They formed up at first light where the fields gave way to the line of trees. Breath fogged. Leather creaked. Someone's kettle hissed and went quiet. Kelda walked the ranks with a slate and a stamp; when she thumped the last page, the subjugation force began to move like a single thought.
"Last checks," Rusk the shield knight rumbled, rolling one shoulder under his shield.
"Bandages top, slings bottom," Ade the healer muttered, patting pouches. "Don't make me spend spells on pride."
Niya lifted two fingers and traced quick shapes in the air—kill-box, bend, retreat flow. "If you forget the whistle codes, read the person in front of you. Silence saves coin."
Trixie tightened a strap on her porter harness, then touched the rim of her buckler. "I count for calm," she said, eyes on Taro. "I carry heavy. I cook well under pressure."
Taro pulled his mitts snug. "If I step, match my breath," he said, keeping his voice easy. "If I say 'No chase,' we don't. We stay boring and come home."
Trixie's tail did a small sweep that stopped when she caught herself. She looked away—with a smile she didn't let finish—and took her place just off his rear shoulder. Rusk grunted approval. Ade rolled his eyes as if they'd already disappointed him and then hid the way he checked their faces twice.
They stepped into the trees.
The forest put teeth on everything. Chalk triangles sat knee-high on trunks where small hands reached. Twine hid in leaf-shadow where eyes wanted to slide away. The air held the sharp tang of sap and something sour the goblins wore like a badge.
"Snare," Niya breathed, not pointing.
Taro let his gaze blur and felt wrongness as an angle instead of a thing. He let exhale lead his foot, and his sole slid a micro-angle past a near-invisible line without touching it. "Clear," Trixie said in a calm clerk's voice, her buckler tucked, her steps matching his count. Rusk's shield lifted to roof their small world. Ade moved like someone who would rather be somewhere else and stayed anyway.
"First blood's close," Rusk said softly.
It was. Six goblins peeled out of scrub with two sappers skittering behind like clever afterthoughts. The spears came with that half-beat goblins loved—too early if you were new, too late if you'd learned.
Taro took the second beat. Guard Melt—flick, flick on the same seam during one breath—softened a shield just enough. Snap Step arrived because his breath already had, and Centerline Surge rode from ribs into knuckles. A goblin's padded helm popped back; Rusk pinned the line; Niya put a shaft where it made the most administrative sense.
A spear jabbed shallow on Trixie's side. She brought the buckler up on Taro's exhale, shoulder-bumped the spearman off their lane, and cut low with the short sword—nothing theatrical, a line the thigh would remember. She was already back behind the shield before blood hit leaves. Ade hissed at a recruit's shallow forearm cut and wrapped it with bored competence.
They reset without a word.
Combat Adaptation Registered.Martial God's Champion — Blessed Growth:+2 to all stats.
Trixie caught Taro's eye for just long enough to confirm I'm fine / you're fine. Something eased in both of them that hadn't had time to grow tight yet.
They moved again.
The first hour was traps as a language. They read it, sometimes fluently, sometimes with an accent that cost skin.
A deadfall log whispered down; Taro didn't fight it—he let Load-Bearing Breath bleed the pressure into ground, guiding weight as if returning a drunk to a chair. A caltrop fan hissed out of a clay gourd and kissed boots; Rope-Cut Step angled his feet past the meanest cluster while Trixie's cadence kept the file from panicking into a second trigger. A net dropped and bounced off Rusk's braced shield; Rooted Frame planted Taro while he split the seam Niya pointed at with two quick hits.
They advanced meters at a time. Leaf litter recorded their patience.
Hour two made ambushes a rhythm. Short bows twanged; Niya's return fire wrote quiet sentences into brush. Goblins tried to bait chases and found these humans didn't love running.
"Cover!" Trixie called when a flanker came slantwise through the briars. The call snapped through the file on a wire. Taro felt that small AGI lift his strange blessing liked to give when someone did the right thing behind him. He cut the flanker on the half-beat, not hard, just true.
A boy from another cell took an arrow to the meat of his thigh and tried to be brave badly. Ade dragged him behind Rusk, Trixie braced with a palm and a hip so the pack didn't swing loose, and together they made the boy's panicked breath count again. "In two… out six," Trixie said, as if reading him a recipe. He obeyed after the initial pain settled, because recipes were how things stopped going wrong.
They went on: through brush, across a shallow, along a line of stones that didn't look like stakes until a spear bounced off one.
Combat Adaptation Registered.Martial God's Champion — Blessed Growth:+2 to all stats.
