Jack walked through the rain with his ten fish, feeling entirely too ridiculous after what had just happened.

  Exhaustion and soaked clothes pulled on his tired limbs, yet there was this inextricable lightness to his mind. He’d done it! He’d survived! Despite all odds, this horrible day had sent his way, he’d done it.

  He’d reached level 10. In all honesty, he thought it would’ve taken him at least a week to reach this milestone after everything Olric told him concerning how hard it was to gain EXP out of combat. Yet, in fairness, it had been through combat that he’d gained so much of the precious resource.

  A part of him desperately ached to confirm the reward dispensation messages, but he knew deep in his bones that it wasn’t the right call for a number of reasons. First, he knew of no Inventory system on Aethros, so gaining all that money and other rewards would mean he’d have to carry them around. He was currently hoisting ten fish, so his hands were quite literally full at the moment.

  Moreover, he had no idea what the class selection would look like. He’d played enough games—and read enough Isekai books—to know that it could be as simple as a series of screens or something as elaborate as whisking him away to some pocket dimension with a snake god who enjoys beer.

  Fix one problem at a time, Jack, he reminded himself.

  Jack’s muddied boots left deep impressions on the grassy path that wound its way to and from the pond and Thisltlebrush. He followed its snaking arcs, his arms filled with the ten fish. They were long, grayscaled creatures, and their fins dug into the bruised flesh of his forearms. But by all accounts, they looked like normal, boring fish. He was sure some nerdy marine biologist, or even just a seasoned fisherman, could’ve pontificated on the nine million differences between Earth fish and Aethrian fish, but to his eyes, these were plain old fish. It was oddly comforting.

  If he hadn’t been walking toward a walled town offset by a magical wall of miasmic darkness, he might’ve been able to believe that he was back home, even if for a short while. But the shroud loomed darker than ever behind the town of Thistlebrush, dimming the warm flame of satisfaction burning in his chest.

  As he neared the walls, he spotted the guards gesturing for the final few stragglers to hurry back in. Jack picked up his pace. He hoped that he could sneak in with the others, banking on the fact that the guard wouldn’t want to take the time to check papers in this weather.

  “Oy! It’s nearly nighttime! Get a move on, ya luggard!” the guard called, huddled under the scarce cover the rim of the gate offered. His eyes narrowed when he saw Jack jogging to comply. “Hey, boy?!”

  Jack continued to jog behind the final few stragglers.

  “Boy!” the man yelled again.

  Jack didn’t slow until the soldier raised a gauntleted fist in front of him. His load of fish slid precariously in his grip, and he careened to avoid dropping any of the ten.

  “Yeah?” Jack asked breathlessly, hoping the sight of him with the fish would discourage the bleeder from the standard procedure.

  “Get a quest done, or somethin’?” the guard asked, his accent thick and slurred like mulled wine.

  “Why?” Jack asked, leaning into the gate’s reprieve from the rain.

  The guard pointed above Jack’s head. “Could’a sworn you was another runt when ya left in a hurry. Level four, by my reckon. Care to explain how ya got so many levels in one trip to that scum pond? Or were ya off gallivanting for monsters to kill?”

  Damn it, Jack thought.

  “Yeah, I got a sidequest from Felix. And I was level nine when you saw me,” Jack countered, grateful for the dim light and rain masking his features. For if the rain had been absent, the soldier could’ve easily seen the sweat forming on his brow.

  “Felix, eh?” The guard pondered something, and so Jack pressed his advantage.

  “Mind if I head in? Felix will have my head if I don’t get these fish back quickly.”

  It was a gamble, but if the guard knew Felix, he could rely on that familiarity to avoid the guard asking for papers.

  Please let this work, Jack prayed.

  The guard remained deep in thought, and tension prickled in the air, so tense it sent goosebumps across Jack’s neck.

  “Felix? He’s got enough coin to hire a fresh hand like you?” the guard asked testily, his scowl deepening even as he rubbed at his matted beard.

