The light faded, and there was a sky.
Blue. Wide. With a sun in it, low and gold behind the trees, so bright that Jin had to put his hand over his eyes.
Then the ground jumped.
It went out from under his feet in a ring. He felt it leave him, the way you feel a shout leave your chest. The long grass of the clearing flattened outward in a perfect circle, the trees at its edge bent back and sprang up again, and every bird in the forest burst into the air at once. The ring kept going, past the trees, past the hills, further than even his ears could follow.
A window opened in front of his eyes.
[World Announcement]
[An Overlord has appeared]
Jin read it once. That was all it took.
The Overlord's Tomb. The Overlord's First Trial. The Overlord's Second Trial.
And now an Overlord has appeared, in the exact spot where I appeared, at the exact moment I appeared.
I'm not stupid. I've just been unlucky for a thousand years.
He opened his status window, just to be fair to himself.
[Class: ???]
Nice try.
He closed it.
Then the birds came back down, and the sound hit him.
Birdsong, from every direction at once. Wind in the leaves. A stream somewhere, a mile off, maybe more, running over stones. Insects in the grass. A fox, three hills away, digging. After a thousand years of ash and silence, it was like being shouted at by the whole world.
Birds.
I forgot about birds.
And under all of it, something he had never felt before. A faint hum in the air, like the static before a storm, coming from everywhere and nowhere. It prickled against his skin and slid off.
He lowered his hand and looked around.
He knew this clearing. The fallen log where Shaun had sat to eat. The flat rock where Takumi had laid out his tools. The tree line where Elise had gone ahead to scout, and the bushes where they'd found the bodies.
This was where they had stopped for lunch.
This was where the sky had split.
* * *
The gate was gone. Where it had stood there was a fence now: iron posts sunk into the ground, linked with chain, already rusting. A wooden sign hung from it, the paint faded.
SEALED GATE SITE. NO ENTRY BY ORDER OF THE HOLY EMPIRE.
Beside the fence, half hidden in the grass, was a stone.
It wasn't much of one. Knee-high, rough, the kind you'd find in any river. Someone had carved into it by hand, with a knife or a chisel, slowly and badly. The letters leaned. One of them had been started twice.
JIN RYU
And underneath, smaller:
THE UNDYING COCKROACH
Jin stood very still.
He knew that handwriting. He had watched it on supply lists and duty rosters for two years. Daewon couldn't carve to save his life. He had done it anyway.
Things had been left at the foot of the stone. A dented tin cup, the one Daewon drank from on every march. A spent dart from Takumi's gun. An arrow, fletched the elven way, with grey feathers. A recruit's badge, the kind they gave to sixteen-year-olds on their first day.
Moss had grown thick over the bottom of the stone and into the grooves of the letters. Jin crouched and touched it.
Moss doesn't grow like that in a season.
They got out. They got out, and they came back here to bury nobody.
He didn't cry for long. He had done most of his crying on a roof in a dead village. But he crouched there in the grass a while with his hand on the stone, and when he finally stood up, his eyes were wet, and he let them be.
* * *
"Who's there?"
Jin had heard the man coming for five minutes. Running at first, crashing through the undergrowth from the east, straight toward the place the ring had started. Then slowing. Then creeping, with careful breathing and the creak of a leather strap. He'd decided not to mention it.
He turned around slowly, hands open.
A young man stepped out of the tree line with a spear levelled. Mid-twenties, broad-shouldered, in a leather coat covered with pockets and a tin tag on a cord around his neck. A brass ring on his left hand glowed faintly blue. His face was pale, and the spear wasn't quite steady.
"Did you feel that?" the man said. "It came from here. Right here. I was two hills over and it nearly took my feet out." He looked Jin up and down: the old army uniform, faded and torn; the battered iron sword at his hip. "Is that a pre-Gate uniform?"
Pre-Gate.
"It's the only one I've got," Jin said.
The man lifted his left hand and pointed the ring at him. The blue glow flickered, steadied, and did nothing at all.
For a second the man just stared at it. Then he lowered the spear and laughed, a short, shaky laugh that was mostly relief.
"Goddess. For a moment there I thought…" He shook his head. "You're a blank."
"A what?"
"A blank. No mana, no skills." He tapped the ring. "Aura gauge doesn't even twitch. Well. You're definitely not the Overlord, then."
