Tim's POV
The goblins appeared on the second day out of E-Rantel, in the tree line where the road curved through a shallow valley.
There were four of them, which was a standard patrol size for the species, small enough to be fast, large enough to overwhelm lone travelers. They had been paying attention to me for perhaps a minute before they broke from the trees, but I seen them a mile away. Hero rank apparently included a meaningful improvement to peripheral awareness, among its other gifts.
They came in fast, which was their tactic, the momentum of the initial rush designed to overwhelm before a target could organise a response.
I hit the first one as it reached me.
Not with my weapons, I didn't bother drawing either of the daggers I carried. An open-palm strike to the side of the head. The goblin's head did not survive the interaction. The second one died the same way before it had processed what had happened to the first. The third and fourth had a moment, perhaps two seconds, of genuine reconsideration before their instincts overrode their survival sense and they continued the charge.
The fight, in total, lasted perhaps eight seconds.
I stood in the road afterward and looked at what remained. The strikes had been effective beyond what I had consciously intended. The statistics that hero rank and thirty-seven levels had built into my base physical parameters were not something I had fully tested in a real context, and the test was informative
.
I continued walking.
The goblins had given me something to think about for the next few hours, I need to be carefull when fighting people.
The bandits appeared on the fourth day, at a narrow point in the road where the tree line came close on both sides, a classic ambush position, which they had chosen correctly and then undermined by stepping into the road in full view rather than waiting for me to be within the gap.
Amateur hour. But I had stopped before entering the gap anyway, from habit, and was observing them from thirty metres when they made the decision to show themselves.
Seven men. Farming tools, a scythe, two mattocks, something that had once been a pitchfork and had been modified toward weapon use with limited success. One man had an actual knife. Their clothes were patched and re-patched all over.
I looked at them and they looked at me, a child with a small bag, and the quality of the standoff was strange. They were not performing the aggression of experienced criminals. They gave me the look of desperation of people who had made a decision that went against something in them and were committed to it now because turning back emty-handed was worse.
I had seen this look before, when people stole food out of hunger.
I walked toward them.
The man with the knife raised it. His hand was unsteady.
I stopped at a distance that was close enough to him and said, plainly and without aggression: "You became bandits because you ran out of any other options, didn't you.?."
It was not much of a question. The silence that followed confirmed it for me.
"I been there before, buddy," I said, "there is always a better way."
"What?" he said.
I opened my bag, counted out half of what I was carrying, fourteen gold coins and twenty silver, and held it out.
The silence that followed was the silence of seven hungry people looking at more money than they had seen in one place in their whole lives.
"You need it more than I do," I said. "Take it and go home, I wish you the best of luck".
The man with the knife looked at the money, looked at me, looked at the money again.
"Why," he said, finally. Not a challenge. A genuine question, the kind you asked when something clearly happened that didn't fit any model you had for how the world worked.
"Because you're not criminals," I said. "You're just farmers having a bad season. There's a difference."
I set the coins on the road between us, picked up my bag, and walked around them.
Nobody moved.
I did not look back.
Days later...
The capital was a different scale from E-Rantel, larger, louder. The architecture was more ambitious, the streets wider in the commercial districts, the gate more impressive.
I joined the entry queue and waited there for my turn.
Ten copper for entry. The guard had looked at me, child, traveling alone, small bag, and run through a brief assessment before accepting the stated reason of adventurer registration with the mild skepticism.
The city opened up around me on the other side, and I began navigating.
Hours later...
The Big cloth merchant shop, I visited, as I think he might have the anwsers I want.
As we talked *with a few silver coins, I asked him about Vesuchā Kurofu Di Rōfan's dojo.
Four years operating. Seven students accepted. Zero concessions to noble money, of which considerable amounts had apparently been offered. The merchant's advice me, to give up on trying, Vesucha choose his students.
I thanked him, got the location, and left while he was still talking.