  “Sure! I mean, I come cheap,” Jack said with a forced laugh. “So, mind if I head inside so that I can get out of this storm?”

  The red knight waved Jack through. “Yeah, alright. Get on with it.”

  Jack was moving before the man had finished speaking, carrying his bundle with as much dignity as one can when holding ten dead fish. Behind him, the guard continued to mutter the old fisherman’s name, as if he couldn’t quite believe something. Jack left him to it, moving as fast as he dared back to Felix’s stall.

  When he arrived, it was empty. Granted, the entire fish market was as well, but it still gave him a pang of panic. Taking a small risk, he slipped behind Felix’s counter and approached the door set behind it, leading into a dilapidated, but standing, home of two floors and a thatched roof.

  He knocked on the door. Rain pattered melodically across the treated tarp that spanned Felix’s stall, and Jack waited with bated breath to see who, if anyone, would answer. The metallic clink of water against metal drew his attention, and he glanced over his shoulder. There, stomping through the rain as it offended him, was Sathem. He looked to be on patrol, but he was headed this direction.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jack muttered.

  He knocked again, this time louder. After a painful silence, he heard footsteps approach the door in near-perfect unison with Sathem’s. The door creaked open, but it was not Felix’s toothless grin to greet him, but the flustered features of a young woman. She took all of Jack in over the span of a few heartbeats, lingering on the pile of fish in his arms.

  Jack returned the favor, noticing her patched dress and dirty bare feet. She was painfully thin. He could see the contours of her shoulder and collar bones sticking through the thinning burlap of her clothes. She had on a dirty apron stained with a dozen old meals. Still, there was a presence about her, as if she wore what little she had with more pride and confidence than the rich elite Jack had encountered in his life. In a word, this woman was queenly.

  “Whatcha want, then?” she asked, and her voice surprised Jack. It was light and melodious, with just the barest strain of politeness despite her apparent discomfort at answering the door to face a stranger.

  “I have fish for Felix,” Jack replied, forcing himself not to glance back at the approaching bleeder.

  Fortunately, it was the young woman who did all the glancing for him.

  “Void’s balls and bollocks,” she hissed through clenched teeth when she spotted Sathem.

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  She took in Jack one final moment, hesitated, then stepped out of the doorframe. “In ya go. Felix is in the back.”

  Jack stepped inside right as Sathem turned the corner and walked past Felix’s stall. He let out a breath of relief.

  “Damn that bleeder,” the young woman grunted as she closed and locked the door.

  She shuffled past him, and he did his best not to smack her by accident with one of the fish.

  “This way, stranger,” she ordered, pulling him down the hallway with nothing more than a wave.

  Her bare feet barely made a sound on the rickety floorboards, leaving the veritable cacophony all Jack’s doing as he walked across them with his muddy boots. They creaked and groaned painfully with each step, but he eventually made it to the end and saw something truly spectacular.

  Jack had seen many incredible, if terrifying, sights since getting yanked from Earth. He’d seen that bizarre storm of impossibilities, flown through the sky to land inside the shroud. He’d seen and fought orcs, met real knights, and seen actual magic at work. Hell, he just killed a kraken with a rock and sheer bloody determination.

  All of those paled in comparison to seeing an old man fend off half a dozen kids with his straw hat and the threat of tickles.

  Felix fought valiantly against the four boys and two girls, all of whom giggled and screamed in delight as the old fisherman wrestled them with the strength of a much younger man. Two of the youngsters tackled his knees, and the straw hat went flying as Felix fell to the floor to the cheers of his opponents.

  “Get him!” a boy no older than three shouted from atop Felix’s chest. His lisp was thick and entirely too adorable. “Feed the monster his tickles!”

  “No! Not tickles! My one weakness!” Felix yelled in faux horror.

  One of the girls cackled an honest-to-God cackle and jumped on the old man. “Got you, Gampie!”

