accept that despite the dressin’ up the stories get, we’re doing the same thing as the heroes we look up to.”

Siegfried twirled the branch in his hand; with each cut through the air it made, he gave a name: bandits, crooked local lords, thugs, villains, monsters, drakes, maddened demonfolk. Each of these were threats that could harm innocents if an adventurer didn’t nip their evil in the bud.

“We made it this far because heroes out there protected the world and stopped any of these from harmin’ us or our families. You all have seen one for yourselves, right? A canton burned to nothin’, orphans left without families. Especially in Ende Erde. There were loadsa kids back in my hometown who’d come from somewhere else you couldn’t rightly put on the map anymore, livin’ with distant relations ’cause that’s all that’s left.”

A true hero protected people whom they would never see. They would shoulder the burden of doing what others did not wish to do.

It irked Siegfried to be parroting Goldilocks’s own words, but they were the right ones to say. He had no other option but to borrow his lines. Seeing these young adventurers punish themselves for doing what they’d had to was just too painful.

“You can’t do anything for the dead. But you gotta remember that they attacked us. They’re the ones who chose to dirty their hands. If we hadn’t bumped into them, who knows what other caravan or canton would’ve been targeted? Poor folk who are too weak to protect themselves. You need to accept that when standin’ up for yourself.”

“What do you mean?” said Mathieu.

“Standin’ up for yourself means doing something scary to protect others.”

Mathieu looked up at Siegfried after this.

“I ain’t saying you need to get used to killing...just be proud of what you do. If you don’t, then it’s unfair to the guy you end up cutting down. Or would you prefer the guilt of thinking that the person you let get away ended up hurting some stranger somewhere else? It would hurt more than this.”

Siegfried no longer had trouble sleeping, but the faces of those he had killed still sometimes appeared in his dreams. The last breath before the end; the splatter of blood on his face; the last words begging for forgiveness. Siegfried couldn’t forget any of them, and never intended to. He would hold these memories with pride. After all, the good he’d done at that cost was just as indelible a mark upon him and his world.

“We bare our blades and stand up and take to the fray. Think about what that means and find somethin’ like peace. If you still wanna quibble after that, then you ain’t cut out for this line of work. It’d be better to head home and pick up the plow again.”

Siegfried tossed the sword-stick onto the fire and stood up slowly.

“A sword is a sword wherever you go. All that changes is who’s holdin’ it. If you wanna be an adventurer, a hero, then you gotta accept your blade as your fellow, a friend. Don’t be sickened by it. Be proud. You gotta think about what you’re doin’ every single time you draw it.”

“I like that, Sieg.”

It was Erich, holding some wurst ready for smoking. He’d approached without a sound. The fact that he was holding a box filled with Kaya’s magically made ice stood a bit at odds with the scene, but he seemed cheerful at Siegfried’s advice. His expression was soft, his steps light.

“You like what?”

“The idea of our blades being our fellows. Adventurers save innocents. We halt evil with our comrades. Without our swords at our sides we can’t be adventurers.”

A tool was a lifeless vessel, happy to perform any function it was made for. It took on a character of its own only when a human will was there to guide it. A device of the foulest imaginable purpose could be redeemed by an inventive soul with the mind to put it to the fairest possible ends.

“So,” Erich went on, “we should be friends to our blades too as we stand for justice. You’ve given me a good idea for a clan name, Sieg. Something that’ll help us to remember the lesson.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot about the whole name thing.”

Siegfried checked on the food and placed more wurst onto the grill as he recalled their discussion back in Marsheim.

“The Fellowship of the Blade. How about it? Cool, huh?” said Erich.

“Our blades are our fellows and we are fellows to our blades too, huh... Yeah, not too shabby. I like it.”

Siegfried almost felt a pang of jealousy with the ease with which the name had passed into being. It was short, punchy, heroic. What could be better?

“You guys happy with that?” he asked the rookies. The four of them exchanged glances before voicing their assent.

“Yeah! Thank ya, Siegfried! Wait, no—Big Bro Sieg!”

“Uh-huh, I feel cheerier already. Cheers, Bro!”

“H-Hold it!” Siegfried said. “Bro? Big Bro Sieg?! The hell’s come over you guys? You’re makin’ me sound like some kinda gangster!”

Siegfried was the youngest of his family. A rush of embarrassment came over him at the thought that the nickname might stick. All the same, he couldn’t deny that he kind of liked it. He could only stand awkwardly as the rookies clapped him on the back and sang his praises.

“Heh, glad we managed to come up with a name we all like. I was worried we’d have to go with Clan Goldilocks or something else equally bad. And hey, we’re exactly where our first excursion was supposed to take us! I call that auspicious timing. Who wants to help me think up a crest?”

“Oy, don’t get ahead of yourself, idiot. It costs a lot to get a pro to come up with one.”

“Well, maybe we got someone who’s artsy here! I can’t engrave a ring or armor, but I could totally make a clasp for a cloak. If we aren’t fussy, we could get some cheap metal or something.”

“Gettin’ ahead of yourself...”

And so, in the smoke of sizzling wurst, this clan of little renown finally became official. They were friends to, of, and bound by the sword—the Fellowship of the Blade. Later they would continue to uphold honor under the sword and they would venture forward in search of glory as adventurers.

Buoyed along by their excitement, they quickly settled on the wolf as their emblem—a widely understood symbol of pride and hunger, fit for a group of unprecedented young unknowns. Karsten, who had an artistic side to him, had drawn it up in a few minutes, and the image of a wolf clasping a sword in its jaws must have really impressed Erich. Erich bought some wood from the canton and whittled it into clasps for everyone.

The sun was still in the sky as they affixed their new clasps. As long as they wore them, they vowed to ever devote themselves to the blade and walk the path of justice. Underneath the bright spring sky, these crazed fools, addled with dreams of their future exploits, made fervent small talk, celebrating the official founding of their clan.

[Tips] “The innocent find refuge from those bearing a sword and a wicked heart in those bearing a sword and a just heart.”— An excerpt from The Teachings of the Fellowship of the Blade which spread in later years.