The line outside the dojo was longer than I expected, which meant either that the discouragement had not reached everyone or that the kind of person who came here to try their luck. I took my place at the end of the line and settled in.
The wait was hours long. I used the time observing the people ahead of me, their builds, their bearing, the way they held themselves in the queue. Several had the posture of trained fighters, maybe adventurers by the look of their equipment, people who had come here with genuine credentials. They emerged from the entrance in groups of two and three, their expressions carrying the particular deflation of rejection, and joined the departing traffic heading away from the dojo.
The man rejected everyone. Every single person I watched enter came out without an acceptance.
My turn came.
The office was plain. A desk, two chairs, the smell of weapon oil and old wood. A man behind the desk who was exactly what I had expected and not quite what I remembered from the anime's aged version of him, younger here, in his fifties rather than his seventies, the black still present in his hair, the bulk of his frame of dense muscle of active practice.
Vesuchā Kurofu Di Rōfan looked at me for approximately three seconds and delivered his assessment with the efficiency of someone who had made this judgment many times today.
"Shit talent. Leave."
I walked to the desk and placed the gold coin.
He looked at it. Looked at me. The eyebrow that rose was the eyebrow of a man encountering an unexpected move.
"What's with the gold coin?"
"Scan me," I said. "That's the fee. You keep the coin regardless of what you decide afterward."
He considered me, than waved his head.
"Why would I do that?"
"Because it's free money," I said, "and the scan costs you nothing but a moment."
The logic was minimal and he knew it. But he picked up the coin and examined it and put it in his desk, and then he cast the scan, the paper forming infort of him.
He looked at it.
Vesuchā Kurofu Di Rōfan's POV
In thirty years of assessing fighters, Vesuchā had developed a relationship with the scan spell that most people who used it casually never achieved. He didn't just read the number. He read it in context, against age, against build, against the bearing and movement of the person standing in front of him, the number as one piece of a larger picture rather than the whole picture itself. [little did Vesucha know, he was right].
He looked at the number.
He looked at it again.
He looked up at the child standing on the other side of his desk.
One hundred and eleven danger levels [level 37].
His eyes had widened. He was aware of this because he had spent decades training himself not to visibly react to things, and the training was working less well than usual.
His own danger level was ninety-six [level 32]. He had been ninety-six for three years now, the slow climb of a man who had spent his life pushing his capability to the absolute limit of what his talent and discipline could produce, arriving at a number he was genuinely proud of and genuinely realistic about as a ceiling. Ninety-six was exceptional. Ninety-six was the product of thirty years of dedicated, intelligent, relentless work.
The child in front of him was one hundred and eleven.
A child. Standing across his desk with a small travel bag and an expression of polite attention.
He looked at the paper again. The number did not revise itself.
He thought about the question that needed asking, and asked it. "Why do you need to learn the sword? You're already stronger than I am."
The child's answer came without hesitation, in a tone that carried neither false modesty nor performance. "Because strength isn't technique. I'm strong and I hit things and the hitting works sometimes, but I bet that you can beat me, as I don't know how to fight. I want to know how to not suck at fighting."
Vesuchā looked at him for a long moment.
He thought about his sword. He thought about the technique he had spent thirty years refining, not the standard methods, not what every competent swordsman in the kingdom knew, but the particular synthesis he had developed through three decades of doing nothing else, the thing he had been trying for four years to find someone worth passing to. As he didn't want to lose his legacy of his swordmanship, to be remeber for all history.
A student who was already beyond his own danger level was not a student he needed to protect from hard sparring, he doesn't have to go easy on him, too bad this child isn't telanted in the sword, but hard work will help.
He looked at the child.
The child looked back with that same patient, slightly amused expression.
"My name," I said, slowly, "is Vesuchā Kurofu Di Rōfan."
The child nodded once, "And my name is Tim."
"Sit down," he said. "We have things to discuss."
Tim
LeveL [37]