  Her tiny twin braids smacked into Felix’s face, and he let out an uproarious roar of laughter as the children defeated their grandfather.

  The entire sight sent a pang through Jack’s chest. It was a scene straight out of a Hallmark movie, but without any of the horribly tense acting. This was joy in its most unfettered form, and he was so overcome by its power and beauty that he didn’t even notice when the young woman who’d let him in took all ten fish from his grasp.

  “Oh! Jack!” Felix exclaimed, muffled though he was by a toddler’s foot as said toddler used his face as a ladder.

  The man’s expression grew tense when he took in Jack’s soaking and haggard state.

  “So you do know this idiot?” the woman behind Jack asked, looking down at the prone Felix.

  “Yeah, he’s–” Felix unearthed himself from the mound of grandchildren still clambering over their hard-won prize, and stood up. “He’s the boy I told ya about. The one askin’ for sidequests.”

  The woman cocked one hip and raised an eyebrow. Without even looking, her right hand snaked forward and snatched a ceramic cup from one of the toddlers racing through the living room.

  Jack inspected her.

  [Nora Hardrove - Level 7]

  [Description: fatigued mother of two children, but surrogate mother to four more whose parents have either died or abandoned them. She is struggling to make ends meet, but will sooner die than give up on those she’s claimed as her own.]

  A bit of the picture started to crystallize inside Jack. It didn’t entirely quell the single blazing question that had been eating away at his calm the past hour, but it helped.

  He decided now was as good a time as any to ask it. “Felix, did you know about the kraken?”

  What happened next came straight out of a dozen comedy shows Jack had stayed up far too late watching. Felix swallowed hard right as Nora turned her withering glare on the old man. A single beat passed, but then three children decided their ‘Gampie’ had not finished playing his part in their game, and so jump-tackled him, one going so far as to leap from the nearby dining table to accomplish her noble task.

  Felix went down with his first genuine shout of alarm right as Nora scolded the aerial child for her surprise attack.

  More of Jack’s indignation died as he saw the family… be a family.

  He simultaneously wanted to laugh, to join in, and to be as far away from this place as possible. Their joy had barbs, though it was no fault of their own. It was just that the place joy was supposed to fit in Jack’s heart was too jagged now to accept the sentiment without aggravating old wounds.

  “Lad, I’ll admit, I thought ya were like all the rest. I figured ya already knew that the pond was infested with the void-touch, and that ya were lookin’ for a quick copper.” Felix groaned as one of the older boys stepped over him and shoved the lion's share of oxygen from his frail lungs. “But I should’a guessed ya were from out of town, given your dress and odd speak.”

  Felix rose to a seated position and looked as serious as one could with six children clambering around them.

  “I’m sorry, lad. I really am. I wasn’t expectin’ ya to succeed, much less come back if ya did. For that, I says ya keep what ya caught. It’s only fair.”

  Felix was so unerringly earnest about his statement that the final embers of Jack’s anger blew away with the wind.

  Jack sighed and shook his head. “Well, you won’t be needing to worry about how to feed your family anymore, Felix.”

  “What do ya mean, lad?” the fisherman asked.

  Jack shrugged, unable to entirely school the manic grin that forced its way into his smile. “I killed the kraken.”

  The house went silent.

  The kids stopped in their monster hunt and stared up at Jack, while Nora scoffed from the side. Only Felix looked at him with genuine shock and amazement. Then, like the river he’d help release, the questions came in a flood.

  “Did ya kill it with a knight sword?” one kid asked, who was missing one of his front teeth.

  “Was it huge?”

  “Did it have a name? Gampie calls it a–”

  “I don’t believe you! Mommy says no one can kill a kraken because they’re all something called a ‘cow-ward.’”

  More questions came, but Jack couldn’t hear where one ended and the next started.

