As the carriage rolled deeper into the baron’s estate, Rowan began getting a slight pressure in the back of his mind. It was like a small weight had settled on his head. When he tried to get rid of it, a status screen popped up.

Battle Results:

EXP:

[Corrupted Boar] +5

[Corrupted Boar] +10

Loot:

2x cards

Claim?

Y/N

Wait, loot? The prospect of getting actual, useful drops was more than a little exciting. So, before the rest of his mind caught up with suggestions of asking Kayden for his advice, Rowan hit yes.

WARNING!

Experience assignment failed, no class found

TIP: System experiences requires a class to be assigned.

The first screen that showed up was a disappointment. By not having a class, Rowan had lost out on the experience portion of his loot.

But before he could mourn the lost experience, two white flashes of light sparked beyond the blue screen. When Rowan dismissed the experience screen, he found two cards that each rotated once before becoming corporeal enough to flutter to the ground. Kayden smiled at the sudden appearance of the cards.

Slightly embarrassed by what he had done, Rowan scooped up the cards as swiftly as he thought was proper.

His excitement wasn’t meant to last.

Reckless Rush (Common, Active)

Rush towards your enemy, increasing your movement speed and dealing increased impact damage.

Bind card to your deck?

Y/N

Rowan was pretty sure that he didn’t want a card like that. As powerful as the boar’s charge had been, Rowan couldn’t see himself sprinting forward and attacking like that. In the small amount of combat time he had, he was much more of a strategic fighter, poking for weaknesses instead of trying to overwhelm enemies with absolute might.

The second card was somehow worse. He couldn’t even use it.

Coarse Fur (Common, Passive)

Your fur becomes tougher and bristly, more easily turning blows.

ERROR!

You are incapable of adding this card to your deck at this time.

That was it. Two cards, both common. Rowan knew that the odds of him getting some kind of amazing loot on his first monster kills was low, but somewhere deep inside of him, he hoped that his very near brush with death would mean something good. The only consolation prize appeared when he checked on his status screen. His vitality had ticked over to ten.

Wait, does the body of the boar count as loot?

Rowan turned his gray eyes on his companion. After glancing at the cards, Kayden had turned his attention back to the scenery slipping by outside the window. In their agreement, they had agreed that twenty-five percent of his loot would go to the baron. Rowan wasn’t sure how he could split a card into fourths.

“If you have something to say, lad, spill it out,” Kayden said.

“The cards, how do I —”

“Don’t worry about them.” Kayden waved Rowan off. “I know they’re common cards, the light was white. They’re probably not good for your deck. Just hold on to them for now.”

Rowan nodded. “There’s something else. And I don’t want to sound ungrateful. But wasn’t I supposed to get seventy-five percent of all my loot? Wouldn’t that include the boar corpses? If they have value?”

“That’s true,” Kayden said. He paused and turned to face Rowan with a sly smile on his face. “That’s very true. The two boars, they were probably level three or four. Beyond the experience and cards they drop, there’s also the meat which is edible, the hides which are somewhat useful, and the bones which can be crafted into a variety of items due to their toughness.”

Rowan waited. He knew Kayden well enough to know that there was going to be a “but” sometime soon.

“So the total value of the materials should be around twenty gold all considered. And most of that comes down to the value of the bones. So you should be getting fifteen gold.” Now, Kayden’s smile turned into a grin. “But the potion you drank is worth twenty-five gold. So technically, you’re running a ten-gold deficit.”

“But you gave it to me!” Rowan protested.

The baron broke into laughter. “Yes, and that’s the kind of trick nobles happily use to get people to owe them. I do admit I should have asked, but you were in shock. I knew you would want to help those people. There’s also the small matter of those cards being arguably more valuable than the carcasses.”

Rowan huffed and rolled his eyes, but let most of his anger pass. “You can have the cards! They’re both not my type. I can’t even use one of them.”

“Thank you, but you should keep those. They might come in handy in the future, or you might be able to trade them away,” Kayden said. “Our agreement comes into play later when you’re earning more. A truckload more.”

That brought Rowan to a new topic. It was pretty amazing that this new world would just happen to use English. “You just described something that I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist in this world. How are we even talking right now?”

“You don’t know? Is this not part of the basic knowledge you were taught on arrival?”

“Basic knowledge?”

Kayden settled back into his seat with a sigh. “I should have known. The reason we can talk is by the grace of the gods. When you were summoned here, it came with certain benefits. You’ll be able to converse with every language-capable creature. If records are to be believed, you will hear every language as though it were your own.”

That made some sense, Rowan thought. The gods wouldn’t want their chosen heroes to flounder and struggle to communicate after they were summoned. Still, hearing anything be referred to as the ‘grace’ of the gods was off-putting, especially since Rowan had seen these gods once before.

