Logan breathed heavily before falling to his knees, his hands resting their wrists on the floor. Black and white lightning sparks continued to course around the long cylindrical divet in the ground all the way to the worm’s corpse, the aftereffect of such a strong attack. Sweat dripped from Logan’s face to the floor as he looked around.

  A few seconds passed before Amalia and Marcus both approached their ally, Marcus pulling his hood back up to hide his features from the townsfolk.

  “Logan! It worked!” Amalia called as she got to her partner’s side and aided him to a stand.

  “That it did, hardly anything left of the beast. It was a good idea to investigate its inners beforehand, if it did house any in its stomach then that blast certainly would have harmed them”, Marcus spoke.

  Logan looked at the Devout and back at the corpse of the worm, a good two hundred feet away. “The attack did a lot more than I calculated. There’re several reasons I can think of, the most probable one was that you two pulled out all the stops to weaken it before it got to Acety”, he spoke with an almost rhetorical tone.

  Marcus nodded, “You could say that. I just threw away the notions I had and focused”, he started as he looked at his fist, “I used a technique that some see as profane… we shall have to see—”

  Before their conversation could progress too deeply, the villagers came jogging to the scene with cheers and claps.

  “That was amazing, Sir Mage!”

  “Incredible! No doubt he could take on the elemental lords!”

  “We had that much power in us? I would have never guessed!”

  Logan clenched his hand over Amalia’s shoulder to turn himself around, still a bit weak after acting as an accumulator for the energy. “The monster is dead, you shouldn’t have to worry about that one any longer. Thank you for allowing me the use of your energy for the final attack.”

  The guard that had spoken to Logan till this point then replied, “It was all down to your powers that this was possible. You can heartily say you’ve completed our contract. What are the names we’ll be singing of tonight?”

  “Logan, Amalia, and a Devout from the VIP guild.”

  The guard nodded, “With this deed, the man deserves a title to replace his nameless upbringing.”

  “Blessed Fist”, Marcus answered quickly, a title he had already accrued. His face twitched a bit as he saw his parents and brother amongst the populace, turning his head away from them so as not to reveal his face.

  “Everyone! Cheers from all for Logan, Amalia, and the Blessed Fist!”

  “Logan! Amalia! Blessed Fist!” the crowd cheered in unison.

  The rest of the day was spent in cheers, communion, and drinks. Logan took a quick trip to Noma to make them aware of the passing danger but returned to the festivities of Acety at the insistence of the townsfolk.

  It was probably the latest the kids had been awake as many ran around the town, though with a bit more supervision than before. All those who had been saved approached the trio and offered up flower crowns.

  “Thank you for saving us, Sirs and Miss!”

  Logan and Amalia bowed down to receive their new head adornments while Marcus picked his up and planted atop his hood.

  To his annoyance, Marcus was approached by his brother. The kid’s square face was a painful mirror for the Devout to look into.

  “Thank you, Mister”, the kid spoke in a higher-pitch version of Marcus’s voice with a slight tonal difference, more “unrefined.”

  Marcus coughed and tried to deepen his voice a bit, “That’s alright, kid. Just make sure to listen to the adults and you’ll be fine going forward.”

  Lucas tilted his body down to get a look at Marcus’s face, “Why do you keep your hood up, Mister?”

  “Scars”, Marcus answered abruptly as he pulled on the edges of his hood.

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  Lucas nodded, “My mum and dad say no matter what you look like, your parents will always love you.”

  Marcus smirked, “What about your class?”

  Lucas shook his head and made a negative humming noise, “Not got seen to yet. Sometime this year though.”

  “He looks to be around 8 or 9, I guess he just skirted around the census”, Marcus thought to himself. “Well, I hope you get a good one.”

  “Mum and Dad will love me anyway! I wish for a good class, like a Knight, then I can make them both rich”, Lucas exclaimed with wide arms.

  “They got enough to keep you”, Marcus said off-handily.

  “I get a lot of hand-me-downs from our neighbours. I keep hearing how they gotta sell stuff to keep afloat. But if I beat up bad guys like you do then they can buy the stuff other people gotta sell, right?”

