Tom considered the advice. What she was suggesting felt weird to him. It was almost like she believed that a lower level of focus would make him better at duplicating the ritual. It was so ridiculous that he wanted to reject it outright, but April hadn’t led him astray yet. While he convinced himself that logic in this case was superior to his flawed human instincts, he threw himself happily into the fight she had designed. The decision wasn’t a contest. There was no world where he was going to reject the advice of a million-year-old expert who had proved herself every time. It didn’t matter what his gut thought. Next time he sat down to do the ritual, he would do exactly what she had suggested.

She had him fighting a series of weapon-wielding monsters. All of them possessed the relevant basic skills that included both a mastery ability and at least one basic enhancement skill, such as Power Strike, Enhanced Sharpness or Heavy Hammer. The challenge was cathartic. It also demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of the bipedal form that he had. Monsters with four or more legs were quicker and could shift directions faster, but those strengths came with limitations. There was more volume for him to strike at, and they didn’t have the same level of rotational capabilities to dodge. Those weaknesses might have been an issue with the rank of creatures that he was fighting, but the difference at his level was noticeable. The multi-legged opponents lacked the range of movement that the bipeds seemed to have when evading enemies strikes. The multiple legs made them faster across the ground, but less nimble.

The multi-armed ones, however, were just outright harder to fight, but that’s what happened when you had four, or six, or, in his final fight, a monster with ten arms. How a single rank-two organism effectively used multiple two-handed weapons, along with numerous single-handed ones, was a mystery to him.

He made the kill and kicked the two-handed sword away. It wasn’t anywhere near as heavy as it looked, but he had noticed that when parrying it. The monster’s strength might have been less than his own, but it had still felt like he had been fighting five people simultaneously. It had been a long, but rewarding fight.

Tom assessed his body. It didn’t feel functional. While he could now patch up most of the damage that had been done with his limited healing during the battle, that capability still had limits, and he suspected he had gone past the point of continuing. He had two cracked fingers, broken ribs, and, he suspected, a compound fracture on his thigh from the hammer hit. While magic had let him manage the injury for the fight, continuing to attempt to do so would be a mistake. In real life, this was where he fled the battlefield. “I’m done,” he called out cheerfully.

He was instantly teleported back to be sitting in the café once more, with his body restored to perfect condition. He followed April’s advice and attempted to rush the creation process. Almost immediately, a line formed wrong. “Damn it.” With a curse, he stopped and went to fix the obvious error.

“No, don’t stop like that.” April snapped at him. “Finish the whole thing with one effort.”

“But that was a critical error.”

“So? This is training.”

He remembered the earlier explanation, and, grumbling he finished it. When it was complete, he held it out for April to evaluate.

She stuck out a tongue. “You failed to connect a required line early, and then a couple of other times, so it’s absolute trash. Completely unusable.”

He glared at her, which only made her grin harder. The bracelet, his credits, all of his hard work - it didn’t matter. The wood crumbled in her hand as she squeezed it. The dust fell through the air, vanishing before it dirtied her clothes.

“Do it again.” April ordered. “I think it is almost falling into place for you.”

Tom trusted her and did exactly what she asked. It might have been close to clicking, but it didn’t click. He left the trial session frustrated both at his mounting debt and complete lack of success.

Another week passed, and Tom learned that the naming ceremony was being postponed until the place was declared clean. Given that Dimitri didn’t trust the isolation rooms, it was a decision Tom had been expecting.

Bored out of his brain, he went into the trial once more, and was put straight into his crafting. In defiance of his previous instructions, he deliberately slowed himself down. It still went fast, just not the backbreaking pace that April had previously been encouraging. He finished it and passed it back.

To his surprise, she nodded approvingly. “That’s a pass. You can do better, but your debt grew lesser.”

A sense of elation shot through him. “Are you serious? Just like that?”

“Like that? Really? Seriously Tom, you’ve put months of effort into this. It’s far from being just like that.”

“No, I mean… This one didn’t seem much better than my other attempts.”

“You might think so, but the main issue with the other ones was how disjointed they were. This one has issues, but at its core it’s a single, flowing piece of work. It worked because you listened to your Sensei like a good boy.”

“Shut up.”

“Don’t be like that. I’m your Sensei. Come on, say it.”

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

“Sensei, please educate me further.”

She giggled. “My pleasure.” Flutes of champagne appeared on the table. “For now, you need to have a break.”

“I’m not drinking. The trial session has barely started.”

“Thirty minutes, then I’ll flush your system.”

“Twenty.”

“Done,” she said immediately, with a look of triumph. “I would have let myself be negotiated down to ten.”

It was fun, and the small celebration at the start set the mood for the rest of the trial. He left the session very happy with his progress. Just like with Danger Sense, he could feel that his Spear Mastery skill was close to completing, and he was starting to pay off his debt that he had accrued in learning his crafting skills.

Everything was looking up.

