"Okay. Blind Eye guild. I am Armsmaster Balthus. You don't know me because you didn't grow up in human civilization, but I am one of the Nine Heroes. People out there will tell you there are only Seven Heroes, but that is a lie."

Balthus changed gears into a mean drill instructor and started with his self-introduction. Cless thought it strange and reminded that Zoe did recognize Balthus as one bigwig adventurer earlier, but Balthus suppressed her. Now he was stating that out front. Something big changed. Maybe Balthus wasn't bound by the same oaths as Karen or the Priest. Before meeting him at the association branch, she didn't even remember hearing his name. But in hindsight, her life before the rite was rather bland.

Another thing worried her. He said Nine Heroes, but out there people only recognized Seven. Why was that? What happened to the other two to make society forsake them? Was Karen one of them too? No way. She never saw any of the locals show any deference to her. Besides, if Karen was a Hero, then the Priest was one as well. She was getting annoyed with being treated on a need-to-know basis.

"We are going to stay in these woods for a whole week. We are training in the morning, we are training in the afternoon. And in the night, we are going to train even more!"

They cheered. The training was good. Getting proficiencies went faster if the target or partner was high leveled. Also if your own level was higher, it became easier to level the basic stuff. Even though it made some people wonder why they had to grind the basic levels earlier when they could just wait to level up and then get the proficiencies the easy way, that kind of mentality bred people that would never level up because leveling up without the proper proficiencies was an endless and deadly grind.

One would either play it safe and fight only enemies at the lower end of their Exp range, progressing at a snail's pace or risk it and fight something they had no chance of hitting or even significantly damaging because they suck with their weapons or spells. Therefore grind your proficiencies. Keep them as close to your own level as possible. Train broader things if you get a lull without much action like Cless had these last several days after she returned from the orc extermination.

"First, as a motivator, let me tell you about who is coming to kill all the five of you. I will weep at your funerals." He made a pause but nobody spoke. "The Church of the One God deigned to grant this town the honor of hosting their most militant branch. The guys that scour the Human Realm in search of heretics, traitors, and demon worshippers. Naughty girls that sleep with monsters will be culled."

"We didn't sleep with monsters!" Cless protested, no longer able to remain silent.

"Does that matter if you are being accused by someone that won't listen? No, it won't. So get used to it. The guys that are coming will push any outrageous charge they want, and they can get away with it. You don't talk back to them," Balthus guffawed as he delivered his next line. "In fact, talking back to them is considered heresy."

once again Cless racked her brain, trying to find any memory of that branch of the Church. She grew up inside a temple, surrounded by religious people. Why wouldn't they talk about it even once? She knew several branches of the church but she couldn't pin the behavior to a name. Unless... Unless they were intentionally avoiding talking about that branch in front of her.

Her reality felt fabricated. Like she was a fish in a bowl. Balthus said that, didn't he? That she didn't grow up in human civilization, just like Venaris or Silverfang. Her life in the church was a lie. From what she knew, Cless was sure it wasn't to harm her. No. It was to protect her. Probably from these very people that are coming now.

"Why are they coming now of all time? What made them come earlier?" She asked Balthus. She could tell the man was not amused by her questions but she had to know.

"Their spy network either failed or got enough information to make them move. If they glimpsed at your status, it was a given for the latter. You know you were under surveillance your whole life. We never figured out who. Everyone around you was normal, everyone around you remained the same all these years. This town sees very little traveler traffic. Even the adventurers are locals. That's why you were brought here. Why Karen and the Priest moved all the way here."

Balthus sighed and his face became nostalgic.

"Back in the heydays Karen could charge a crown for a night at her inn at the capital and she would have a full house every single night. The Priest was... that's his story to tell. They gave it all up for you, Cless. To keep you safe from them. And now they are coming."

"Who is coming?" She asked, more a demand than a request.

"I'll tell you at the end of the training. Now, we begin." Balthus lined them up. "The enemy will bring appraisers. Does any of you know what they are?"

She knew from Clara's memories. Appraisers were...

"People that can forcibly pull up another person's status and detail regarding their class, Skills, and proficiencies." She answered.

