Chronicles Of The Crafting Hero [REMASTERED]

James felt his body resting against something warm and soft. The hard surface of the ground was gone, in its place, the familiar give of a soft bed pressing up against his back. As he breathed slowly through his nostrils, he caught the faint scent of old dust and timber mixed with wet soil. Birdsong drifted in from somewhere outside. He slowly opened his eyes, or at least he tried to. Only one answered.

Through his right eye, the image that greeted him was blurry, like looking out through a fogged window. It took a moment before things sharpened into focus an old, unfamiliar ceiling directly above him, threaded with small cracks and dark timber beams. As his eye moved across it, the dull, throbbing ache radiating from his left eye deepened, pressing through his skull and swallowing everything else whole. He clenched his teeth against it, a small groan escaping through his lips as his hand flew up to his face. His fingers found cloth. He pressed against it softly. It was different from before.

Then everything came back at once.

The assassin. The battlefield. His own hands pressing into the churned soil as he crawled toward his father, his body barely holding itself together. And Benedict, Benedict's last expression as his boot connected and the portal swallowed James whole, and then the ground had rushed up and taken him.

"Father," he muttered.

A soft sound came from somewhere beside him. He turned his head immediately, his heart slamming against the inside of his chest. A girl sat in an old wooden chair with her eyes fluttering open, blinking rapidly, like she had been asleep and the sound had pulled her out of it. She had brown eyes, black hair, and wore a brown dress dirty at the hem.

"Thank goodness," she said, rising quickly to her feet. "You're awake!" She stepped toward him. James's body reacted before his mind could catch up, his arms pushing against the mattress to lift himself and the pain drove him back down immediately, sharp and radiating outward from every point of impact he had accumulated and forgotten. He clenched his jaw against it.

"Don't move," she said. "You'll only hurt yourself."

"Who are you?" James said, then stopped to cough, his throat completely dry. "Where am I?"

"You must be thirsty," she said. Before James could respond, she had already turned and pushed through the wooden door, stepping outside and pulling it shut behind her.

James was left alone with the silence.

He looked around the room properly for the first time. It was bare, the bed beneath him, the wooden chair she had been sitting in, a drawer pushed against the wall beside him, and a small table near the foot of the bed. A wooden cane rested on top of it. Through the small window, all he could make out was a stretch of barren, dry soil beneath the pale light outside.

The door opened again. She returned holding a wooden cup and crossed the room quickly, lowering herself onto one knee beside the bed and pressing the cup toward his lips. James turned his face away. "Stop!" His voice broke mid-word, dry and cracked.

"You need to drink. You've been unconscious for three days."

James coughed. "What?" The words barely made it past his throat. "Three days?" He tried to swallow and found nothing there, his throat so dry it ached. He looked at the cup. At the girl holding it. He did not know her. He did not know this room or this village or how he had gotten from the forest floor to this bed. But his throat felt like sand and the water was right there.

"Please," she said. "I mean no harm."

He looked at her for a moment, then nodded slowly.

She moved closer, pressing a hand gently against his back and easing him upright, then brought the cup to his lips. James swallowed. The first gulps burned going down, his throat raw and protesting, but the cold of the water spread through his chest immediately and he kept going until the cup was empty. He pulled back and gasped, his breath unsteady.

The girl stood, watching him with an expression caught somewhere between relief and concern. James held himself upright with both hands pressed into the mattress. "Where am I?" he asked again.

"Our home," she said. "In Liora."

"Liora," James repeated, the name meaning nothing to him.

"Yes." She tilted her head slightly. "You're not from around here, are you?"

He didn't answer. His gaze had dropped to his own body. The armor was gone. He wore a white tunic that wasn't his, though his leggings were still his own. The blood and the soil from the battlefield were gone entirely. He pressed the back of his hand against his forearm slowly. Clean. He caught a faint scent on his skin, something close to soap, but nothing he recognized.

The girl watched him stare at the empty space in front of him without moving.

"What's your name?" she asked.

James gripped the edge of the mattress and swung both legs over the side of the bed in one motion. The pain hit him immediately, radiating outward from his ribs and back, sharp enough to pull the breath out of him in a hiss.

"Don't move like that," the girl said, stepping forward. "Goodness. You don't listen, do you?"

"My name is James," he said through his teeth, steadying his breathing. "James Tyranny." He lifted his gaze to her face.

Her eyes had gone wide. "Are you..." she said. "Are you the son of Alexander? The great hero?"

"Yes."

