Will didn’t sit around on his ass all day before leaving the fort and instead spent his day observing the soldiers of various classes and asked around what they thought was the best class to have.

He decided to get his scout class revoked and gain a new class.

He wanted strength and from his recent bloody adventure, it was pretty advent to him that being a scout wasn’t the way to the peak. Scout class would earn him enough money to live a good life, but the strength to fight against cruel and vicious monsters? As scout wasn’t the class for all around heavy duty lifting.

He completely left behind his mentality of having a happy and safe life behind and decided to live his life fully to the end.

It took him three days to ask around and get enough information about the classes to have an opinion formed of his own.

According to his research, the strongest or the most damage dealing class was the Mage, but it was also the hardest class to level and rank up.

Because according to the mages he meet, every rank up needed a set level of proficiency in all the skills, like to reach rank one the mage needed to have all of their skills in the intermediate rank.

And that wasn’t all; one also needed affinity with an element to become a mage and be a genius at that. There were no known self taught mages in the world and getting a teacher was expensive.

Top that with how expensive mage skill books were, he simply decided to not even try.

And the talk about zero mobility, paper defense, need of a party to hunt monsters…

“It’s not worth the effort.” He thought.

Then there was the swordsman and warrior. Both classes were similar to each other and depended on their weapon mastery to Rank up. Although the demand for talent in these classes was not that high, the time it demanded was and time was what Will didn’t have.

He simply didn’t want to waste his time swinging his sword left to right day and night for years with no end in sight.

He didn’t even ask about the support classes like a priest, healer, or scout.

The only options left were for him to either become a Thief or an archer.

While an archer had his own set of skills and could be quite deadly, but in the end an archer was also just a support class, with very limited scope of becoming overpowered.

So he decided to become a thief. Maybe he chose the class because of Rae, maybe not, but he just decided that.

Then after calming his mind, he said his goodbyes to Anton who gave him a letter with their mercenary groups seal on it and left the fort.

He came out bare footed and on Anton’s recommendation decided to check out the Ragnarock town and register in the adventures guild there.

“Give the letter to the receptionist and the rest will be taken care of. But do you really have to leave?”

He remembered his last conversation with Anton, before shaking his head and taking steps toward the dangerous future he was walking toward.

It took him half a day to cross the forest and reach the dirt road leading toward the town.

“Hah, how far is it?”

But thankfully just a minute later he heard the sound of horses running and carrying something heavy with them.

It was a merchant travelling back to the town after a successful run in the dungeon on the eastern side of the continent.

The cart stopped near him.

“Want a lift kid?”

Will didn’t know what to say to a person who would stop on their own and give lifts.

“What are you hesitating for? Come tell me where are you going?”

Will though for a minute and decided it was better for him to travel in the cart than to walk the whole distance.

“Ragnarock.” He said.

“Oh! Well, isn’t this a coincidence, I am also going there. Come on lets go.”

Will glanced at that person’s chubby but cleanly shaved smiling face and sighed.

‘What happened to me? If it was before… then I would have probably jumped on the first chance. No, I would have asked him to stop on my own accord.’

Shaking his head he hopped on the seat.

“let’s go….”

“What’s your name kid? People call me Divine.”

‘Like hell they call you that!!’ Will retorted in his mind and his face turned stiff, which the merchant caught, but didn’t comment about.

“So going there for business or just passing through?”

“I… Don’t know.”

“Oh! It happens. Looks like it is the first time you are travelling on your own.”

“It shows?”

“Haha, I am Devine, what can’t my eyes see?”

Will snorted as a reply to his comment.

“Any ways, aren’t you a little too young…” Will glared at him for saying that and Divine replied, “No, no, I’m not saying that you can’t travel without a guardian or anything, but still…”

“No, I didn’t run away from my home.” He then recovered a sealed letter from his pocket, with the forts seal on it and waved it around before pocketing it back.

Sweat appeared on Divine’s forehead when he remembered which noble house had that seal.

“Ha-ha, like I was saying that dungeon is too horrifying!!”

Will rolled his eyes on Divines try to change the topic, but the talk about the dungeon attracted his attention.

But from the content he understood that the dungeon Divine was talking about was to the east. A ten something year old dungeon which had 20 floors and a rank 3 albino snake of some kind waiting at the end, guarding the master core.

