Rafe thought the guys he was fighting were dangerous if a little bit underwhelming compared to the experts he'd fought over his journey. Still, there were thousands of ways to win a fight and a million to lose one you thought you would win without any doubt. He would know. He couldn't remember the last time he'd won a fight against someone who was supposed to be at his level.

  The tournament in Shariah had been a kind of reprieve. There he'd met combatants he could crush with pure might. Then he'd gone up against archmages and advanced practitioners. Rafe knew he was in a special position, based on the fact he was weaker than anyone at his level should be. Weaker physically, that was.

  He did not have the statistics to match people at level fifty to seventy-five. That was why people who should have been his peers were still a little stronger than him. Still, he managed to hold on until he faced the first grand mage in his bracket in an epic duel that had them destroying the whole simulated combat field. With his flighty style, even though his endurance was lagging, he was hard to take out.

  He lost in the end, but every grand mage he challenged thereafter accepted to fight him. He had gotten experience fighting the best mages on this continent, and probably this world. And they had all been above level one hundred in the eyes of the system. A whole race ranked above him if he remembered the ranking system Noid had given him right. Still, every once in a while, Rafe had lost fights to people his weight class or lower. Simply because they were more talented sometimes, but also because they had more cunning than he had anticipated.

  He had a weakness. He had spent thirty five years now sharpening his blade, and if he ever landed on an opponent who he couldn't cut, well, things took a bad turn. If his opponent specialised, in say, spacial magic, illusions, even just plain old barrier magic, Rafe would lose, not to mention tanks. He was so easily countered. It was worse if his opponent was clever.

  Rafe had always known he wasn't the best thinker, but the trance he fell into during combat had exacerbated the fact. He couldn't think. He could only attack, try to cut. At least his well honed techniques weren't left to the wayside when he entered his trance. He wasn't some kind of berserker, but he was pretty sure this was some kind of skill he would find once he unlocked his status screen.

  All these and more thoughts flashed through his mind as he studied the opponents arrayed before him. He hadn't fought seriously in months, and he didn't have his swords. His body trembled as he stepped away from Su’Arian. He couldn't tell if he was scared or excited.

  He watched as the hecklers got serious. He saw at least three peel off from the group and almost disappear. He had his fair experience with assassins by now though, and he'd spent months training with the masters of illusions, the light masters on their floating island.

  He wasn't scared of the assassins. The mundane-looking scouts and porters though, he kept a close eye on those. And maybe that was a mistake, given he was still a bit hangover from the previous night's festivities. An axe wielder screamed as he charged him. The war cry was all that saved Rafe from a self-perpetrated ambush.

  He lifted a chair to block the axe. The chair broke into pieces of wood and debris. All Rafe retained were two legs, and those would have to be enough, for though they were light, they fit his hands well. He grinned as he looked at the man ahead of him. With a single twirl, the man cried as he barreled into his comrades. Then Rafe was among them. The time for thinking was over.

  A fire spell flew towards him, and since he'd promised to protect the tavern, could only try to cut through it with his pieces of blunt wood. Only, they couldn't cut, and he hadn't infused sharpness into them, as Noid had warned him against cultivating insights in the void.

  The fire hit him with a whoosh, and he flew back a few paces, looking at his body in disbelief. He stared at his enemies once more, and he couldn't keep a grin from his face. He didn't even bother trying to defuse the flames as he swung in the direction of the fire mage, his movement technique carrying him almost unseen right to her side. He cloaked her before she could react, and by the time a sword swing cleaved that location he'd long since left.

  He had a few seconds before the flames, hotter than normal flames, burned through his barely surviving threads. He wanted this fight done before that could be a problem. Sometimes this was why he lost. He liked to set challenges for himself during the fight, even if it was already a hard fight. This time though, he was just stretching his wings a little.

  The mages would fall first, he decided, even as he danced through their ill-formed formation. Then all ranged fighters. Then the melee fighters would panic, those who were fast enough to follow him at least. They might have had better stats all told, but his agility stat was more effective than theirs two times over. He'd specialised in it for a long time, squeezing every ounce of potential from it and more. He was sure he had a skill that passively made moving easier, boosting his agility further.

  And his flexibility too, even if that was not a stat he remembered. Still, the ease with which his muscles responded to the smallest instruction? He was there, among three mages lost to the motions of their spells. His left leg, his body still in the air, aimed at the temple of one of the mages, his right leg aimed to help him land, and both his arms were attacking like they had minds of their own.

  He launched himself with his right leg before he'd even fully landed, like a ballerina bouncing off a pond, and he was among the next group of five, his body twisting and turning like he was made of rubber and not cartilage and bone. He didn't kill anyone. It was the privilege of the strong, and for some reason, he felt like these guys were not stronger than him.

  They were perhaps elites, between levels twenty-five and fifty. They only had, if that, twice as many stats as him if he had to guess. And Rafe could deal with someone who only doubled the number of stats he had because his supposed peers tripled his stats.