"Yes. And that is bad because of thanks to the pri... Cless here, every single one of you has skewed status. Cless herself has stats that only a person with a level of a hundred-fifty should have. And she has been giving you Stat points like candy."

"Was that bad?" Cless asked, afraid of the answer. She might've doomed everyone.

"Bad? What do you think, Cless? Do you think you did a bad thing?" Balthus' gaze could burn a hole in her head.

How could she? Cless was divided. With Silverfang, it was a kill or be killed kind of situation. The lycan wouldn't let any of them escape. With Vic and Kurt, she could set them loose but the boys wouldn't like that and they offered themselves. Venaris carried the legacy of the gnomes of her village as the sole survivor. Did she think she did wrong? Giving them Stats and Skills? No way. These five were their guild. Her family. She would split the world in twain for them.

"No. Because even if I had double the stats I have now, I'd be only one person. There's only so much one person can do regardless of power." She replied.

Balthus glared at her even harder. "That is the most precious line of fantasy I've ever heard. You know nothing of the world, girl. 'Only so much a single person can do?' Look at the Church's leader. From his Holy City, he rules the world. All three Realms belong to him."

There we go. Cless self-confidence took a heavy hit. But before she could stop to lick the wound and do some self-soothing, her attention was drawn to what Balthus said. The three Realms. So the gnomes' wisdom was right and the humans knew that. At least the elite. But did the church of the One God reach that far? All three realms? Who won then?

It could not be the infernals, because the church hunted demon and demon worshippers with unending zeal. The Celestial then? The Priest said there was not a One God, but he might be telling her that the entity worshipped as the One God was from the Celestial Realm. They do try to influence humanity to use them as cannon fodder in the neverending fight against the Infernal.

That was way out of her pay grade. If the Ruler of Midgard expected her to deal with that crap, he should've picked another person. There's a true Hero right there, for crying out loud.

It was a day for Cless to connect a lot of dots. If there are three out of seven heroes in town, there was no way they could survive that encounter. How strong were these church militants?

"... Can you answer that, Cless?" Balthus asked her. What?

"I stand by my guild. Either everyone is strong or everyone is weak." She answered.

"I asked you if you know how to avoid appraisers, Cless," Balthus said.

"Run away. Get out of their range and you'll be safe."

Balthus came up close to her. She never noticed how tall he was. She was looking straight ahead and into his collarbone. "Are you joking?"

"If the Church conquered the three realms the war is over. They won." She decided to fish for information next, "If even three heroes can't stop them, it is over."

"Three?" He laughed. "Who did you pin?"

Cless noticed one thing. Why just three? "You gotta be joking me. Five?"

Balthus smirked. "Make up your mind."

She paused to think. Balthus, Karen, and the Priest. Who else? If they were one of the Heroes, they would be ridiculously powerful. But more than that, they would be here for her. It means they would know of her plight and appearance. They literally retired to protect her.

Did it feel... nice? More than nice. She thought she was alone, but in fact, a lot of people standing at the top of the world took the time, years for some to watch over her. What would motivate them to do so?

Back to pinpointing the heroes. They would never show disgust or disdain for her. They would actively seek to help her. She had no way to measure their power but they should be fearless.

"Balthus, Karen, Olson, George and the Priest," She named. Cless noticed she didn't know the Priest's name even after all these years. Funny how it eluded her mind until now. "Five."

"Farmer Olson? A Hero? Is that your final opinion?" Balthus tried to ridicule her. Tried being the key word. Cless felt that he was just messing with her head.

"How many farmers you know don't fear a lycan?" Cless asked back.

"Fair enough." Balthus dropped the mockery, the teasing, even relaxing. Cless felt there was something else going on.

"You guys had a bet running on whether I could identify you or not!" She accused.

"Guilty!" Balthus raised a hand to single himself out.

"Who won?" Cless asked.

Balthus' mirth disappeared when he thought about that. "Karen did."

"What did she bet?" She became very interested. If she knew Karen's bet, the truth about the heroes would be revealed. Suddenly Cless would have more sources of information to pester.

"Not telling. Go ask her yourself. Let's start our training. We're wasting time here."

