Tim's POV
No levels, every class I carried had settled into the slow accumulation of long-term development, none of them close enough to a threshold to tip over in a few months of normal activity. I had stopped expecting level-ups. They would come when they came. In the meantime there was work, and the work paid well, and the gold came in good.
St. Linel's had grown. I had watched it from a distance on my evening visits, the new faces at the windows, the slightly repaired fence, the larger batches of bread visible through the kitchen window when I passed.
Sister Edna had apparently made the decision that resources meant bigger capacity, and bigger capacity meant more children taken in from the streets, which was exactly the decision I would have made in her position. The gold was doing what gold was supposed to do when it was working correctly, converting into something of value.
I had more gold than I knew what to do with, which was a problem I had anticipated abstractly for years and found, in practice, to be exactly as strange as I expected. Not uncomfortable, I wasn't gonna say that money doesn't bring happines. Gold sitting in a hiding spot was gold not working for me, maybe i have OCD.
Months later as Spring arrived. The sick-season eased. The healing ward thinned out with the warming weather, the gold flow slowing to the trickle it was during the healthy months. And with the easing of the immediate work, the question I had been deferring through winter's busyness returned.
*What do I do now*.
The church was a place, I used well. It had given me training, legitimacy, access to a library, the healing ward experience. In return I had given it a student who performed adequately, caused no trouble, and earned it a respectable amount of gold during sick season.
A fair trade, it is.
Time to leave, but before i do, i need to do some paperwork.
I don't want to not sign that paper. The healing-for-free clause was reason enough, I had been quietly healing people in the poor room without charge for over a year, and I intended to continue doing so, and agreeing not to and then continuing would be a dishonesty I found more comfortable with. But the danger level scan was the deeper reason. I had maintained the concealment of my actual capability for years in this institution, presenting a profile to whoever was watching, as I *looked* very ordinary. A formal scan at departure would go into the records. The records would go to whoever received such reports. And whatever profile I had successfully kept as normal, and unremarkable would call me a Monster, *I don't mind the name calling, but the attention, that's a no for me, buddy*.
I needed to leave cleanly.
The window in my room was on the ground floor. The drop was less than two metres. The courtyard on the other side was the herb garden, which was familiar territory, but I need to do something first.
I went to Brother Aldous that morning with my decision prepared.
He received it in the way of a man who had watched many students leave and had developed the particular mix of mild regret and professional equanimity. He asked why, and I gave him the answer I had prepared, the difficulty with the tier one spell, the self-assessment that my progress had been slow, the feeling that I was not well-suited to the path the church offered.
I had been one of the last students to demonstrate *Light Healing* to his satisfaction. My visible progress had been managed to appear slow. My self-assessment, delivered in the earnest tone of a nine-year-old being honest with a trusted adult, was the product of several days of careful practice, *I'm bad at acting*.
He looked at my reports. I watched his face while he read them. The reports reflected exactly what I had presented over years, steady but unspectacular progress, a student of decent character and limited talent. He nodded, slowly, with the expression of a man whose own assessments were being confirmed.
Then he told me about the paperwork needed to leave.
I asked him to get it while I packed.
He left to retrieve it from the administrative office, which was on the second floor, which would take him at minimum ten minutes including the walk and whatever brief conversation the administrative staff would initiate about the departing student.
I went to my room and closed the door.
Packing took four minutes. I had never accumulated much, and what I had was already organised in a nice sack. The important things, my notebook, the cloth-wrapped coins, the daggers, were distributed across the inner lining of my traveling coat before I finished the first minute. The rest fit into a nice sack.
I opened the window. The herb garden below was empty, Hosef wouldn't arrive until mid-morning, and it was barely past the first hour of the day's work schedule.
I looked around the room once.
Stone ceiling, same as always. The pot by the window where the wheat had grown, now empty, the soil turned out and the pot cleaned and returned to the kitchen weeks ago when it had served its purpose. The small polished metal disc I used as a mirror, left on the shelf. The chalk marks on the wall beside the bed where I had kept my notation of my age.
I climbed out the window, dropped the short distance to the garden soil, and walked to the gate in the garden's east wall that opened onto the side street.