"No," Jin agreed.
That's lie number one.
"Did you see anything? Something came through here. Something big."
"A light," Jin said. "Then it was gone."
That one's mostly true.
"I'll say it was gone." The man stuck out a hand. "Kang Doyun. Licensed adventurer, E-rank. I've been tracking a thornback through these woods for two days, and instead I get a world announcement and a blank in an old uniform crying over a grave. This week just keeps getting stranger."
Jin shook his hand. It was warm and calloused and very fragile.
Careful. Careful. Don't break him.
* * *
Doyun talked the way some people breathe: constantly and without seeming to notice.
He talked as they walked out of the clearing and down toward the forest road, and in the first hour Jin learned more about the world than he had in the last thousand years.
That this was the Gate Day site. The Gate Day site, the first one, where the sky split five years ago and everything changed. That gates opened all over the world now, every week, and people like Doyun went into them for money. That there were guilds and licences and ranks, from G at the bottom to S at the top, and nobody alive had reached S. That everyone had a window now. That everyone had magic now, or near enough.
"Even my grandmother," Doyun said. "Seventy-three, lights her stove with a spark spell every morning and complains it's too hot." He glanced sideways at Jin. "Sorry. That's not… it's not your fault, you know. Being a blank. Some people just come out that way."
"Go on, then," he added. "Let's see your window. Maybe the gauge is wrong."
Jin thought about a window that said Level ???, Title: Overcame Death, and Ki: ???.
"I'd rather not," he said.
Doyun's face went soft again. "Right. Course. Nothing to see, eh? Plenty of blanks don't like opening theirs. I get it."
You really don't.
Mostly, though, Doyun talked about the Overlord.
"Every window on the continent," he said. "Every one. My mother's, the guild master's, probably the Emperor's. Nobody's ever seen anything like it." He swung his spear up onto his shoulder. "You watch. The Empire'll want it in the Hunter Corps by supper. The Church will say it's a demon by breakfast. And every kingdom from here to the sea will have people on the road by morning, trying to get to it first."
"What do they want with it?"
Doyun gave him a look, as if he'd asked what people wanted with gold.
"Everything," he said.
Five years.
A thousand for me. Five for them.
Jin had thought he was ready for the number. He wasn't. Daewon would be forty. Shaun would be twenty-one. Hana, his little sister, would be eighteen, the age he'd been when he walked through the gate.
"Hey." Doyun had stopped. "You all right?"
"Fine," Jin said. "Just tired."
That, at least, was true.
He had already decided not to tell Doyun anything. It hadn't taken him long.
The last time anyone noticed I was "special", they sent me to the front line.
This time the whole world got a message about it. Kings. Priests. Nobles. Everyone who ever wanted something from a commoner.
They wouldn't send me to the front line. They'd make me the front line.
Not until I know what this world is.
* * *
The thornback found them an hour later.
Jin heard it long before Doyun did: a heavy, snorting body pushing through the undergrowth to the left of the road, coming fast. He said nothing. He wanted to see what an E-rank adventurer looked like in a fight.
It burst out of the trees like a boulder with legs. A boar, but the size of a cart horse, with a ridge of black spines down its back as long as daggers.
Doyun was good. Jin gave him that. He spun, planted his spear, and shouted a word, and the spearhead lit up with blue fire. The thornback hit the spear, screamed, and kept coming. Its shoulder took Doyun in the chest and threw him across the road. The spear went one way and Doyun went the other.
The boar turned. Its small, furious eyes found the next thing standing.
Jin.
The helpless blank.
It charged.
He had perhaps a heartbeat to think about it, which was far more than he needed. He bent down as if he was going to fall over in fright, picked a pebble off the road, and flicked it with one finger and a sliver of ki. Barely anything. Less than he'd used to open a door in the trial.
The pebble hit the thornback's foreleg and broke it.
The boar went down nose-first in the dirt and slid to a stop at Jin's feet.
By then Doyun was up, swearing, spear back in his hand. He drove it in behind the boar's shoulder, and that was that.
He stood over the carcass, panting, and looked at Jin. Jin looked back, doing his very best impression of a terrified man.
"Did you see that?" Doyun said. "It tripped! It just tripped! Must've caught a root." He laughed, a little wildly. "Goddess, you're lucky. That thing nearly had you."