  Only people below the threshold of mastery depended on their stats wholesale like these idiots did. Rafe wondered if, at least according to this world, he'd long reached the realm of mastery even without using a single concept ability. Then again, maybe training his agility stat to the max had gotten him some insight into speed. Maybe he had and was unconsciously using insight into momentum. That would be bad for his future development, but he couldn't get himself to care.

  He bounced off a shield with his wooden staves breaking into mere shrapnel. A piece of paper flattered after him, and he almost ignored it. He rolled away at the last second as the talisman exploded. There was something off about the green flames it spewed.

  He cursed himself for having forgotten to keep track of the porters. One was already aiming to shoot him down with a crossbow. He'd bet everything it was an exploding shot. The damn bastards were going to burn down Su’Arian's tavern, and he'd promised her.

  He moved so fast even he couldn't believe it. He intercepted the bolt a centimeter away from its crossbow, then he redirected it straight into an open window. The explosion sent the villagers into a tizzy, but the adventurers just stared at him, shocked.

  The talisman user scrambled to get something from his bag, but Rafe arrived before he was ready, or so he thought. The talisman user backpedaled with a smirk, leaving his dummy bag in Rafe's scrambling hands. He jumped at the last second, the trap array blasting a swathe of hot green liquid upward, like a volcano. Rafe watched the floor melt, and he seethed. That was Su’Arian's floor.

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  Rafe charged the talisman user before he could regroup with the others. His vicious attack was redirected though, instead landing on a shield he hadn't been aiming for and bouncing back. Before the shield wielder could celebrate though, the momentum of the bounce helped Rafe body check a spear wielder who hadn't seen him enter his range. And for some reason, Rafe bounced right off, feeling the other man's bones snap, yet none of Rafe's did.

  He grabbed the flying spear, turned it butt up, and cloaked a wide-eyed assassin who had no idea she was not fooling anyone with her hiding spot. He did not rest, not even for a moment, going for the talisman wielder before anyone could react. The crossbowman was holding an enchanted spear now. Rafe saw it, saw the trick, and pretended to fall for it. He'd fought enough explosion mages to know the gimmick. He just had to make sure their weapons didn't touch, easy. That one went down as well.

  He was like the wind, with a cape of fire following him wherever he went. The last person he had to defeat was a tank, go figure. And by then he had long since spent ten seconds longer than he had planned for, and so the fire made calculating his approach difficult. He was in pain. What better could he do than throw ineffectual fiery fists at the shield, pushing the shield wielder back with an unconscious application of a heavy blow skill?

  The shield wielder decided it was impossible someone could get the better of his impenetrable defense, and he charged a shield bash. Rafe gained clarity long enough to remember the technique he had faced hundreds of times before, and after dodging it, cloaked that man too.

  He stood there, with only a few threads trying, and failing, to prevent his skin from scalding.

  “Well, that was something,” he said to the stunned tavern.

  It hadn't taken him fifty seconds to defeat a horde of warriors anyone would have called elites in the pre-system era.

  Of course, he hadn't known they were elites when he first beat them. He didn't know anything about them.

  Su’Arian rushed towards him, fussing over nothing, in his opinion. It was strange, she wasn't even looking at the mass of bodies he had very carefully deposited so they didn't touch any of her furniture. She wasn't looking at the exploded floor boards, corrupted by a poisonous green fire.

  “Your clothes are all ruined!” she yelped. “Did it burn you?”

  She was touching his exposed, blackened shoulder. It was just soot, he was sure. The fire might have nicked his skin and heated it a little, but it hadn't been going long enough to outright burn him.

  “I'm fine, relax,” he assured, then, looking around, he frowned, “and I kept my word, see? The tavern is still standing. There might be a few drops of errant blood here and there, but I'm sure you can—”

  She grumbled something, or rather mumbled loudly, he couldn't quite tell. It was loud and gruff enough to get his attention, but still unintelligible somehow.

  “What was that?”

  “I said, it wasn't the tavern I was worried about, you idiot!” she yelled with a vicious glare. “It's a tavern. Fights happen all the time.”

  “Huh? Me… you were worried about me?”

  She looked away from him then, doing her best to hide her face from him. She couldn't hide the heat creeping up her neck. Something in Rafe stirred at that, something like pride, self-confidence. Su’Arian was taller than most women, and at twenty-five in a peaceful society, she was considered a spinster. Rafe couldn't but imagine the woman had fallen for him, and he was fast forgetting all his scruples about Noid's mind and whatnot. When he'd just entered the trial, he would have been a lot shorter than her. Thirty years later, and although he still looked about twenty, he was at least much taller.

  This woman was cute, with all her tough love and kicking him out of the tavern every morning.

  “You look a lot younger with your hair done up like that. And you are a lot stronger than I thought too,” she said, still not meeting his eyes.

