Still straddling the baniv, Rayne wiped liquid from his brow, his hand descending over his eyes and coming away slick and shiny with blood. Suddenly nauseous, Rayne leaned to the side, spewing the contents of his stomach over the grass. Retching loudly, his body heaved as waves of nausea overtook him, painting the green grass yellow as he surrendered to the impulse.

  From the side, he heard footsteps as the familiar form of Syra came up alongside him.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, her eyes thick with worry.

  “I’m fine,” Rayne panted, holding up a hand to stall her as he wiped vomit off his chin. “I’m fine.”

  Syra raised an eyebrow. “You sure? Because you don’t look fine. You look like you’re about to die.”

  Gesturing to the baniv that still lay beneath him, Rayne shook his head. “I’m fine,” he reiterated. “Just wasn’t ready for how visceral it was all going to be.”

  When Syra’s eyebrow climbed higher, he paused, gathering his thoughts as he did his best to catch his breath.

  In the final moments of the fight when he had been struggling, it had not been his own fate that put fear into him, but Issa’s. If he died here, his sister would be left with no one. They had already lost their parents in the war years ago, and smart as she was, Rayne knew that his sister was also quite frail. If he died, would she? Well, it wasn’t really worth thinking about. And yet, he could not help himself.

  Unable to convey this all to Syra in only a few words, he licked his lips, suddenly aware of just how dry they had become.

  “The baniv,” he said at last, gesturing to the corpse. “It didn’t want to die. Until its last, it put up a struggle. And I realized, as my knife finally found its throat, that that could have been me. If anything had gone differently, it would have been me lying there. I don’t want to die, but neither did it, and yet now it’s dead.” He shook his head. “It made me realize that willpower isn’t enough. And my skills are far from enough. I need to adventure, I need the money. But I think I was taking it all too lightly.”

  Syra eyed him carefully. Then, without saying a word, she reached down and helped him up, hauling him off the still warm body of the baniv. “That’s what life is,” she said simply. “You want and you dream and you try, and sometimes, it’s not enough.”

  There was truth in her words, as well as some hurt, and Rayne nodded as he pulled his arm from her grip and moved over to the brook. Plunging his arms into the stream up to the elbow, Rayne began to scrub vigorously, doing his best to get the blood off his skin. Reflected in the stream, he could see Syra watching him, her posture slightly unsure.

  Biting her lip, she looked directly at him. “Rayne,” she asked. “What do you need money for so badly that you decided to become an adventurer?”

  “My sister,” he responded simply. “She needs more money for tuition. As her older brother, it’s only right that I get it for her. Clerking doesn’t pay enough for that, so… Here I am.”

  Syra regarded him strangely. “It might not be my place to say this, but I feel that as her older brother, shouldn’t you value your life more?”

  Rayne wanted to retort, to tell her to mind her business, but he held his tongue. Syra had only said this out of concern. She had no idea what hell Issa had gone through in order to get to where she was now, how hard she had worked in order to be accepted at the Academy and not just survive but excel. The sleepless nights, the pressure of exams, how Issa had studied even with a severe fever just so that she might keep her scholarship and relieve the pressure on him as the only breadwinner for the house.

  His sister knew what their parents’ hopes for her had been, and what he had sacrificed for her, and she had responded in kind. Friends, boyfriends, a normal life, she had given up everything in order to get to where she was today, and now it was his turn to sacrifice so that she might continue on the path she had so ardently constructed for herself. If Syra knew this, there was no way she would have attempted to remonstrate him so, and Rayne had to bite back the words he wanted to hurl at her.

  Instead, all he said was, “Perhaps.” The meaning within his tone was evident as he glared at her reflection in the water.

  Seeming to understand his intention, Syra nodded. “Well, much as I’d love to watch you take a nice, long bath in the river, I think it’s time we grab the herb baskets and get back to town. Banivs aren’t known to be loners, and it likely won’t be long before this one’s companions come looking for it.”

  “Don’t we need its horns?” Rayne asked, having not lost sight of the reason he had fought the monster.

  “Oh, right.” Bending over, Syra retrieved a thick hunting knife from her belt. Then she used it to saw at the base of the monster’s horns, cutting both of them off with practiced cuts and tossing them to him. “Your spoils.”

  Catching them, Rayne deposited them in one of his pockets, before following Syra out of the clearing to where they had left their herb baskets. The containers were none the worse for wear having been dropped in the forest for a few minutes, and after checking that their hard-earned herbs were still there, the two began the trek back to town.

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  On the way, Rayne quizzed Syra, having guessed by now that the beastwoman was at least somewhat knowledgeable about adventurers. Despite having only gone through initiation the day before, she possessed knowledge that he did not, and he intended to gain it now.

  “How does one get stronger?” he asked. “Because clearly, I need to get stronger if I want to continue as an adventurer.”

  “Clearly,” Syra responded, her eyes glittering with amusement. Lifting her hand, she held up two fingers. “There are two main ways to get stronger: stats and training. The first is fairly straightforward. Do you remember that test you took when you signed up for initiation?”

