Tim's POV
The decision to address the gaps in my magical and holy education was overdue and I knew it.
Tier one. That was where I had been sitting for years in both the wizard and priest classes, which was the magical equivalent of learning to read and then deciding one book was sufficient. I had been busy with the orphanage, the healing practice, the Eight Fingers operation, the dwarf kingdom, the various classes I had been accumulating through my shotgun strategy.
I was danger level two hundred and twenty-five. Level seventy-five. Twenty-five levels remaining before the level cap, and the time before Ainz arrived to my door-step. The shotgun strategy had built me a foundation that was broader than any single specialist could claim. What it had not built was depth in the specific domains like magic.
And this is a Magical World.
I wrote the notices myself, posted them at the guild and the market board and the administrative office and anywhere else that people who were actually good at magic could find. The language was plain: best available instruction in holy magic or wizardry, compensation negotiable, instruction to take place at the orphanage.
The four churches sent representatives within a week.
I received them in the main room with the chairs arranged next to each other, to make them feel like, they were being treated equally, which they were.
"Your churches tried to have me killed," I said, conversationally, before anyone had settled fully into their seat. "What's with the change of Heart."
The Air priest opened his mouth.
Then Earth priest cut him off.
The Earth priest was old, genuinely old, he looks like someone who had spent their entire lives in the *HOLY* discipline that apparently contributed to his health and longevity.
"First you are an Adamantite rank adventurer," he said. "You have the full backing of the dwarf kingdom. The political balance has changed beacuse of you."
I looked at him for a moment.
"Thank you," I said. "For the honest answer."
He nodded once, as he sat back down.
I asked each of them, what's their highest tier holy spell. The Air, Water, Fire were tier two. The Earth priest said tier three, in the tone of someone stating a fact rather than advertising himself.
"Then I choose you," I said to the Earth priest. "Soooo when can you start?"
He looked briefly at the other three, then back at me. "Tomorrow," he said.
---
As for the wizard, he arrived three weeks later with the particular entrance of someone who owned the world, as he slamed my doors open.
He was perhaps forty-five, dressed in the formal robes of someone who wanted show of their credentials at any distance, with the specific pride of a man who had achieved something that most people hadn't and had organised his personality around that achievement. He cut me off, as he told his rate before I had finished standing up from my desk.
"One thousand gold coins. For Each Year" he said as he made a pose.
I was about to asked what tier of magic he could cast.
He cut me off AGAIN.
He told me tier two, and added that his talent was exceptional for his age, in the tone of someone who had said this sentence many times before.
I looked at him for a moment.
Tier two was tier two. He was the best available option at a price that was steep but covered by the herb income and the adventuring returns with large margin remaining, let alone the gold moutain. His confidence was irritating and probably also accurate about the talent, given that most people claiming exceptional talent in magic were tier two Wizards.
"ok, whatever dude," I said.
He looked slightly deflated by the absence of my cheers.
GOOD.
---
A whole year of instruction followed, conducted in the parallel tracks of holy magic with the Earth priest and wizardry with the proud wizard, whose name was Aldous, as he told me for the millionth time, the name apparently having some statistical density in this region, and who turned out, beneath the performed confidence, to be a genuinely good teacher when the subject matter engaged him.
I did not learn any tier two spell.
In either discipline.
I sat at my desk on the morning of my twentieth birthday and slamed my head on the table and stayed there for a while.
My theory was fully complete. The understanding of what tier two spells required, the mental architecture, the depth of magical capacity that the spells demanded, I understood all of it with the best comprehensive clarity. My body wouldn't learn. The same wall that had stopped me in front of tier one for years before the click came, except that this wall was higher and BOY, did it make me mad.
I was still in this position, head on table, when the sound reached me from the courtyard.
Screaming, alot of screaming.
I was moving before I had consciously identified what I was hearing, the response to medical emergency having been built into my reaction time by years of taking care of these kids. Through the door, down the corridor, into the courtyard where a circle of children had formed around a red-headed teenager named Jynn who was on his hands and knees on the ground, vomiting a significant volume his blood at the grass.
