Tim's POV
Mathematics had always been honest with me, even when I didn't like what it was saying.
Level one to level two had taken me weeks. Level two to level three had taken months. The progression wasn't linear, it was exponential, the experience required multiplying with each tier, the gap between levels widening into a chasm that vermin simply couldn't bridge fast enough. I'd known this intellectually, had filed it away as a future problem.
Now the future had arrived, and the problem was sitting squarely in front of me.
At my current rate, systematic, thorough, covering most of the city's alleys in rotating circuits, I might reach level four in two to three years. Maybe longer. The rats were running out, partly because I had been so effective at eliminating them. I was a victim of my own efficiency.
I needed something bigger.
I was turning this over in my mind one grey morning, walking a familiar route back from the market district, when I passed him. A man sleeping in a doorway, wrapped in rags, face slack and weathered, an empty bottle loose in one hand. A hobo one of dozens scattered through E-Rantel's lower ward like debris after a flood.
The thought arrived before I could stop it, clear and cold and precise:
'If I killed every vagrant in the city, how many levels would that buy me?'
I stopped walking.
Stood there for a moment with the thought sitting in my chest.
It wasn't a good thought. I knew it wasn't a good thought. But the part of my mind that had spent months thinking in terms of experience yields and efficiency ratios had generated it automatically, and now I had to look at it directly and decide what to do with it.
I thought about Ainz. About the way Ainz Ooal Gown had approached this world, with the detached calculus of a game player, where populations were variables and morality was a luxury that powerful beings could afford to discard. I had always found that chilling when I read it from a comfortable distance. The question was whether I would find it equally chilling when the logic was pointing at something I could actually do, something that would solve a real problem.
The answer, I discovered, was no, as i have basic morals.
I didn't want to kill because it was risky. I wanted to no kill, because those people sleeping in doorways were human beings who had made no choice that warranted death. They were the bottom of a brutal society, the furthest fallen, the ones the city stepped over and ignored.
They were, in a different way, what I was, and i am not some heartless monster.
I promised myself, that I would not become like Ainz. That I would not treat this world, its inhabitants as obstacles or resources, or at least i will try. The thought in the doorway was exactly where that kind of thinking started. One reasonable exception, then another, then another, until you were a skeletal overlord in a tomb wondering abstractly why you couldn't feel anything anymore.
No.
If I was going to kill to level up, and I had already accepted that I would need to, then I would choose my targets differently. Not the helpless. Not the innocent. Not even the merely petty criminal in the petty sense, the pickpockets and beggar children running small cons to survive.
The scum. The actual scum. The ones who preyed on people weaker than themselves not out of desperation but out of appetite.
E-Rantel had those too. Every city did.
I started paying different attention to the slums.
I had walked most of this city's alleys over the past months, but there were sections I had avoided, not from ignorance but from conscious caution. There was a cluster of streets in the deepest part of the lower ward, past where even the regular beggars congregated, where the architecture itself seemed to lean inward conspiratorially. I had marked it early as dangerous and routed around it.
But I had observed things from the periphery. Men moving at odd hours, carrying things. Bundles. Bags with shapes that didn't resolve into anything innocent when you thought about them too carefully.
Bodies, I was almost certain. Or people who were about to become bodies.
A place where men carried what looked like corpses through alleys at night was either a murder operation or something adjacent to one. Either way, the people doing the carrying had made certain choices about how to exist in this world, and those choices had consequences.
I went at dusk, bowl in hand, taking a circuitous route that let me assess the approaches from three different angles before committing to entry. The alley itself was narrow, older than the surrounding streets, the walls stained with things I didn't examine closely. It smelled of rot and something metallic underneath. The smell of a place that saw regular violence.
I found a position and settled in to wait.
This was something I had become genuinely good at, the particular stillness of patient observation, the ability to slow my breathing and my thoughts and simply exist quietly in a space, it makes me feel like a badass.
The alley darkened. The city sounds shifted from daytime commerce to nighttime wariness. Somewhere distant, a dog barked twice and stopped.
He came perhaps two hours after full dark.
A big man[level 12, not exceptionally tall but wide through the shoulders, the kind of build that came from physical work rather than deliberate training. He was carrying a sack over one shoulder, holding it with the casual ease of someone for whom this was routine. The sack had a human shape that made my jaw tighten. It moved slightly, which was somehow worse than if it hadn't.
Not a body yet, then. Not quite.
What I knew was that the sack moved, and I had made a decision, and I was committed to it.
I stepped out of my position and moved toward him, bowl extended, doing the voice, slightly hoarse, slightly vacant, the voice I'd developed for the beggar persona. "Please, sir, anything you can spar-"
He turned.