"But that's—" she stopped herself, pressing her lips together. "That's impossible."

"We were attacked," James said. "And then I was..." The image came back without warning. His father on the ground. He felt it move through his chest before he could stop it, a cold wave that started somewhere behind his ribs and spread outward. He finished the sentence quietly. "I was teleported here."

The girl looked at him for a long moment without speaking.

"A rumor has spread," she said carefully. "An announcement was made. That the great hero Alexander had passed."

James already knew. He had watched it happen. But the words leaving someone else's mouth hit him in a place that knowing had not reached yet, like something striking a wound that had not fully registered as a wound. He felt his heart stutter.

"His son along with him," she said.

"What?" His voice came out flat. "What do you mean?"

"Many bodies were found at the battlefield," she said. "Including the great hero and his..." she paused, searching for the word, "...attendant. Your body was not found. People were saying that perhaps from the destruction, that there may have been nothing left."

"That's a lie." The words came out sharper and louder than he meant them to. "I'm still alive." He pressed both palms hard into the mattress and pushed, and made it exactly two inches before his arms buckled and dropped him back down.

The attempt had cost him more than he wanted to admit. He sat on the edge of the bed with both hands pressed into the mattress, his arms keeping him upright while the rest of him worked through what Lisa had just said.

His attendant. That was Benedict. The man who had bound James's eye with a torn strip of cloth while a horde bore down on them, who had used everything left in his body to send James through a portal. A body had been found. Benedict had died there.

The last image James had of him, his expression as his boot connected and the portal took James whole, pressed itself into the back of his mind and stayed there.

"Are you alright?" Lisa asked.

James did not answer. He stared at the floor between his feet. The wooden boards were old and uneven, the grain dark with years of use.

*Nobody knows I'm alive.*

The thought arrived without drama. Flat and clear. Whatever remained of the kingdom's attention after the news of his father's death had already turned elsewhere. The battle site had been found. The bodies had been identified. Whatever conclusions people had drawn about James, they had drawn them without his body as evidence. He was a name attached to a tragedy. Not a living person anyone was looking for.

If Lisa told anyone who he was, that would change.

Someone had sent those assassins. Someone who had known exactly where they were going, when they were leaving, how to find them in a monster zone hundreds of kilometers from the kingdom. That information had not come from nowhere. It had come from someone with access, someone still unknown. And James was weak. He had no strength, no allies, no means of protecting himself against anything that would come looking.

Being dead was the only armor he had.

He looked up at the girl. "Don't tell anyone I'm here," he said. "Please."

Lisa looked at him for a long moment. Something behind her eyes shifted, a quiet recognition of the weight sitting underneath the request. She gave one slow, deliberate nod. "Alright," she said.

A sound came from behind the door. Slow, measured footsteps, the particular rhythm of someone who had learned to be careful with each step. The door swung open and an old woman entered, carrying a small clay bowl with both hands, her back curved forward under the accumulated weight of many years. Her eyes, dark and sharp despite everything else time had done to her face, moved from the bowl to James and settled there without expression. She set the bowl on the small table near the foot of the bed and looked at him the way a person looks at something they have already decided how to manage. Then she turned and left.

"She doesn't talk much," Lisa said.

James looked at the bowl. A thin broth, still warm, a thin thread of steam rising from the surface.

He ate.

He did not leave for four days after waking.

His body made that clear the first time he tried, and he understood it clearly enough not to push it again. He moved between the bed and the window when he could manage it, and through the small square of glass he watched the land stretching flat behind the house, dark soil turned in long even rows, and Lisa moving along them with a hoe in the pale morning light, her pace steady and unhurried in a way that suggested she had been doing this alone for a long time. The old woman appeared on a low bench near the wall of the house when the sun was out, her hands busy with something in her lap.

On the fifth day he stepped outside.

The light hit harder than he expected, broad and pale across the open land, and he stood in the doorway letting his eye adjust. The air smelled of turned earth and something cool and green carried from far off. He looked at the field. At the section of fencing along the far edge where one corner had come apart, the posts leaning inward at an angle that would let animals through by nightfall if it was left alone.

He spent the morning fixing it.

He was not good at it. His hands knew swords and training grounds and the specific demands of a skill his instructor had spent years drilling into him, but not this, not the leverage needed to drive a post back into packed soil, not the knots that would hold through weather. He made mistakes. Lisa appeared beside him at the right moments with a length of rope or a quiet suggestion about the angle, and then moved away again before he had to acknowledge that he had needed either. He was grateful for it in a way he could not have named properly.