  A vague memory of an emerald orb floated to the front of Rayne’s mind and he nodded.

  “Well,” Syra continued. “Those can be improved. Every time you kill a monster, you absorb some of its powers. Don’t ask me how, I don’t know. All I know is that killing monsters makes you stronger. And that the type of monster matters for the type of stats you’ll receive. An ogre will give you a lot more strength than a kobold will for example. Given that you’re probably an F-ranker, that baniv you killed earlier probably advanced at least one of your stats by one. Kill another thirty or forty of them and you’ll graduate to an E-ranker.”

  “So I’ll naturally grow through adventuring,” Rayne summarized. “Got it. What’s the second method?”

  “Good old fashioned training. Mana is nice, but there’s no substitute for hard work. Enough sweat can buy you at least a few stats, and more importantly, it will let you use those stats. No point having insane strength if you don’t even know how to wield a sword after all.”

  Rayne winced at this, remembering his clumsy ambush against the baniv. Beside him, Syra continued talking, blithely unaware of his embarrassment.

  “Once you’ve awakened your magic, you’ll also gain the ability to use Skills, which is another method to improving your strength. But that’s probably still a ways off for now. So for now, it’s just those two: stats and training.”

  Quirking her lips, Syra appeared to consider her next words. “Unlike stats, training is a bit more nebulous as it’s related to talent. But training will never let you down.” Pulling one of her blades from its sheath, she held it in front of her, the tip shining as it caught the light. “I’ve practiced with these all my life. There’s nothing you can do to make up for lost time, but it’s like planting a tree. The best time to do so was twenty years ago.”

  “The second best time is now,” Rayne muttered, finishing the idiom. “The only problem is that I don’t know how to train. Or what to train with for that matter.”

  Syra tilted her head in confusion. “You’re not happy with the sword?”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m not happy,” Rayne said carefully. “More that I’m not sure whether it suits me or not.” Spreading his hands wide, he gave her an imploring look. “I’ve never used weapons before in my life. Sword, axe, mace, spear, daggers, or even something more esoteric like a whip or a flail. I have no idea what suits me best. How am I supposed to train when I don’t even know what to train with?”

  At this, Syra broke out into a grin.

  Seeing her response, Rayne frowned. “Hey, I’m being serious here.”

  Her grin widened, but she lifted her hands to reassure him. “I know, I know. But you’re thinking too big here. The training that a novice like yourself needs has nothing to do with preferred weapons. What you need is to have the basics beaten into you. Once you’ve got those down, then you can start worrying about if your fate is to be the continent’s best spearmaster or its worst swordsman.”

  “And those basics would be?”

  “Stamina, power, technique, flexibility, and breath control,” she said, ticking them off on her fingers as she went. “You’re already fairly calm under pressure, so no need to work on that. But the other five are crucial. Essentially, you need to start working out, stretching, and hitting some target dummies. The guildhall has a training yard out back where you can practice, and the base of the city walls are a great place to run. As for the other stuff, I can help you with that. Can’t have my number one partner falling behind on me now.”

  Nodding gratefully, Rayne looked at her. “Thanks, Syra, I don’t know what to say.”

  This earned him another laugh. “Save your thanks for after I’m done with you, clerk-boy. Because I have a feeling you’re not going to be feeling so thankful in an hour.”

  Rayne gawped at her. “You want us to start now?”

  “Why not?” Syra shrugged. “No time like the present.”

  For a moment, Rayne grappled with his words. But unfortunately, he could find no reason to refute her. There were still another two hours before he was due to pick up Issa, and Syra was right. He did need to start training.

  Seeing the defeated slump of his shoulders, Syra smiled. “Hey, don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll only throw up once during today’s lesson.”

  And so, arriving back at the guild, Rayne turned in the baniv horns and their herbs for a hefty sum of silver, and then followed Syra out into the yard for his first proper training lesson.

  An hour into his first impromptu training session with Syra, and Rayne was regretting every nice thing he had ever said about the beastwoman. Syra was an absolutely merciless instructor, and she refused to hear any words of dissent. Starting with a stretching routine that caused every joint in his body to creak, she proceeded to put him through his paces with rigorous glee.

  At last, after three hundred overhead swings into the straw-stuffed form of a training dummy, Syra finally called an end to their first session together. Immediately, Rayne collapsed, his chest heaving as he desperately sucked in air to fill his empty lungs.

  Thanks to Syra, he was now aware of muscles he had not even known existed, and every single one of them were currently screaming in pain, angry at him for putting them to work for the first time in twenty-two years.

  Thankfully, unlike her predictions, he had not thrown up, though not for lack of trying. His stomach was simply too empty from his previous fight with the baniv.

  Giving himself another minute to recuperate, Rayne at last summoned the strength to roll onto his stomach, from which he slowly gathered himself into a kneeling position. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew he looked pathetic, but he lacked the energy to care. Only two thoughts dominated his mind right now. The first was pain, and the second was:

  How the hell am I going to explain this away to Issa?