A new chapter is up.
Come in, get comfortable, and let’s see what kind of trouble waits this time ❤️
✦
After leaving Old Baine’s tavern, Alden went straight back to his cottage.
The sword demonstration had left him drained.
All he wanted was to lie down and rest.
The sharp pain in his back told him rest would have to wait.
He needed to adjust the bandages first, or the wound there might worsen.
Using the twin-blade style before his body had fully recovered had placed extra strain on him and aggravated the injury, but it had been worth it.
Matters had unfolded exactly as he had hoped.
Now he only needed to stay home and wait for what came next.
Ever since he regained consciousness and realized he had been reborn in a world resembling the Middle Ages, he had been thinking about his future.
Remaining a commoner was the first path he discarded.
If fate had truly given him a second life, he had no intention of staying at the bottom of society, especially not when he possessed a gift no one else did.
Becoming a merchant was another option he rejected quickly.
In every feudal order he knew, merchants held poor standing unless they lived in a city-state or country built around trade.
Everywhere else, a merchant was little more than a purse that walked.
That left nobility as the only destination he could accept.
During the month and more he spent trapped in bed, he had imagined every path he could take to reach it and every contingency if things went wrong.
Thinking had been the only thing his broken body allowed him to do.
This world was not a generic medieval realm after all.
It was the world of ice and fire.
Still, its social order was not so different from the one he had first imagined, so most of the plans he had made from his sickbed remained useful.
Some parts, however, needed adjustment.
Certain features of this world could help him gain power and position faster.
Tourneys were the clearest example.
At first, he had not considered tourneys a path of advancement.
In the medieval world he knew from history, only nobles could enter most proper tournaments.
The stories where commoners put on armor, hid their names, won fame in the lists, and walked away with honor were usually fantasies.
Noble competitors were checked too closely for a commoner to slip in.
The tourneys of the Seven Kingdoms were different.
Beyond the central jousts, there were melees and archery contests, and those allowed commoners to compete.
Victory in either could still bring honor and coin.
It did not compare to the glory of the lists, but it was a real chance to make a name.
With a name, a man could catch the eye of a great lord.
If he entered that lord’s service and earned battlefield merit, he might be knighted.
Even without joining a great house directly, fame could win him a place as some knight’s squire and open the same road.
Knighthood sat at the lowest edge of the noble order in the Seven Kingdoms.
A knight was not quite a lord, but he held the key to becoming one.
Alden had considered other methods as well.
He could use knowledge from his old life to gain a noble’s favor and become a steward, adviser, or trusted servant, then perhaps receive knighthood that way.
But that sort of rise was fragile.
It offered little room to climb and almost no real chance at lordship.
Littlefinger was the best example.
He had spent endless schemes and effort to reach power, yet still never became the lord he truly wanted to be.
Even when he held authority in the Vale, the lords there never regarded him as their own.
At the end, not one Vale lord stood up for him.
That was how brittle court-born power could be.
Alden was no longer worried about joining the Red Lake guard.
With Old Baine involved, that should be simple.
Even without the twin-blade skill granted by his gift, he probably could have won a place.
The difficult part would come afterward.
How could he earn enough merit?
How could he catch the attention of someone able to make him a squire, then a knight?
For an ordinary commoner, that leap was almost a rebirth of its own, and strength alone would never be enough.
Bronn was the clearest proof.
For all his skill, he had spent most of his life as a sellsword until chance put him in Tyrion Lannister’s path and finally brought him a knighthood.
A common man needed more than ability.
He needed the right person to give him a step upward, and in Alden’s judgment, House Crane could not provide that.
In his old life, while reading discussions about A Song of Ice and Fire, Alden had once seen an analysis of the lesser lords of the Reach.
It included House Crane, a house that barely mattered in either the books or the show.
The analysis had not been long.
Its conclusion could be reduced to one word: dependent.
House Crane had spent a long time taking its cues from House Florent, the power it leaned on.
Trying to rise through House Crane itself would be nearly impossible.
That did not mean the Cranes were useless.
They still had one asset he could use: Ser Vortimer Crane, a member of a branch line.
Alden did not know the man’s current situation in detail, but he did know Vortimer would become master-at-arms at Highgarden.
If he could make contact through him, he could connect himself to House Tyrell.
That would give him far more chances to become a knight.
As he thought, his hands did not stop moving.
He picked up two wooden sticks from beside the bed, each roughly the length and thickness of a hand-and-a-half sword, tossed a cloth bundle from near his pillow into the air, and moved his wrists, arms, and shoulders in quick sequence.
The twin-blade style struck the falling bundle again and again, keeping it bouncing in the air without letting it touch the floor.
Ever since he had been able to sit up two weeks earlier and move both hands, he had used this method to train and familiarize himself with the twin-blade skill his gift had given him.
The gift had poured a vast amount of combat experience and technique into his mind, but receiving knowledge was not the same as mastering it.
He still needed endless practice before it truly became his own.
That gift was the reason he believed he could carve out a place in this world.
