Tim's POV
Thirty years.
I turned the number over in my mind the way you'd test the weight of coin before pocketing it. Not a guarantee, nothing in this world was a guarantee, but a working estimate.
It had taken me three days after learning I was in E-Rantel to work up the nerve to do something about it. The knowing was one thing. The *planning* was another. I was five years old, living in an orphanage on charity bread and watered soup, with no possessions, no money, and no power. Panic was a luxury I couldn't afford. So I folded it up neatly, put it somewhere quiet in the back of my mind, and started thinking practically.
The first thing I needed was a timeline.
I remembered enough about Overlord's story to know that the inciting event, the moment Ainz Ooal Gown descended on this world in the tomb of Nazarick, happened when the first prince of Re-Estize, Barbro, was in his early thirties. I didn't know the exact year. I hadn't memorised the lore like some devoted fan. But it gave me a reference point, a fixed star to navigate by.
So I needed to know how old Barbro was now.
I couldn't exactly walk into a noble's hall and ask. But a shop would do. Shopkeepers talked. It was practically their profession alongside selling things, the exchange of goods and gossip in equal measure.
The closest shop to the orphanage was a narrow little place that sold dried goods and cheap candles and the kind of general sundries that the lower ward needed. The old man behind the counter had a white beard and the permanent squint of someone who'd spent decades calculating small sums. He looked at me the way adults always looked at orphanage children, a slight narrowing of the eyes, an instinctive check toward anything valuable within reach.
I didn't waste time.
"Excuse me," I said, keeping my voice polite and small, the way I'd learned adults preferred children to sound like. "My caretaker was talking about the royal family. How old is the first prince now? I forgot."
The old man blinked. Clearly not the question he'd expected.
"Prince Barbro?" He scratched his beard. "Born two winters past, I think. Maybe three. Why's a ward child asking about the prince?"
"Caretaker asked me to remember for her," I said. "She forgets things."
He seemed to accept this with a shrug, and I thanked him and left before he could think about it too hard.
Two years old. Barbro was two years old.
I walked back to the orphanage doing arithmetic in my head. If Barbro was in his early thirties when Ainz arrived, call it thirty-two to be safe, and he was currently two, then I had approximately thirty years. Perhaps a few more, perhaps a few less. In the world I came from, thirty years would have felt like an eternity. Here, knowing what was coming at the end of it, it felt like a countdown.
Thirty years to become someone who could survive what was coming. Someone who mattered.
I sat in the dormitory that evening and thought about what I actually knew about this world's mechanics.
The thing that most inhabitants of the New World didn't understand, couldn't understand, because they had no framework for it, was that their reality operated like a game. Not metaphorically. Literally. There were levels, there were classes, there were experience points accruing invisibly beneath the surface of every living thing. People knew *something* was there. They called it danger levels. They understood instinctively that a veteran soldier was more formidable than a farmhand, that certain individuals seemed to absorb experience from the world and grow in ways that went beyond simple training. But they didn't understand the system underneath it. They couldn't see the architecture.
I could. Or at least, I knew it existed, which was already an enormous advantage.
As I understood it, there were two primary paths to gaining levels. The first was occupational, mastery of a craft or profession accumulated over time into class levels. A blacksmith who worked the forge for years would gain levels in that class, growing stronger in ways they'd attribute to experience and skill but which were also, invisibly, numerical. The second path was combat. Killing living things generated experience. Every creature had a value. The stronger the creature, the more experience it yielded.
I was five years old. I could not swing a sword. I could not take on bandits or wolves or dungeon creatures.
But I could kill some random vermin, every living thing had exp, no matter how little.
The orphanage had plenty of vermin.
I started that same night. The rats were first, there were three I'd identified living in the gap behind the kitchen stores, fat and bold from years of easy pickings. I fashioned a crude tool from a broken piece of wood with a nail through one end, something I'd found in the yard, and I waited by their hole in the dark long after the other children were asleep.
It wasn't glorious. It wasn't even particularly satisfying. I was a forty-year-old man's mind in a five-year-old's body, crouched on cold stone in the dark, waiting to ambush rodents with a nail on a stick. But the first rat died, and then the second, and I felt nothing dramatic, no surge of power, no golden light. Just the grim practicality of the work.
I moved on to cockroaches. The orphanage had plenty of those too, clustered in the warm corners near the hearth, in the cracks behind the water basin. I killed them methodically, thoroughly, without squeamishness. My former self might have recoiled. My current self understood that every small life extinguished was a fraction of experience added to a total I couldn't see but could trust was growing.
The ants came next. There was a colony near the eastern wall of the yard, well-established, thousands of workers moving in their patient lines. I spent afternoons there, quietly and systematically. The other children assumed I had developed a fascination with insects. I let them assume.
Weeks passed.
I expanded my range. The alleys behind the orphanage were a different ecosystem entirely much darker, richer with vermin, less supervised. I went in the early mornings when the light was grey and the streets were mostly empty, and I worked through whatever I could find. More rats. Larger ones, meaner, the kind that would bite if cornered. I cornered them anyway and learned quickly that the five-year-old body I inhabited, whatever its limitations, responded to use. My hands grew steadier. My reactions sharpened slightly. Whether that was simple physical development or the early accumulation of something, I couldn't tell.
And then one morning, approximately six weeks into my campaign of systematic extermination, it happened.
I was crouched in an alley two streets from the orphanage, dealing with a rat that had made the poor decision of retreating into a dead end, and after killing it, when the feeling hit me.
There was no other word for it but *rush.* A wave of warmth that started somewhere in my chest and expanded outward through every limb simultaneously, like stepping from winter cold into a room with a roaring fire, except the fire was *inside, flooding through muscle and bone and nerve. It lasted only a few seconds, but those seconds were extraordinary. I sat back against the alley wall and simply breathed, hands trembling slightly, not from fear but from the sheer animal shock of sudden physical transformation.
Level two, i think.
It had to be. I had no way to verify it, no status screen floated obligingly before my eyes, no numerical confirmation appeared in the air. But I *knew*. My body felt different. More present. Like a blurry image suddenly brought into focus, something like this can't be found on my old world.
I flexed my fingers and made a fist. The same hand, the same small knuckles, but there was something behind it now that hadn't been there before. Density, maybe. I had read in overlord that first level up gains in this world roughly doubled base statistics, as you jumped form level one to two. If that was true, then the body I now inhabited was meaningfully stronger, faster, and more durable than it had been this morning.
For a five-year-old orphan with power of a ten-year-old, now that saying that out loud, it sounds silly.
I sat in that alley for a while longer than necessary, not moving, just taking stock. Around me the city made its morning sounds, cart wheels on cobblestone, distant voices, the smell of bread from somewhere above. A normal day in E-Rantel. Nothing had changed for anyone but me.
I picked up my makeshift tool, found another rat and did my duty.
Then I went looking for more.
Tim's stats [he can't see his stats]
lvl 2
Vermin killer [1/10] [deal 30% extra damage to all Vermin, and 300% extra damage to Vermin lord]