[Congratulations, you have been chosen as a new SAINT!]
[Congratulations, you have unlocked the class: Necromancer!]
[Changing class: Saint Necromancer]
Soren froze as the blue text burned into his retinas.
'Saint?'
He had been preparing for his class change for weeks. Being a "Classless Orphan" for nineteen years was enough of a stain.
Soren looked down from the floating system messages to the ritual circle at his feet and failed to understand what he had done wrong.
Inside the damp, suffocating air of the crypt, a polished human skeleton sat in the centre of an intricate magic circle.
Blood, still dripping sluggishly from the fresh cut on Soren's forearm, filled the engraved stone, pulsing with a faint, crimson light as it brought the ancient magic to life.
'What do you mean, Saint? Who the hell wants to be a Saint?!'
The Saint class wasn't a blessing; everyone in the kingdom knew that. It was a curse, a golden shackle you could never break.
The Church would hunt you down, drag you to the capital, and lock you away in the deepest depths of the cathedral.
There, they would force you to endlessly summon Heroes from other worlds to throw at whatever problems the King didn't want to deal with - which were many.
You become a slave, nothing more. You would be forced to heal arrogant nobles every time they felt even a bit sore, draining your own life force until, inevitably, you died of exhaustion. Then, the Church would do a fancy funeral and move on to the next unlucky soul to replace you.
Soren would rather die right here in this crypt than live like a cow.
He dreaded opening his status window, his heart hammering against his ribs. The Necromancer prompt appeared second... there's still a chance!
The familiar, comforting blue status screen didn't appear. Instead, he heard the unassuming ding—the announcer of a new message—followed by a cascade of frantic chimes.
[ERROR]
[User can only have one active class.]
[ERROR]
[Please reduce your current classes to one.]
[ERROR. UNKNOWN CLASS DETECTED.]
[Admin action required.]
[Available admins: 0]
[Initiating emergency recovery. Please wait...]
'I've never heard of the System glitching like this!'
Soren panicked, clutching his bleeding arm.
'Am I the Saint in the end? Please tell me I'm not!'
As the error messages fell one after another, the skeleton in the circle began to stir. It rose from the floor, joints clicking and snapping into place, one bone after the other.
According to the grimoire Soren had found rotting under the orphanage library's floorboards, this ritual was the sure fire way to awaken as a Necromancer. It was even supposed to raise his first undead servant immediately.
He had gone to painstaking lengths to sneak out, dodge the night patrols, and find a crypt with an intact skeleton inside.
Soren felt frustrated that he couldn't stay to watch his first creation fully rise. But the pain in his arm was flaring up, sharp and hot; the cut was deeper than he had intended in his nervousness.
First priority: get back into the orphanage and patch this up. Bleeding out in a crypt wasn't in his plans for today.
He clenched his wounded arm tightly to staunch the flow and activated his [Sprint] skill. A burst of stamina flooded his legs, propelling him out of the ruins and into the cool night air. It was still dark, but the grey haze of pre-dawn was cracking the horizon.
Thankfully, the crypt was part of an old ruin near the village edge. He could make it back before the sun rose and make up some lie about how he got injured.
The lights in the Director's office and the nurses' quarters were still dark. Lucky. Sometimes, one of the elders would wake up early, making re-entry almost impossible.
Soren squeezed himself through the spiked iron fence at his secret spot. Years ago, the welds on one of the bars had eroded, allowing him to remove it and slide it back into place without a trace. However, sliding through the tight gap had become increasingly difficult as his shoulders broadened over the last few years.
'I need to be careful about not leaving blood everywhere,'
He thought, grimacing as he shimmied through.
'I was an idiot for cutting so deep!'
Before slipping inside the building, he hid his mud-caked boots and outer tunic in a wooden crate behind the tool shed that no one ever used. Shivering slightly in the cool air, he struggled to pull on his rough linen nightshirt without staining it.
He climbed through the ground-floor window he had left unlatched, holding his breath. The inside of the orphanage was darker than the moonlit outdoors, heavy with the sound of sleeping children, but he knew this place like the back of his hand.
He made his way to a half-broken shelf near the communal washrooms. There was a protruding, rusted nail there that the caretaker had neglected to hammer down for days.
Soren slathered a generous amount of fresh blood from his arm onto the nail and flicked a few droplets onto the wall below it for effect.
'Oh, right! The hair.'
He quickly reached up and ruffled his tousled golden hair, shaking out the leaves and dust from the run, making it look like he had just tumbled out of bed.
'Alright. Time for the performance.'
He needed a solid excuse. No one would believe he had simply tripped and cut himself on a nail if they didn't hear the commotion. He found it surprisingly hard to force himself to fall on purpose—harder than it had been to slice his own arm.
'Here goes nothing.'
Soren threw his weight forward, letting his feet tangle. The stumbling made a tremendous amount of noise in the silent hallway.
