Everyone on the south road was going north.
By the second morning it was a river of them, and Jin and Doyun were the only two fish swimming the wrong way. Mercenaries in mismatched armour, laughing too loudly. Church riders in white with the Goddess's wheat sheaf stitched on their chests, faces like closed doors. A cart of hunters in strange, close-fitting black clothes with no buttons, carrying weapons Jin didn't have names for. Farmers with pitchforks and a map. A boy of about twelve with a wooden sword, who told Doyun very seriously that he was going to find the Overlord and make it his friend.
"Good luck," Doyun told him. "Bring a snack."
The boy nodded as if that were sound advice and kept walking.
Jin watched them all go past him, hundreds of them, every one of them hunting the same thing.
Every one of them is looking for me.
Not one of them looks at me.
* * *
On the first night Doyun showed him a window.
They had made camp in a hollow off the road, with a fire and a pot and a rabbit Doyun had snared with a skill he said was called Tracking, which seemed to Jin like a strange thing to need a skill for. Doyun had noticed him staring at nothing in the firelight, the way people did when they were reading their own windows, and decided Jin must be ashamed of his.
"Here," he said kindly. "I'll show you mine. It's not so bad, having one. Even an empty one."
He made a small gesture, the way you'd turn a page, and a pale square of light opened in the air between them, facing Jin.
[Name: Kang Doyun]
[Level: 141]
[Rank: E]
[Class: Spearman]
[Title: none]
[HP: ■■■■■■■■□□]
[Mana: ■■■■■□□□□□]
[Skills: Blue Flame Spear, Steady Footing, Tracking]
"Hundred and forty-one," Doyun said, and couldn't quite keep the pride out of it. "Took me four years. Hundred more and I'm D-rank."
"What do they do?" Jin asked. "The skills."
"Doesn't say." Doyun shrugged. "You find out the hard way. Blue Flame Spear was easy, it does what it sounds like. Steady Footing took me a month. I thought it was useless till I fought a mud crawler on a riverbank and didn't fall over." He grinned. "Some people have skills they've never worked out at all."
Jin looked at the little bars, the three names, the empty space where the numbers should be.
He thought about his own window. The one that told him exactly what every skill did, to the last detail. The one with numbers, even if most of them were question marks.
His doesn't explain anything. Mine explains everything, except me.
So that's what a candidate is. Someone the System bothers to talk to.
"It's a good window," Jin said, and meant it.
Doyun closed it, looking pleased, and stirred the pot. After a while he said, without looking up, "I send most of it home. The bounty money. My grandmother, the one with the stove. And my sisters. They're nine and eleven." He poked the fire. "Our farm was on the wrong side of a gate, Gate Day. Nobody died. We just didn't have a farm anymore."
Jin didn't say anything. He didn't need to. Doyun hadn't said it to be answered.
Everyone lost something that day. Even the ones who think they were lucky.
* * *
The wolves came on the fourth day, in the hills.
Jin heard them an hour before they arrived: eight of them, running low and fast through the scrub, coming in on both sides the way wolves do when they've done this before. He said nothing. He wanted to see.
They weren't quite wolves. They had the shape, roughly, but too many eyes, a cluster of them across the brow like black beads, and they made no sound at all when they ran.
Doyun was good. Jin had known that since the thornback, but now he saw it properly. Doyun planted his feet, and there was a faint shimmer around his boots (Steady Footing, Jin thought) and he didn't move an inch when the first wolf hit him. The blue fire ran up his spear. He worked it in short, tight arcs, never overreaching, keeping the wolves in front of him and keeping Jin behind.
He fights like someone who's been scared for a long time and decided to be good at it instead.
One wolf got past. It came round the rocks low and silent, straight at the blank.
Jin stumbled. It was a very good stumble. He'd been practising it in his head for four days. His foot caught a stone, his body pitched forward, and his elbow happened to land on the back of the wolf's neck with a sliver of ki behind it.
It didn't get up.
"You all right?" Doyun shouted, ripping his spear out of the last one.
"Tripped," Jin called back. "Fell on it."
"Goddess, you're clumsy." Doyun came over, breathing hard, and looked at the dead wolf, and then at Jin, sprawled in the dirt. He laughed. "Clumsiest lucky man alive."
You have no idea how right you are about the second part.
* * *
The bandits were waiting at the ford on the seventh day.
