Tim's POV
This summer was, by far, one of my best years for me.
I had decided this sometime in late spring and had not revised the opinion since, as I easily gained Seven levels form Gardening. The courtyard in full growth was a different environment from the bare winter space where I had first spoken to Hosef about soil, every plant broadcasting its state in the green language. The medicinal herbs had come in strong this year. The apple tree's root issue had been resolved by drainage work that Hosef and I had done together in March, and it was expressing its gratitude, if plants could be said to express anything, in the form of more fruit buds than it had produced in the previous two years combined.
I was working the eastern bed, thinning a row of young lavender, spacing it correctly, the druid perception giving me precise information about each plant's needs rather than the approximation that Hosef operated on through long experience, when I felt it.
The normal sensation of a level-up...?
But that had been diminishing for years, as I had predicted it would, each successive level a smaller proportional change to an increasingly substantial base, the feeling fading from the explosive heat of the first level to the cool wave of the third, to the gentle shift of the later gains, to something that was now barely distinguishable from the mild warmth of working in summer sunlight. I had grown accustomed to it the way you grew accustomed to any sensation that repeated with diminishing intensity.
This was not that.
This felt the same, the familiar initial pulse, the recognition of *level-up, like when I first level-up to level two. But instead of fading as it should, it held. And then it grew.
I kept my hands in the lavender and breathed carefully through my nose and waited for it to pass the way they always passed.
It didn't pass.
It expanded. The warmth became heat, the heat became something beyond heat, a pressure building from the inside outward that had no precedent in any of the previous twenty-nine times I had felt this sensation. Like the difference between a candle and a forge. Like the difference between warm bathwater and being submerged in Lava.
The Pain.
I became aware of wetness on my upper lip.
I touched it with the back of my wrist. Red.
My jaw tightened. I processed this information without panic, because panic required available cognitive resources and all of mine were currently occupied with managing the sensation that was escalating through my body. The pressure was in my chest now, my head, behind my eyes. Something was happening that was not the normal process.
Am I Dying...?
Hosef was three metres behind me, his back turned, working the western border with the slow methodical attention he gave to everything. I could hear the rhythm of his tool against the soil.
I pressed my lips together.
Blood was coming from my nose now, a steady warm trickle rather than a few drops, and I could feel it starting at the corners of my eyes as well, which was an experience so profoundly wrong-feeling that I had to work very hard to keep my breath even and my posture unchanged. My ears were wet now. I could taste Iron at the back of my throat, which meant it was coming from there too.
Clean.* I cast it without moving my hands from the lavender, the spell going outward in a controlled radius, taking the blood with it. The front of my shirt, my face, my hands, clean. The soil in front of me, where a few drops had fallen, clean. The spell was quiet, left no trace, and I had been casting it for months, that it was completely automatic.
Light Healing* I said simultaneously too, which was harder, two spells, one after another was not something I had formally practised, but the druid class had been quietly improving my magical multitasking in ways I was still finding out, and the healing spell came together even as the cleaning spell was still running. I pushed it inward, toward whatever was tearing loose inside me, and felt it working against the pressure, I feeling like I putting a bandage against a deep wound, better than not trying.
The pressure kept building.
Clean* again. More blood. *Light Healing* again, harder this time, pushing against a process that was not injury in any normal sense, was i posioned. I was cycling the two spells with a focused desperation in my eyes.
I held my breath because breathing felt dangerous. Failed Badly. The exhale that came out of me was wet and wrong, a sound I did not want Hosef to hear, and I cast *Clean* on the air in front of me before the evidence could reach the ground.
"What was that noise?"
Hosef's voice, behind me, must cast spell...
Clean.* Everywhere. My face, my hands, the ground, the air. The taste of Iron was fading, the pressure was fading, finally, receding the way a wave recedes, pulling back from its peak with the same gradual certainty it had arrived with. I straightened slowly, keeping my back to Hosef for the additional second I needed to confirm that my face was presenting nothing alarming.
"What noise?" I asked.
A pause. The sound of him turning, looking around. The garden looked normal, the *Clean* spells had been thorough, and the lavender I had been tending was undisturbed.
"Nothing, my bad" Hosef said, with the slight uncertainty of a man who trusts his own perception but cannot find evidence to support it. "Thought I heard something."
"I'll head back in," I said. "Getting too warm for me."
He made a sound of agreement and returned to his work. I walked toward the door, not like I had just spent three minutes bleeding from every opening in my head while doing garden work.
Nothing Happen OK.
The door to my room locked with a simple iron bolt. It closed silently. I sat on the edge of my bed and ran the scan spell with hands that I noticed, with detached observation, were not entirely steady.
The paper formed.
I looked at the number for a long time.
Ninety.
Ninety danger levels. Level thirty.
I had gained one level this morning. The gardening had given me one more today, was it beasuce i turned level thirty...?
Perhaps it was the level thirty itself.
Hero rank.
I had known the term for years, had used it in my own thinking without fully interrogating what it meant in physiological terms. In the Overlord lore, hero rank was the threshold above which humans became something recognisably different, Super-human. It was the point where the gap between a hero-rank individual and a normal person was not a matter of training or skill but of fundamental physical category.
I had reached it and had apparently not appreciated what crossing that threshold would feel like from the inside.
I set the scan paper down and examined my hands.
Normal. The skin was the same colour, the same texture. My nails were trimmed short in the habit I had maintained since infancy, slightly dirty from the garden, completely ordinary in every visible respect.
I scratched my left forearm with my right thumbnail. The normal test for skin sensitivity, the kind of idle self-examination that produces a faint white line that fades in seconds.
I heard it before I fully processed what I was seeing.
A sound. Small, metallic, the kind of sound that fingernails on skin did not make. The kind of sound that a hard implement drawn across a resilient surface made.
I did it again, slowly, watching this time.
My thumbnail moved across my forearm. The skin did not indent the way skin indented. And the sound, faint, unmistakeable once you were listening for it, was the sound of two hard metal meeting.
I watched sparks fly.
Did they mean this, when they talked about hero rank?* The phrase *beyond human* i had read about, in the context of Overlord's lore.
This was a threshold.
I thought about the bleeding. About the pressure from inside. The transition had been painful because it was a genuine physical transformation, not a gradual statistical improvement. The body crossing the hero rank threshold was not simply becoming stronger. It was becoming *different, and the process of becoming different, apparently, involved a restructuring that the biological systems experienced as trauma before they experienced it as upgrade.
I rolled my sleeve down.
Checked my face in the small polished metal disc I used as a mirror. Normal. Brown eyes, eight-year-old features. Nothing that announced *hero rank* to an observer. Nothing that would show up in casual interaction.
But I would need to be careful. The scratching test was information I needed to keep to myself, the implications of what it suggested about my physical composition were not something the church needed to be thinking about, what do i do if they want to scan me later..?
I opened my notebook and recorded the number. level 30. I noted the physical symptoms. The transition process. what other changes the threshold might had produced that weren't immediately visible.
Tim's stats (he can't see his true stats)
level: [30]
Vermin killer: [2/10]
Assassin: [2/10]
Priest: [1/10]
Gardener: [9/15]
Chef: [9/15]
Doctor: [4/10]
Wizard: [1/10]
Durid: [1/5]