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

They were professional, Jin had to admit. As far as the bandits went, that is.

They didn’t scream or charge or act like dumb robbers.

They closed the circle to javelin range and stopped, spears leveled, crossbows resting on stumps, in the practiced manner of men who had done this many times to caravans that couldn’t fight back.

From the treeline, their leader came forward - a wide slab of a man with a broken-nosed face like a mishandled anvil and a boar spear over his shoulder.

Jin decided to try the cheap option first, on the principle that Violence was unnecessary and words were free.

”Good morning,” he called out, and pulled his collar aside so the signet caught the light. ”Before anyone does anything expensive - my name is Encrid Gannon. This is the White Griffin you’re looking at. Fourth son of Duke Aegis Von Gannon, who owns the ground you’re standing on, the trees you slept under, and every judge between here and the capital. Walk away now, and today never happened.”

Silence.

Then the big man laughed, and the circle laughed with him.

”That’s the one, boys - matches the description and everything.” He rolled his neck. ”Sorry, little lordling. We know exactly who you are. That’s exactly why we are here, in fact.”

’It didn’t work,’ Jin noted. ’Interesting. And informative.’

”Young master,” Harun said solemnly, ”that was very impressive. I have never seen twenty-five men become less frightened at once.”

”Harun.”

”Truly, the name carried weight. All of it downward.”

But Jin’s mind had already stepped past the joke and was thinking about the real question.

’They aren’t afraid of the Duke. Bandits don’t laugh at that white griffin crest. They especially don’t ambush it if they know. Robbing a duke’s son isn’t profit but suicide - every sellsword in the empire would hunt them for the bounty. So they’re not here to rob.’

And by the way, they are laughing at the opening at the party - it was very likely that they knew who’d be on this road, they knew when, and someone paid them enough to make the White Griffin a target instead of a warning.

And there was exactly one person Jin could think of who would do such a thing.

’The brat actually did it,’ Jin thought, torn between outrage and a kind of awed disbelief. ’That rust-haired idiot actually hired bandits to murder a duke’s son over a barroom insult. He’s either the bravest fool in the north, or he genuinely believes nobody will care that I’m dead.’

The second thought landed harder than he wanted it to. He set it down and turned in the saddle.

”Sir Gareth. Twenty-five of them. Honest assessment - can the four of you manage it?”

The old knight looked over the ring of spears, slowly, the way a man reads a menu when he isn’t hungry.

”No sweat, young master.”

”...I beg your pardon?”

”It’s an expression I heard somewhere recently.” Sir Gareth drew his sword. The sound it made coming out of the scabbard was soft, and every trained ear in the ambush circle heard it anyway, and the laughter died. ”Learned it from the young ones I used to train.”

He said as his horse moved a bit forward. ”Yohan. The young master and the boy - stay on them. Harun, Berrick. Leave the leader able to speak.”

”How generous should we be about the rest?” Harun asked, drawing.

”They came to kill the duke’s son,” Sir Gareth said. ”Be exactly that generous.”

What followed was something Jin would spend years failing to describe accurately.

He had read a hundred fight scenes in the novel. He had imagined them, thrilled at them, reread them. None of it had prepared him for the sheer wrongness of watching three men move through twenty-five like weather through a paper town.

Sir Gareth did not appear to hurry. Somehow, he was always already where he needed to be. A crossbowman atop a tree stump lost his weapon, his footing, and his consciousness in a single unhurried pass. Gareth never seemed to swing harder than necessary. Every strike was measured. Every movement economical. A sword wrist snapped beneath the flat of his blade. A knee buckled. A pommel struck a temple. Men collapsed before they fully understood they had been beaten.

Berrick moved like flowing water.

His blade traced flat, efficient lines through the chaos, never wasting so much as an inch of motion. A sword slipped from numb fingers. A shield spun away into the brush. A charging axeman found himself face-first in the dirt after a single step inside Berrick’s reach. Wherever he passed, resistance simply... folded.

Harun, meanwhile, was laughing, and it was somehow the most terrifying sound on the battlefield.

A spear came hurtling toward him. Without breaking stride, he caught it one-handed, glanced at its balance with mock disappointment, then hurled it back.

The weapon crossed the road with a crack.

It punched through a man’s coat, through the leather beneath it, and buried itself deep into the trunk of a pine.

The unfortunate bandit hung there for a bewildered second before his feet found the ground again.

”I meant to miss,” Harun called cheerfully.

The man immediately decided surrender was an excellent idea.

Elsewhere, another bandit rushed Gareth from behind.

Before Jin could even shout a warning, the knight stepped sideways.

The attack met empty air.

Gareth’s elbow drove into the man’s ribs, followed by the hilt of his sword beneath the chin. The bandit crumpled as a puppet with its strings cut.

Star energy hummed off them like heat off a forge. Three stars. Four stars. Numbers on a page, right up until the page stood up and broke a war band in ninety seconds.

Jin sat stiffly atop his increasingly nervous horse, trying very hard not to become part of the battle by accident.

Beside him, Gus gripped the reins so tightly his knuckles had turned white.

Yohan, meanwhile, lounged in his saddle with one leg dangling lazily over the side, watching the spectacle as though it were street entertainment.

’This,’ Jin thought, with a want so sharp and sudden it startled him, ’is what strength looks like. This.’

Jin wasn’t entirely convinced there was a difference. For a brief moment, he wondered whether he should join in.

His hand even drifted toward the sword at his waist.

Then he watched Harun casually knock three men unconscious with the shaft of a borrowed spear while Berrick disarmed another without spilling a drop of blood.

...Perhaps another day.

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