The Conqueror's Rise Book 1: A LitRPG Fantasy, page 1
The Conqueror's Rise
Book 1
Orion Walker
Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Books By This Author
Chapter One
The assessment hall smelled like nervous sweat and cheap tallow candles. I'd been standing in line for two hours behind a kid who kept cracking his knuckles and a woman in her late twenties who was doing the assessment for the second time, which was either brave or desperate depending on how her first class had shaken out. She hadn't volunteered the information and I hadn't asked.
I was eighteen. I had no expectations. That's not me being humble — I genuinely hadn't spent much time thinking about it. My father was a Silver-rank Fighter who'd retired from guild work after losing two fingers on a dungeon job when I was twelve. My mother had a Scout class she'd never done anything with. Between the two of them I figured I'd get something in that neighborhood. Fighter, Scout, maybe Striker if the system felt generous. Something I could work with.
The line moved. I moved with it.
The assessment itself took about four minutes. You sat in a chair that was older than the city, placed both palms on the reader stone set into the armrests, and waited while the examiner on the other side of the desk watched the results appear in his logbook. That was it. No pain, no flash of light, none of the drama the penny novels liked to describe. Just a chair and a stone and a bored civil servant.
My examiner was a heavyset man with ink-stained fingers and the look of someone who'd processed ten thousand assessments and found all of them equally uninteresting. He opened his logbook to a fresh page, uncapped his pen, and nodded at me.
I sat. Pressed my palms to the stone.
It was warm, which I hadn't expected. Then warmer. I watched the examiner's pen hover over the page, waiting, and then watched him not write anything. He was staring at the logbook. His expression hadn't changed exactly, but something behind it had — a small recalibration, like a man who'd stepped on a stair that wasn't there.
"Give it a moment," I said.
He looked up at me. Back down at the logbook. Set his pen on the desk.
"Stay seated," he said, and got up.
I stayed seated. He crossed the hall to where a second examiner was finishing up with another applicant, said something low and quick, and both of them came back. The second examiner — younger, with a guild senior badge on his collar — looked at the logbook, looked at me, and then looked at the logbook again with the specific kind of attention people give things they're hoping will change if they stare long enough.
"Both hands still on the stone?" he asked.
"Haven't moved."
He said something to the first examiner I didn't catch. The first examiner left again. The second one stood across the desk from me with his arms crossed and his eyes on the logbook, not hostile, just watchful, like I was a problem he was still formulating.
The first examiner came back with a third man — older, grey at the temples, a different badge that I didn't recognize. This one didn't look at the logbook first. He looked at me.
"How do you feel?" he said.
"Fine. Wondering what's in the logbook."
"We'll get to that." He pulled up a chair and sat across from me with the ease of someone who wasn't in a hurry and wanted me to know it. "Any family history of rare classes? Bloodline abilities, unusual affinities?"
"My father's a retired Fighter. My mother's a Scout. Neither of them ever mentioned anything unusual."
"And before today — any signs? Unusual strength, instincts that didn't match your circumstances, abilities you couldn't account for?"
I thought about it genuinely, because it seemed worth doing. There were things, now that he was asking. Fights I'd won that I probably shouldn't have. A sense sometimes in bad situations that I knew where everything was, like I could feel the geometry of a room. I'd chalked it up to growing up rough in the outer districts.
"Maybe," I said. "Why?"
He turned the logbook around and pushed it across the desk.
The entry was short. Class assessments usually were — a line or two, the class name, the initial rank, any notable affinities flagged for the record. Mine had the initial rank — Iron, standard starting point — and then the class name, and then a long handwritten note from the first examiner that read confirmed by second witness, result unprecedented in registry records, flag for senior review.
The class name was one word.
Conqueror.
I read it twice. Not because I didn't understand it — I did, immediately — but because I wanted to make sure I wasn't misreading.
"Last confirmed appearance," the grey-templed official said, "was approximately four hundred years ago. There are two historical records that mention the class and neither of them is complete." He paused. "We don't fully know what it does."
"What do the records say?"
"That the individuals who held it were difficult to stop."
I sat back in the chair. The stone under my palms had gone cool again. Outside, I could hear the line still moving — other people cycling through other assessments, getting their Fighter classes and their Scout classes and going on with their afternoon.
"So what happens now," I said.
What happened now was a private room off the main hall, a cup of water I didn't drink, and forty minutes of questions that circled the same territory from different angles. Did I have affiliations with any noble houses. Did I have outstanding debts that might create leverage points. Had anyone approached me before today with unusual interest in my assessment outcome. I answered everything honestly because I had nothing to hide and because lying to civil servants before you've even left the building seemed like a bad way to start.
