Jules Gailen had celebrated his thirty-first birthday not two months back. He had been working as a guard for Dolvesk Transport Services for thirteen years, since he had come of age. His uncle, then-patriarch of the semi-prestigious Gailen family and overseer of its ever-shrinking estates, had bought him the job and told him to make as many business connections as he could in order to support and grow the family fortune.

Jules had promptly ran off to the North Coast, leaving his family high and dry. He hadn’t realized at the time the costs of starting a new life and beginning a new career all at once with zero friends or know-how, and ended up wracking up profound debts with local creditors, foremost among them his employer, Dolvesk.

He was functionally an indentured servant, no better than a Bound in his own opinion, and had become only more disloyal and rotten with time, not that he had had much to start out with.

He was, as his Class stated, a . Level 4, thank you very much. He hadn’t leveled in the Class in more than five years, and not for lack of a certain kind of dedication to his job.

His secondary Class, , which synergized quite nicely with his first one, now that he had leveled in. 9 levels, to be exact; he had been excited to level again and Advance that Class.

Of course, the biannual Arcgem Class verification Dolvesk did on all its employees should have caught the pair of red flags that were his two Classes, but those were easy enough to bribe or bully your way out of. All in all, Jules was pretty happy with how things had turned out.

All of this was before that fateful night, when that freak wolf attack had ended with two thirds of the ripped to shreds, a fair number of prisoners sharing the same fate, and the rest scattered and lost.

Jules had been left stranded, with little food and water but lots of gold and silver— looted from the broken-open money chest of the caravan master of course— and no where to go but blindly search for civilization.

After four and a half days, he had gained two Levels in the Class and finally stumbled onto a small, quiet town. And who was there to meet him but a pair of oh-so-nice looking . He grinned a wolf’s grin. They sure looked like easy marks. He could almost taste the money to be made. But first: food and rest. Then, so much to do.