The city was mid-morning busy. I was a child in ordinary clothes with a small bag, walking south, unremarkable from any distance.
I did not look back at the church.
The city gate was the only moment of potential complication, and it turned out not to be complicated at all. E-Rantel's gates managed inflow carefully, checking travelers coming in, assessing what they carried, who they were, whether they belonged. People leaving received a fraction of the attention. A child leaving the city on a spring morning was barely worth a glance.
I was through by noon.
The road north, toward the Re-Estize capital, was well-maintained by the kingdom's standards, which meant it was adequate. Merchant traffic moved both directions, I walked at a normal pace until the city's walls were below the horizon behind me and the nearest other traveler was far enough ahead that the road between us was empty.
Then I ran.
The speed still startled me occasionally, even after a year of operating at hero rank. Not because it was invisible, I knew exactly what I could do, had tested it carefully in private, had mapped the gap between my movement and normal human movement. But knowing it and feeling it were different experiences.
The road beneath my feet at full speed was a different texture than the road at walking pace, the world reorganising itself around me, as i ran, *what a good feeling*.
I was not going to the capital for the capital's sake. I was going to the capital because somewhere in that city, there was a sword dojo that I had been thinking about for years.
The swordsman class was the remaining prerequisite. Priest I had. Swordsman was the other component, and it was the component I had been deferring because acquiring it required finding the right person, not just any sword instruction, which was widely available in a kingdom where every noble household had a training master, but a master of sufficient quality to generate genuine class levels rather than the slow accumulation of a poorly taught teachers.
Nighttime soon came.
I ran faster.
Behind me, in a room that had been empty for hours, someone was about to have a very bad evening.
Brother Aldous's POV
The administrative staff had wanted to discuss the withdrawal form in detail, which was their function and which he had accommodated with the patience of long practice, and by the time he descended the stairs with the papers in hand the morning had advanced further than he had expected.
He went to his office, and waited.
He waited another hour. Then another. Told himself the boy had perhaps gone to the kitchen, or the garden, or any of the dozen locations in this building that a student might visit in the time it took to collect papers from an administrative office.
He went to the kitchen. Tim had not been seen since morning.
He went to the garden. Hosef was working alone.
He went to Tim's room door and stood outside it for a long moment with the papers in his hand.
He pushed the door open.
The room was empty. Not just unoccupied, *emptied, cleared of the small accumulation of personal items that a student gathered over the years. The window was shut but not latched, and when he crossed to it and looked out at the garden, the disturbed soil below the sill was visible to anyone who was looking for it.
The afternoon light was going amber and low.
Brother Aldous stood in the empty room for a long time.
He was not, by temperament, a man who got angery. He was a careful and measured person who had spent twenty years in a profession that rewarded patience and discouraged displays of uncontrolled emotion. These were genuine qualities, and he was moderately proud of them.
He roared in Pure Rage.
The sound of it echoed in the empty room and dissipated into the stone walls and accomplished nothing, which was appropriate. He was aware of this while he was doing it and did it regardless, because some moments required the acknowledgment of genuine anger, at being tricked by a child.
He breathed. Once, twice. The red behind his eyes faded to something manageable.
*Why did he leave..?.*
Not *where, that was for the guards, who would be deployed shortly, who will begin their search of the city with the systematic thoroughness. The city was large but bounded. A nine-year-old child on foot could not have gone far.
*Why* first.
Tim had come to him voluntarily. Had initiated the departure conversation, had made the request, had offered a reasonable explanation. Had waited patiently while the papers were retrieved, or appeared to wait. Had used the waiting time to leave.
Why would a student who wanted to leave, who had been given permission to leave, run rather than sign a few papers?
The healing-for-free prohibition came to him first, he thought about the time Tim had apparently spent in the poor room, helping the needy for free, and than it hit me.
Tim hated not helping the poor, with healing magic, and did he think not signing the papers might help him.
The anger tried to reassert itself. He let it have a moment and then set it aside, because anger was not useful here.
The guards would search the city. They would find Tim, he suspected, and he will be used as an example.
Brother Aldous stood up.
Looked under the bed, just in case.
Nothing.
Tim's level: [37]
(i will show the stats, when something new happens to it, like level ups, new job class, etc)