  “Kids!” Nora shouted, ending the barrage. “Jack here is just teasin’. There’s no way an unarmed street urchin killed the kraken that had the feckin’ bleeders shakin’ in their boots. Ya didn’t actually kill the kraken, did ya, Jack? Ya wouldn’t go lyin’ to children, now would ya?”

  “I killed the kraken,” Jack repeated, though his face reddened a bit at her plain disbelief. “You’re welcome to go and check.”

  She squinted at him, as if she couldn’t quite tell if he was real or not. “Nooooo. Ain’t no way on Ardent’s green ground ya slayed the lake’s ol’ guardian. Not as a classless level 10 idiot.”

  Felix stood up and placed himself between Jack and Nora. “Wait a moment. Jack here was level 4 last I checked his status.” He mirrored his daughter’s squint; this one was altogether less judgmental. “Ardent’s beard, boy. Ya actually did it, didn’t ya? My sidequest was desperate, no gettin’ around that. Me and mine haven’t eaten in four days save for meager rice and loads of water, but that couldn’t account for six levels in a single afternoon.”

  “Da, ya can’t be serious?” Nora argued. “This wee thing? He’s more bone than broth!”

  “That may be, girl, but I know the look of a warrior when I see one. And there’s just no other way he could’ve gotten all those levels if not for clearin’ out that damned world quest connected to the ol’ lake! This here is a hero, I says! Not one of those bullies in red, but a real hero!” Felix tapped Jack on the chest, unaware that he touched the Banisher’s mark beneath in its true center. “This here is a legend in the makin’! Jack, the Kraken Killer!”

  “Jack the Pond Cleaner!” a boy supplied with a toothy grin. All the kids cheered and giggled.

  “Jack the Fish King!” another shouted, not wanting to be outdone.

  “Jack the… the…” Everyone waited as the youngest of the kids who could speak stammered. When all eyes fell on her, she blanched and fidgeted nervously. “The… the… dooty head!”

  All the kids roared their approval.

  “That’s enough of that, ya crazy kooks!” Felix reprimanded, though there was no real bite to his words. “Jack here helped Gampie get his pond back, so I says we all go out tomorrow and get our fill of fish. Tomorrow, we eat right and proper!”

  “No.” The word escaped from Jack before he was fully aware of it.

  “No? Ya don’t want us fishin’ in the pond ya cleaned up, do ya?” Nora said testily.

  “No,” Jack stuttered, shaking himself out of the tense reverie of seeing a family so tightly knit. “I just meant you should eat tonight. I went to all the trouble of getting the fish for you. Please. Eat them.”

  “No, lad. A deal’s a deal. Ya caught them, ya keep them!” Felix replied dismissively.

  “That wasn’t our deal. I was to get you ten fish in exchange for the sidequest. Now, here’s my payment.” Jack gestured at where Nora had started to bring the ten fish back out. They looked absolutely massive in her slender, but calloused, fingers. “Besides, it’s not like I’m coming out of this with nothing to show for it.”

  He raised his ten fingers, only to quickly curl them into fists. He’d forgotten he was missing a finger.

  “I got more than what I needed. So please, eat the fish.”

  “Can we?” the eldest boy asked his mother.

  Nora gave one last look at Jack, then cupped the boy’s face with her free hand. “Of course, dearie. Go get my pan. I say we sear these lovely fellows right and proper.” She pointed at Jack. “And you’re stayin’. If I hear one peep of a no, I’ll have my fine warriors tie ya to a chair and spoonfeed ya what I make!”

  The oldest girl, who couldn’t be a day over six, nodded seriously and cracked her knuckles.

  And so Jack stayed for dinner.

  are growing, it is not quite fast enough.

  What that means:

  I will be posting chapters Mon, Wed, and Friday starting this week. It is far slower than I want---and certainly slower than I can write---but this will give me the time and space to find a part-time income until we once again make those ever-elusive ends in our lives meet.

  WILL continue!!! I have so much more to add to Jack's incredible tale in Aethros, and we're just getting started.