The silence for the remaining carriage ride didn’t feel particularly awkward, especially since they soon caught sight of their destination.

A part of Rowan expected the baron’s home to be something like a large village or small town. After all, the man had been more or less demoted to the lowest rank of nobility. It was also at the far edge of the empire, right about at the frontier.

So when tall, thick walls began appearing in the distance, Rowan wondered if they had somehow overshot their destination and reached the frontier. After some squinting, he could make out crenelations. The walls weren’t just for show, they were built to handle trouble.

But Rowan saw the baron relax, the same way someone might when they caught sight of their home. Except in this case, that home was about the size of a city.

The baron has a castle?

As it turned out, Kayden did. A small castle, to be fair. The castle was built around what looked to be a small hill, with a sprawling settlement emanating beyond the walls.

The settlement itself looked like it was flourishing. The streets were actually paved with checkered stones. The houses looked to be in good repair, predominantly built out of stone as well.

Does the baron have a quarry?

Most telling was the welcome the baron got. When people realized it was his carriage rolling into town, they waved and smiled, a couple of them even cheered.

In that moment, it struck Rowan that for all of Kayden Sutton’s ramblings on nobility, he’d never revealed the details of his own house.

“Do you have a family, Kayden?” Rowan asked.

“Uh…” For the first time since Rowan had known the man, the baron was caught off guard. Kayden winced as he composed his response. “You’ll meet some of them soon.”

Rowan could sense that it was futile to push more on the topic. And like Kayden had said, he would meet them soon, one way or another. The wince was odd, but Rowan couldn’t think of any reason the man would be reluctant to speak on the subject.

As they rolled through the gates separating the castle from the wider town, Rowan expected some procession of maids and butlers to greet them. Something to match the splendor that he had seen so far.

Instead, they were greeted by a harried looking boy in a livery coat, who immediately started to work on the horses, and an older gentleman in a dark suit.

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“Welcome home, Lord Kayden. Your daughter and Lady Sutton are waiting for you inside.” With that bit of formality out of the way, what was almost a fatherly smile slid onto the older gentleman’s face. “How did the summoning go? Did our good King Harold get what he wished for?”

“Ah… On that subject, Garrett, meet Rowan Clairfont, a young hero we have the honor of hosting. And Rowan, meet Garrett, our butler. He’s indispensable.”

Several emotions flashed across Garrett’s face. Shock, worry, a hint of… hope? His expression slipped back into a polite mask as he turned to face Rowan. “Lord Clairfont, I apologize for my late greetings. It is truly an honor to host a hero.”

“It is an honor to be here.” After debating on what the right response was, Rowan chose a line that he had heard uttered in movies and speeches. “You can call me Rowan.”

“Of course, Hero Rowan,” Garrett responded.

Before Rowan could try to get the butler to try a more informal name, Kayden stepped between the two of them. “Come, lad. We need to introduce you to my family. Garrett, could you help the coachmen get situated? They did well.”

“My pleasure, Lord Sutton.” Garrett bowed.

The castle was oddly cozy. The stone was clearly old, worn down by the passage of time until it was glossy. Still, someone had made it all a bit more hospitable. Warm colored rugs, a couple of nice, cheerful paintings, and an occasional vase with flowers did a lot to soften the cold stone.

It didn’t help Rowan relax. All of a sudden, he realized that he was about to meet the lady of the house, a previously-married-to-a-duke noble lady, while wearing the baron’s spare clothes.

The baron noticed Rowan’s fidgeting and grinned like a shark. The baron was a large man, but Rowan’s clunky build made it so that the clothes were still uncomfortably tight. It hadn’t mattered during the training sessions, but now, everything felt wrong.

Pushing open massive oak doors, the baron led Rowan into a large dining room that was more or less lifted out of a Harry Potter movie. The room was big, and lined with massive wood tables. At the end of one such table, looking tiny, were a few plates of food.

A tall, willowy woman stood as they entered, and there was something about her that subtly threw Rowan off. “Finally, Kayden! We expected you days ago. If you were going to be late, the least you could is —”

Her protests were cut off when the baron rushed up to her and lifted her in a hug.

“Put me down, you brute! You smell!” Lady Sutton exclaimed.

“I’m happy to see you too,” Kayden said. The two soon devolved into quiet muttering.

With the two side by side, Rowan realized that the proportions of Lady Sutton’s body were odd. Her arms and legs were just a little too long, and her fingers reminded him of the videos of pianists he’d seen in the past. It wasn’t anything that made her look ugly, the opposite actually. She seemed to have a natural grace thanks to those characteristics.

“Mother, father… you are embarrassing yourselves. And in front of an audience,” a new voice protested. Rowan searched around and found a girl around his own age. She remained seated, wearily looking between him and her parents.

