[Automatic Job change in 3...2...1... Commencing Job change.]

[Job changed: Royal Champion -> Elite Soldier]

[Tier changed: 5 -> 2]

[Level changed: 10 -> 10]

[Attributes updating...]

[Body changed: 121 -> 95]

[Agility changed: 98 -> 62]

[Mind changed: 75 -> 46]

[Clearing and updating skills…]

[Please check status screen for updated skill list.]

“Your people are scattered,” he said as he glimpsed the once pretty blue ribbon binding his left hand. New emotions warred within him. There was some relief that the majority of the people had escaped, but the ones that did not appeared in his mind. The ones buried or cremated, or the ones left on the fields to feed the carrion and the enemy’s armies, all of them had been brave patriots and heroes. Even the penal legions who had fought tooth and nail for their own survival and for their promised pardons had earned respect in their own way. Even with the sacrifices of the army, many towns had been butchered by the enemy as well and an untold number of tragedies had been written in blood.Jaren had neither the time nor the inclination to confirm the changes in his status. He had been through enough Job changes to know what to expect and had trained his body enough to feel the changes that the Job change had brought in mere moments. More importantly the inner door of the cathedral opened and a new wave of enemies joined the fight against him from within. The blood on their blades told him that these were the ones who had killed the people inside.

Worse for him was the grief he felt having read those messages. Their implications cored through him and cut deeper than any wound he had ever felt. There was a sinking sensation in his gut.

“Your kingdom has fallen,” he whispered to himself, those words etched into his mind. As he fought, images of the kingdom he had sworn to protect flooded his mind. Not some lines on a map, nor words in the history books he had been forced to read as a child, but the faces of the people that had populated it and the works they had taken pride in. Great fortresses had once stood in strategic locations throughout the lakes and valleys of the kingdom. Lofty towers where mages had gathered to pursue their arts. Bright cathedrals and bustling adventurer’s halls and marketplaces had been frequented by commoner and noble alike. The simple homes of the commoners, neat and well stocked with firewood; the fields, aqueducts and forestry all worked by the people, even these things appeared in his mind along with the people he had seen in them.

Most of what they had built was gone now. The buildings in ruin, crushed or burnt during the years of fighting, the fields, forests and irrigation trampled under the feet of the competing armies. He could see through the entrance the smoke filled sky and ruins of the capital and beyond the walls was more smoke and muddied battlefields.

His focus was not entirely on the fight and he took a few lesser wounds that he would have never taken before, even with the reduced attributes. He viciously counterattacked, slaying the foes nearest to him. The most canny ones stepped away and allowed the others to sacrifice themselves. Perhaps they believed he would tire now that his Job had been reduced.

Even tier one Jobs could make a normal person exceptional as one levels it towards the cap of level ten. Tier two truly reached into the realm of the supernatural. Tier three was well beyond the strength of what most species could reach without the system, but for those with the system it was the realm of the powerful and established. Tier four were masters, and tier five was the realm of heroes. Not Heroes, that cheap cheat Job meant to produce a strong fighter with little effort, but true heroes, people that stood above the rank and file as true paragons of their disciplines.

Perhaps, his enemies knew that Jaren had been stripped of the great power of his tier five Job and were now waiting for him to weaken sufficiently for them to swoop in and kill him. It helped that his mind was muddled from the sense of loss he felt. Like a hole that had been punched in his soul, a significant portion of his identity had been lost. Royal Champion had indeed been merely his Job, but he would have never met the prerequisites for it within the Divine system if he had not held the kingdom and his duty towards it in such esteem.

“Your King is dead,” he whispered again, bile heaving up from his core and tears threatening to fall.

“Oh, what a brave little knight you are. Do you mind letting me handle this brave one?” A firm hand had gripped Jaren’s small shoulder, pulling him back to stand behind the man who had just spoken. Jaren looked up and saw the man looking down at him. The man was handsome, with golden hair and polished armor and his smile was fresh and reassuring. Jaren had forgotten his fear of the monsters that had come to his orphanage in that moment. He watched the man fight them and defeat them all, securing his place as the paragon of knightly virtue that Jaren would later aspire to emulate.

It was that man that had adopted him from the orphanage and with his wife had raised him in the royal palace. It was that man that Jaren had sworn to serve all of his life and it was that man who the system had so nonchalantly had pronounced dead. Yet, Jaren still lived. His King was dead and yet the Champion lived on. He felt despair deeper than he had ever felt before and a sense of self loathing and rage started to bubble up within him as another wave of enemies swarmed towards him. He swung his spear with great rage, his emotions eroding at his composure and his economical movements starting to be replaced with grander, more exhausting ones.