At the end of it the grey-templed official — his name was Ceth, he'd eventually offered it like an afterthought — gave me a provisional guild registration card and a piece of advice.
"Keep your head down for a few weeks," he said. "Until we can get proper documentation filed. Once word spreads—" He paused, reconsidering. "When word spreads, you'll have interest from multiple directions. Some of it welcome. Some of it not."
"What kind of not."
"The kind that views an unknown variable as a threat to be neutralized rather than an asset to be recruited." He said it plainly, which I respected. "The registry is theoretically confidential. In practice it leaks. It always does."
I pocketed the registration card. "Anything else?"
"Don't do anything that draws attention before we—"
"Right," I said, and left.
* * *
The afternoon had turned while I was inside. The sun was lower, the street outside the assessment hall busy with the tail end of the working day — carts, foot traffic, the smell of something frying from a vendor three stalls down. I stood on the steps for a moment and let the city do its thing around me.
I was a Conqueror. The word still sat oddly, like a coat that didn't quite fit yet. I'd figure out what it meant when I started using it.
"That took a while."
She was leaning against the pillar at the bottom of the steps. Dark hair, practical clothes, a Scout badge on her belt that was a few ranks more worn than new. She was maybe twenty-two and she was looking at me with the direct attention of someone who'd decided to be curious and wasn't embarrassed about it.
"Longer than expected," I said.
"I saw them pull in a senior official." She pushed off the pillar. "That only happens for rare class results. I was waiting on my friend but she went out the side door twenty minutes ago so at this point I'm just nosy." She said it without apology. "What did you get?"
I looked at her for a moment. She had an open face — not naive, just unguarded, which was different. The kind of woman who asked what she wanted to know and didn't dress it up.
"Conqueror," I said.
She stared.
"That's—" She stopped. Tried again. "That's not a real class."
"Registry thinks it is."
"Conqueror hasn't appeared since—"
"Four hundred years. Yeah. They told me." I came down the steps. "I'm Drev."
She was still working through it, I could see that, the information rearranging itself behind her eyes. But she wasn't rattled — more like someone doing fast arithmetic. Finally she fell into step beside me, which I hadn't invited but didn't mind.
"Saya," she said. "Scout, Silver rank. Three years with the Ironpath Guild." A beat. "You don't seem particularly surprised."
"I'm surprised. I'm just not panicking."
"What are you going to do?"
I thought about Ceth's advice. Keep your head down. Wait for documentation. Let the process do its slow, careful work while every faction in the city that monitored the registry figured out what I was and started making plans.
"Join a guild," I said. "Start working. See what this class actually does when I put it to use."
"Ironpath is recruiting," Saya said. "I'm not saying that to recruit you. I'm saying it because it's true and because you're going to need somewhere to land in the next forty-eight hours before the noble houses start sending envoys."
"You think that fast."
"Scout class," she said, like that explained it. "We assess situations."
She was right, I knew that. She was also interesting, which was a separate thing, and she clearly knew that too — she wasn't hiding it any more than she'd hidden the nosiness. There was a straightforwardness to her that I found I liked immediately.
"Ironpath," I said. "Who runs it?"
"Guildmaster named Rauth Keld. Hard man, fair terms. He'll lose his mind when he finds out what you are but he'll keep it together long enough to make you a real offer." She paused. "Probably."
"Probably."
"He's never recruited a Conqueror before. No one has. I'm estimating."
I almost smiled. "Lead the way."
She did, and I followed, and behind us the assessment hall went on processing its queue of ordinary results, and somewhere in the city a registry entry was already making its way toward people who'd want to know about it, and none of that was my problem yet.
What I had was a class no one had seen in four centuries, a provisional guild card, and a Scout named Saya who was interesting enough to follow into an unknown guild on the same afternoon I'd turned the registry on its head.
Good enough start.
Chapter Two
Ironpath Guild sat at the intersection of two mid-city streets like it had been dropped there and everything else had built around it. Stone construction, three stories, a sign above the door that had been repainted recently but the iron hinges holding it hadn't been touched in decades. The kind of place that didn't need to advertise because everyone already knew where it was.
Saya pushed the door open without knocking.
Inside was exactly what I expected — long tables, a job board taking up most of one wall, a bar along the back that was doing decent business for late afternoon. Maybe thirty people scattered around. The noise dropped when we walked in, not all the way, just enough that I noticed. Eyes moved to Saya first and then to me, the way eyes do when they're trying to figure out what they're looking at.
I didn't know what I looked like to them yet. I figured I'd find out.