He sat everyone around a fallen log and started.

"First thing is that you need to know how to appraise your own status. Without knowing how to appraise the status, you can't put up a defense. We are going to cheat out this stage. Cless, you will work on your Appraise: Status proficiency and then distribute the points to everyone else. I'm working their other proficiencies while you do that."

Cless gave him a puzzled look, "How?"

Balthus nonchalantly told her, "If you can transfer Experience, Stats, and Skills, why not proficiencies?"

"Why not, indeed. Gift five points of Appraise: Status to each of Venaris, Silverfang, Vic, and Kurt." She felt the Skill activate. "It worked," She exclaimed, surprised.

"What part of Absolute in your Skill name didn't you understand? Honestly, I'm glad you are such a good girl. You could've destroyed half the world in this month if you wanted to."

"To which I feel obliged to reaffirm, I don't." Just the thought sickened her.

"Appreciated. Now work on getting your own status appraised again and flush the proficiencies to them. Don't zero it though."

That was their first day. Cless ended the day with a huge migraine to which Balthus gave her a potion.

"This one is expensive. The deep-pocketed appraisers quaff them like a drunk quaffs ale but I only have two. You drink one today and another tomorrow. How many points did you distribute?"

"Thirty-five to each one of them. I have to raise my own now."

"Do it tomorrow. If you can get everyone to forty by tomorrow it would be swell. Now drink this, it is called a mind-soothing potion and go to sleep. You guys are going to wake up to do some night training in a couple hours."

Cless thought she had barely closed her eyes when Balthus woke everyone up with cold water. Was that really necessary? He made everyone use the Appraise: Status proficiency to familiarize with the principles behind it. These were interesting, in Cless assessment. You basically were trying to cram everything about a being into a single number. It was an awful ridicule amount of calculations and measurements to reach that. People were different so even two people with the same score would show different results in different fields covered by the Stat or trait. Doing all that by heart when you had no idea how was the reason Appraising caused such mental distress.

There were cases even of appraisers dying on the job.

What one had to do in order to block appraisals was simple in theory. External appraises were information theft. The appraiser would read the data of the person and do the calculations themselves. How to stop it? Just cram too much junk information with the real one and watch the poor person's brain implode when they try to sift the junk out. And since combat between specialists was all about doing something unexpected that could pierce the other party's defenses, blocking appraises became paramount.

"That is especially true when the appraiser is also a skill hunter. It lets them choose their marks. Appraise Skills work differently than automatic proficiency. They give a flat bonus to proficiency, like a profession."

How it was done was basically insanity. You needed to keep two separate mindsets, one the real thing and the second one where you think something else of yourself. You had to be convincing enough to fool oneself. When the appraiser pulled the information from your being, both datasets would be transmitted and become a unentangleable jumble of corrupt information.

At the end of the second day, everyone had migraines, but Cless was basically incapacitated. The second dose of the mind-soothing potion helped wonders for her. They woke up again in the middle of the night to train combat. Cless summoned her golem, a massive three-meter bulwark of granite that was as cumbersome as it looked. They started to train in group tactics and roles.

Cless was the healer and ranged or melee damage dealer. Venaris was also ranged but could use illusions for crowd control. Vic was pure magical damage. He had trouble because the golem cared not a single bit for poison. He'd need some other source of magic to deal damage to these enemies immune to poison. Silverfang was the main tank.

The problem appeared when it came to Kurt's usefulness in combat. He could fly around and slash with his talons, but his real power was to sing and entrance females. However, it had the obvious effect of taking Cless and Venaris out.

"From his natural abilities, he would be some sort of scout-bard hybrid," Balthus shared his honest evaluation. "Kurt could handle information and support, relieving Cless to attack more often."

"And how will Kurt learn support proficiencies this fast? We only have five days left." Cless pointed out.

"We are already screwed if someone gets a good reading of your status, we are going to break some taboos." Balthus decided. "We are going to the association and having the boys use the class selection crystal."

After planning their 1st and 2nd tier classes, they returned to town. With Karen in tow, they swarmed the association. Cless gave enough Exp to Venaris to get her able to reach the 2nd tier. She changed herself into Vicar. Then Karen and Balthus started a fight at the lobby. Now, when two heroes fight each other, even when it is a mock fight, do you know what happens?

