The Steward was an older man, probably in his fifties. Young enough, and with an easy enough life, that he looked to be in good shape and had quite a few more years left in him. Old enough that he had that dignified gray-hair look that made people appear wise, even if they weren't. He stood on a raised platform in the center of the town square next to the bell, which he had presumably been ringing. The man wore a solemn expression as he waited for people to gather around.

  It certainly wasn’t all three hundred-plus villagers, but there were a good two hundred or more people in the crowd, standing fairly silently and waiting for the Steward to open his mouth and speak.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the Steward, looking around as if to make sure everyone in the crowd knew he was talking to them. “As you likely already know, the Lord and his retinue had gone out earlier in the last handful of days to join up with the other village lords to fight the yearly goblin horde.”

  Ryan had indeed known that the majority of the village’s warriors had left. What he hadn’t known was that the goblin horde was a yearly occurrence. That was news.

  “What you may not know is that our lord and his retinue left early in order to claim glory by defeating most of the goblin horde before the others showed up. This was a…” The Steward paused. The man clearly did not approve of the decision to fight a horde of goblins by themselves, but seemed unwilling to say anything negative about his lord, even though the man was presumed dead. “…a miscalculation.”

  “Unfortunately, our scouts report that the lord and his retinue are dead, and that a sizable chunk of the goblin horde has turned toward our village.”

  The Steward lowered his gaze, as though waiting for the crowd to accept the situation. There was a wave of muttering. Ryan looked at Heroan, who looked back.

  “Okay, everybody, settle down now.” Said another voice from the stage.

  Almost in unison, the entire group turned to look at the new speaker. Reeve Branson had climbed up onto the raised platform and stood out in front to put all eyes on himself. The Steward looked surprised, but not displeased. The Reeve was in his early thirties, in fairly good shape, with dark hair, dark eyes, and an almost award-winning smile.

  “Now remember that we are talking about goblins here. Along with the walls, me and my men—though we are only six in number—can easily take fifty little fuckers. I’m certainly open to suggestions on ways that we can improve our odds to take on more.”

  “Do we have a militia?” Ryan asked Heroan.

  In response, Heroan cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted at the stage, “Oi! We should train up a militia!”

  Reeve Branson paced the small platform while nodding, his hands behind his back as though he were contemplating the suggestion and listening to the other villagers shout their agreements. “Ah, but we don't really have enough battle axes to arm a militia,” he said in counterpoint.

  “We can make spearheads pretty easy,” Ryan shouted back.

  “Oi! We just need to stand on the walls and stab at the little fuckers as they try to climb up,” shouted another man from the other side of the stage.

  The Reeve tilted his head, then nodded. “All right. What about shields?”

  Someone yelled out about having plenty of wooden planks that they could cut into shield lengths and within thirty minutes, the village had a plan of action. The Reeve was in charge and was going to train up a militia. The town gates would be barricaded so they were no longer a weak point. Some of the farmers were going to harvest as many crops as possible before a bunch of goblins trampled them. Shields and spears would be made en masse.

  “You go stoke the forges,” said Haroan. “I'm going to go make sure we have enough iron.”

  ***

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  Ryan opened the door to his home and stumbled over the threshold, greeted by a wave of warm air thick with the scent of some delicious-smelling stew. He made his way over the dirt floor of the entry area and flopped down onto the hard wooden section that covered the rest of the one-room shack; sprawling out on his back, shoulders against the wood, feet still on the dirt, eyes closed as he let out a long sigh.

  “Tired?” Ping asked as she moved the table from its storage position against the wall to its eating position in the center of the floor.

  “Honestly, if I wasn't so hungry, I'd fall asleep right here and right now,” Ryan said, keeping his eyes closed. And because he didn’t actually want to fall asleep, he opened his character sheet.