“Ah yes, our ‘audience’, as you put it. Camilla, Olivia, allow me to introduce our guest and charge, Rowan Clairfont, one of the summoned heroes our kingdom was blessed with,” Kayden said. “And Rowan, Camilla Sutton is my wife. Olivia, my daughter.”

This produced two diametrically opposed reactions in the ladies. The lady of the house looked stricken, before her eyes accusingly snapped onto her husband. Her daughter, however, straightened and looked at Rowan with undisguised glee. Several seconds later, she slumped down in her seat again and let strands of forest-green hair obscure her face. A small part of Rowan’s mind was stuck thinking whether the color was natural.

“I welcome you to our home, Hero Rowan. It is not every day that we get to house one such as you,” Camilla finally said. Something had passed between her and her husband while Rowan was distracted by their daughter.

“Thank you for your welcome, Lady Sutton.” Rowan tried for a smile. He knew it looked strained.

“We were not expecting a guest, but that’s easily rectified.” Camilla had a death grip on her husband’s hand as she dragged him down next to her, at the head of the table. “Now please, do regale us with your tale of how we got the honor of hosting a hero.”

While they picked at their food, Kayden was forced to go into exacting detail of what had happened.

Camilla contributed nothing of substance throughout, her face unreadable.The baron’s daughter had nothing to say either. She was stuck staring at her plate, a contemplative expression passing over her face occasionally.

Rowan had no clue what to make of it all. Kayden had clearly not consulted his wife or daughter when he decided to take a hero home. Even if they were too polite to outright object to him, the idea that the barony wasn’t going to be anything but welcoming was like a cold stone in Rowan’s stomach. As much as he hated to admit it, Rowan had taken a liking to Kayden despite the baron’s torturous training. He doubted that anyone else in the kingdom cared about him as much as the baron.

At least the food was good. Rowan had grown sick of the road rations less than a day into their journey. There was only so much one could do with dried meat and hard bread, even if they were turned into a makeshift soup. So, the warm, delightfully seasoned meat and vegetable dishes were doing a wonder for his palate.

When the conversation wound down and the food was mostly gone, Camilla took charge of the conversation for the first time. “Well, I know you two must have had a trying journey. Rowan, if you would follow Garrett, he will get you settled and direct you to a bathroom.”

Rowan knew a dismissal when he heard one, so he politely excused himself with a few words of thanks and followed after the butler.

“You shouldn’t worry, you know,” Garrett whispered. The words snapped Rowan out of his melancholy. The old butler was briskly leading him to their destination, but the tone of his voice was kind. “You will be welcome here. We’ll do our best to assist you. Please don’t hold her attitude against Lady Sutton. She just doesn’t like to be surprised.”

Rowan didn’t know how to respond to that, so he simply said nothing and waited as, over the course of the next few days, the butler’s words came true.

—

“Faster! Come on, faster! My one-month old kitten could run faster than you,” Kayden shouted.

“Does your kitten have a system?” Rowan shouted back, surprised he could find the breath for it after running for hours.

“Of course,” Kayden responded. He grabbed a spear from a nearby rack and chucked it, non-pointed end first, at Rowan.

Rowan slowed down and caught the spear, feeling the same rush of relief wash over him. He was starting to get used to the power of his Keen Spear card.

“Hold position,” Kayden barked.

Rowan brought his right leg back and stood almost parallel to the spear. He slid his right hand to the back of the spear while his left gripped the middle portion.

“You know, this is much worse than the training we did on the road,” Rowan said. Even though his body was on the verge of collapse, he felt oddly disconnected. Like it was someone else who was going through all that pain and he was merely an observer.

“It’s meant to be,” Kayden said. “Thrust position.”

Rowan pushed the spear forward and appraised the motion. He could have been a bit faster but the spear didn’t wobble after the strike. He was getting better. “I appreciate all this training. But why are we doing this again? I thought the whole point of a system was so that we didn’t have to train like this.”

“Ha,” Kayden scoffed. “Anyone can kill monsters, gain experience, and level up. That’s easy. What’s not so easy is making sure that a person gets the most out of every level. The limit for an unclassed person is 10 in all stats. Normally, that’d require training from birth to even have a shot of reaching. But you’re a hero. The Gods gave you a chance to catch up. But there’s always a give and a take. Can you guess what the take is? Shuffle.”

Rowan pulled the spear back, swapped hands, and shuffled to a new position in a single motion. It was smooth enough that he felt proud of the technique. “I have to work harder than other people?”

“Exactly. Even a single stat point at this stage makes a world of difference,” Kayden said as he watched Rowan’s stance. “Good stance.”

“So why can’t I train after I get a class and level up a bit?” Rowan asked. His body wasn’t as sore as before. Somehow, whenever he held a spear, fatigue would start to melt away.

