Not a month.
Not even close to the timeline Ashra had cautiously suggested only hours earlier.
Caius stood frozen in the training yard, the Council’s letter trembling in his grip, and felt the entire fragile plan he’d been assembling in his head since waking up in this body come crashing down around him.
“What does it say?” Var asked, her earlier clinical detachment replaced entirely by sharp, focused concern.
Caius handed her the letter wordlessly, unable to trust his own voice, and watched her expression harden into something grim as she read through it.
“Sponsorship denied,” Var muttered.
“That’s unusual. Divine petitions from active patron deities are rarely rejected outright, regardless of how minor the god’s standing has become.” She looked up at Caius, her scarred face unusually pale.
“Someone on the Council actively wants this Enforcement Evaluation to proceed. This isn’t standard bureaucratic caution. This is deliberate.”
Caius’s mind raced back to Ashra’s parting warning the night before.
Something is accelerating events far beyond what your original timeline predicted, and I do not yet understand what, or who, is truly responsible.
Someone was pushing.
Someone with enough influence on the High Council to override a divine sponsorship petition and fast-track a Saint-rank Enforcement squad toward a seventeen-year-old boy’s front door in under three days.
“What happens during an Enforcement Evaluation?” Caius asked, though some sick part of him already suspected the answer wouldn’t be pleasant.
“Officially, it’s a formal assessment,” Var said carefully.
“Enforcers arrive, evaluate the anomaly in question, and determine whether it represents a genuine threat to divine order.” She hesitated.
“Unofficially, the evaluation is usually a formality performed after the Council has already decided the outcome. Enforcers don’t typically travel in force for genuine uncertainty. They travel in force when the verdict is already assumed.”
“They’re coming to kill me,” Caius said flatly.
Var didn’t correct him.
Caius forced himself to breathe, forced the rising panic back down into something he could actually work with.
Panicking wouldn’t buy him seventy-two hours of usable training time.
Panicking wouldn’t turn thirteen Agility and seventeen Vitality into something capable of standing against a Saint-rank combat specialist.
“I need every advantage I can possibly get in three days,” Caius said, straightening.
“What can you actually teach me in that time?”
Var studied him for a long moment, something calculating shifting behind her scarred features, and then, to Caius’s surprise, something that looked almost like respect.
“Most students your father’s assigned me over the years fall apart the moment they realize how outmatched they actually are,” she said.
“You’re doing the opposite. Good. Fear that turns into paralysis gets you killed. Fear that turns into focus keeps you alive.” She rolled her shoulders, cracking her neck.
“Three days isn’t enough to make you dangerous. It’s enough to make you less likely to die in the first thirty seconds. That’s the realistic target. Understood?”
“Understood,” Caius said.
“Then we start now,” Var said.
“Summon your Grimoire.”
Caius did, the ancient tome materializing in a swirl of blue-white light, its cracked leather cover settling into his palms with familiar weight.
“You have Ashveil, Ember Lash, and a locked skill requiring Ash Affinity Level 10,” Var said, having apparently already extracted this information from him during their earlier session. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
“What’s your current Affinity level?”
Caius checked mentally, the stat screen flickering into existence.
[Ash Affinity: Level 4]
“Four,” he said.
“It jumped from three to four sometime last night, probably during the fight with the Warden.”
“Combat experience accelerates Affinity growth faster than passive training,” Var said.
“That’s your fastest path to unlocking your third skill before the Enforcers arrive. We spend the next three days pushing you into controlled combat scenarios specifically designed to force rapid Affinity growth, while simultaneously drilling enough defensive technique into you that you don’t die during the process.”
It was, Caius realized, an absolutely insane training regimen by any rational standard, deliberately courting near-death experiences to farm experience points against a ticking clock that ended with actual armed government assassins showing up at his door.
It was also, given his circumstances, probably the single most reasonable plan available to him.
“Let’s do it,” Caius said.
The next seventy-two hours blurred into a single, exhausting continuum of pain, exhaustion, and grudging incremental progress.
Var drilled him mercilessly through defensive footwork drills, forcing him to internalize the fundamental mechanics of dodging and blocking until his body moved without conscious thought.
She sparred against him repeatedly using controlled, sub-lethal strikes calibrated specifically to push his Vitality and reflexes to their absolute limits without actually killing him, each session ending with Caius collapsed in the dirt, gasping, sometimes bleeding, always slightly stronger than before.
[Notification: Ash Affinity has increased to Level 5]
[Notification: Ash Affinity has increased to Level 6]
By the second day, Caius had unlocked a third minor passive, Cinder Step, allowing him to briefly convert his own momentum into a burst of ash-propelled speed during evasive maneuvers.
It wasn’t much.
It bought him perhaps a fraction of a second of extra reaction time during a dodge, but against something faster and stronger than him, fractions of a second were the difference between surviving and not.