The sun sat behind them and a dark cover of branches hid all light the moon light.

The merchant flipped a knob to his left and the two fire candles at the front of the cart lit up.

Will looked astonished at the marvel at first, but his face turned to one of grave anger as he remembered where they were.

Divine saw his face turning astonished and nodded to himself in his mind, but then Will flipped on him.

“Hey what are you doing? You- are you a bandit? Really even you?” Divine shouted, but will didn’t listen to him and somehow after quite a lot of struggle, succeeded in turning the knobs off.

After doing that he once again came back to sit on his side of the seat and Divine was left confused and scratching his head.

“What’s your problem? Behaving like a girl on her period…”

Wills head slipped from his hand when he heard that and glared at him.

“What?” Divine yelled?

Will shook his head hearing him and asked him, “Why did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Give all the monsters in the forest a direct target to attack!”

Divines face turned serious when he heard that and he shivered how serious the allegations were.

He hurriedly looked around the cart to see if any wolfs were following them or not.

Will snorted once again seeing him behaving like a coward, but then he smelled something.

His brows furrowed he took a strong whiff and frowned.

He stood up on the moving cart which scared Divine and made him yell out, “What are you doing, sit back down or you will fall.”

But Will simply brush his hand off and squinted.

He saw that the sky some distance glowing with an orange glow and the closer they got to it the higher the surrounding temperature was becoming.

“Did the temperature rise suddenly?” Divine asked when his greasy body got covered in sweat.

Ash fell on wills face and he yelled out, “Its fire! The forest is on fire!!”

“What?” Divine couldn’t believe his ears. “Where?” He jumped on his seat in astonishment.

“Look at the side, the whole forest in on fire!!”

“Was there a thunderstorm? Fuck that.” And Divine tensed the reigns to stop the horse.

“What are you doing?” Will, simply couldn’t believe him.

“What do you mean, we need to return. I don’t want to give my life to forest fire.”

“You, don’t you know anything? We need to get out of this forest and the only way out is in front. There is no way we will be able to get past the fire if we returned now.

“But…”

“You don’t understand! A single gust of wind and the fire will spread all through the forest in the matter of seconds. Just believe me and drive forward.”

Divine gritted his teeth and remembering his times in the dungeon city Magnolia, he decided to trust his companion’s decision.

“Hiya!”

*Smack*

And with the sound of reigns hitting the horse the cart flew on the dirt road.

Will the noticed that the fire was coming from the north, but it was far away and seeing the distance he saw sure that they would be able to reach the town with their lives intact. That is if they didn’t stop in the middle somewhere.

But just twenty or so minutes later, Will saw something coming out of the forest. At first he thought about the wolves, but the silhouette looked to be 7 ft tall and walking on two feet.

“Stop there, stop right there. There are people…”

“No, if I stop now I won’t be able to get out of the forest…”

But then the human stumble and fell. The duo saw the human fall and ended up breaking into three parts.

And just as Divine saw him falling he hurriedly stopped his cart near the human on his own and jumped down.

Will looked astonished at his sudden change of heart and following behind him. He went to pick the guy and saw that it wasn’t one human, but there were two girls and one man and all three of them were unconscious.

One girl had her arm cut off and was bleeding. The other two although didn’t have any bleeding wounds, their appearance still looked haggard, as if they had been fighting until just some minutes ago.

“What are you doing kid? Stop staring and help me out. I can’t pick the man alone you know, he is too heavy!!”

“Huh… yes!!”

Then using all of their strength they hurriedly picked them up and ran from the place after loading them up in the back of the cart.

They didn’t speak and Will stared at the girl with no arms.

He gritted his teeth and turned to face Divine.

“Do you have a medical kit or something like that?”

“Huh… Ah! The girl, yes, yes, in the back, there is a chest. It has some….”

Will didn’t let him finish and hurriedly moved to the back and opened the chest. He pulled out a flask containing yellow liquid and showed it toward Divine.

“Is this a disinfectant?”

“Huh, yes, yes.”

Will emptied the whole bottle disinfecting her wounds and tied a string at the open bleeding wounds of her arms to stop the bleeding.

Dust shivered in pain as he did that, but otherwise didn’t wake up.

