Extra's Survival: Raising SSS-Rank Characters Is My Only Option

[ ✦ Minor Narrative Event Detected ✦ ]

[ The fate of an unwritten character has been permanently altered. ]

Jin nearly jumped.

’Give me a warning, damn it! My heart almost stopped.’

[ Narrative Relevance Updated: 0.11% → 0.17% ]

[ Calculating Minor Reward... ]

He tried to keep his face neutral and watched the text from the corner of his eye.

’A reward? For this?’

[ Calculating... ]

[ Calculating... ]

[ ERROR: Reward allocation failed. ]

Jin blinked.

[ Cause: Target relevance value could not be resolved. Recalculating... ]

[ ERROR. ]

[ Reward delivery has been rescheduled. We apologize for the inconvenience. ]

The text flickered once before settling in and vanishing.

Jin stared at the empty air where it had been. He waited a few more seconds, but nothing else came - no reward, no explanation, not even the decency of an error code. The Developers of this system clearly didn’t know how to add clear error messages.

’Fuck this faulty system,’ he cursed aloud, letting out his frustration. But when he calmed down and thought about the messages, something caught his attention.

’We apologize? Who is we?’

Of course, he didn’t get an answer.

The system also said - Target relevance value could not be resolved.

He turned the phrase over in his head and looked at the boy by the door, who was carefully folding a piece of paper as if it were made of gold leaf.

’The system couldn’t measure him??’

He had a strange feeling about it, not a bad feeling exactly but not a small one either.

✧ ✧ ✧

The next day, they saw the registrar an hour after dawn.

It took less time than buying the horse.

A clerk in Lord Ferri’s east wing read the deed twice, copied it into a ledger the size of a paving stone, and took Gu’s wrist as if he had done it thousands of times.

The counterbar iron was small and silver-white, and it did not burn - which was new information for Jin. The skin simply accepted it, as the wax accepts the stamp.

One straight bar was struck cleanly through the tally,

”Freed man Gus,” The clerk said to the ledger and to anyone present as he wrote. ”Manumitted by Encrid Gannon. Witnessed by an honorable knight of the Gannon household - Sir Gareth Varus. Registered.”

The process was done.

Gus stared at his own wrist all the way back across the courtyard, holding it slightly away from his body as he was carrying something borrowed and expensive.

”It’s still there,” he finally muttered.

”It’ll always be there,” Jin said. ”So will the bar. Anyone who grabs your wrist from now on will know you are a free man, but they’ll also know you were a slave. Wear a glove from now on.”

Gus looked at the tally, and the clean silver white line struck through it, for a moment longer. Then he pulled his sleeve down over it, and his chin came up a degree, and he walked the rest of the way like a boy with somewhere to be.

✧ ✧ ✧

Later that same morning, Jin learned that the world was fundamentally unfair.

He had suspected this for a long time, of course. His previous life had provided substantial evidence. But the final proof arrived in the house Cavel’s training yard, holding a wooden sword.

”Left foot forward,” Sir Gareth said. ”Weiht low. Grip loose at the top hand, firm at the bottom. Now hold the stance.”

Gus held the stance.

Jin looked at him. Then he looked down at his own body, arranged into what he had sincerely believed was the same stance. Then he looked at Gus once again.

They were not the same stance.

Gus stood the way the stance would have been depicted in a diagram manual, if they could breathe. His feet had found their distance on the first try. His shoulders sat level. The wooden sword rose from his hands at an angle that looked less like something he was doing and more like something that was simply true.

”Good,” Sir Gareth said.

’Good?’

Jin had been swinging a sword for three days, and the most generous word Sir Gareth had produced was ’Again’. The boy held a sword for the first time in his life for the length of one breath and had already earned a - Good?

”Now step and cut. Slowly.”

Gus stepped and cut. Slowly.

The wooden blade moved through the cold air in one clean line, from high to low, and stopped exactly where it was supposed to stop. There was no wobble. There was no drunk bird. His hips turned with the cut, his weight falling on the blade the same moment where it was needed, and the whole thing looked so natural that Jin felt personally insulted.

Sir Gareth was quiet for a moment.

”Again,” he said, but it was a different kind of ’again’ than the one Jin received every morning.

Gus did it again.

And it was better the second time.

The old knight walked a slow circle around the boy, studying his feet, his grip, the line of his back. When he came around the front, his face had the carefully controlled expression of a merchant who has found a gemstone in a bag of gravel and doesn’t want the seller to notice.

”Boy, you said you have never trained?”

”I haven’t, sir.” Gus lowered the sword, suddenly anxious. ”I swear it. I only watched the household knights train every morning in the east yard. And I could see them from the stable loft while I did my work. I just... watched them. I’m sorry.”

”You’re apologizing,” Jin said flatly, ”for having eyes?”

”...Sorry, young master.”

”Stop apologizing.”

Yes, young master, sorr- yes.”

Sir Gareth ignored the exchange entirely. He raised his own practice sword and demonstrated a movement - a short parry into a step, something Jin had never been shown. He did it twice.

”Copy that.”

Gus copied it.

It wasn’t perfect. His timing was early, and his back foot dragged. But it was recognizably the same movement - on the first attempt, and the second attempt fixed the back foot on its own.

Jin watched all of this from four feet away, holding his own wooden sword, experiencing a rich and complicated emotion.

’This is what talent looks like.’

He had read the phrase a thousand times in novels. A genius who learns in a day what others learn in a year. As a reader, he had loved those characters.

But standing next to one was an entirely different experience.

’Five years,’ Jin thought, watching the boy repeat the parry a third time, cleaner again. ’Five years he watched other people train from a stable, because it was death for him to pick up a sword. And Encrid, who was handed a six-star sword art the day he could walk, drank himself into an F rank.’

The unfairness of it was so complete, and so perfectly circular, that he almost laughed.

The System apparently agreed that the moment deserved its intervention.

[ Delayed Reward Delivery In Progress... ]

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