Lucky Prodigy

12: Hero's Party

^^ Hero Matthias Coleburn ^^

— Zoken —

Training with the Sage was by far the best time of my life.

Truly.

The others were always complaining, -when he wasn't around to hear, of course,- about soreness, aches, pains, or other activities they'd rather be doing, but they all secretly enjoyed the new power, and the respect it gained us in the village.

But me? I just really, really liked the training, and I wasn't afraid to show it.

There was something liberating about being able to move so freely, without rest, without wheezing for breath like I always had; the Priests and Healers in the Holy City had said it was an illness of my lungs, and that I would never be a warrior. Ever. And they were right. Had the Sage not cured me, I would never have been able to keep up with the others, not even for an hour, or half of one.

But, the difference between us was clear; they were here because they were ordered to be, because they needed the power, because they knew their duty was to get stronger. All good reasons; but I was here because I wanted to be. No amount of orders or respect or hatred would ever sway me from my path to be the Sage's greatest disciple. I would be the strongest, to show him my appreciation and respect for his curing me, and then one day I would surpass him, and protect the village in his stead, so he could finally relax, after 100,000 years of protecting us from the shrine of the mountain.

No one had told him, of course, that his Presence in the Shrine had always driven beast-minded monsters away from the Lake. No one had told him that his awakening had weakened our magical borders, which we had placed using him as a sort of magical power source, considering he oozed the type of Ur we all saw as nearly Godlike. But when he woke up, that was all gone. The warriors had to fight more often, the patrols were attacked by bandits and thieves and beasts more often. We hadn't lost a Dragon Hunter in nearly 50 years, but in the past year, we'd lost two.

None of this was his fault, of course. We took responsibility; we'd decided to use him to power our borders. We'd decided to loosen our awareness, to relax into our sense of peaceful security. We had become Co-Dependent on him as an Immovable God of Protection, Immune to all forms of attack. When he'd been revealed to be only a man, we'd been shocked, and confused, but it was something of a relief, that weight on our backs of 'what if we displease God' was gone. In its place, a hearty, ready atmosphere took root, as he trained the entire population, and us, the Disciples, specifically.

When the children of the village, as precious and weak as they were, got sick, we panicked, but then they were healed, and we felt the Sage's eye upon us for just a moment, before it was gone.

This reminded me of when he'd given us the Apple, our first day of training, and we'd been out through that traumatizing, hellish pain, which still echoed through my mind every time I ate one of the White Apples.

Immediately, I knew what had happened; the Sage had seen our weakness and unreadiness, and had decided to gift us with such a valuable, Unique Magical Item, a Legendary Item, even.

I lectured the villages, all of them, thoroughly, after that revelation. The Sage had wasted a valuable resource that he could only get once a century, because he could see our weakness, and it angered him, but instead of reacting violently, he had reacted benevolently, taken Pity on us. 'That you return that benevolence with vigilance and striving for greatness,' I said, 'is the absolute least we can give in return. We must never be the subject of the Sage's Pity.'