Tim's POV
The run back from the Baharuth Empire took two days at the pace I preferred for long distances, fast enough to cover ground efficiently, slow enough to think, the rhythm of sustained movement providing the specific quality of thinking-space that sitting at a desk didn't produce. The arena fight had been clean in the way I appreciated, decisive, brief, but I will not get cocky again.
What I hadn't expected was the five levels, was champion a rare job class..?
I checked the accumulated count somewhere on the first day, and the number was sufficiently surprising that I stopped moving and sat on a rock beside the road and ran through the accounting again.
I didn't get any skills form Champion, what gives..?
I didn't know what the champion class gave. That was the problem with classes that Overlord didn't explain, the ability set was unknown, and you usually discovered it under conditions that weren't ideal for systematic examination.
An troll appeared from the tree line as I was still sitting on the rock.
It was alone, which was the usual for troll behaviour, and it was running oddly at me. Mid-sized, the brownish-green skin of the species variant common to this region, armed with a club that had been improved.
I felt the power arrive before the orc reached me.
[Champion Passive skill: when in a one on one battle, all stats increase by 50%]
Not Limit Breaker, this was different, not the removal of governors but the addition of something, a boost layered over my existing statistics with the specific quality of an external enhancement rather than an internal release. Substantial. Powerfull.
The troll swung.
I hit it.
The troll's upper body was gone.
The power boost dissipated at the same moment the troll stopped being alive, the connection between the two events clearly not coincidental. I stood on the road and thought about what had just happened.
The Champion ability. gives me a boost in combat, was my first hypothesis. The power arriving when an opponent is engaged, departing when the opponent was no longer present.
Some testing is required.
---
I later found a group of goblins, encountered about two hours further down the road, a patrol or a foraging party, moving through the scrubland beside the road with loose formation.
I waited before engaging.
No power boost.
Five goblins, all of them present and oriented toward me, and no enhancement arriving. I killed them with the base statistics I was operating on, which was sufficient, five goblins at my level was not a challenge with or without additional power, and continued watching the internal state as I worked.
Nothing additional throughout.
The hypothesis was narrowing: the boost required a specific condition that five goblins didn't meet and one troll did. The most obvious distinguishing factor was the one-on-one nature of the troll encounter versus the group nature of the goblin encounter.
An hour later I found another troll. Alone, again, which was useful for testing purposes.
The boost arrived immediately.
I deployed a shadow clone before engaging.
The boost left.
I stood beside the troll, which was looking at me and at the clone with the uncertain aggression of something that had committed to an attack and was now processing a complication, and I paid attention to the internal state with the focused attention of someone running an experiment.
No boost with the clone present. Remove the clone, the boost returned. Redeploy the clone, the boost left.
The champion class ability was a one-on-one enhancement. Solo combat specifically, the presence of any ally, even a shadow clone, removed the bonus. The system was tracking whether the combat was genuinely one-on-one rather than whether I was technically unassisted, as my clone stood there.
I dismissed the clone, killed the troll, and continued toward E-Rantel with the new information integrated.
Champion class: power enhancement conditional on solo one-on-one engagement. Not useful for group combat, not available when allies were present, potentially significant.
Filed And Understood.
---
Two Days later....
The desk in my office had accumulated correspondence in the four days I had been away, which was normal, the orphanage generated administrative traffic with the consistency of any institution its size, and I received external correspondence at a rate that had been increasing as my profile grew.
I sorted through it with the efficiency of someone who had been managing correspondence for years and had developed fast triage. Most of it was institutional, supplier communications, the dwarf kingdom's regular reports on the curriculum integration they had been contributing to, guild notifications, the various administrative threads of running a significant establishment.
The noble letters were the familiar category that I encountered every month now, proposals of one kind or another, Both ladies and...Men...., families seeking connection with an Adamantite adventurer who had the backing of the dwarf kingdom and a dragon as his librarian. The phrasing varied. The underlying ask was consistent: affiliation, connection, the social capital that proximity to someone like me apparently represented in the Re-Estize Kingdom's noble culture.
I put them in the discard pile with the practised motion of someone who had made this decision many times before.
Jynn knocked and entered my office.
He told me he was leaving.
I asked where.
Farming, he said. He wanted to be a farmer. He had been thinking about it since the harvest seasons, the work that I had conscripted all of them into annually with the secondary purpose of secertly accumulating farmer class levels, and had discovered somewhere in that thinking that the work itself appealed to him beyond the chiraty of it.
I told him he was only sixteen years old.
He told me he was an adult.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Looked at him the red hair, the specific build of a hero-rank sixteen-year-old, the face of someone who had already made the decision and was informing me of it rather than requesting permission.
In my previous world, sixteen was not adult. In this world I had grown up in, in the medieval framework that governed how this society understood the human lifecycle, fourteen was adult.
The children of the orphanage had been growing toward adulthood by this world's definition.
I looked at Jynn for a moment.
The first child to cross the hero rank threshold, the air-punch shockwave, the laughter as he ran outside to test what his body had become.
"You'll need seed money," I said. "And land assessment. The soil northeast of E-Rantel is better than the southeast, drainage patterns."
He blinked. "huh?"
"What were you expecting?"
He thought about it. "More arguments maybe?"
"You're an adult," I said. "By this world's reckoning. Come to me if you need resources for the startup costs."
He stood in the doorway for another moment with the slightly uncertain quality of someone who had prepared for a longer conversation and found it shorter than anticipated. Then he smiled at me.
"I will," he said.
And he soon left.
I sat at my desk and looked at the discard pile of noble letters and thought about the fact that the first generation of orphanage children was becoming adults, which was something I had designed and worked toward and was now arriving on schedule and was still somehow surprising to me.
---
The Scout's POV
I had been in this position the past six hours.
The observation post I had established three months ago was well-chosen, elevated enough to give sightlines to the orphanage's main entrance and the street that connected it to the city's primary thoroughfares, concealed enough that casual observation from the street below didn't reach me. I had been rotating through this position and two others in a cycle that kept any single location from becoming a pattern, the standard tradecraft for extended surveillance operations.
The report I was writing was the fourth this month, Tim's movements, his visitors, the traffic in and out of the orphanage, the dragon's flight patterns when it left the building for the limited excursions it took. My previous three reports had noted the absence created by Tim's trip to the Baharuth Empire and his return.
I wrote the return down. Added the six-day absence duration. Noted the direction of approach, which confirmed the Baharuth Empire destination.
I was completing the detail notation when I felt the hand on my chin.
The second hand was on my head.
I tried to move my head, but my skull held stable, and in a fraction of a second, I knew, I was done for.
I tried to respond.
The crack was the last thing I heard. The vision inversion was the last thing I saw, the ground and the sky exchanging positions.
Then nothing.
---
Tim's POV [Clone]
I lowered the dead body to the grass.
The fourth spy this month. All of them using similar positioning techniques, similar documentation methods, the similar tradecraft signature of a single training source. Theocracy, certainly. The consistency of the approach across four individuals pointed toward a standardised program rather than individual style variation.
I examined the current one's notes with the brief attention of someone confirming what they already knew. Tim's return noted. Duration of absence. Approach direction. The same categories the previous three had been documenting.
The Theocracy's intelligence operation on my location had been running continuously since my rampage.
"how annoying"
I returned back into the shadows, as I melt into it.
---
Tim
[level 63]