“‘Ave a good one!”

“Yeah, you too!” I yelled back at Charlie, as he likely wandered back home to start on dinner, as did I.

Though all four of us spent the day quietly pensive, uncharacteristically so for Mona and Jack, there was still a sort of companionable atmosphere to being with friends I’d sorely missed. Even so, I couldn’t help but feel there was something off. Like there was some secret, unsaid conversation going on that I’d missed. Not like I couldn’t guess; the argument I’d walked in on loomed large over everything else.

Even if he still shouldn’t have said it, Jack couldn’t be blamed for cracking a little in the face of death.

The sound of shattering glass welcomed me home. It took all my self-control to not jump out of my skin and it took the majority of my courage to not turn around and find something to busy myself with for an hour. It wasn’t the first time my father had gotten this angry, but it had been years since the last time. In fact, I couldn’t remember him getting this angry since he’d been an unwitting accessory to...what happened with Charlie’s father. A deep breath to steel myself, and I entered.

Gingerly, I half-crept down the main hall towards the work room, careful to step around the pile of flask fragments. The creak of my own steps in the silence wasn’t the most reassuring prelude, but I knew in my head that it was probably good that I couldn’t hear my father yelling.

“Dad?” I asked, as I approached the door. Certain he wouldn’t accidentally bean me with a flask, I poked my head into the room. He’d sat himself at a workbench, face red, eyes staring furiously at a single point in front of him, hands restlessly clenching and unclenching.

I hesitated, then berated myself for the instinct. I was being cowardly. Reminding myself that I probably wasn’t the one who’d drawn his ire, I stepped into the room fully. Walking over to lean on the workbench, I let the silence resound for a moment, while I gathered my nerve.

“What’s—”

“The hag has no fucking shame,” he growled through gritted teeth. There was only one person he ever referred to like that.

“What did Mrs El—”

“She had the gall—the fucking gall to start whinging about it. ‘Oooh, it wasn’t his place’,” he ranted, dipping into a mocking falsetto.

It took a moment before the pieces started coming together. Honestly, I was surprised, but not exactly shocked. As a former inhabitant of the empire, the grocer, Mrs Eleanor, was infamously outspoken about upholding traditional values. Old and bitter about something nobody I knew really cared to ask her about (not that she would likely have told anyone). Naturally, she wasn’t happy about the way the town had warped around the Guild, but she was maybe the only person in town who still held clearly mixed feelings about—

Then, I was struck by just exactly what she must have been objecting to.

Frankly, I couldn’t quite believe anyone could think like that, far less actually say it to my father’s face. That...no, Mrs Eleanor was a woman of barbed remarks and disapproving glares. There was no way she’d have come out and said it, even if she believed it. My father was clearly letting his anger get the better of him.

“Come on, I mean—I know she’s, well, y’know, but there’s no way she said I should’ve let him kill—”

“SHE WAS THINKING IT,” he roared suddenly, before steadying himself, “Maybe, maybe she’d have denied it, if I put it right to her face then and there, but only because she’s a fucking coward.”

He paused to catch his breath.

“I could see it in her eyes. She’s a fucking coward. Soon as she realised what she’d said, she tried to weasel out of it, tried to shift the subject, talk about ‘oh, but who’ll protect the town from—’ you stupid bitch, the monster we needed protecting from most is the ONE WHO YOU’RE TRYING TO DEFEND.”

If there were words I should’ve said, they eluded me at the time. Instead, I just waited there, until his hands stopped shuddering and the scowl he held ceased to have that same sharpness. Eventually, his breathing steadied, which he punctuated with a sigh.

“How was it besides that? Anything to note?”

He paused, as though only just remembering anything else had happened today.

“Yeah, there’s going to be a town meeting tomorrow. All twenty of us with legitimate claims will be attending, to talk about what happens next,” he hesitated, “Someone’s going to propose an Area SOS quest. I don’t intend to oppose it.”

I balked slightly. At some point over the afternoon, the idea of becoming an adventurer had crossed from ‘idle thought’ to ‘presumption’ and I hadn’t realised it until the thought had been threatened.

“Clearly, you’ve earned yourself a class,” he smiled as I went to object, then stopped, then condensed the grand extent of my mental grumbling into a single annoyed look, “Your old man ain’t that blind…”

He paused.

“Look, I know you’re a proper man. You’re more grown up than I was five years older than you...And I’m not going to gainsay you, if you want to take up the gods’ work, but…” he trailed off, mind’s eye probably focused on something a decade and a half gone.

“Relying on two level one adventurers—”

“Wait, you know about Mona?”

He gave me an amused, knowing look.

“Leo, most people aren’t that cagey,” I mentally appended that with ‘like you are’, “Leyland and his daughter were crowing about it all over town, up until—well, that’s not impo—anyway, like I was going to say, two level one adventurers just isn’t going to cut it. We don’t know how long till we start getting wolves, let alone Goblins or other invaders. We need someone with experience, who can be relied on to be able defend the town tomorrow, if need be.”

Though it pained me to acknowledge it (which, in and of itself, felt like I was acting incorrectly), it wasn’t as though anything he said could be objected to. The town’s hunter corp had been a family business, back when it had one. That’s how I’d read most towns worked out in The Shores. For any place more dangerous...

Well, that’s what guilds were meant to be for.

“You remembered to pick up something to make dinner with, right?” I asked into the lull, flatly as I could. My father cracked a grudging smile at the impressively transparent attempt at changing the subject, and I answered with a grin of my own. Per the otherwise unspoken agreement that went on there and then, we ate dinner at the main table, as if that outburst hadn’t happened. In fact, until we said goodnight and I was sure my father was fast asleep, I tried to put the thoughts that had plagued me all afternoon completely out of my mind.