"He'll be upstairs," Saya said, already moving toward the staircase at the back.
I followed. Behind me the noise picked back up, which told me either they'd decided I wasn't interesting or they'd decided to talk about me instead of at me. Either way I'd find out soon enough.
The guildmaster's office was on the second floor, door open, and Rauth Keld was standing at the window with his back to us when we walked in. He was bigger than I'd expected — broad through the shoulders, Silver-rank Fighter written in every line of him, the kind of man who'd been in enough serious fights that his body had just permanently organized itself around the possibility of another one. Grey in his beard. A scar along the left side of his jaw that had healed clean.
He turned before Saya said anything. Either he'd heard us on the stairs or he'd been waiting.
"Saya." He looked at her and then at me. "This him?"
"Drev Cauhn," she said. "Just out of assessment."
Rauth looked at me the way the grey-templed official at the registry had, except without the bureaucratic caution. This was a different kind of appraisal — faster, more practical, the kind that was less interested in what I represented and more interested in what I could do.
"Sit down," he said.
There were two chairs across from his desk. I took one. Saya took the other, which told me she'd planned to stay for this, and Rauth hadn't told her not to, which told me he didn't mind.
"She tell you what she is?" He meant the class.
"She mentioned Scout."
"Silver rank in three years. Faster than average." He sat down behind the desk. "She's got good instincts. When she came to find me twenty minutes ago and told me she'd walked out of the assessment hall with a Conqueror, my first thought was she'd misread the badge." He paused. "I've verified with the registry. You haven't."
"I read the logbook myself."
"I know. I'm not questioning it." He laced his fingers together on the desk. "I'm telling you that I've been running this guild for eleven years and I've never had a conversation like this one, and I want you to understand that I'm aware of that, because it means I'm going to make you an offer that's outside my normal terms and I want you to know it's deliberate, not sloppy."
I liked him immediately. He was the kind of man who said what he meant and didn't dress it up as something else.
"Go ahead," I said.
The offer was better than anything I could have negotiated on my own. Full senior member terms from day one — percentage of job earnings, private quarters in the guild annex, access to the training facilities and the equipment stores. No probationary period, no trial jobs. He wasn't buying my class. He was buying the fact that whatever the Conqueror class turned out to be, he wanted it under his banner before someone else figured that out.
"In return," he said, "I want first right of refusal on any job offer you get from outside the guild. You can take outside work — I'm not going to pretend I can stop you — but I want to know about it first."
"That's reasonable."
"And when the noble houses come knocking, which they will, I'd prefer you handle it in a way that doesn't create problems for the guild."
"What if the problems come looking for the guild anyway?"
He almost smiled. "Then I'll deal with them. That's my job." He extended his hand across the desk. "Do we have an agreement?"
We did.
* * *
Saya showed me the annex after. It was a separate building connected to the main guild by a covered walkway — six private rooms, a shared kitchen, a training yard out back that was better equipped than I'd expected. The room she showed me was on the second floor, end of the hall, window that looked out over the rooftops toward the eastern part of the city.
"Most of the senior members live off-site," she said, leaning in the doorway while I looked around. "You'll have the annex mostly to yourself. Jak uses the room two doors down but he's gone on jobs half the time."
"Who's Jak?"
"Gold-rank Striker. Good fighter, bad at cards, owes half the guild money." She paused. "He'll be friendly. Everyone here will be friendly. You should know that's not entirely genuine."
"They want to know what I can do."
"They want to know if you're useful and whether you're going to make their lives harder or easier. That's not unfriendly, it's just honest." She shrugged. "You'll figure out who's worth trusting inside of a week."
I put my registration card on the desk and turned around. She was still in the doorway, arms crossed, that same direct look she'd had on the steps outside the assessment hall. She'd been with me for two hours now. She'd guided me here, talked me through the offer, explained the guild. That was more than nosiness, and we both knew it.
"You live in the annex?" I asked.
"Main building. Third floor."
"Then you came out of your way to show me the room."
"I wanted to make sure you knew where everything was."
"You could have had anyone do that."
She didn't answer right away, which was an answer. She looked at me with that open, unguarded face and I could see she was deciding whether to be honest or deflect, and then she decided.
"You're a Conqueror," she said. "I've been a Silver-rank Scout for two years and I'm good at my job and nobody in this guild or any guild is going to care about that the way they'd care about what you are. That's just true." A beat. "I got here first. That's also true."
I looked at her. She was pretty in a sharp-featured way — not soft, not the kind of pretty that was just luck of birth, but the kind that had something underneath it. She knew exactly what she'd just said and she wasn't embarrassed about it.