Someone is going to need renovations. The boys and Venaris rushed to where Cless was while the clerk went to help save whatever was left of the building.

"Venaris, you already know your second tier. Get it. You go first. After Venaris is Kurt. Get Bard and then Songsoother. Vic, get Spellblade and then Warmancer. Silverfang, get Pugilist and Wild Aegis."

They quickly changed jobs. She wanted everyone to become Dabbler as she was to earn Exp with any activity and she was sure Wisdom had benefits of its own. She had no idea what were they, but surely something as good-sounding as Wisdom had to have benefits. However, the Stats might be required and they could always change again... If they raided another association branch.

Cless wanted to remove the Priestess class and see what stat-less options she had but it bumped into the problem of not knowing what stat-less classes were there. And she might also need the forty Stat points the maxed-out class was giving her.

They snuck out of the room with the boys covering Cless as if they were just rescuing her. When they came around, the fight was over and both Karen and Balthus were apologizing and abusing their Hero status to get away with it. Cless thought it would also have the side benefit of making the scary and still unnamed visitors believe that not everything was fine between the two.

Eventually, they returned to the northern woods before George could show up. She'd deal with the constable when the time comes.

The training resumed. Cless was able to see her Status in depth now. Appraise her own proficiencies and Stats.

Strength: Physical prowess and muscular exertion limits.

Agility: Movement precision, flexibility and muscle reaction time.

Health: Overall immunity, physical recovery, and ability to withstand damage.

Intellect: Memory and ability to process information. Mental reaction time. Increases strength of spells.

Wisdom: Mental fortitude, mental recovery ability, and capacity to make inferences. Increases magic power recovery rate.

Charisma: Strength of personality, ability to affect other's reactions, and resistance to emotional damage.

Magic: Size of energy pool to cast spells. Resistance to magical effects.

Balthus continued with the instruction. "We are now going to learn how to resist appraisals. You must forge a fake status sheet with gibberish. Use the same path you forged to pull your data but instead push. Imagine a second status window opening in front of you, slightly above the true one. Fill it with random numbers. Make up a 'character sheet', a persona."

They worked for the remaining five days of the week. Without the potions, they couldn't risk mental exhaustion. When they weren't burning their brains with the resistance training, they were training tactics and combat. Cless' golem was being crushed over and over.

"Why do I have to train how to shoot this sling?" Venaris complained. "I have an automatic proficiency!"

Once more, Balthus shared his knowledge. "Automatic proficiencies don't mean you can get lazy. They will only make you succeed, most of the time, in the action. However, the best path of action is not coded in the Skill. You can hit where you want with a sword, but you will have no idea WHERE to hit or even WHEN to hit. A perfect proficiency is worthless if you don't know what to do with it. Hitting a stationary bulls' eye is very different from hitting someone that is actively trying to not get hurt in combat."

A week after, they returned to the inn, weary and mentally drained. Cless had Appraise Resistance forty and the others were somewhere between twenty-five and forty. Being the lowest leveled, Venaris was at her soft cap. Coupled with her Magic stat it would give any appraiser under level a hundred-fifty a run for his mind-soothing potions.

"Bath. I might not be soaked in orc blood but I feel as filthy," Cless groaned.

She and venaris had their bath and after they returned to the room it was the turn of the three boys.

They slept in the next morning. Cless woke up and found a chest with bread and fresh fruit with a note.

Take the day off. You need to rest and be on top of your game. Karen and Balthus are like ants whose hill was kicked right now. I'll bring more food and refreshments later.

– Josefine.

Thankful, the five did just as the doctor prescribed. They stayed indoors, played, modified clothes, did a fashion show, harvested flower seeds, and finished learning the last Mage spell. The three choices were Blink, a short-range teleport, Deeppockets, an extradimensional enchantment placed on clothing to store items, and Lightning Bolt, an offensive spell that could pierce defenses. Given the usefulness of the first one, everyone picked that, their former agreement, gone. Cless noticed one thing. Since she had two Skills that granted mage spells, she could select a second one. Each would be bound to one Skill and if she lost the Skill she'd lose access to the spell. She picked deeppockets as the 25th level spell of the Brownie Magic Skill.