“Because the system is also a give and take,” Kayden answered. “It offers amazing benefits when you level up. It uses mana, in some way that we can’t understand, to bolster a person’s physical and mental faculties. But each point that you get from leveling up drives you further away from what you could achieve on their own.”

“Which is a bad thing?” Rowan asked.

“In some ways, yes. Once you start leveling up, it becomes incredibly hard to increase stats through training. It might take you years of strength training to get even a single point of strength. Usually, the system would rather give you experience instead of raw stats.” Kayden motioned for Rowan to go through the stances at his own pace. “So right now is your best chance of getting stats while only paying the low, low cost of being exhausted.”

Rowan thrust the spear out as he lobbed his next question. “So how do stats work with leveling up?”

“Every level you gain, you get two points to spend,” Kayden said. “Now you get why we’re doing this? You’re gaining at least two stat points every day right now.”

“Just an excuse to torture me,” Rowan mumbled.

Kayden caught that comment. “Oh, you haven’t seen torture yet. Do a thousand spear thrusts. Now, it’s probably time to talk about proper noble etiquette. I’m guessing you’ll need it if you want to stay on Camilla’s good side.”

—

For better or worse, both the butler and baron were right. When Rowan did the proper greeting to Lady Sutton later that day, she became markedly friendlier.

The baron’s family seemed to take all their meals together. And Rowan was naturally invited. Over time, he got more accustomed to the place, making friends with Garrett and learning more about the past glories of House Sutton. Apparently, they had been very close to one of the past heroes and found their standing through holding steady in their support of the hero.

While the rest of the house was warming up to Rowan, the baron’s daughter was the opposite. It wasn’t that she was hostile, she just never spoke up. And Rowan could have sworn that he saw her staring at him on a couple of different occasions.

Not that there was much time to dwell on such things. Kayden soon added two more parts to Rowan’s training. The first was fun. Instead of stuffy nobility bloodline lessons, Kayden began teaching the strengths and weaknesses of different classes. There were the classic fantasy classes like [Knight] and [Mage], and then there were just as many specialized classes like [Cultist] or [Baker].

But it was always a bit of a downer when Kayden ended each lesson by emphasizing that Rowan’s class had been set in stone thanks to his card. He had to take [Spearman] as his class. The only reason he was learning about the other classes was to know how to counter them if the time came.

The second new addition was less fun. So far, Rowan had found an equilibrium with the baron’s training. The exercises were tiring. The knowledge was interesting. The endless spear grilling was actually enjoyable. So when Kayden mentioned sparring, Rowan was excited to see what would happen.

His hopes were dashed when Kayden summoned a maid from the castle to be his sparring partner. A dainty, smiling woman in her early thirties who arrived still wearing an apron.

And then Rowan had made the mistake of looking at the grinning baron and raising an eyebrow in question about his opponent. A second later, his world was flipped upside down, and he landed roughly on his back, all air driven from his lungs.

When Rowan got back to his knees, he found the maid smiling with her hands behind her back. “What are you? A [Brawler]?”

The maid giggled. “Hero Rowan, you’re hilarious. My base class was [Maid].”

“[Maid]?” Rowan echoed. That threw him for a loop. In all of their discussions about class, Kayden had mostly focused on battle professions. And Rowan was pretty sure that [Maid] wasn’t a battle class, unless there was some major translation issue going on. “What kind of [Maid] class does that?”

“A [Battle Maid] of the Sutton House,” the maid answered. “Ready to continue, Lord Rowan?”

It was a trick question. Before Rowan answered, he was tossed in the air again.

—

With the maid’s help, it only took a week to max out Rowan’s physical stats. In that time, he never once touched the hem of her apron. The woman moved like the wind. No matter what Rowan did, she’d find the right angle to dodge, parry, and counter.

During that time, the baron’s entire staff found it hilarious that Rowan would flinch away from every maid that passed him in the castle’s hallways. Rowan himself was less amused and more proud. For the first two days after the [Battle Maid] was introduced, he had been squaring up at every maid on instinct. Flinching was much better than trying to fight the people doing his laundry.

Perhaps because of all the suffering and trauma, Rowan grew at a speed that shocked even himself. As he sat in Kayden’s study, the baron asked him to open his system window. It was glorious.

Rowan Clairfont

Level 0 Unclassed (+)

EXP: N/A

Mana: 50/50

STR: 10

VIT: 10

DEX: 10

PER: 10

INT: 10

WIS: 10

Deck (1/4):

* [Epic] Keen Spear (Heart)

Blessings:

* Blessing of the Stalwart Hero

No one threw him a party or showered him with gifts at the tens across every stat. The baron had emphasized how much those stats would help him, and how much they’d do for his survival. Seeing them for himself, Rowan couldn’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment. It felt like he was finally getting the hang of this new world.

And so, it was with glee that Rowan finally focused his intent on that blinking plus mark.

It was time for him to pick a class.