  Name: Ryan Larson

  Titles: None

  Race: Human*

  Strength: 10

  Endurance: 10

  Charisma: 10

  Intelligence: 11

  Luck: 10

  Agility: 10

  Stamina: 10

  Stamina Regen: 10

  Manipool: 0

  Mana Regen: 0

  Unassigned Points: 1

  “A point in Strength to reduce how much stamina I use per swing of the hammer. A point in Stamina to increase stamina in general. Or a point in Endurance so that what stamina I do have lasts longer. Or maybe a point in Stamina Regen so that I regain stamina faster,” Ryan asked, half to himself, half to Ping.

  She responded with, “Or a point to Intelligence so that you realize where you're wasting stamina and therefore make your use of it more efficient.”

  Ryan let out a humorous chuckle. “Yeah, it seems like everything has something to do with stamina, though in different ways. What about Mana Pool?”

  “Waste of a point,” Ping said. “Mana Pool is useless without Mana Regen, and it's all useless without somebody to train you how to cast spells.”

  “What about the priestess? She trained people how to cast spells?”

  Ryan got the feeling that Ping merely shrugged, but he still had his eyes closed. “I'm not certain. And congratulations on reaching level, what, two?”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “I finally made Apprentice in Smithing. Just another twenty levels to grind out before I get to Journeyman.”

  “Everything gets better when you hit Journeyman,” said Ping, parroting pretty much what Haroan had told him.

  “Yeah, but Haroan won't tell me what actually happens.”

  “You get a skill tree and perk points to spend on it. What exactly happens for Smithing, that I can't tell you.”

  “Maybe I should go find Haroan and beat the information out of him.”

  “Or maybe you should eat, because I told you to.”

  Ryan closed his character sheet and sat up with a groan. “Or I should come eat because you told me to.”

  He reached down to unstrap his boots and paused. “Where's Tor?”

  “Last I saw him, he was holding a spear with a dozen other men and getting yelled at.”

  Ryan gave a soft chuckle as he undid his boots and climbed fully onto the wood section of the one-room shack where the town kept all its weirdos. What exactly made Tor a weirdo, Ryan hadn't figured out yet. He seemed completely normal compared to both Ping and himself. Ryan scooched his way over to sit cross-legged in front of the short table on the opposite side of Ping.

  Ryan was very much the town weirdo. While aesthetically he looked like the rest of the townsfolk, he had shown up in a field at level zero, had no idea how anything worked, and asked strange and stupid questions. Ping was very much his opposite. She was very familiar with the world they were present in and got along well with the village itself. However, she was the town's sole non-human—so long as no one considered half-elves to be non-human. In the last three months, Ryan had seen a couple of different races—dwarves, orcs, and a purple-skinned people he would have called demonkin, although they apparently had nothing to do with demons. None of those people lived in the village; they were just passing through, so Ping was the only real non-human he ever actually dealt with.

  Still, the locals seemed to take less issue with the small, pale horns protruding from her forehead than they did with her overall facial features. They called her Iteyan. Ryan would have called her Asian. There must have been some cultural issue, or maybe people just weren’t used to various ethnic groups. Ryan had seen more than a few people who were not some variation of Nordic, but even Tor, who certainly liked Ping as a person, openly admitted that he couldn’t be attracted to somebody who looked like they got hit in the face with a shovel. It seemed kind of rude to Ryan, but then again, Ryan was from the USA, not magical, mostly nordic fantasy land. To him, Ping was kind of cute. She had a ruddier, more weathered complexion due to a harder, more outdoor style of life. But for the most part, she was a cute Asian girl with small white horns. And her cooking was delicious—though that might just have been the fact that he was ravenous. However, she did have the Cooking skill, and she was a Journeyman in that, so it also just might have been RPG-world magic stuff.

  As if to break him out of his thoughts, Tor came through the door and stumbled across the dirt portion in a similar manner to Ryan. When he reached the raised wooden platform, instead of sitting down and falling backward, he just kind of fell forward.

  “Food's ready,” said Ping.

  Tor let out a loud moan before pushing himself over onto his back. “Everything hurts.”