Retirement.
It had been his husband that who pushed for it for nearly twenty years. The man… had a point, admittedly. He would have felt terrible had his husband passed without them spending more time together, and age gap aside, both of them knew who would pass first.
It was the curse of being a damned effective Adventurer. Over his long career, he had accrued enough vitality that his lifespan was far greater than any other he had known, at least so long as he avoided an untimely death. A small part of him still longed to reunite with his beloved mare—his long-dead bonded companion animal, and the only woman he had ever truly loved—within Samsara, but that was unfair to the man he had pledged his life to.
He was nearly two hundred years old when he planted the seeds for his successor.
Five promising candidates, each given a slight nudge.
Within four years, three were dead. Adventuring wasn’t exactly the safest occupation, even among the elite. In the end, the man that he left Ariminum’s Adventurer’s Guild to—the main branch that reigned over the rest—wasn’t his first choice. The man had a solid head on his shoulders, but he fancied himself too much of a political mastermind. He was savvy, but men of ambition that sought political favor were dangerous.
He was still the best option. And so, the man took over and his predecessor chose an out of the way posting where he could retire and live in quiet solitude. Completely abandoning the Adventurer’s Guild was out of the question; it was too core to his identity. Neither his husband nor their new lover begrudged him his personal comfort.
He had never expected to discover a sixth candidate out there, albeit far too late to properly be considered a candidate. He had made his choice, and the man would no doubt shape the Adventurer’s Guild for another eighty years at a minimum.
The young woman had certainly been the most interesting Adventurer that he had met in a very long time, and he suspected that she would go far… if she survived long enough. Her impatience worried him, but she was driven in a way that felt all too rare.
Admittedly, the kind of person that leapt into a den of goblins—many of which were higher level than she—just for the sake of coin tended to have a short career. But if she managed to beat the odds…
Well, at least she was more interesting than the men that were her guardians. They became A-Ranked on the merits of their level and little else. Ex-soldiers tended to make decent enough Adventurers, though they rarely held on to their drive or their passion, at least in his experience. The rank and file were still the rank and file, no matter which battlefield you placed them in.
He still gave her a nudge, not unlike those he had given her five predecessors. Perhaps if she beat the odds and blazed brightly enough, she could still one day end up guiding the Adventurer’s Guild in the far future. He would never be around to see such a day, but the hope was a bright spot in the twilight of his life.
A few days after the fiery spirit departed for the capital, a courier arrived from Ariminum. The two had no doubt passed one another on the road. Most of the scrolls that the courier had carried for him were uninteresting, but two stood out. One bore the seal of the pompous idiot that had declared himself emperor (speaking of the dangers of political ambition…). The Guildmaster set it aside and, quite pettily, decided to review the other scroll first.
Greetings Guildmaster of the Adventurer’s Guild, Sardonia Chapter.
An acquaintance of mine shared your correspondence with me to seek my counsel. I must say, your anonymous Adventurer sounds fascinating. If I understand what you left unstated, he possesses a class where all skills branch from a single core skill, and then he received a new skill that created an unworkable prerequisite? I’ve never gotten a first-hand account of a situation quite like this!
I would urge you to send him to the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft, here outside Ariminum. I would personally work with him to catalog his skills and discover exactly how his new skill affects them, so we can consider possible solutions. With my resources and expertise, I am optimistic that we can find a solution for him.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
As for advice in the meanwhile, forgive me if this seems obvious, but what one finds impossible to do themselves can often be handled with a new skill. I would recommend practicing the task until such a skill is offered. The System makes all things possible, as my predecessor once said.
Though I still believe he would be well served by visiting the School.
Sincerely yours, School of Sorcery and Spellcraft Acting Headmaster Maximus.
The Guildmaster chuckled to himself and rerolled the scroll before he tossed it into the appropriate bin so that, later, one of his clerks could remove the ink and recycle the scroll. He was relieved that Ranthia had figured out her own problem; he had the displeasure of having met more than a few men like this Maximus over the years. He was adamantly certain that the man cared more about her skills than helping her. And such men tended to be bad for someone’s necessity for secrets.
If she hoped to ever reign from a position of power, she needed to be far more careful about who knew how her skills worked. Otherwise, inevitably, Ranthia would be killed by someone whose personal abilities fell short of their ambition.
He handled a few minor tasks that he had put off, watered the plant their lover had gifted him to ‘liven up’ his office (as if any building where Adventurers lurked was somehow lacking in liveliness), and generally did his best to delay the inevitable. But finally, he ran out of excuses and was forced to open and review the scroll with the emperor’s seal.
Delightfully, it proved to be far more interesting than he expected. The unsurprising part was that the military man was throwing—had thrown, given the date inscribed on the scroll—Remus into yet another war already, though at least it didn’t seem to be an invasion of the lands of the dwarves, like he and other Guildmasters had feared. He wasn’t sure what a ‘shimagu’ was, nor did he believe the rhetoric that was printed in the scroll. Honestly, body-snatching beasts that turned people into puppets? Ridiculous!
No, the surprising—and good—part of the scroll promised to piss Ranthia off to no end, but it was utterly to her benefit. It did mean that the poor woman had wasted quite a bit of time perfecting something she would no longer need, however. He wished he could see her face when she found out, it was certain to be a delight!
The days were getting interesting again, it seemed.
It was somewhat bittersweet, with how precious little time he likely had left. He would have loved to see how things played out from here. He had always viewed the Republic’s restrictions on women as one of its most grievous mistakes and he truly wished to see what shape this change would bring and how the Adventurer’s Guild evolved because of it.
And he wanted to see if the young woman could use the changes to her advantage.
Unfortunately, there was a dark side to the news. A new form of war meant the Adventurer’s Guilds needed to coordinate very closely to ensure they remained impossible for the emperor to subjugate. They were independent, but there had always been those that believed classers should be under the government’s sole purview. Visionless men that would eagerly turn Adventurers into nothing more than disposable troops, especially with the new war machinations.
Remus had armies that were trained against an unthinking enemy that just used crushing endless tides of bodies. None of those men were trained or competent to deal with enemy classers. The only force that the government kept on hand that had that expertise were the Rangers and their handful of Sentinels. It was far too few for a war, and, somehow, he doubted that the Rangers would happily march off to war, even if the Adventurers would thrive in their absence.
There was a real risk that the emperor and the senate would turn their eyes to the Adventurers.
At the very least, the Guildmaster was glad that he didn’t have to take charge of the efforts to repel the so-called men in power. The Guildmaster of the Ariminum branch would have that fun.
Interesting days or not, Sardonia was a perfect retirement to let him do what he enjoyed, while he left the rest of the mess to the younger generations.
There was little else he could do. On a bad day, he could almost feel White Dove watching him, with his beloved mare waiting behind her. On his worst days, he missed his bond terribly, even as he struggled to remind himself that his connections with his husband and their mutual lover were priceless… and were almost as important to him as his bond had been.
He hoped White Dove would be content to wait at least a little longer.
Besides, he hoped for news about how Ranthia grew. Until he got word back from Ariminum someday, he could only pray that she would outlive him, however unlikely it might be. Still, he believed that it was obvious that she was touched by the divine in some fashion. He, of course, knew better than to pry; those secrets were meant to remain between the touched and their patron deity. But if some deity had marked her then maybe, just maybe, she had a larger role than even he could predict.
But he had been alone with his thoughts for long enough. He had the strangest craving for rabbit stew, after expending so much mental focus on the young woman that seemed to have her face in a bowl of it almost every time he saw her around town.