It was not as overwhelming as the powers found in some stories, but for him, it was enough.
Strictly speaking, he had two advantages.
One was the strange gift itself.
The other was a talent that seemed to have come with his rebirth.
Perhaps the merging of two souls had changed his body.
Whatever the cause, his physical recovery and sensory perception had become almost inhuman.
His healing, for example, had allowed him to recover in little more than a month from an injury that had nearly broken his spine.
Flesh wounds that would trouble others for days closed completely in one or two.
In a world where war was never far away, that made survival much easier.
The healing was not without cost.
Its greatest flaw was the amount of food and tonic it consumed.
Most of what had been spent during the month and a half of his recovery had gone into feeding that process.
Crude as it was, the exchange made sense.
There was no healing without fuel.
Beyond recovery, his senses had sharpened to an astonishing degree.
His hearing could pick out the movement of tiny insects outside the cottage.
His sight could trace motes of dust drifting through the air.
At first, that flood of sensation had been torture.
Unable to move from the bed, he had spent much of his time learning to control the sudden expansion of his senses.
Compared with his healing and perception, the improvement to his strength and agility seemed ordinary.
They remained within human limits and still needed training.
The only advantage was that the results of training were extremely clear.
Clear in the most literal sense.
When he exercised, Alden could perceive a faint gauge tied to his physical condition.
It rose slowly as he trained.
The increase was tiny, but it gave him useful feedback, allowing him to adjust his methods according to what actually worked.
That gauge came from the gift he had carried into this rebirth, a power built on the old game For Honor and then altered until it barely resembled its source.
That was no exaggeration.
Its only real connection to For Honor lay in the hero images and ability concepts.
Even those were incomplete.
It held only nine heroes from the knight faction.
The ability it granted was simple.
He could choose one corresponding hero aspect in his mind and receive that hero’s combat techniques directly.
He could choose only one at a time.
To choose another, he had to train until the gauge filled again.
When Alden made his first choice, he had been half-conscious.
Pain had left his head fogged and scattered, so he had not thought carefully.
He had treated the gift as a lifesaving straw, believing that choosing a hero aspect might heal him instantly, the way leveling up in a game restored health.
Instead, it had not healed his body at all.
The flood of knowledge into his mind had left him dazed for days, as if someone had drugged him.
Only after he cleared his head and sorted through the techniques in his mind did he realize he had chosen poorly.
Under ordinary circumstances, Alden would absolutely have chosen Warden or Warmonger.
Both hero aspects were closest to true knights, and their techniques fit knightly combat.
Instead, he had chosen Peacekeeper, a style closer to a dual-wielding assassin.
He had tried to take only the combat knowledge and ignore the dual-blade requirement by fighting with a single sword, but doing so produced a violent sense of wrongness.
The techniques became stiff and awkward, as if he had never mastered them at all.
That taught him that his gift worked under its own restrictions.
He was not entirely satisfied with Peacekeeper’s twin-blade style, but it was enough for his current situation.
Once his body fully recovered, he needed to strengthen his base endurance and power so he could actually use the style in battle.
Otherwise, he would end up as he had in Old Baine’s yard, panting after less than a minute.
Over the next two weeks, Alden practiced the Peacekeeper style whenever he could.
When he had time, he walked through the village, then sat in a quiet corner of Old Baine’s tavern and listened to the travelers and customers talk, gathering whatever information he could.
White Village was not large, but its location was special.
It sat near the meeting point of Old Oak, Red Lake, and Goldengrove.
Caravans and travelers moving between those three seats often passed through the village, which meant Baine’s tavern never lacked customers.
Plenty of news could be heard there.
The topic most discussed lately was King Robert’s plan to hold a grand tourney in King’s Landing to celebrate the birth of his first child, Joffrey.
Since it would be the first great tourney of the Baratheon reign, it carried unusual weight.
Its scale would surely be enormous, and knights from across the Seven Kingdoms would gather in the capital.
The men in the tavern, however, cared more about dangers close at hand than events in faraway King’s Landing.
Chief among those dangers were outlaws.
The Usurper’s War had ended about three years earlier, but its rot remained.
Targaryen loyalists had not all been destroyed.
After defeat, many had hidden in mountains and forests, mixing with wild clans and emerging now and then to raid.
The Reach, one of the wealthiest regions of the Seven Kingdoms, held not only broad fields but also countless forests where men could hide.
Red Lake Forest was one of them.
Two weeks earlier, a band of outlaws claiming to be Targaryen remnants had drifted into Red Lake Forest and built a camp there.
They preyed on caravans taking the forest shortcut.
Four or five caravans had already suffered attacks, with more than a hundred dead or wounded.
Among the dead was a branch-line son of House Rowan of Goldengrove.
Because of that, House Rowan had begun contacting House Crane of Red Lake and House Oakheart of Old Oak to join in clearing the outlaws from Red Lake Forest.
I hope this chapter pulled you a little deeper into the story.
Stay close, because things are only getting more interesting.