Every opening in his face. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth. Not fatal, the quality of the bleeding, I had learned to recognise in myself years ago, the systemic nature of it marking it as transition rather than injury. But it was alarming to look at, and the circle of children around him had worried faces.
"Everyone back up," I said. "Give him some air."
They backed up.
I crouched next to Jynn and put a hand on his back, the *Light Healing* ready but held, because this wasn't something healing addressed, this was the body rewriting itself, the hero rank threshold being crossed from the inside.
"It's going to stop," I told him. "This is your body becoming something stronger. It hurts and it looks terrible. But it's going to get better."
Jynn looked at me from underneath red-streaked features with the expression of pure fear.
"Promise?" he said, between efforts.
"Yes, I promise," I said.
And It stopped, after a few more minutes.
I cast *Clean* and watched the evidence of the transition disappear from his face and hands and the courtyard stones. Jynn knelt on clean stone in clean clothes and took stock of himself.
He made a fist. Stood up. Looked at his hand.
Then he punched the air.
The shockwave was modest by the standards of what hero rank could eventually produce, he had crossed the threshold minutes ago and had no understanding yet of what his body could do, but it knocked the papers off the wall board and sent two of the watching children stumbling backward, and it was produced by a punch that hadn't been aimed at anything.
I went to pick up the papers.
"Be careful, okey," I told Jynn.
He was already running to the far end of the courtyard to test the next thing.
---
The months that followed produced a phenomenon that I had anticipated and had, in practice, completely underestimated.
The children had been accumulating class levels for years, cooking, farming, gardening, the physical education curriculum I had developed. The cooking in particular had been generating levels with the consistency I had observed in myself. The farming harvest seasons added farmer levels annually. The garden curriculum contributed gardener levels. The swordsmen education, which had developed from basic fitness routines into something approaching systematic combat training, framed as games and sports to reduce the resistance that children naturally had to things labelled training.
The cumulative effect was a generation of children who had been accumulating job class levels for years without understanding what they were accumulating, and the threshold those levels represented was the hero rank crossing, and the hero rank crossing looked like what I had just watched Jynn go through.
The crossings happened one by one, then in clusters, then in what felt like a continuous background event that I was perpetually managing. Each crossing had its own character, the specific combination of classes each child had accumulated produced different expressions of the transition, different bleed patterns, different immediate capability signatures afterward.
Each one also produced a child who now had hero rank statistics and absolutely no framework for operating conservatively with them.
Jynn's air punch was the first incident. It was by far not the last.
The roof-jumping trend started about three weeks after the first cluster of crossings, which I identified in retrospect as the point where enough children had crossed the threshold to form a self-reinforcing group of hero rank teenagers who had discovered that they could do anything thing they want. The city's architecture was not built for beings who could jump four storeys and land without injury, and the rooftops around town suffered accordingly.
I paid for the damages many times already, in good conscience.
The huge cracked streets from the dumb high-jumping than fighting-while-falling trend, costed me even more, as they left kids-shaped-holes on the road.
I had a conversation with the hero rank children about restraint that I suspected would need to be repeated many times over, before they learn their lesson.
---
The Masked Scout's POV
The report had been accumulating for three years, cross-referenced monthly against the Theocracy's broader intelligence on the subject.
Three hundred and twelve children in the St. Linel's orphanage and associated dormitory expansion. Two hundred and ninety-eight of them had crossed the hero rank threshold, the crossings documented through the observation of danger level scans run on the building's residents by the operative embedded in the lower ward's administrative office.
Two hundred and ninety-eight hero rank individuals, and children no-less.
The Black Scripture, the Theocracy's elite force, the most powerful human fighting organisation on the continent, had forty members.
He wrote at the bottom of the report, in the space reserved for analyst commentary: *Assessment of how Tim accomplished this: unknown. Assessment of the threat this represents: significant. Recommendation: Mind-control immediately.*
He sealed the report.
Sent it north.
Went back to watching.