As they fought, they could at least tell themselves that the losses and sacrifices had been for a greater good, but now in the moment, as the uncaring system informed him, he couldn’t quite say whether it was good or not. The majority of the people had escaped to some other world, but they left with only their lives and only their most important possessions. What could these people expect for themselves in the world they were going to? Surely the people already in that place will not be so welcoming as to readily open their arms to them. People in that place must have their own worries, how could they have the time to concern themselves about the wellbeing of these newcomers and even worse, how would they treat these new people who would be seeking to make use of the same resources that had already been parcelled amongst those already there?

Hadn’t he already experienced this when he went to the orphanage? The nuns now had a new mouth to feed but no new food to feed him, so all the other children had gotten less. How had the older boys responded when they received less of their share? It would be easy to call them bullies but could they truly be blamed when they acted out on instincts borne from hunger pains? How would the people of that other world react to the influx of newcomers, an entire nation of new people who don’t know their language or culture, that have now come to share the resources, space, and opportunities in that space? Jaren knew human nature and he knew that even the most well meaning people would not handle the situation perfectly. He knew that while the initial existential threat had been removed, the true trials were still ahead of them and neither he, nor his King, would be there for them.

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The image of a blond haired girl flashed in his mind and tears finally started to fall. He had known that he was lying to her when he last spoke to her, but he had not really considered it until now. Since the day she was born, he had never lied to her. He had treasured this child of his benefactor and that beautiful queen beyond anything save his oath to his King. What trials would she have to face without him or her father? What of the queen or the newborn prince? What of the widows and children of his friends that had died on the battlefields? He could do nothing for them, he hadn’t even died before his King.

“I am sorry. I have failed you all,” he said, his voice choking up. His vision blurred in places from the tears and his erratic emotions had blown his focus and he took a few more wounds, though his experience, training, and equipment protected him from the worst of it. A bubbling rage began to form within him, fueled by his shame, pain, and desire for vengeance.

[Your emotional state has satisfied the final requirements for a new Job. Will you accept the Job change? Since the level of the current Job has been maxed, the Job change will automatically be accepted if there is no answer in 10… 9… 8... 1… Job change accepted.]

[Job changed: Elite Soldier -> Battle Rager]

[Tier changed: 2 -> 3]

[Level changed: 10 -> 0]

[Attributes updating...]

[Body changed: 95 -> 61]

[Agility changed: 62 -> 55]

[Mind changed: 46-> 34]

[Clearing and updating skills…]

[Please check status screen for updated skill list.]

“Hahaha, damn…” he laughed ruefully as he felt his attributes shift downwards again. He felt his Rage take on a more palpable shift as he sensed a similarity between it and the Fighting Spirit line of skills from the various Soldier Jobs. He could sense the active functions of this Job change. It seemed to be an instinctive style of fighting contrary to the deliberate style that he had previously pursued. Contrary to the Fighting Spirit line of skills, which required strong will to maintain, the Rage line fed off of raw emotion and burned endurance. The effect was a much more explosive use of energy at the risk of burning out much faster.

At least with the Fighting Spirit line, the skill had formed a virtuous cycle where a person with a strong will could continue to use the skill so long as they had the will for it and the skill itself would reinforce that will. The overall benefit, with the most advanced form that he had mastered, Royal Champion’s Fighting Spirit, was to provide an extreme resistance to fatigue, morale loss, fear, and charm, while providing a significant boost to attack and defense through the sheer focus it granted. With his mastery of Fighting Spirit, as long as he had the will to do so, he could focus on the fight and as long as he was not disabled by the enemy, he was certain he could fight for at least a week, though he had not tested it and he was less sure now that his Body stat had regressed to half of what it had initially been.

He could sense that Rage was different. It spent endurance at alarming rates in exchange for a hyperfocus upon the fight and a tremendous boost to attack. He could tell that the focus cleared up his muddle headedness from before and locked him back into the moment of the fight. His sensation of pain became numbed, and his actions risked tearing muscles. He could tell that his fatigue after the fight would be tremendous assuming he didn’t tear himself apart during the fight, but the rage boiling underneath it all prevented him from caring about it.