In the dead silence of the dimly-lit workshop, I began to address them. I began to mull over the situation before me.

There was a clear and immediate issue that pressed upon the back of my mind whenever I thought about becoming an adventurer. In the past, it’d been enough to dissuade my more fanciful side, and remind myself that, if I made it through the fire, I’d probably be an alchemist like my father.

Leonard 'Leo' Proust Level: 1 (0 / 50) Race: Human Class: Knave Fav. Weapons: Katana Attributes Phys. Attack: 3 Phys. Defence: 2 Health: 53 / 53 Fortitude 5% Mag. Attack: 3 Mag. Defence: 4 Magic: 81 / 81 Status Resistance 60% Accuracy: 2 Evasion: 2 Stamina: 18 / 18 Move Speed 1.0x Passive Skills The Defiant

[Truth] [Class] Effect: +10% Damage when outmatched. -10% Damage taken when outmatched. +25% Status Resistance Alchemist's Knack [Rank 1] [Cross-Bonus] [Crafting] Effect: +30% Status Resistance Katana Mastery [Rank 1]

[Weapon] [Mastery]

Effect: +10% Scaling while equipped with a Katana (Main-Hand).

Active Skills

Draw Stance [Grade F — 10 / 50]

[Technique] [Weapon] [Katana] [Sheathed] [Iconic]

Cost: 5 Stamina

Effect: Enter a stance that increases the damage of your next basic attack or Katana Skill by (+20%). Effect broken by Unaligned Action.

Clean Cut [Grade F — 10 / 50]

[Technique] [Weapon] [Katana] Cost: 15 Stamina

Effect: Deal (150%) damage to a single target. Deals (+20%) bonus damage against Adventurers if performed under [Draw Stance].

Savage Cut [Grade F — 10 / 50] [Technique] [Weapon] [Katana] Cost: 15 Stamina Effect: Deal (150%) damage to a single target. Inflicts (10%) Bleed damage if performed under [Draw Stance].

Sneak

[Technique] [Class] [Stealth] [Non-Combat] Cost: 10 Stamina / 5 Stamina per Hour Effect: You enter Basic Stealth. Effect broken by Action or Disruption.

It was my stat page.

It wasn't that any one aspect of it was irredeemable. The stat block I’d been born with was poor. A weak total, combined with a poor distribution. That could be overcome. A lack of Skills, both passive and active, symptomatic of neither training nor natural ability. That could be overcome. No natural talent yet discovered. That could be—you get the picture. The problem was that I was distinctly unremarkable, except in how mediocre my base was, and also in how such things extended beyond my stat page. There were a multitude of magical devices and objects that could make up for my multitude of shortcomings, but none that were readily available to a nobody out in The Shores, who had no prospects as an adventurer besides. And that was before addressing the issues outside the page. I wasn't born into an adventuring family, nor did I have the privelege of living in a city with an adventurer's college. There wasn't anyone, who could really instruct me on all the pifalls of the life, or who could mentor me in a weapon.

Was there anything to me that I could even leverage to help myself forward?

Stupid question.

Of course there was, there was my craft.

There wasn’t a plan, yet. I wasn’t so presumptuous to think I could construct one, knowing as little as I did, but I did have a hunch. There were certain things I was sure would be useful, no matter how things went. Being practiced and improving more so than anything else.

And thus I began to work.

Kamei had once offhanded scoffed at Alchemy as little more than ‘Cooking without the imagination.’ Whether he was serious or trying to rile me up, it wasn’t a rare perspective.

It was, however, completely and utterly wrong.

Chemistry and Preparation were similar mechanically. Alchemy and Cooking were lightyears apart. Cooking was an effort in judgment, in understanding the exact nature of one’s ingredients and how each related to one another. Alchemy, by contrast, was about time management, calculation and discovery. The Chef had a thousand choices—how to treat an ingredient, side dishes, sauce— but only a handful of desirable outcomes.

It wasn’t like that for an Alchemist

“Split ten stacks into six and four, three minutes and two minutes...that’s...yeah, that’s exact.”

A Heat Resistance potion needed salamander flesh, ice crystals and water, and there was a precise, correct way to make it. Or it needed fire drake scales, water crystals, formic acid and wet clay and there was a precise, correct way to make that. The mark of a skillful Alchemist was his repertoire. There were not recipes to be embellished or modified. There were instructions and procedures to be followed.

“Add solution in thirty...”...twenty-nine...twenty-eight...

There were certain rules, yes. In fact, there were many rules...But they were rules learned in hindsight, used to estimate what else might result in something useful. And then there was Astrology, the other side of Alchemy, which made the process even more finicky and restricted.

And even after all that, Cooking was still the greater craft in many regards. Especially those valued by adventurers, like healing and persistent stat bonuses.

But where it lost out in potency...

The North Star will pass overhead in three...two…

Alchemy made up for in breadth.

EXP Booster Mix [D Grade] x10 Created!

Gained 8CP in Alchemy!

The next day, armed with a quest log [Quest: Shopping Trip!] of Reagents I had to replace, whose bottom trailed far below my field of vision, and whose contents I barely knew how I could afford without telling my father, I made the trip to Mr Adamite’s Arcana. The whole morning was a barely remembered blur, as ideas and thoughts and worries and hopes bounced around my head. It almost felt like I'd fallen asleep while moving, only to wake up first at breakfast, then as I said goodbyet to my father, and finally as I stood in front of Mr Arcanite's Arcana.

And yet, somehow despite this, there was something that pricked my attention through that anxious, excited haze.

The greengrocer stall was conspicuously unattended.