  Rafe took a step toward her, intending to wrap her up in an embrace.

  “You bastard! Do you know who we are?”

  Rafe tensed, turning to look at the interrupter with what he hoped was a promise of violence if this chance was stolen. The man, stunned as he'd been, wasn't even looking at him. He was trying to get to his feet, his trembling feet, using a nearby table for support. Rafe was about to answer that no, he didn't know, and didn't care, but the man spoke before he did.

  “We are jade rankers, you bastard. We are the best Grayward has to offer. You think you can just beat us like this? No, you can't. We'll get you, I swear we'll get you. We'll kill you slowly.”

  Rafe's eyes widened, his countenance shifting to one of confusion. Jade ranked adventurers. The so-called elites, just below the peak tier elites known as masters, who were below the hidden juggernauts called grandmasters. They'd been so weak.

  “No. No. Nooo! You can't be jade rankers, you're so weak.”

  “Huh? What did you say, you bastard?”

  Rafe was still confused, but the murmurs from the villagers, who'd backed away when the fighting started brought him back. Su’Arian was behind him, and the new situation that might be developing with her was more important than—

  “You offended the wrong people, boy,” another adventurer said. “Even if you leave here alive, you will never know a day of peace. Neither will those rotten mercenaries.”

  Rafe's neck snapped around so fast, it was a wonder he didn't pull a muscle.

  “That's right? Who would hire at least five jade-rank parties looking for me? That doesn't make sense,” he thought out loud, trying to wrap his mind around the situation.

  No one said anything for a moment, but Rafe's mind was racing. He'd just thought about it, hadn't he? Returning to Grayward was the same as returning home to his friends and family, but he also had enemies there. He'd killed a party of jade-rank adventurers, and maybe a coalition of them had decided the fact that a silver ranked had killed their own was cause for a reckoning. Or even worse.

  He moved before he could think better of it, kicking the man who was still struggling to get up straight on the chin. The man cried as he fell back. Rafe didn't care. He stomped down on the man's hand, eliciting a sharp cry.

  “Who hired you?”

  The man only screamed louder.

  Another kick, this time to the stomach, then again, and again. The man was spitting blood.

  “Who hired you?!” he yelled, stomping on the man's hand again, increasing the pressure every few seconds.

  He was sure the man's wrist was going to snap a bunch more times if the fool did not answer his question.

  “The Ellan family! The Ellan family did!”

  “The Ellan family?” Rafe said quietly, half question, half confirmation.

  He kicked the man in the face, crushing his nose and knocking him out. He scanned the grounded bodies, looking for the second person to speak, the one who'd been giving ominous warnings.

  He kicked him a bunch of times, just trying to work through his thoughts. Noid had said his avatar was leaving the trial before Rafe had started his sword journey. Noid had stopped him from going to the noble district before, saying Rafe had been too weak at the time. Now there was no Noid, so he could take them down. There was also something these fools had said earlier, something about him having been gone only five years.

  Still, if he could show the damn Ellans that he didn't fear them. If he sent the adventurers back in pieces, maybe they'd leave him alone. He could settle here with Su’Arian and—

  “They are going to take the girls!” the man he was kicking cried.

  Rafe stopped then, stopped filtering out the man's piteous wails, and stopped kicking his guts out.

  “Explain,” he said, his voice so ice cold even he didn't recognize it.

  “They hired an emerald assassin, I think you killed someone she trained. They hired her with us, at the capital. She's going to kidnap Wilde's daughters.”

  Shit! That was all Rafe could think after hearing that. An emerald rank, a mythical rank. The equivalent of masters, although oftentimes believed to be even stronger. They hadn't mastered a concept ability. Instead, they'd mastered their skills fully.

  In the system era, they'd be the kind of people who'd maxed out all the levels of their skills, upgraded them, and continued leveling them, hence having skills that hit twice as hard as normal. And they had high levels too, skipping the bottleneck jade rankers faced at about level fifty by virtue of their skill prowess. They oftentimes also had at least partial insights, only lacking a developed concept and its ability. If they managed to develop their insights long enough, they could even skip the level seventy-five and one hundred bottlenecks that even some masters got stuck at.

  All of this was to say, this was going to be a problem. He couldn't in good conscience ignore a problem he had brought to the Wildes’ doorstep. He had thought he could fool around for a bit here in the mountains, but…

  Hadn't Noid said how long the trial lasted depended on energy? And his resurrections depended on that same energy. Even his adamance of the blade ran on this energy as far as he knew. He had died about fifteen times during his journey, that he could remember. Once in the elven forest, once when he went to visit the light templars on Maeve, and a

  few handfuls of times on the demon continent. He couldn't deny the obvious anymore.

  The trial was going to end with this next confrontation. He looked at Su’Arian, his face blank. And the look she gave him... She knew too.