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

The first thing the nose smelled properly came from Fennick, in the middle of a conversation about boots.

The Far-watch had been doubled.

Encrid knew that much. The order had reached his desk as a simple change in rations.

What he hadn’t been told was where the new patrols were being sent.

Fennick showed him on the table at the Crooked Lantern, using spilled ale to draw the patrol routes.

Every new patrol had been sent north and east. Every one of them.

The western side of the Wall had always seen most of their encounters with roamers. For ten years, it had produced nearly two-thirds of all reported sightings.

But the western patrols were still following the old schedule.

”They’re not looking for roamers, are they?” Encrid said.

Fennick took a drink.

”They’re looking for where the roamers went.”

Encrid looked at him.

”What did you find?”

”Nothing, my lord.”

Fennick’s eyes stopped moving.

That was the most disturbing thing Encrid had seen all week.

”Four hundred square miles of forest,” Fennick said. ”Nothing there. No Reevers. No Rackhorns. Not even a Grinner hiding in a rotten log.”

He turned his cup slowly in his hand.

”There are deer everywhere. Fat ones, too. They’ve got nothing hunting them.”

Encrid said nothing.

Fennick looked at him.

”The forest isn’t full anymore.”

He paused.

”It’s been emptied.”

He paused.

”And whatever emptied it,” Fennick continued, ”went east or north.”

Something was happening at the Wall, and Encrid was getting restless because he knew almost nothing about it.

Whatever the ’Last Age of Radiance’ had recorded about the Wall had happened after its fall. The only thing Encrid knew for certain was that it was somehow connected to the Sin of Pride.

But knowing that didn’t help him.

He had no idea what was happening, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Encrid let out a sigh and walked outside.

He turned toward the place that had become his usual escape.

The frozen training ground behind the granary was rarely crowded. Most of the men who trained there had been discarded by society. They had little hope of getting stronger, and even less reason to believe things would get better.

But these days, Encrid could almost always find someone there.

Gus was there even now, practicing his swordsmanship.

Encrid had made a habit of training beside him. They usually kept going until his hands became so tired that he could barely close them.

And thanks to that - he could see some improvements in just a month.

[Gannon Family Swordsmanship: E (2%) → E (9%)]

[Appraisal: F (19%) → F (31%)]

The first increase came from training.

The second came from something else.

Curiosity.

There were eleven thousand people on the Wall, and Encrid had made a point of reading every person he passed.

Clerks. Captains. Lamplighters. Levy soldiers.

Most held Common talents.

Occasionally, he found someone Uncommon.

Once or twice, he had even seen someone marked Rare.

He wrote down their names.

Because that was the other ledger he was keeping.

The one nobody knew about.

He kept it in a locked drawer, written entirely in English - a language from his old world that nobody here could read.

And at the top of the first page, he had written a single word:

RESOURCES.

✧ ✧ ✧

The next day, Encrid walked the Wall - it was his rest day.

Even that had become a habit. He climbed to the walk with a clerk’s satchel as his excuse and paced from bastion to bastion, checking the real world against the paper one. He had found four mistakes that way, including a javelin store that only existed in ink. The watch officers had stopped being suspicious of the strange young lord with the ledgers. Now they were almost glad to see him, because a supply complaint made to Encrid Gannon tended to be fixed within 2-3 days.

But the ledgers were the excuse.

Encrid came up here to look at the forest.

He stood in the

shelter of the ninth-mile tower with his hands in his coat. He did what he did every time. He took out the three names, turned them over, and put them back.

The first was Vael’Zira.

Yggdrasil’s Shadow. The Forest Child. One of the Eight Stars of Astralis. The girl the forest itself had raised, who spoke to the green the way other people speak to family, and who would one day stand between two worlds and be claimed by both. The novel had loved her, and the readers had loved her more.

And she was in there. Somewhere in that dark, right now, guarded by the Root Elves - the forest’s keepers, who had not shown themselves to men in three hundred years and killed the ones who came looking.

Encrid had thought about it a dozen times, but no matter what - a one-star initiate walking into the great green forest to find its most protected child was simply suicide.

’I have to set her aside for now.’

The second name was Rael, and he was the whole reason he was on this stone. Encrid set him aside too, but only because he had a plan for him, and the plan was slow, and slow plans should not be picked at.

Which left the third. And the third was not a name at all. That was the part that had started to bother him.

The novel had given it a title. The Sin of Pride - eventually becoming the strongest of the Seven.

The one that even the other six sins were careful around. And the author had done what he always did with his best material. He had held it back for a decade and then spent it all at once.

Twelve volumes of a title with nothing attached to it. Then, in the middle of volume twelve, a fight.

Encrid remembered reading about the fight scene.

The Sword Saint had met it. Not Arthur but the current generation sword saint. The Empire’s strongest sword, the man they sent when there was nothing else left to send. The Chapter had run four times the normal length, and the readers had poured out their excitement like anything.

The Sword Saint had not won. He had not lost either. He came away alive with most of his ribs broken.

And the description of the thing he had fought was three paragraphs long, and Encrid could still recite it, because every one of those paragraphs had been about how little there was to describe.

|| It was man-high. It was man-shaped. It was pale, and it wore nothing, and it carried nothing, and the light near it bent, as though the world could not stop paying attention to it. ||

Encrid forced himself to focus on the useful part of what he had learned.

’So it can’t be killed.’

’Not by me. Not by this Wall. Not by anyone the Empire can send.’

That wasn’t pessimism. It was a fact.

Whatever he did here, it would survive.

Encrid stared at the treeline for a while longer.

Then there was the second thing.

It had taken him weeks to notice it. Now that he had, he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The sheet in every captain’s room had seven rows, but only four of them had ever been filled.

At first, Encrid had assumed the empty rows meant ’Level Four, but worse’. The highest point of the scale. The next rung of the ladder.

He was wrong.

Encrid had read the Wall’s old histories in the small library beside the mess.

There had been eleven recorded Level Four encounters in the last two hundred years.

Every one of them had been a powerful roamer - huge and old beings..

Creatures that had torn through a bastion’s watch and required a Master to kill.

But they were still roamers.

They had cores in their chests.

After they were killed, the salvage teams had gone out, cut those cores free, and sold them south like any other.

The empty rows were not the top of the ladder.

They were a different ladder entirely.

Someone had drawn those rows two hundred years ago because they needed somewhere to record things that the normal system couldn’t describe.

Encrid had once asked Cray about them while submitting a requisition.

The Gatekeeper had looked at him with the tired patience of a man who had answered the same question many times before.

”It means run, my lord.”

That was all Cray had said.

Then he returned to his ledger.

”There’s a reason those rows have no number. A number tells a captain how many men to send.”

He paused.

”There is no number you can put there that wouldn’t be a lie.”

Encrid looked back toward the forest.

*And the Sin of Pride isn’t a roamer.”

If it had one, the author would have mentioned it.

That man had never missed a chance to explain how something worked.

’So what is it?’

Encrid didn’t know.

He put the question away, just as he did with everything he couldn’t answer.

There was always something else he had to do.

He turned and went down the stairs toward the next muster.

If Encrid had known that the answer was already three months old, sleeping in a valley twelve days north of the Wall, he would have gone down those stairs much faster.

✦ ✦ ✦