Chapter 1

It was the day before my eighteenth birthday. Grim had to wake me up by lifting my bed so I fell out on the hardwood floor.

“What you do that for you big dumb ox,” I said with a slight chuckle.

“You sleep too long, me wake you up now.” Grim exaggerated “You fall on floor, me think funny.”

“But without kidding now. It’s already 9 in the morning. We need to get some of our packing done and out of the way. You know that after your awakening we can’t stay here anymore. The Guild Mistress pulled enough strings to let me stay until then.”

We had been roommates for as long as I could remember. His eighteenth birthday was a few months ago and he had already gone through his awakening ritual. When kids who became of age would learn what their skills were and what class they would have.

In my case when I got access to my character sheet I would finally be able to find out what race I was. The parents I lost while on the voyage weren't my birth parents. My mom told me that she was recuperating from injuries sustained in the war and doing light training at the monastery where they found me on the doorstep.

That evening while praying she had a vision sent to her by Freya, the wife of Odin, warrior-queen of the Norse pantheon. She was tasked with adopting me and raising me as her son.

I was now 185cm tall and weighed around 75kg. For the last year or so the jet black hair that I was so proud of had been falling out, and by this time I was almost bald.

And for the last month getting up in the morning had been becoming harder and harder. The thoughts of one of the doctors in town was that I was maybe going through my races version of puberty, but until I knew what my race was that was speculation.

I went to the bathroom to get a shower. Afterwards, I tried my best to see if I was finally growing some hair on my face. I was a bit jealous of Grim’s goatee.

The face that I saw in the mirror was still the same as always. Alabaster white skin, smallish nose. Ears that looked like exaggerated elf ears with the points reaching about the same height as the top of my head. White teeth that seemed to have started to form slightly longer canines on the upper jaw. Rubbing over my chin and cheeks they still felt as smooth as a babies bottom.

Grim saw me standing by the mirror. “Still no luck?” He asked with a smile. “We can't all have such luscious locks as I have.”

I turned back to him and threw the hairbrush I didn't need anymore at him. It just bounced off of his gigantic chest.

By this point, Grim had grown to an impressive 250cm tall and weighed in at about 400kg, all muscle. Light green skin, long black hair that reached to his shoulders. A black goatee was braided in two long braids. At the ends of them, he had added in some small bones. He wanted to give himself some brutish charm, apparently, the ladies agreed with him.

We spent most of the day packing up our things into a big trunk. We had pooled a lot of our savings to buy a trunk with a spatial enchantment on it. That way we could move all of our possessions to where ever we ended up. The only things we didn’t pack were Grim’s weapons and armour.

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Grim had the Cleaver class. Unlike the name suggested it was a hybrid crafter and combat class. He had skills for butchering and cooking things with meat, and could give people temporary stat buffs with his cooking. On the other hand, he also had skills in dual-wielding and in the use of an exotic sword, type called an orcish war cleaver.

These were big square blades with an edge on one side. Picture a butchers cleaver but instead of a 30cm blade a 150cm one. They weighed about 15kg each and for a human, they would struggle to wield one two-handed. Grim could use them in one hand and had taken to dual-wielding them.

That evening we made our way to the cafeteria for what would be our last time having a meal there. After having you awakening the school would no longer care for you anymore. You were from that point on an adult and expected to make your own way in life.

When we entered we found that almost all of the tables were now placed in the centre of the room placed in a horseshoe shape. All our friends sat at the two legs of the horseshoe. The gorgon twins, missy and sissy, would have their awakening in a few weeks themselves, and were the only ones near our age. Bill the satyr, about a year or two behind us, who never missed a party if he could help it. Us five being the only ones in the school that weren't born on the new continent.

As a side-note, yes I know what you are thinking. Naming this the new continent. Blame the council of captains, who thought that it would be good advertising to attract new settlers. To be fair we called where we came for just the Continent as there were way too many kingdoms, republics and independent towns of all different races to get to a consensus of what to name it. Side-note over.

Then of course there were a lot of the smaller kids, a few humans, but a lot of adventurers were of other races. There were a few harpies. Some wolfkin and catkin that were chasing each other around the room, the one gnome kid riding on a wolfkin’s shoulder shouting “Gnome’s rule”. It was complete pandemonium.

As soon as they noticed us everyone quieted down and we were shown to the places of honour at the head of the table. As we were the oldest kids and the first ones to ‘graduate’ from the school, or as the guild-mistress liked to say with a chuckle, finally getting kicked out. They had decided to throw us a surprise going away party.

To be fair as nobody could keep their mouth shut, and they keep forgetting that with these big ears I have really good hearing. I knew about it for a few weeks now. Grim and I acted as surprised as we could though. And we all sat down and had a great meal together. Afterwards Grim and Bill went off for drinks at the bar down the street. Satyr’s didn't have a minimum age for drinking alcohol, and most of them would have a magical bottomless wineskin given to them at the age of 5.

I decided to not join them and head to bed early as tomorrow would be a long day. Everyone’s awakening was different, and I didn't know what to expect. The system made it so that nobody would be able to talk about what happened at their awakening to someone who hadn’t gone through it themselves. It was the same reason people couldn't look at their character sheets, or progress in any skills until then, as the system wanted children to just be children and not worry about levels and skills and so on. At least that’s what I was told by the guild-mistress.

It’s also why the guild and its inner workings are kept as secret as possible from those who haven’t awakened yet. As such the classes at school mostly dealt with history, geography and biology. When you have something like the continent that we came from being millions of square miles on the surface and having multiple underground layers. With at last count having four different empires, two-hundred fifty-six kingdoms, And countless numbers republics, theocracies and city-states. You can understand that Just history and geography are gigantic subjects. I don't even want to start on biology with the insane amount races.

Let's just say that sex-ed, with who is compatible with who, and all the different mating rituals and practises, has kept me up at night. Get your head out of the gutter, I meant with studying of course.

But I digress. Tonight I would go to sleep for the last time as a boy. Tomorrow I would finally become a man.