The old woman watched from her bench and said nothing.

He told Lisa at the end of that first week that he would be using a different name going forward. She accepted it the way she seemed to accept most things, with a nod and without questions. He did not explain further.

He practiced at night.

Past the far edge of the farm where the treeline started, he found whatever space opened between the trunks and worked through everything his instructor had taught him. The instruction was still there, pressed deep into his memory by sheer repetition, Benedict's voice, patient and exacting, correcting the same mistakes so many times that James had the words committed long before his body understood what to do with them. He could hear them clearly in the dark, as though the man were standing a few meters back watching his form with that particular expression he wore when James was doing something almost right.

The skill was harder to reach outside of training. Slower to respond, imprecise, demanding a level of concentration that left him emptied out in a way physical exhaustion alone had never managed. But it was there. Present, like a coal that had not gone out.

He would not let it go out.

Benedict had not had a wife or children. He had given everything to one family and had died in a destroyed forest with the skill still in him, the last person who carried it. James was not going to be the reason it ended in that clearing. He owed his instructor that, and he knew with a quietness that needed no examination that he owed him more than he could ever properly account for.

He worked at it until his concentration broke apart, went back inside and slept, and in the morning worked the farm, and at night returned to the treeline.

It was during the second month that word reached Liora through traveling merchants, fragments of news passed between villages the way all news traveled in places this far from anywhere. Three bodies had been found at the battle site. The great hero. His attendant. And a third, an unknown man, a dual-blade assassin, dead among the wreckage with wounds that matched nothing any of the investigators could account for cleanly.

James sat with that information for a long time after he heard it.

The assassin was dead. Whatever had sent those men into that forest had lost its instrument. That did not mean the threat was gone, whoever had arranged the attack was still somewhere, still unknown, still capable of sending others. But it meant that the specific man who had seen James's face, who had watched Benedict kick him through the portal was gone. It was not safety. But it was something.

He kept practicing.

The months passed quietly.

James continued to practice.

Not because he expected some sudden breakthrough, but because it had become difficult not to. Training had occupied too much of his life to abandon entirely. Even when there were chores to finish or repairs to make around the farm, he still found time somewhere in the day.

The rest of his time gradually filled with other things.

Living with Lisa and her grandmother had been an adjustment at first.

The work itself was not particularly difficult. Most of it was simple and repetitive. The difficulty came from unfamiliarity. There were countless small things that everyone in the household seemed to know instinctively and that James did not. Tasks that required no special skill still took him longer simply because he had never needed to do them before.

The old woman seemed to find this quietly amusing.

She never mocked him for it, but there were occasions when she would watch him struggle with something for several minutes before walking over, fixing the problem in a matter of seconds, and returning to whatever she had been doing.

James learned.

Slowly at first, then more quickly.

The village became familiar as well.

For a time, he had expected someone to recognize him.

Not because he was particularly famous, but because his family was not unknown within the kingdom. Yet as the months passed, nobody showed the slightest sign of connecting him to anyone important.

Eventually he realized there was no reason they would.

Liora was far from the places he had known.

Even in the city where he had grown up, there were likely many people who would not have recognized him if they passed him on the street. Most of his life had been spent away from public view. The name of his family was known far more widely than his face.

The villagers knew nothing about him beyond what he chose to tell them.

And after a while, that became normal.

The blacksmith greeted him when he passed through the village. Merchants occasionally stopped to exchange a few words when they arrived with supplies. People waved when they saw him helping with work around the farm.

Nobody treated him differently.

Nobody expected anything from him.

For the first time in a long while, James found himself living among people who saw him as nothing more than another resident of the village.

He discovered that he liked that more than he would have expected.

The days became easier after that

He learned which chores Lisa preferred to do herself and which she was more than willing to hand off to someone else. He learned that her grandmother woke before everyone else and somehow always seemed to know who had been avoiding their responsibilities before breakfast.

The old woman remained sharp despite her age.

James occasionally suspected she understood far more about him than she ever said aloud.

If she had questions about where he came from or why he had appeared half-dead on a riverbank all those years ago, she kept them to herself. In return, James never offered explanations she had not asked for.

The arrangement suited both of them.

Seasons passed.

Traveling merchants came and went. Harvests succeeded or failed by varying degrees. Children James did not recognize grew taller and eventually became people he did recognize. The village changed in all the small ways places changed when enough time was allowed to pass.

Without realizing exactly when it happened, James stopped thinking of himself as a guest.