His objective mind still worked, as if in a fugue, calculating the situation, predicting the enemy’s reactions, and formulating plans based upon that, but the emotional part was dominated by the rage that he had felt. Years of training kicked in and he began to analyse the new skill and use it as optimally as he could. As he did so, the dullness of certain sensations receded and the sharpness of others increased.

[Skill changed: Battle Rage lv 1 -> Battle Rage lv 2]

[Skill changed: Instinctive Perception lv 1 -> Instinctive Perception lv 2]

The enemy continued to come at him in waves, with elites sometimes intermingled with them. It seemed to him that no matter how many he killed many more would come. Conveniently he found that his Fighting Spirit skill was not impacted by his Rage skill, so he was able to make use of the two and the staggering drain on his endurance was greatly reduced. Even better the focus of both skills seemed to compound upon each other. This made his attacks even more powerful and as he got used to the Perception skill, he was able to avoid more attacks than before as well. It didn’t make up entirely for the loss of almost half of his Body and Agility attributes, but it allowed him to stabilize the situation quickly and twenty minutes later, he felt a wave of healing wash over him as a new series of notifications appeared.“So that’s how it is,” he whispered to himself as he received the new information. Some amount of the hyper focus he felt in the moment was not directly tied to the Rage skill, but was rather tied to this new Perception skill. He began focusing even further, attempting to feel out the mechanics of the two new skills and attempted to use them with the skills he already possessed.

[Level changed: 0 -> 1]

[Body changed: 61 -> 67]

[Agility changed: 55 -> 58]

“Damn it, it won’t work like this! Shamans attack from the corners, Champions and Warchiefs protect the Shamans and attack only when it's guaranteed. I will take him.”

The accompanying flash of light that came with the level up alerted his enemies and he heard curses from their leaders followed by a string of orders. The one who gave the order strode into the narthex from the cathedral itself. It had a bloody halo of light around its head which indicated its status.

“Damned Hero,” Jaren cursed. Hero was a cheat Job. Instead of relying on an inheritance that instructs the holder on the prerequisites or struggling to feel out the prerequisites themselves, Heroes merely require experience and the prerequisites for the next tier are fulfilled automatically. Heroes sponsored by a god would consume the divine power of that god to make up for any insight they lacked, while those sponsored by other forms of magic just required expensive resources. What was worse, was that instead of having to take many branching Jobs to satisfy the requirements to tier up a Hero simply had to complete the previous tier of Hero. Whereas Jaren had needed to complete ten separate Jobs in tiers one through four to satisfy the requirements of Royal Champion at tier five, a Hero merely needed to complete the tiers one through four of Hero.

Similarly, due to the fact that Heroes didn’t need to gain insight into the skills and abilities or satisfy any kinds of personality requirements, all they needed to do to grow stronger was to gain experience and since there was no limitation on experience gain up until tier five, a Hero could simply kill even the Jobless or tier ones. Perhaps a chivalrous or caring god would prevent such a thing, but Garroolsh would have encouraged it. It pleased him and satisfied his domains to see such slaughter. A god of slaughter such as himself would have gained divine power from the very act of butchering the defenceless like that.

Jaren was faced with one such Hero now. He looked it over and was not impressed. This one seemed stunted in comparison to the other Heroes of Garroolsh he had faced. No less than three Royal Champions and half a dozen other tier five defenders of the kingdom had died facing them in battle. This one seemed somewhat diminished in comparison. Probably even weaker than Jaren had been as a Royal Champion. The very cheat that allowed a Hero to progress up the tiers rapidly meant that at high tiers they were not guaranteed to be stronger than someone who had worked honestly to get to there.

The sheer difference in numbers of Jobs.alone meant that the similar tiered Job with more requisite classes would have more attributes, while needing to actually learn the skills tied to your Jobs to progress tended to mean that the opponent would have a much deeper understanding of their own skills. While a high tier Hero might have the Weapon Mastery skill maxed out, unless they actually learned it in and out like someone that actually had to max out that skill they would only ever puppet the skill at best.

Seeing the Hero stride forward to face him, the Rage within Jaren boiled ever higher. A sinister smile formed on his lips as he smashed aside and dodged the incoming attacks from the Hero’s companions. With a flurry of attacks he swept away the low tier chaff that was being sent in to tie up his movements. A low laugh bubbled out of him as he reaffirmed the image he had had of himself before, that of a boss monster accepting challenges from adventurers.

“Come forth and die Hero.”