The next day they kept practicing their mage spells. Blink's range increased with proficiency and Deeppockets would hold more stuff. They were actually getting bored during the late afternoon when Josefine knocked on the door.

Cless answered it, having sensed the barmaid through her detection spell. "Yes, Josie?"

"Cless," Josefine was worried, with a face like someone that was about to give bad news, "The people we were expecting arrived."

"Who?"

"The Inquisition."

Name: Cless (no surname)

Race: Human.

Level: 50 ( 1,003,681 / 1,275,000 Exp )

Class: — Dabbler 11 (56,542 / 66,000 Exp ) — Priestess 25 (975,000 Exp / ** ) — Vicar 1 (0 / 51,000 Exp)

Profession — Veteran Warmaster 18 (158,689 / 171,000 Exp) — Crafter 16 (Skill) — Farmer 16 (Skill)

Base Stats — Strength: 63 — Agility: 85 [136] — Health: 85 — Intellect: 96 — Wisdom: 40 — Charisma: 46 — Magic: 115

Available Status Points: 66

Skills:

S-rank: [ Absolute Contract ]

B-rank: [ Succubus’ Kiss ]

C-rank: [ Crafter ], [ Dangersense ], [ Elven Longevity ], [ Eat Anything ], [ Earth Magic ], [ Master Miner ]

D-Rank: [ Trick Shot ], [ Nimble Step ], [ Tinker ], [ Grounding ], [ Dancer’s Grace ], [ Great Leap ], [ Druidwalk ],

— [ Tremorsense ], [ Gemsense ], [ Ore sense ], [ Brownie Magic ], [ Courtier’s Charm ], [ Curmudgeon crafter ]

— [ Singers’ Talent ], [ Poison Resistance ], [ Merchant sense ], [Steelshine], [ Heavy Handed ], [ Farmer ], [ Twin Strike ],

E-Rank: [ Gravebreath ], [ Architectural Ingenuity ], [ Coin Sense ], [ Weavertouch ], [ Silk Hair ], [ Wanderlust ],

— [ Giant's Stamina ], [ Hearth’s warmth ], [ Seamstress Talent ], [ Lady’s Countenance ], [Enhanced Touch],

— [ Howl], [ Air Sailing], [ Splinters ]

F-rank: [ Gardener’s touch ], [ Florist’s Wonder ]. [ Cheat ], [ Inner Compass ]

Spells (spells under 20 hidden):

Cleric: — Mending: 50 — Detoxify: 46 — Light: 50 — Turn Undead: 34 — Blessing: 46 — Holy Bolt: 50 — Purify: 50 — Protection: 50

— — — Hallow: 50 — Flametongue: 40 — Cure: 40 — Uncurse: 40 — Banish: 40 — Heal: 50 — Warding: 40 — Revivify*: 30

Mage: — Detect Magic: 35 — Armor: 41 — Shield: 45 — Resistance: 34 — Deeppockets: 25 — Blink: 25

Priestess: Censure: 42 — Bulwark: 45 — Mass Mending: 50 — Sacred Dance: 41 — Judgement: 47 — Song of the Accord*: 44

House: — Detect Dust: 32 — Doorwatch: 26 — Prestidigitation: 32 — Never Overdone!: 35 — Touch Up: 27

— — — Dry: 24 — Repair: 41 — Clean: 50 — Bloom: 45 — Hearth Recall*: 24

Earth: — Soften: 26 — Earth Armor: 40 — Stone Shape: 41— Terrakinesis: 31 — Golem*: 50

Proficiencies (values under 10 hidden):

Appraise: Status: 50 — Resistance: 40

General: Prayer: 50 — Reading: 16 — Skinning: 11

Social: Negotiation: 31 — Persuasion: 16 — Bluff: 17

Martial: Leadership: 38 — Intimidation: 44 — Tactics: 34

Weapon: Long Blades: 27 — Unarmed: 27 — Archery: 34 — Maces: 32