  Marcus sighed and widened his eyes as he used Identification. “Don’t get your hopes up. A lot of people end up classless.”

  Lucas shook his head, “Nuh-uh! Imma think real hard and wish real hard for it. When the people come round they ‘will’ say I got a class.”

  A girl from the kid group then shouted over with an elongated, “Lucassss! C’mon.”

  “Coming!”

  Lucas ran off to the kids who continued to play as they finished talking to the grownups.

  Marcus sighed and stared at his parents who were talking to some of the other adults of the village. Clenching his fist, he put his hand into his bag and pulled out a mask for his eyes and approached them.

  His mother shared Marcus’s eye and hair colour, worried amber eyes were now full of joy and happiness while her long black hair was still a bit ruffled and messy for a commoner.

  His father had the same hair texture and length as Marcus, brushed back, but was a lighter brunette with greying ends, stubble adorned his more chiselled face.

  “You’re the Edwins, correct?” Marcus asked, still masking his voice a bit along with his face.

  The pair jolted up as they turned to face the adventurer, their chatting partners moving away to give the trio privacy.

  “Yes. I am Edvus”, Marcus’s father answered.

  “My name is Junie”, his mother added.

  Marcus’s heart twinged a bit as he finally heard his parent's names and voices, they felt so familiar but he was sure he wasn’t old enough to really have any memory of them speaking.

  “We must thank you again for saving our son, and the other children of Acety. We’d been pulling our hair out ever since he went missing”, Edvus informed with a sweaty brow and a shaky voice, possibly intimidated by Marcus and the power he held, or just not wanting to insult the man.

  “Yes. We couldn’t withstand losing another child”, Junie added as she placed a hand over her chest as if to guard heartbreak.

  Edvus wrapped an arm around his wife’s shoulders to console her.

  “Another?” Marcus asked, knowingly.

  Edvus nodded, “Not to the worm. This was many more years ago. See, we left our home village due to a fallout with our families, but we had little money for ourselves because of it. We couldn’t feed our newly born child after that so we had to entrust him to a church.”

  “Why didn’t you claim him when you did have enough?” Marcus probed.

  Junie took on a look that seemed to express anger or shame, it was a hard topic to broach.

  “It had already been a whole census passing by the time we could afford to feed and house three. At that point, our child was fully engrossed in his new family and we didn’t want to just prize him away if he had obtained a class.”

  “There’s also the fact we gave up any legal claim to our child, the church adopted him and that was his new family. We didn’t think it would be moral to put our son through that kind of process”, Junie added adamantly, defending her past decisions.

  Marcus looked back at Logan before returning his hidden gaze to his parents, “Logan is a great scryer. If you could meet your son again, would you?”

  The parents took a few moments to display their shocked faces. They looked at each other and then at the mysterious man. “As much as I wish the past were different, it has happened. If we were to meet him now, that might just mess with his current situation”, Edvus admitted.

  “That’s if he even wants to meet us. We have to think of him before ourselves. I would love to see him, and talk to him. I don’t want him to think we just abandoned him because of a different reason.”

  “We had to give him a chance at a better life. We barely made it through the chills with the aid of our neighbours.”

  “I take it you never got a chance to even find out what his class was”, Marcus prodded further.

  “Nary a half-year passed before we had to give our little Marcus up, not enough time for the census to come around”, Edvus replied.

  “We don’t even know if Lucas is classed or not, yet”, Junie added before becoming a bit more stern, “But it didn’t and doesn’t matter either way. In a perfect world, we’d have both with whatever they wanted.”

  “It seemed the best-case scenario occurred. They did what was best for me”, Marcus thought to himself.

  “Why such the interest in our previous son? Did Lucas say too much when he went over to you? He is a bit chatty”, Edvus laughed.

  Marcus shook his head, “He said a few things. Nothing bad I suppose.”

  “What of you then? You’re a nameless adventurer, no parents to speak of either?”

  “I have two parents still, but an adoptive family too, and a guild family. I kept my name when I was given to a church”, Marcus answered as he pulled off his mask and pulled down his hood, “I am Marcus Eren.”

  --- *** ---