The fire never reached them and in after three hours they finally arrived at the town.

The guild thanked them for saving the lives of three adventurers on a very important mission and gave them a gold coin as a reward, which Will and Divine distributed equally between them.

Divine left after telling will that he would be in town for a month and that he could come look him up if he wanted to visit the dungeon city Magnolia.

Then after saying his goodbyes to Divine, Will once again entered the guild.

The marvelous building and its clean and formal look made him stop breathing for a second.

He couldn’t understand how such a building could exist in this cruel world.

“Whoa!” he exclaimed and the adventurers passing by him chuckled looking at his completely mesmerized look.

He went to the reception and stood in the line.

It was already night time and because the rush hour had passed, his turn came soon.

He got to the front and the amazingly beautiful and cheerful receptionist greeted him.

“Welcome dear sir. How can I help you?”

And after a stare up, blushing and some stuttering later, Will recovered an envelope from his pocket and after passing it to Jade spoke, “I-I would like to join the guild.”

Jade accepted the envelope and opened it. Her brows furrowed when she saw the seal on the envelope, but the content was a simple identification certificate from the forts commander.

“Very well. Please, wait there for a minute and I’ll call you back.” She pointed towards the seats at the side and clicked a button on the tab.

Another girl came from the room behind the desk and Jade gave her the certificate. The girl asked her who it was for, but disappointed at his age returned back to the room.

A minute later she returned with a blank card and passed it to the receptionist who then called Will.

“Yes!!” Will asked being equally nervous and excited.

Jade gave him a ten page joining contract and told him,

“Please read it carefully and then make a blood print here, here , here and here.”

Will looked awkwardly at her and spoke, “I- I can’t read.”

Jade looked at him shying and smiled.

“Don’t worry about it. Here let me help you.”

The contract didn’t contain a single line that could be used against them or by them.

It included terms like; you pay for your injuries, food, clothes, etc, etc. The Guild won’t be responsible for your death. You will work as a contracted worker, if the situation ever arose. You are allowed to choose you own mission, but in case of any emergency or any guild activity when your presence is required, your presence is necessary.

Failure to comply with the terms would be punished with the lightest being a fine and the highest being the termination of your contract.

It also said that he was needed to complete at least one mission per month or a higher ranking mission than your guild rank after a month of absence.

Will nodded his head understanding every clause, and then their talk reached the guild ranking.

“So, currently your rank is F which is the lowest rank. Guild ranks go from F to A and then S, SS, SSS, G, N and finally L.”

Which confused Will.

Because the ranking wasn’t following the alphabetical order.

“Now, Mission ranking F and E are like community service. The missions include helping a shopkeeper, running some errands, playing hockey for some old lady…”

Will coughed at the last one and jade giggled.

“Then C& D ranking mission are the mission which deal with transportation, dealing with bandit groups, one on one fights, revenges etc.”

“Even revenges?”

“Yes, even revenges. Then mission for rank B & A deals with everything dangerous like; exploring uncharted land, Exploring Dungeons, etc. S, SS and SSS are specialty missions which can’t be given to normal people. You won’t find them listed on the mission board.

She didn’t explain them and Will also understood that his rank was too low and he didn’t need that information.

“And finally the missions with the ranking G, N and L are the compulsory missions, which you will have to participate in if asked for. G is when the mission is our guilds personal business, N is for a mission on the national scale, and L for something which affects the whole world. These missions as a citizen and member of the guild are advised not to skip, as the deserters are usually hunted down afterwards. Okay any questions?”

“So, how can I get a mission?”

“There is a mission board over there and a board outside and both are frequently updated with missions. Now, once you pick a mission of your guild ranking or the one a single rank above, you will have to remove it from the board and bring it here. Understood?”

Will nodded his head.

“Good boy. Now, place your hand over this hole please.”

Will looked but then complied and just as he rested his hand on it hole on the table, something got logged inside his hand.

Will shrieked and then looked at his hand, but before he could ask what it was jade replied, “That is a tracking device, a identity proof, takes samples for you strength increase every day, and also tells us whether you are alive or not.”

“Then what is the card for?”

“It proves that you are a member our guild. Anything else?”

“NO…” and he walked out of the guild.