There were six of them, spread across the shallows where the road crossed a wide brown river, and they'd picked the spot well: steep banks, nowhere to run, and the water slowing everything down. One of them stood a little back from the rest, a thin man with a staff and a tag on a string that said F.
"Toll," said the one in front, who had a crossbow and very few teeth. "Everything you've got. Or the river gets you."
Doyun looked at the six of them, at the crossbow and the mage, and Jin watched him do the sum and not like the answer.
Then Doyun stepped in front of him.
He didn't think about it. Jin could see that. He just moved, the way Daewon used to move, so that the blank was behind him and the danger was in front, and he lowered his spear.
"Get behind the rocks," he said over his shoulder. "Don't argue."
Jin got behind the rocks.
It was not a pretty fight. The mage threw a fist of water that knocked Doyun off his feet into the river, and the crossbow bolt grazed his arm, and for a while it was mud and shouting and blue fire hissing where it met the water. Doyun was outnumbered six to one, and he was bleeding, and he was scared, and he didn't stop. He put two of them in the river and broke the crossbow over his knee, and when the mage tried a second spell Doyun threw his spear like a javelin and pinned the man's sleeve to a tree.
The rest ran.
Jin stayed behind the rocks the whole time.
He could have ended it from the other side of the river. One pebble. One breath of pressure. He could have ended it before the toothless man finished saying toll.
He didn't. He stood behind the rocks and watched Doyun's back, and something happened in his chest that he didn't have a name for at first.
The last person who stood in front of me like that was Daewon.
A thousand years ago. In a cave, with a giant in chains.
In the trial, nobody ever stood in front of me. There was nobody. It was always just me, and whatever was trying to kill me, and the stone.
He found the name for it.
I wanted to see what it felt like.
It felt like the squad.
Doyun waded out of the river, soaked to the waist, holding his bleeding arm and grinning like an idiot. "You all right?"
"Fine," Jin said. His voice came out strange. "You?"
"Never better." Doyun pulled his spear out of the tree. The mage, still pinned by the sleeve, made a small noise. "Never better."
* * *
They reached a waystation on the tenth day: a fortified inn at a crossroads, with a stable and a notice board and a crowd of travellers in the yard all talking at once.
A rider had come in from the capital that morning, and he was still telling it to anyone who would buy him a drink.
"Rode out the day after the announcement, all three of them," he said. "The captain, the elf and the tinkerer. North, to the border. Half the Corps went with them. Whole city came out to watch."
Jin turned to Doyun. "We'd have passed them."
"Not on this road." Doyun snorted. "They'll have taken the Imperial road. Paved all the way, fresh horses every station, no commoners allowed. This one's for the rest of us."
Five years, a new world, magic for everyone, and the Empire still builds a separate road for the people who matter.
"And the kid?" someone asked.
"Stayed behind. Someone has to mind the capital." The rider drank. "Shaun Aki, guarding the whole city by himself. Gods help us."
"Goddess," a woman corrected him sharply, and pointed at a fresh notice pinned beside the old one on the board. "And mind your mouth. The Church has spoken."
Jin read it over the heads of the crowd.
THE SO-CALLED OVERLORD IS DECLARED AN ENEMY OF THE GODDESS OF ABUNDANCE. ALL FAITHFUL ARE CALLED TO REPORT IT.
Right next to the Empire's notice, still offering a generous reward for the same thing.
So the Church wants it dead, the Empire wants it hired, and they've pinned it up side by side on the same board.
I almost feel sorry for whoever I am.
"Hey." Doyun nudged him, grinning, a mug in his good hand. "Maybe it's you. The Overlord. Disguised as the clumsiest man in the Empire."
Jin laughed.
It came about half a heartbeat too late. Doyun didn't notice.
Jin did.
* * *
On the thirteenth afternoon they came over a long rise, and there it was.
The capital. Still a few hours off, but already filling the horizon: white walls, and towers behind them, and above the towers the great pale dome of the cathedral of the Goddess, catching the low sun like a second one.
Doyun stopped and whistled. "Never gets old."
Jin didn't answer.
He was listening.
Far ahead, miles past where Doyun's ears could reach, somewhere between them and the walls: steel ringing on something that wasn't steel. Men shouting orders, sharp and practised. A woman's voice calling a spell. And under all of it, a roar so deep it made the dust on the road at his feet tremble.
Doyun was already walking on, talking about a bath.
Jin stood on the rise a moment longer.
Of course.
Of course there's a monster between me and the door.