Taro didn't glance back this time. He knew she was there by the way his breath came back to him untroubled.
They met hob sergeants in the third hour. Two of them, anchoring a ragged gob line with discipline that would have been admirable if it weren't trying to kill people Taro had begun to like.
"Seam," Niya said from somewhere that didn't seem to need a body.
Rusk made that breathy grunt that meant I'm a door, and Taro treated the hob's shield like a discussion: flick-flick on the same spot to convince, Snap Step, Surge short and mean into the jaw hinge. The hob's eyes rolled a thought he didn't have time to think. The line buckled. A spear butt clipped Ade's shoulder and Trixie was there—buckler high, short riposte, then back behind the shield. She flinched once when a wild jab scraped her hip and showed teeth that were not for smiling.
They held. The goblins didn't. Enough died to make room for silence. The rest slid backward, not brave enough to show their backs, too tired to pretend bravery much longer.
"Forty minutes," Kelda barked from a rise. "Heals, water, food. Then we finish this."
They pulled into a bend made defensible by roots and common sense.
Ade moved from wound to wound, stingy with light, generous with wraps. Trixie re-tied a strap on her buckler and put a fresh band on Taro's forearm where leather had kissed him more honestly than he liked. She handed him a bowl when he didn't think to ask.
"Rule four," she said.
He ate. "My favorite rule," he said, and she rolled her eyes in a way that meant she'd heard a worse joke today and didn't want to.
Niya came back from a silent walk with her braid damp and a new thorn in her calf. "They've burned some of their own traps," she said. "They're running light into a pocket."
"Desperate counter," Rusk predicted, testing the edge on his patience with a thumb. "Good. I hate thinking in forests."
"Slow push," Kelda called. "Expect a charge. Formation, not heroics."
Taro flexed his hands. Trixie's fingers brushed the back of one—checking a wrap's lay—and lingered a breath longer than necessary. He didn't look up. He didn't need to.
The forest opened like a mouth that had meant to smile and forgot how. A rough clearing showed stumps, staked banners, a trampled space where too many feet had believed standing here could matter. The Hobgoblin Captain stood centered, iron-shod cudgel in one fist, scars making a poor map across his face. Around him, five dozen goblins bunched into a line that would either break something or become one.
The traplines were quiet. The air smelled only of sweat and bad decisions.
Kelda's horn called the line. Rusk slid his shield into place. Ade's lips moved around a prayer that sounded like an insult. Niya's bow pointed at ideas and waited to turn them into facts. Trixie put her buckler where it wanted to live and matched Taro's breath without looking at his mouth to count it.
The Captain bellowed something that might have been a word. The goblins charged.
Everything in the world got small enough to read.
Taro cut lanes, not men; Weave Engine carried his head under and over as spears tried to edit him. Load-Bearing Breath made the cuirass forget to steal from his power. He felt Trixie's Cover! call nudge his feet into a better stance twice, three times. Her buckler sang, ugly and beautiful, catching iron where soft things would rather live. Her sword made quick diagonals that bought Ade heartbeats, nothing more, everything.
A spear got past the math. It scraped Trixie's hip and wrote red there. She howled once—not pain, not fear, something like a promise—and reset her feet as if she'd meant to stand there all along. Countering the retreating goblins thrust with a spin and a hit of her buckler across the shaft plunging her sword into his chest to end him. Taro saw her retreat and weaved into the space where she stood, the goblins trying to get her were soon killed with punches and hooks that broke jaws and necks. She nodded to him with a smile of thanks as she rejoined their defense line and Taro grinned as he returned full focus to the fight.
The Captain shouldered through the press in front of the Beta core. His cudgel lifted into the exact angle that ends three people if the world is unkind for a second.
Taro saw it the way a man sees the old version of himself in a reflection of iron. The boy who never got the bell, the man who was always the opener, the life that was always about someone else's chance.
No.
He breathed—in, not greedy. Out, owning it. Everything aligned: ribs closing, hips stacked, spine present. Heat rose in him not like flame but like structure learning to be more itself.
Light moved across his skin like the world agreeing to help.
Class Evolution Achieved.
Junior Fistfighter → Monk I
Skill Unlocked — Ki Soul (Rank A):Permanent+20 STR, +20 END, +20 AGI, +20 Ki. Enables Full-Body Ki Enhancement (toggle; slow Ki drain) and Ki Guard (minor damage dampen while active).
The cudgel fell. Ki Guard took the edge and Rooted Frame gave it to the ground. Taro didn't shove back. He changed the conversation.