Then the atmosphere around the orphanage shifted again. Volunteers, outsiders he had never seen before, turned up. Tom saw them working in teams to draw rituals and activate them. He searched for Harry amongst them, but didn’t see his friend. That was another person to attempt to find and catch up with once he was older, but thinking of him brought up the memories of Everlyn –memories he was trying to suppress. Judging by the desperation and the hurt that he had heard in her voice, the fifty years between his death and rebirth had not been kind to her. She hadn’t felt like the woman he remembered, and he wondered if the rest of his friends, if they still lived, would they be the same. When he caught up with them, would he discover people so jaded or battered by the passing years that they were no longer the companions he had fought with?

Would his friends be gone, even if they were physically still alive? Was he going to discover that Keikain was a changed person? Probably not, Tom decided after a moment of thought. Keikain was never going to be anything but a prick. But the others? Toni? Rahmat? With Harry, he could see the pressure of years of struggle transforming them into something different. They might not be the same people.

On the fourth day after the first of the ritualists arrived, he entered the main gymnasium to see that the banners had turned to green. The difference for anyone not reincarnated was small. The vast majority had been treating the issue as having been solved for the last couple of weeks. Tom took control of his own body, even though it felt weird.

Immediately after breakfast, all the children his age who had gone through the bloodline improvement ritual were directed toward the naming ceremony. Tom tuned out the speech Dimitri gave, but basically the expectation was that everyone would choose a name when they went into the room. All names presented would be those known to have been held by humans who had died in the competition.

Tom was the eighteenth to enter, and when he got in, he felt the wards go up to make it a private space. He had ten minutes, and he had to select before then.

To keep up appearances, he decided to see what the room could do.

He touched a button, and a random name rang out while being simultaneously displayed on the screen in large letters. “Ajax.”

The name was spelled in big letters, and there were even brief bios of two Ajaxes who had died in the competition. The most recent death was twenty years ago.

Ajax was a training and battle fanatic who, at his death, had over two hundred different skills and spells that he used in combat. One of his favourites was a heavily modified spatial fold applied to weapons to bypass the armour of the monsters he fought.

Judging by that description, the man had to be cracked a little in the head. Power was not gained in this world from breadth of abilities, but by enhancing a single one - either by advancing it up the tiers or increasing it in levels. Even if he had a choice, he wasn’t taking that.

He pressed once more, and another name appeared. “Kai.”

This name had two different notable blurbs, but they were very similar in attitude. They had both obtained a lot of skills and impressed everyone by how high levelled they had got their core abilities. Which resulted in them both being described as conscientious and precocious. There were differences. One had been a singer with a stunning spatial storage, while the other had seemed to have focused on elemental magic.

The similarities, despite them being different people amused him, and something about the name actually resonated in Tom. It felt appropriate for him to take, and he guessed he was going to end up in a similar place with the mass of skills he was planning to develop over the next decade. But, as nice as the name sounded, it was not for him. The advice he had been given by the priests was to choose his own name. They wouldn’t be so strong about that point if it didn’t provide some level of protection.

He pressed again this time with a focused thought in his mind.

“Tom.” His name rang out in the room.

Six blurbs appeared.

Died in a tragic accident while surfing on the backs of a stampeding herd of rank forty Lightning Bisons.

Tom snorted at that when he read it. He wondered whether, to a five-year-old, that was a point to sell a name or not. They didn’t need to know how to read, because a single finger touch caused the room to narrate the passage.

He scanned down and found his own blurb.

Beloved by many. A genius whose ideas were critical in shaping the lives and future of humanity. He elevated those around him to greatness by filling any niche the team required without complaint or request for favour. He will be remembered as the most important member of the Heroes of Humanity.

Tom swallowed. They had cared, they had noticed. Given the context, he was not surprised by the intensity of the emotion that overtook him. It was a few brief words, ancient history, and it shouldn’t be having this effect on him, but it did. He wiped away the tears trickling down his cheek and selected the name. The machine throbbed, and a badge was printed out.

He held it like it was a treasure. This was his name. No more would he be saddled by the first word he had said. From now on, everyone would know him as Tom, and he would have this new version be even better known than the last.

Beloved by many. A genius whose ideas were critical in shaping the lives and future of humanity.

That was a sentiment he would live up to. He put the badge on, and, after making sure that his face was dry with a clean and a heal, he smiled bravely and went to see what names everyone else had chosen.

What he had expected to be a simple confirmation had been surprisingly emotional. It was the fact of who had signed off on his blurb that had done him in.

As declared by all six survivors of the blended Heroes of Humanity.

Only six, and the word blended told him that included Selena’s and Vidja’s teams. It was a message to him. There had been almost twenty that had left to do his quest, and only six had survived.

He wondered who counted amongst them, and, selfishly, he wished it was his friends. He knew that two of those six still lived. The breaking Everlyn with all the personal baggage between them and Keikain.

Out of all the possible survivors, why did it have to be those two. He thought and immediately hated himself for thinking it. Everlyn, for all her faults, did not deserve that.

Only six had survived, and fifty years had passed. Anything could have happened to the other four.

As he left the room, he was starting to cry again.