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

The reports reached the Gannon estate over the space of five days, from five different directions.

The first came the letter from Lord Ferris Cavel, written in the old baron’s own economical hand.

Then the petitions from the three major merchant guilds of the north in association with smaller merchant guilds, which itself was remarkable because the northern merchants rarely agreed on anything without rebuking each other.

Then the report of Sir Gareth, sent in secret, which contained the factual and dry report on what Encrid was up to.

The last was a hysterical letter from the house Maren, where in the young lord Rodric protested his innocence against the forgeries and slanders across six pages that read as though written at speed and possibly drunk.

And the last was the copied ledger from the bandit stronghold itself, sent by Encrid.

Duke Aegis read all of them at the same worktable where, some weeks before, he had looked down at his kneeling son and prepared to cut him off the family tree.

He read for a long time.

The study was silent but for the sound of crackling fire.

Corvan, who had served the house for thirty years and was one of four living men permitted to stand in this room while the duke thought, watched his master’s face and could read, as always, nothing at all.

”Corvan.”

”Your Grace.”

”Summarize what my son has done. I wish to hear it aloud.”

Corvan had prepared for this, after all- that was his job as the steward and the close associate of the Duke.

He began narrating the brief report he had prepared.

”The young master, after leaving the Gannon estate, arrived at House Cavel following several days of travel. It was reported that he was received personally by Baron Ferris and shared a private dinner with him. During his stay, he also freed a purchased slave-a boy who has remained with him ever since.”

The man paused briefly before continuing.

”Upon leaving House Cavel, the young master travelled east, eventually reaching the eastern ridges of Maren, where he stayed at an inn for the night. According to several witnesses, he intervened when a Maren soldier assaulted a commoner and issued a warning under his own name.”

His voice remained even.

”When House Maren answered that insult by hiring known bandits to kill him on the road, the young master’s escorts defeated the attackers. He then led the surviving bandits to their stronghold, seized the fortress, and recovered evidence of their activities. There he freed nineteen subjects of the Empire who had been abducted and imprisoned there. He recovered approximately four seasons’ worth of stolen cargo, along with coin and other valuables taken from merchants, villages, and travellers throughout the region.”

”And rather than burn the fortress, execute the surviving culprits, or simply take the recovered wealth for himself, the young master summoned every injured party he could identify and ordered their property returned in public, before witnesses, with the claims verified against the documents recovered from the stronghold. And including documentary evidence that the heir of House Maren had financed the banditry throughout the region and other evidence - the young master copied and distributed them to the guilds, House Cavel, and yourself. He then departed for the Wall, taking the surviving bandits with him as a labor levy.”

”He is en route to the Wall,” the duke repeated.

”Yes, Your Grace.”

The duke set the pages down, aligned their edges, and looked into the fire.

What he did not say aloud, and what Corvan therefore had to assemble from thirty years of practice, was the calculation moving behind those arctic eyes - because Aegis Von Gannon assessed his children the way he assessed campaigns, and the assessment had come back wearing an unfamiliar shape.

The Encrid he knew would have attacked - and, if provoked far enough, he would have ordered the knights to kill the nobleman. That would have created a catastrophe, one that would eventually have forced the duke to choose between his son and the law. Yet the boy had done none of it.

He had not started a feud that would bleed the North of needless bloodshed and battles. Instead, he had protected commoners, strengthening House Gannon’s name in the hearts of its people. He had gathered evidence, making the house’s case nearly impossible to refute. And he had staged the revelation before the guilds and House Cavel itself, ensuring that the demand for justice would no longer come solely from the family.

But it would come from below-from the merchants, the villages, and the bannermen-until it reached the duke’s table not as a family’s bitter dispute, but as a petition backed by half the North, one the duke could not simply dismiss.

And it had indeed come.

”He has given me no choice at all,” the duke said quietly to the fire. ”How efficient.”

There was almost something like admiration in the words.

The only thing left for him to do was deliver the verdict Encrid had already prepared for him.

Corvan could not tell from the duke’s tone whether it was disapproval or the furthest edge of pride. He suspected the duke could not entirely tell either.

Aegis drew a fresh sheet of paper, dipped his quill, and began to write.

What he wrote was very short.

”Corvan. Dispatch this to Sir Aldos. The Second Wing of the White Griffin is to ride for Maren Ridge within the week. A full commission of inquiry is to proceed under my seal, with every petition from the guilds attached. Examine every account. Question every soldier. Trace every coin that has passed through House Maren’s hands.”

”And if the evidence is confirmed, Your Grace?”

The duke finished the letter and signed his name.

”Then House Maren has spent a year feeding its own subjects to bandits, attempted the murder of my blood to conceal it, and lied to my face in writing.”

He set down the quill.

The fire cracked softly in the silence.

When the duke spoke again, his voice had not risen in the slightest. Somehow, that made the room feel colder.

”If it is confirmed, eradicate them.”

Corvan remained still.

”Tell Sir Aldos to make certain the North understands what it costs to lay a hand upon my blood.”

”Yes, Your Grace.”

Corvan bowed, took the letter, and had nearly reached the door when the duke spoke once more, in a different register entirely - flat, unwilling, as if the question had escaped confinement.

”The innkeeper. The one my son placed under protection.” A pause. ”See that the protection is real. Quietly. No names.”

”...Yes, Your Grace.”

The door closed. The duke sat alone with the fire and pages of Sir Gareth’s dry report, and after a while he turned back to the one line he had read four times already, in the report’s final section.

The young master trains at every halt. He has no talent that I can find, Your Grace. He continues anyway. I am teaching him the basics as of now.

Aegis Von Gannon looked at that line for a long moment.

Then he filed the report, took up his quill, and returned to the empire’s business, and if the great study’s firelight caught something unfamiliar in the arctic eyes, there was no one left in the room to read it.

Two hundred miles north, the subject of the report was at that moment lying unconscious in a carriage, being force-fed a sword style by a glitching system - and would never learn that on this particular evening, in the coldest study in the empire, his father had read his name without disappointment for the first time in years.

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