Between training sessions, brief windows of exhausted rest, Caius found himself increasingly aware of the estate’s growing tension.
Servants whispered in hushed corners.
Extra guard patrols had been posted along the repaired wardline.
His father spent hours in the war room receiving reports from scouts posted along every approach road leading toward House Draxos territory.
On the evening of the second day, exhausted and bruised from another brutal sparring session, Caius found himself summoned unexpectedly to the estate’s smaller receiving hall, a more modest chamber reserved for private audiences rather than full military briefings.
His father waited there, along with an unfamiliar young woman dressed in traveling leathers marked with an unfamiliar clan crest, a stylized wolf’s head wreathed in frost.
“Caius,” Voran said without preamble.
“This is Lady Isolde Frostmere, envoy of the Frostmere Clan, currently en route to enrollment at the Divine Academy. Her caravan requested emergency shelter within our borders following reports of Heretical activity along the northern trade roads.”
Caius’s breath caught in his throat.
Isolde.
The name detonated through his memory with the force of a physical blow.
In [God Reborn]’s lore, Isolde Frostmere was one of the Protagonist’s primary heroine targets, a Blessed of the Goddess of Winter capable of freezing entire courtyards solid at Saint rank, destined to have her affections cultivated across the game’s first thirty chapters before being ritually sacrificed on a golden altar during the story’s infamous genre-shifting twist.
She stood before him now, seventeen years old by the look of her, sharp blue eyes and pale silver hair braided tight against the cold, watching him with the guarded, evaluating expression of nobility assessing a stranger’s usefulness.
“And this is the youngest heir I’ve heard whispers about. The one the Heretic addressed directly.”
Word had apparently already traveled beyond House Draxos’s walls.
“News moves quickly,” Caius said carefully, forcing his voice to remain steady despite the war raging inside his head.
This was, potentially, one of the exact people he needed to save before the game’s script could catch up to either of them.
“Concerning news moves faster than most,” Isolde replied coolly.
“A Heretic breaching a four-century wardline to personally recruit a minor noble’s son is precisely the kind of story that reaches Academy circles within days, regardless of how carefully House Draxos attempts to control the narrative.”
Voran’s expression tightened slightly at the implied criticism, but he said nothing, apparently choosing diplomatic restraint given the Frostmere Clan’s standing.
“I understand your caravan will be resuming its journey toward the capital within the week,” Voran said instead, redirecting the conversation.
“House Draxos is honored to provide shelter and escort as needed.”
“We depart at first light in three days,” Isolde said, her sharp eyes never fully leaving Caius even as she addressed his father.
“Assuming the northern roads have been sufficiently cleared of whatever drove that Warden through your wall.”
Three days.
The exact same window before the Enforcers arrived.
Caius’s mind raced through the implications with sudden, desperate clarity.
If Isolde’s caravan departed at the same time the Enforcement Evaluation squad arrived, there was a real, terrifying possibility that whatever confrontation awaited him would happen with one of the game’s central heroines standing directly in the blast radius.
“I should retire,” Isolde said finally, apparently satisfied with whatever evaluation she’d been silently conducting.
“Thank you for your hospitality, Lord Draxos.” Her gaze lingered on Caius a moment longer, something sharp and calculating behind those pale blue eyes.
“I look forward to seeing whether the rest of you matches the rumors, Caius Draxos.”
She swept out of the receiving hall with the same cool, guarded composure she’d entered with, leaving Caius standing alone with his father in the sudden quiet.
“The Frostmere heir travels with a full honor guard of Winter-Blessed knights,” Voran said, watching the door she’d exited through.
“Her presence within our walls, however temporary, is not without complications given your current situation.”
“I know,” Caius said quietly, already calculating the horrifying arithmetic of Saint-rank Enforcers arriving at the same estate currently hosting one of the empire’s most prestigious noble heiresses.
That night, exhausted from another brutal training session, Caius collapsed onto his repaired bed and immediately fell into the deep, dreamless sleep of someone whose body had finally been pushed past its limits.
He woke abruptly, hours later, to the sound of the estate’s war horn screaming through the darkness for the second time in a single week.
He shot upright, heart hammering, and summoned his stat screen with trembling hands, praying it was another Warden, another random border incident, anything except what his gut already told him it was.
[Warning: Multiple High-Tier Divine Signatures Detected Approaching from the Southern Road.]
[Signature Classification: Enforcement Delegation.]
[Estimated Time to Arrival: Twelve Minutes.]
Twelve minutes.
They’d arrived a full day ahead of the Council’s stated seventy-two hour window, and Caius Draxos, exhausted, undertrained, and completely unprepared, had exactly twelve minutes to figure out how he was supposed to survive meeting them.