He let out a sharp, startled shout—half-faked, half-real fright—as he went down. He grabbed the shelf instinctively to slow his descent, ripping the rotting wood right off the wall with a deafening CRACK.
"Agh—!"
He hissed through his teeth. "Okay, that actually hurts now, not just the arm."
"But the noise did the job."
It only took a few seconds before Clarice, the Head Matron, came rushing down the hall, holding a candle. She was sleepy-eyed and wrapped in a thick shawl over her nightdress.
"Soren! Did you trip over your own feet again? Seriously, how old are you?!" She whispered harshly, trying to avoid waking the entire wing.
"Ah! It hurts... Clarice, I think I'm bleeding."
"Tsk. You useless boy. Can you stand up on your own?"
Despite her sharp tongue, she immediately extended a hand and hauled Soren to his feet. Her eyes widened as the candlelight fell on his arm.
"My—you're really bleeding!" She failed to suppress her voice this time. "Hold the wound tight. We're going to Mariella's room."
Mariella was not happy to be woken up so early, but as the only resident Healer, she was used to dealing with the clumsy injuries of the younger orphans.
She didn't even look properly at the wound; she simply waved her hand, muttered the incantation for [Minor Healing], and rolled back over to sleep before the green light had even faded.
The flesh on Soren's arm knit together in seconds, leaving not even a scar.
Soren stared at his arm, as impressed as the first day he had seen magic. 'Magic is so convenient,' he thought. 'But getting a magic-oriented class is usually a privilege reserved for nobles.'
Very few mages would be willing to teach a commoner, let alone an orphan with no family name. That was why he couldn't let go of the idea of becoming a Necromancer after finding that grimoire.
He had read countless books about great Archmages and glorious Paladins; he couldn't settle for being a farmer or a guardsman.
Summoning whole armies of skeletons... that's the kind of power that guarantees freedom.
The only drawback was the reputation. Necromancers were despised almost as much as pests. 'But surely I can work with that,' he reasoned. 'Better to be feared than to be a slave.'
"Are you okay now?" Clarice asked, yawning. "Go back to bed. I'll deal with the clean up."
"Thank you, Head Matron!"
Soren expressed his thanks with a respectful bow, which was met only with a cold, dismissive wave.
'That went a lot better than I imagined, 'Soren thought as he walked back to the boys' dormitory. 'She didn't question me at all! My nightshirt is a bit bloodstained now, but that's better than getting kicked out onto the streets.'
He was already the eldest in the orphanage. In fact, at nineteen, he wasn't even a "kid" anymore. He had spent so much time burying his nose in books that no family wanted to adopt him, and now he had aged out of the system.
Anyone else would have been thrown out by now, but no one wanted to take on his annoying chore of cataloguing and cleaning the library every day. The staff were already overworked. The Director conveniently "forgot" to kick him out again and again because hiring a cleaner would cost money.
The books were largely donations from the Church, so they couldn't be neglected without risking a drop in funding. Soren had figured out that little economic loop years ago.
But if I become too much of a nuisance, they might decide the cost isn't worth it.
'Well, I'm leaving soon anyway!' he told himself, climbing into his narrow cot in the corner of the communal room.' If I can just confirm my Necromancer class, I can survive forever in the wilds with my undead army.'
He tried to reassure himself, but the idea of living in a cave somewhere eating roasted rats sounded like a step backward. Maybe I can use my powers to make an honest living? The easy way out was to hunt weak monsters and sell the mana stones and corpses.
He closed his eyes, visualizing his future. He could see himself commanding a great skeletal legion, repelling monster waves, and being applauded by the masses as a dark hero. Who could stop him if he wanted to be a benevolent Necromancer?
Besides the Church. And the King. And the Royal Guard. And anyone physically stronger than me.
He pushed those thoughts away. He refused to acknowledge the flaws in his plan tonight.
But none of that matters if I ended up being the Saint.
If that happened, his life was over. He would have to flee the country immediately to escape the Church's grasp. The Kingdom was wide, but the Church's reach was wider.
It was a strange religion, one that acknowledged only a single God, despite the fact that Saints appeared in other kingdoms with different powers entirely. It was a mystery to Soren how they maintained such absolute authority.
It felt as if they had eyes and ears in the walls. Even in this backwater countryside orphanage, he couldn't escape their influence.
He couldn't wait to try the spells the grimoire had promised. [Summon Skeleton] could apparently pull a warrior out of thin air! [Raise Undead] could turn any dead monster into a tenacious zombie. And [Drain Blood]...
Well, [Drain Blood] is a bit creepy, he admitted to himself. But the book said it heals the caster. A healing spell for a solo mage? That's invaluable.
Lying in the dark, surrounded by the soft snoring of the other boys, Soren felt a mix of hope and terror.
'I can't really be the Saint, right? It doesn't fit me at all! Please, System, don't do this to me.'
He drifted into a restless sleep.
He woke up a few hours later to a series of frantic blue system windows hovering directly in front of his face.