I was raised by my mother in a small mountain cabin with a field, which we tended together. We lived in peace, even after my sickly father passed when I was little...but our calm didn’t last forever. When I turned twelve, my mother, too, fell ill.
Desperate, I cared for her as best as I was able—but, little by little, she wasted away. Then, one day, she handed me a leather pouch containing a small amount of money and said:
“I’m sorry I couldn’t give you much of a life. The least you deserve is to live one of your own choosing.”
Those were her final words to me; the warmth had gone from her body by the very next morning.
And so, I was alone.
After digging a grave for my mother beside my father’s, I resolved to descend the mountain and head for the city. I’m sure I could have kept on living in that cabin, the way I always had; though it was a rural area with no access to a doctor, I had livestock and a bountiful field. The nearby forests were also filled with fruit to eat, as well as wild hares and other game to hunt. I would never have had to fear going hungry, and yet...
I still chose to leave my little home—the place I’d lived my entire life.
You see, I had a dream: I wanted to become an adventurer—one just like the heroes in the great epics my father had told me so many times when I was little. Like the hero who, with his friends by his side, slew a titanic dragon, won its treasure, and moved ever onward in search of the next quest. Or like the one who studied magic under the tutelage of a wizened magician, dispelled the curse afflicting a forest, and was rewarded by the Spirit King with a miracle elixir that could cure any illness.
My father had told me countless stories of such adventures, and each one lit a flame in my heart.
If I’d had a miracle elixir, then my parents might not have had to die. From time to time, I would let my imagination chase that what-if...but there was no guarantee that it even existed. Maybe the stories were all made up by my father to delight his little boy.
Still, I wanted to see for myself. How much truth was there to my father’s stories? How many were just fairy tales?
But, no—maybe it didn’t even matter to me whether they were true. In reality, I just wanted to be like the characters that had always amazed me. I yearned to be the hero who would wield his sword for his friends and for the meek, staring down any hardship in his way—who would always win and ensure the story had a happy ending.
Yes, that was how I wanted to be. And that was all it was, plain and simple. I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to be a hero.
It took me a few days to descend the mountain, after which I headed for the city’s Adventurers Guild. Provided that I hadn’t heard wrong, that was where I needed to go to become an adventurer.
Reaching the building itself was easy—I asked a guard where it was, and he led me there right away. Yep, reaching it was easy. When I tried to go inside, however, a grim-faced man came out and barred my way.
“This is no place for kids,” he said. “Go home.”
But there was nobody left waiting for me back on the mountain. I fumbled together an explanation of the circumstances that had brought me here.
“So you’re an orphan, are you?” There was a brief pause before he continued, “I guess that changes things. In that case, why not go to a class training school? They’ve never taken in a kid as young as you before...but if you’d like to try, I’ll see what I can do.”
Then, scratching his head, he began to explain.
In this city—the royal capital—those who wanted to register with the Adventurers Guild could receive class training at one of the royal training schools. According to the man, they had been established under decree by the currently reigning king as a way to help prevent the deaths of rookie adventurers. Anyone could attend them for free, and to top it off, the schools would feed, clothe, and board you for the duration of your attendance. All expenses were paid for by royal taxes.
It sounded beyond my wildest dreams. So, naturally, I jumped at the chance to attend.
“If you truly wish to be an adventurer, then go to a training school and come back after you’ve learned a skill. Any will do.”
At the time, I hadn’t really understood what the man—a Guild employee—was talking about. It was the first I’d ever learned of the existence of skills.
Skills, he explained, were what people considered proof of one’s strength and ability. According to him, every person harbored within themselves the talent for one or two particularly exceptional skills, and the training schools existed to identify that talent.
In this country, there were training schools for the six basic class branches. Anyone could receive training for the class of their choice, through which you would quickly discover which skills you had a talent for and which class you were best suited to be.
So, I decided to follow the man’s advice and undergo training. I asked him for directions, said my thanks, then headed straight for the one class training school I had already decided on.
Swordsman.
It was the class I’d always dreamed of being. In one of my favorite adventure epics, the hero had cut down a titanic dragon the size of a mountain with a single swing of his sword. I had always hoped to one day be capable of similar feats. I knew it was just a story, of course, but I couldn’t help but wonder what I could become.
No, I decided—what I would become.
With that thought running through my head, I enrolled as a student of the swordsman training school...
But it wasn’t meant to be.
After several months of training under an instructor, I learned something about myself: I had no talent with a sword. In fact, I was genuinely hopeless.
Generally speaking, the role of a swordsman is to attack. Their ability to wreak utter havoc—in other words, the possession of offensive skills—is valued above all else. But despite training for the entire term set by the school, I never developed a single offensive skill.
Far from it, in fact; I never even developed the commonplace skills that anybody could acquire through hard work. So, with my training term coming to an end and unable to bear the thought of giving up, I asked the instructor for an extension. But the response I received was as follows:
“A swordsman flailing his sword about with no skills to his name is nothing but a burden on his allies. You’re wasting your time.”
Despite my disappointment, I went off to be trained in another class. If there was no future for me as a swordsman, then I would become a warrior instead.
Warriors were a vanguard class that used all kinds of weapons, putting their lives on the line to shield their allies. Though not as picture-perfect as a swordsman when it came to the ideal adventurer in my head, it was still a class that I admired.
I already knew that I wasn’t any good with swords, but that was fine; I would simply use another weapon. Anything would do. As long as I had the strength to live as an adventurer, it didn’t matter to me what I used.
So I enrolled at the training school for warriors, where I spent the next few months living among burly grown-ups, training so intensely that it felt as though all my blood, sweat, and tears had been wrung out of me.
But despite my desperation, the only skill that I managed to develop by the end of the training term was the most basic one of all—one that anybody could use. It strengthened my physical ability a little, and that was it. It would never be enough for me to pass muster as a warrior.
In other words, I had no talent for becoming a warrior either.
The instructor had been kind enough to train me personally until the end of the term, but after that, he recommended that I try another class. “If you keep pushing for the impossible, all you’ll have waiting for you is an early grave,” he said.
And so, despite my mounting disappointment, I kept my hopes alive and headed for my next training school.
This time, I’d try to become a hunter. If close combat was beyond my grasp, then I was happy to settle for fighting with a bow and arrow. I wasn’t a total novice to hunting either; I’d had practice setting traps and felling birds with stones back home on the mountain. Maybe I already had some promise—and it was with that thought in mind that I started my training.