The men of Redding returned, triumphant. We had suffered some losses, but together, the men had managed to slay over twenty goblins. While they mourned my family’s loss, they also celebrated Hildan for encountering the nest. At the size that it already was, if left for much longer, it could have rapidly grown into the hundreds, which would have doomed us all.
That was bittersweet, if not just outright upsetting for Hildan. He had lost his favorite child—his protégé—and his arm, and with that, his means of survival.
I struggled with what I could do to support him. I started to come to terms with Toldan’s loss, but that seemed to further upset my father, who continued to descend into his depressive torpor.
Hildan and I weren’t close to begin with, and despite my fondness for Toldan, he was the sibling I had been least close with, as a result of him being my father’s favorite. I was self-aware enough to realize that of all my siblings to lose, Toldan was the one that least affected me. A part of me felt awful about that, but given that this was my second life, and thus second family, I often didn’t truly feel like an actual participant. I felt like an outsider. After all, I was multiple times Hildan’s age inside, and my first life had been one that was much more advanced and educated than life in this world, magic and skills aside.
Child mortality was high in this world, for that matter. That was part of the reason why families had so many kids. I didn’t want to see any of my siblings die, and losing Torra would definitely hurt the most, but I knew I would move on a lot more easily from deaths in the family in this life than others would.
As horrible as it is to think, it might be better if Hildan dies from his wound. It would be one less mouth to feed.
Perhaps if I hadn’t killed some goblins and leveled up, I would have been caught up more in my family’s grief. Since I had figured out how to train Will, though, I was suppressing a constant giddiness about training with my mana.
I was able to largely put it out of mind when the healthy men and I got back to the harvest. There was a lot of work to do, and as a village, we moved past this trauma by staying busy.
It was no surprise when Hildan continued to give in to the drink. Berrel had been caring for him, and he slowly but surely started to heal from the wound. I had thought infection would take him, and was rather surprised that it didn’t. She had acquired a poultice for the wound, which could have been something a little more supernatural than I was familiar with, although I assumed such a thing would be devastatingly expensive. Not that I was privy to our household finances, which I figured were pretty poor in the first place. It would be problematic if Berrel had chosen poverty for our family’s future as a result of electing to heal Hildan, not that I could particularly blame her for wanting to save her husband and the father of her children. As his alcohol intake continued, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was the right choice.
On the other hand, maybe that poultice was dirt cheap, simply a mash of moderately helpful herbs, and he recovered due to his stats. I had no idea what his stats were, and no idea what healing in this world was like with sufficiently high stats, if that affected it at all. If he had killed a couple goblins with his bow before he was disarmed, he should be at least Level 2, if not higher. I had no idea how many monsters he had hunted in his life. As a result of his assumed levels, his Will would also be above 1, and maybe a little magic was all it took to beat out infection.
Or maybe it only required a high Body stat. Hildan’s had likely developed at least somewhat from regular exercise while hunting. I assumed it was at least higher than mine, just by virtue of age, even though I had been quite intentional about my own training.
It was pointless thinking about it. In the end, it just meant dealing with a drunk dad who was home all the time instead of hunting or helping to harvest. Like the village, I kept busy by working to put the fields to bed for winter, and spent much of the rest of the time working on my Will training.
Getting my Will to 4 came quickly, then it slowed right down. It took until almost the end of harvest season before I managed to get it to 5, and I imagined that my progress had only come that quick as a result of having a solid foundation of Body and Mind to work with. I figured I could probably get it to 6 in the next year, and then I would be lucky if I could grind it to 7 before I may need some kind of skill to change up how I trained it.
My excitement about the future of my training got derailed, however, when the consequences of my actions caught up with me.
“How’s the recovery, Hildan?” Mishel asked my father from the doorway.
“S’going,” my father slurred. He sneered slightly. “Looks like I’ll live.”
“That’s good, that’s good,” Mishel responded, a momentary look of pain flashing across his face. As a former soldier, this was likely not the first man he saw surviving the loss of an appendage. His expression cleared quickly, and he motioned to me with his chin. “Say, I need to borrow Tovar for a while. That all right?”
Hildan waved us away with his good hand, grumbling and turning back to his drink.
An iron grip clamped down on the back of my neck.
“Come with me, Tovar,” the old man said with a strained smile.
Unsurprisingly, Mishel guided us back to his shop, never releasing me. A few villagers glanced our way as he marched me back to the site of our old training, but the old man just put on a smile and waved with his other hand.
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I just feigned innocence. It’s not like I could run from this, anyway.
“With harvest over, and after that goblin mess, I was giving your old request some thought,” Mishel said, releasing me into the yard.
“What request?” I asked with a sweet smile.
“Sparring,” he said, jabbing me in the chest with his finger. “But imagine my surprise when I went to get the practice swords and found one missing.”
“That’s odd. Shame we can’t spar.”
“Indeed. Well, it’s not a problem, because I just finished this replacement,” he said, tossing me a brand new wooden sword. I looked down at it and frowned.
Right. No big deal. I just have to… not activate the skill. Somehow. Wait. Is that even possible?
I glanced up, steeling myself to play dumb, and saw the tip of Mishel’s training sword driving towards me, only inches from my eye.
“Shit!” I cried, twisting the sword in my grip to deflect the oncoming attack.
[Swordsmanship] flared to life and took over, executing a picture perfect parry. Mishel stepped back, crossing his arms.
“You could have blinded me!” I exclaimed, bringing my hand to my eye and checking that I still had both of them.
The former soldier sighed. “What did you do, Tovar? Clearly, you’ve already acquired [Swordsmanship].”