"Lucky," Jin agreed.
A thousand years, and the first thing the Overlord does back in the world is let a man think he saved him.
Daewon would laugh himself sick.
* * *
The town was a half-day's walk down the forest road. Jin didn't recognise it, and then, coming round the last bend, he did.
It had been a border post, once. A muddy crossroads with a barracks, an inn and a smithy where the squad had stopped for supplies on the way north. Now there were walls around it, new stone walls with towers, and a gate with guards.
Inside, it was another world.
The streets were paved. Crystal lamps stood on iron posts along the main road, already glowing as the sun went down, though nobody had lit them. A man outside a tavern lit his pipe by snapping his fingers. Two children in an alley were throwing sparks at each other and shrieking with laughter. A woman carried a basket of washing that floated half a step behind her.
And the hum was everywhere. The same static he'd felt in the clearing, a hundred times stronger, coming off every person and every lamp.
So this is what magic feels like when everyone has it.
The whole town was talking about one thing. He heard it on every corner, with ears that could have heard it from the walls: Overlord. Two guards arguing about whether it was a man or a monster. A woman telling her neighbour it was the end of the world. On the steps of the town chapel, a priest in white was already shouting that the Goddess's enemies had been given a crown, while a man in an Imperial coat nailed a notice to the door behind him.
INFORMATION ON THE OVERLORD WILL BE GENEROUSLY REWARDED. BY ORDER OF THE HOLY EMPIRE.
Recruit it or kill it. They can't even agree with each other.
Same Empire, then.
People glanced at him as he passed and then glanced away again. It took him a while to understand the look. In the old world, a commoner in a torn uniform got looked at like that by nobles. Now everybody looked at him like that.
No aura. No magic. A blank.
The one thing in this town nobody's looking for.
Near the gate, a guard in a dark uniform leaned against the wall with something strapped to his hip: a short, heavy thing of black iron with a grip and a long barrel. Jin had never seen anything like it. When the guard shifted his weight, Jin heard tiny parts click against each other inside it, oiled and precise.
"Gun," Doyun said, following his gaze. "Watch guard's issue. Don't worry, they hardly ever use them. Magic's cheaper." He clapped Jin on the shoulder. "Come on. Guild hall's this way. I'll get my bounty, and you're getting a hot meal on me, and that's not an argument."
* * *
The adventurers' guild hall was loud and warm and smelled of beer and wet leather. There was a long counter, and a board covered in papers (gate postings, Doyun said, sorted by rank), and a lot of large people in coats with pockets, all talking at once, and all of them about the Overlord.
Doyun went to the counter with the thornback's tusk. He pressed a coin into Jin's hand on the way. "Food's over there. Eat something. You look like a ghost."
You have no idea.
Jin didn't go to the food.
He had stopped in the middle of the hall, because on the far wall, above the fireplace, there was a poster.
It was huge, painted in bright colours, the kind of thing the Empire put up in every town square when it wanted young men to sign up for something. Across the top, in gold letters:
THE HOLY EMPIRE HUNTER CORPS
And underneath, four people.
A big man with an axe and a small shield, standing at the front. His beard was grey at the edges now, and there were lines around his eyes that hadn't been there before. A lean man with white-grey hair and some new device strapped to his arm, all brass and wires, grinning like he knew something you didn't. An elf with yellow hair and a bow, exactly as Jin remembered her, because five years was nothing to an elf. And a young man with a sword, taller than the boy Jin had known, broad in the shoulders, with a soldier's face.
Under each of them, a name and a rank in gold. A under the big man. B under the other three.
Daewon. Takumi. Elise. Shaun.
THE FIRST GATE SURVIVORS
THEY WALKED OUT OF THE FIRST GATE. WILL YOU WALK IN?
And at the very bottom, in small print that most people would never read:
In memory of those who did not return.
Jin stood in the middle of the guild hall with a coin in his hand and the noise of a hundred people arguing about the Overlord around him, and looked up at Daewon's painted face for a long time.
He could almost hear him. The way he'd said it after every battle, every arrow, every time Jin got up again when he shouldn't have.
Oi. Still alive, cockroach?
Something in Jin's chest that had been clenched for a thousand years let go, just a little.
Still a pig, Captain.