Our eyes met for a fraction of a second. His were flat and assessing, the eyes of a man who read threats for a living, running a rapid calculation on what I was. The calculation took perhaps two seconds and than...
"Piss off," he said. The voice of someone who had dismissed a thousand inconveniences exactly this way.
He turned his back.
This, I had learned from months of watching this world, was the critical moment. People were most vulnerable not when they were threatened but when they had just decided they weren't. The moment of dismissal was the moment of maximum inattention.
I had the plank in my other hand. I'd been carrying it pressed along my forearm, hidden against my body, a piece of timber I'd modified weeks ago with two salvaged nails driven through one end, rusted but solid, the heads filed to rough points. Crude.
Undeniably crude. But I'd thought about this carefully and I'd determined that crude was what I had, and crude would have to be sufficient.
I didn't think. Thinking was for before. This was after.
I moved fast, faster than I had any right to at this size, the accumulated levels expressing themselves in a burst of speed that my five-year-old frame shouldn't have been capable of, closed the distance in three silent steps, and drove the nail-end of the plank into the top of his skull with every gram of force my body could generate.
The sound was something I won't dwell on.
The nails went in. I felt the resistance, then the horrible give of it. He dropped immediately, not the dramatic stagger of story fights but the instant collapse of a body whose signals had been cut, the sack falling from his shoulder as he went down, hitting the alley floor with a weight that seemed to shake the stones.
He was convulsing.
I shook the plank, the way you'd try to maximize damage to what's left of his mind, and hated myself for knowing that was the correct thing to do, and did it anyway, and then he stopped moving.
Silence.
I stood over him and breathed.
The convulsions ceased. The alley was quiet. The sack had fallen against the wall and was not moving anymore either, and I could not let myself think about that right now because if I thought about it I would stop functioning and I needed to keep functioning.
The first rush came maybe ten seconds later.
A cool wave, level four, I thought, smaller than before but definite, that familiar sense of the world becoming slightly more solid under my feet, my hands slightly more capable, my body slightly more *mine.* And then, before the feeling had fully faded, a second one. Smaller still, the gentlest of breezes compared to the first level up's storm. But real.
Level five.
The man lying dead in front of me had been carrying enough experience for two levels. Which meant he had been, I did the rough math with what I knew of this world's danger levels, [ 3 danger levels= 1 level ]. Not a simple thug. A professional, or something close to it. Someone who had accumulated genuine levels through genuine violence.
I stood there looking at him for a long moment.
I had expected to feel worse than I did. Or perhaps I had expected to feel nothing, the clinical detachment of a man who'd made a cold calculation and executed it. Instead I felt something, not guilt exactly, a little happiness.
I crouched down and checked his pockets.
The money bag hit me like a physical shock. I opened it in the dim alley light and counted, twice, because the first count seemed impossible.
Fourteen gold coins. Twelve silver. A scatter of copper.
I stared at this for longer than was tactically wise.
Fourteen gold coins was not a sum a casual thug carried. That was salary. That was payment for services rendered at a high professional level, or the operational budget of someone trusted by people further up a chain than this alley. Whoever this man was, whoever he worked for, I had just killed someone with organizational ties, which meant somewhere, eventually, someone would notice he was gone.
The daggers were well made, far too large for me to use conventionally but far too valuable to leave. I pulled them from his belt, wrapped them in a strip of cloth from the inner lining of his coat, and tucked everything into my clothing, distributed across my waistband and shirt.
Then I walked. Not ran, running drew attention. Walked, smoothly, purposefully, the way I always walked, back through the darkened streets toward the orphanage, taking three unnecessary turns to break up any potential trail.
My mind was very quiet the whole way back.
I found the rat hole in the orphanage's foundation wall, long abandoned, the original tenants thoroughly eliminated by my own campaign, now empty and dry, and packed the cloth-wrapped coins and daggers deep inside, making sure the opening looked undisturbed.
I lay down on my sleeping mat. Around me the other children breathed in the slow rhythms of deep sleep.
I stared at the ceiling and made myself a promise.
Not to that alley again. Not to that category of work again. Not in this city, not now, not until I was old enough and capable enough that the risk of exposure was manageable and the targets were ones I had properly evaluated rather than one man in one alley chosen because he was carrying a suspicious bag.
I had levels to gain. I had thirty years to gain them. This was not a problem that needed to be solved tonight, or this year, or recklessly.
I was level five. Half a year ago I had been level one.
I could afford to be patient.
I closed my eyes and, after a while, slept.
-Tim's stats (he can't see his stats)-
level: 5
Verim killer: [2/10]
Assassin: [2/10] (20% damage boost, crit hit of 2000% on backstab)