Guard Melt—flick-flick on the bracer seam—opened a grammar mistake in the Captain's guard. Snap Step arrived because it had been invited by breath, and Surge went through the hinge of the jaw with a pressure that made the body remember its off switch. The Captain snarled like someone trying to leave a joke gracefully and swung that iron again on an ugly hook.
Formation Breach timing—Rusk pinned a shield, and Taro used the beat the shield created, not the one he wanted. Weave took the counter; body-head-short right wrote a small ladder; the last Surge didn't move much and did everything.
The Captain sat down like a chair had been placed behind him. He tried to decide not to, failed, and slept. Never to wake again.
Niya's arrow found the drummer who would have called a last bad idea. The goblins' line collapsed inward on itself, then outward into panic. Kelda's horn sounded the hold; they did not chase beyond the mark. Ade swore, just once, purely for joy.
Combat Adaptation Registered.
Martial God's Champion — Blessed Growth:+2 to all stats.
Counter-Tempo II → III: wider interrupt window; micro-stagger on disrupted elites.
Load-Bearing Breath I → II: improved power retention under sustained enhancement.
Silence arrived in a rush, then burst into noise. The subjugation force let go all at once—roars, laughter with blood on its teeth, the wildness that comes after surviving the exact thing you were afraid of.
Trixie crossed the few steps to him with her sword down and her buckler still thinking about working. She looked him over like a ledger: eyes, breath, hands, blood. Her cheeks flushed, her ears tilted, her tail forgot to behave. She smiled—small, involuntary, sharp with relief.
"Master," she said, and for once the word had nothing to do with a collar and everything to do with what he had done in front of her. "You're okay."
"You too," he said, not trusting his voice to do anything more interesting. He put his palm lightly over the wrap Ade had tied on her hip. "You held the line."
"You made one," she said back, soft. Then she tipped her head to the sky and let out a clear, bright howl that made the tired men grin and the tired women laugh and the cleric Ade mutter, "Fine. I like you."
Rusk clapped Taro once on the shoulder with a hand the size of something you build houses with. "Captain bounty's fourty, and I'll buy stew with it." His smile made him look like the father he'd said he was. "You plant your feet like good soil."
Kelda came through the aftermath with her slate. She took the captain's token, checked the tally, and made a mark so crisp it probably cut the page under it. "Done," she said. "No chases. Pack the injured. Then home."
Taro looked down at his hands. They didn't shake. His breath came back in long pulls that sounded like agreement.
He met Trixie's eyes and found the same thing in them—relief arranged into intention. Somewhere far behind the trees, the town bell lifted a single note and let it hang until it had nothing left to prove.
Status — Taro
Class:Monk I(evolved from Junior Fistfighter)
Title: Martial God's Champion (SSS)
HP:580 base (10× END 58) → 1080 effective (during combat/training; END 108)
Ki:51
Base Stats(end of Ch.7 → after Chapter 8)
STR: 34 → 60(+6 Blessed Growth, +20 Ki Soul)
END: 32 → 58(+6, +20)
AGI: 30 → 56(+6, +20)
SPIRIT: 31 → 37(+6)
MIND: 28 → 34(+6)
LUCK: 27 → 33(+6)
Ki: 25 → 51(+6 Blessed Growth, +20 Ki Soul)
Effective Physicals(in combat/training; SSS +50)
STR:110END:108AGI:106
New/Updated Skills & Techniques
Ki Soul (Rank A):Permanent+20 STR/END/AGI/Ki.
Toggle Full-Body Ki Enhancement (slow Ki drain).
Ki Guard: minor damage dampen while exhaling.
Counter-Tempo III: wider interrupt window; micro-stagger on disrupted elites.
Load-Bearing Breath II: improved power transfer and stamina retention under sustained enhancement.
Formation Breach (Novice): small accuracy/power bump when striking through allied shield gaps.
Guard Melt I, Centerline Surge (Novice), Weave Engine I, Snap Step (Novice), Rooted Frame (Novice), Rope-Cut Step (Novice).
Team Passives:Call-and-Breath I, Cover Call I (with Trixie).
Trixie — Field Highlights
Buckler Guard (Novice), Shield Shoulder (Novice), Porter Brace I; calm cadence under pressure; effective low-line cuts; maintained line discipline; minor hip wound treated.
Loot & Ledger (scene)
Hob Captain bounty:40s(plus standard ear/token shares tallied by guild).
Repairs needed: buckler strap (re-stitched), cuirass scuffs (oil/patch), glove lining (dry).