The old woman died in the third year.

Quietly, in the way of someone who had been moving toward that point for a long time and arrived without surprise. Lisa had known it was coming and had prepared for it in whatever way a person prepares for something that cannot be stopped. James had done what he could in the weeks before and the weeks after, which was mostly to be present and to keep the farm running and to ask nothing of her during that time.

It was after this that James made the walk to the nearest hunter base and registered.

He had thought about it for a long time before he did it. A registered hunter left a name in a record. A name in a record was a thread, however thin, that someone determined enough could follow.

But Liora sat so far from the kingdom that the distance alone was its own kind of obscurity. And the farm needed more than what the farm was producing. Lisa would not say it, but he could see it in the careful way she managed what they had.

The registration process asked for his level. He gave it. He was now an E-rank. The man behind the desk looked at it, then looked at James, then looked back at the number with the expression of someone deciding whether to comment, and then decided not to. He stamped the paper and slid it across without another word.

James folded it and walked back to Liora.

Monster zones required travel, required preparation, required the kind of careful planning that accounted for the fact that he was going in with a single skill he had not fully mastered and a level that most hunters would have been embarrassed to admit at his age. He learned the geography of the nearest zones slowly, from other hunters passing through, from old maps the base kept in a back room that smelled of mildew.

He went in for the first time alone and came back out alive, which he counted as a complete success given the variables. He went in again. And again. The skill was not precise enough yet, and he knew it, and so he learned the shape of what it could and could not do by working the edge of that boundary very carefully over a long time.

He was not strong. He had accepted that about himself years ago, cleanly and without sentiment. But careful and precise were things he could be, and in a monster zone, careful and precise kept you breathing when strong did not always manage it.

He brought back what he earned. It was enough, and then more than enough, and eventually considerably more than that as the skill sharpened and his knowledge of the zones deepened and he stopped being afraid of the work itself.

The years after settled into their own shape. The village of Liora did not ask too many questions of people who worked hard and kept to themselves, and James did both. He was known there as nothing more than what he appeared to be, a young man with one eye and a reputation among the local hunters for being methodical in a way that made up for what he lacked elsewhere. The scar had healed into something permanent, a clean line running upward from beneath the leather patch he wore, and he had long stopped noticing it.

He was twenty-one when he understood that what he felt for Lisa was not what it had been years back.

At eighteen he had looked at her and seen the person who had pulled him from a riverbank and kept his secret and given him a place to stand while he worked out what came next. He had felt something for that, something that went too deep to call gratitude, a quiet wonder at the fact that a person could simply decide to do that for a stranger with nothing attached to the decision.

But this was different.

He noticed it one morning while she was moving through the field before she knew anyone was awake yet, her pace different then than it was at any other time of day, looser, less purposeful, more like someone simply being in a place where they were comfortable. He was standing at the window. She did not know he was there. And something about the ordinary, unhurried way she moved through the early light settled into him and stayed, and when he looked at it honestly he understood that it had been there for a long time before he acknowledged it.

He said nothing. He went back to the zone the next morning and worked until the concentration broke, and when he came back to the farm it was the same as before, and it went on like that.

Until it didn't.

He was twenty-three when he told her. He had not planned to. They were at the edge of the field in the late afternoon with the light going long and orange across the dark soil and she said something, something ordinary, something he could not recall afterward, and he looked at her and the thing he had been holding quietly to one side refused to stay there any longer.

She listened. Then she told him, in the tone of someone stating something that should have been obvious for a long time now, that she already knew.

Something in his chest that had been wound tight released.

They were married before the year was out.

His daughter was born years later.

James had understood weakness in a particular and thorough way for most of his life. He knew its specific shape, the exact ceiling it placed on what a person could do in a world where strength was either something you were born into or something you were not. He had made a kind of peace with it over the years, not warmly, but with the practicality of someone who had stopped fighting the features of the landscape they lived in and learned to move through it carefully instead.

His daughter had been born at level one.

By the time she was walking she was no longer at level one.

By the time she was two nothing had changed. She didn't move through the world the way the old texts described the truly born heroes.

She was just like him. He knew she would not become one of them. He smiled at the thought.

He had told no one.

He understood with the same cold clarity that had kept him alive in Liora for years what it would mean the moment someone found out. A child carrying a name that was not the name she had been born into, living quietly in a village that had never produced anything of note. It would pull attention the way fire pulls attention in the dark.

He had kept her hidden, kept his silence, and kept moving forward.

Until Tyler.