“...Maybe I just have excellent reflexes?”
“There’s beginners luck, and then there’s that,” he said, pointing to my sword. “For a ten year old who has never sparred before, you don’t deflect a [Swordsmanship] strike with just reflexes, no matter how good they are.”
“Can’t believe you’d use your skill on a child,” I hissed.
Mishel snorted. “Please. You underestimate me if you think I couldn’t have halted that strike before blinding you. So? How did this happen?”
I glared at my swordsmanship teacher. “I admit to nothing.”
Mishel smiled the most sadistic smile I had ever seen on the old man. “Is that so.”
The old man came at me again, his sword arching through the air with beautiful form. I had no choice but to activate [Swordsmanship], allowing the basic mastery of the skill to help guide my movements, deflecting and even countering when I spotted an opening.
Not that my counters or strikes had a raindrop’s chance in hell of landing. Mishel’s skill was either higher level than mine or, between a high Body stat and a lifetime of experience, there was a wider gap between skills of the same level than I realized.
Soon I was sweating profusely despite the cool autumn air, and as suddenly as he had started, Mishel leapt back and stopped his onslaught. My shoulders ached and my arms and legs were trembling.
I would have loved this two years ago. Wonder how high my Body would be if we had done this every week for the last couple of years.
“Well, I believe that you’ve been keeping up with your forms, at least,” the former soldier said. “A skill only takes you so far. While it instinctualizes some aspects and improves them, your foundation is the core of it. And you can always reinforce your foundation with more training and practice.”
“Is that how you get your skill level to go up?”
Mishel raised an eyebrow toward me. “So you know about skill levels, then.”
I blanched slightly. “Ah, fuck.”
“Stop cussing,” Mishel said, shaking his head at me. “I don’t know what you did, but you’re alive and well and your skill seems solid. The Guardians have set you on your path.” He let out a breath. “Of course, I’m going to have to tell your parents.”
I groaned. I was excited to get a skill, but it wasn’t like I wanted to be put onto the soldier’s path. “Do you have to? I mean, how do you even know this is my path?”
Mishel looked at me, eyebrows furrowing. “You have the skill.”
I was grasping at straws, but couldn’t help but ask. “What if I had another skill?”
Mishel’s gaze changed, and he looked at me seriously. “Do you?”
Well, I’m not copping to [Metasurvival], obviously. “Uh. No.” Not from this universe.
“Then you’re on the path granted by the Guardians, as per your stats and skills.”
Wait. I might have an out. But it means trusting Mishel entirely…
I looked up at the soldier turned carpenter. He was clearly pious, so questioning the faith was pointless, but he was a good man who had treated me well. This was just the way of the world to him. But that meant that I could make an argument using the same rules of engagement.
“...but my Will stat is five,” I said slowly.
Mishel stood there silently, appraising me for a full minute before he spoke again. “No lie?”
I shook my head. “It’s the truth.”
“That is… peculiar, to say the least, for one who awoke to the path of [Swordsmanship]. But you have no magic skill?”
I shook my head to confirm, and he hummed, stroking his chin in thought for a few moments before finally coming to a decision.
“In that case, let’s go to the chapel. You can pray for revelation. Perhaps the Guardians will tell you themselves.”
That didn’t give me much hope, but at the very least I could lie afterwards about the Guardians revealing to me that my path was magic, so I nodded and followed Mishel to our village’s Five Guardian Faith chapel, the same place I’ve gone every day of worship for a decade now.
“Hello, cantor Umbor,” Mishel said as we entered the building. The cantor greeted us with a kind smile.
“Oh, Mishel. And Tovar, what a lovely surprise. What brings you here today?”
Mishel pat me once on the back, forcing me forward. The cantor looked at me earnestly.
“Um, well. I’ve earned a skill.”
“How wonderful! The Guardians have granted you a path. So you’ve come to give thanks?”
“Oh, well—yeah, but—the thing is, my stats make me think my path is… different.”
“How curious. Ah, so you’re here to pray for revelation?”
Huh. Both men called it that, which made me think they were talking about something specific. I racked my brains trying to recall a sermon that might have mentioned this, but just nodded.
“Well, no harm in that. Come now, Tovar, follow me,” the friendly cantor said, leading me away from Mishel, who sat down in a pew to wait.
In all my years attending services, I had never actually approached the front of the chapel. There wasn’t much of a reason to, since we sat in the pews, and to be honest, my family had a bad habit of running late to service while wrangling all the kids; we often wound up seated pretty far in the back.
Not that the chapel was large, for a small village, but still, as I approached the front, it was probably the closest to the statues of the Five Guardians I had ever bothered to get. I glanced up at them, arranged in a half circle behind the podium from which cantor Umbor led service.
“It’s all right for me to go up there?” I asked.
“Of course, of course,” the cantor said, leading me behind the podium until I was standing among the statues of this nation’s gods and goddesses. “Now, you just go ahead and pray, and Mishel and I will be waiting for you when you’re done.”
Umbor stepped away, and I waited for him to descend to the pews before turning back to the statues.
So… I guess I just stand here for a bit, then? Maybe close my eyes, mutter a few words. I wonder how long I should wait.
I stood there with my eyes closed for a moment, debating what sort of story I would tell, when a voice rang out.
“SO, YOU SEEK REVELATION?”
My eyes opened in surprise, and I found myself in a white void. I glanced up at the five statues, now all looking down at me, eyes glowing.
“Oh… huh. You’re real,” I said, shocked into honesty. “I... was not expecting that.”
