Hero Candidate

We spent another month taking D-ranked quests before we finally saw a Pegasus hunt posted. Alicia snatched it off the Quest Board, then brought it over to the dining area, where she sat staring at it instead of registering the quest for our party. The paper shook between her hands, and she probably would have torn it if Nero hadn’t plucked it out of her hands. He skimmed through it, eyes narrowing. “Alright, let’s take it,” he decided when he finished.

“Are we really ready?” Alicia asked, even as she stood to follow him to the counter.

“As we’re likely to get,” Nero said. “Luna’s only gained one level after a month. I don’t think we can wait for her to level up while we go around completing low-level quests. We’ll end up getting rank-locked.”

Rank-locked. A term for adventuring parties who’d plateaued. The reasons were varied, ranging from fear to disinterest to lack of ability, but it was generally agreed that adventurers who didn’t regularly push themselves out of their comfort zones would eventually become rank-locked.

“Okay…” Alicia slapped her cheeks between her hands, then nodded more confidently. “Right. We can do this.”

Her confidence lasted long enough for us to reach the hunt’s location. "Do you think we can really beat a Pegasus?" Alicia asked nervously as we entered the plains the monster was known to inhabit.

"Yeah, we researched it, right?" Nero said with a small smile. "We've got this."

We did. All of us had sort of forgotten, because my evolution had happened in the middle of the fight against the Goblin King, but actually getting the materials for my evolution hadn’t involved a dungeon at all. Yes, dungeon guardians tended to be necessary for the second evolution on, but the first evolution usually just involved a stronger-than-average overworld monster.

The difficulty in obtaining evolution materials wasn’t supposed to come from the level of the enemies one had to fight to obtain them. The monsters the materials came from were generally within five levels of the summon's level cap. Rarity was supposed to be the limiting factor in obtaining evolution materials.

However, we’d all conflated the dungeon with evolution, so we were left feeling deflated and full of unspent nervous energy when we piled on damage to the Pegasus right off the bat and nearly one-shot it.

We stared at the Pegasus rib left behind. We’d gotten lucky with the drops again. Alicia smiled shakily at Nero. “I guess we have Luna’s LUCK UP to thank, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Nero laughed in sheer relief. “Well? What’re you waiting for?”

“What, you think I should do it now?” Alicia asked.

Nero nodded. “Why not?”

"A-alright, here goes," Alicia said. "Evolve!"

Heather glowed green. Then, slowly, her body reformed.

Not. Fair.

Heather went from an all-white horse with wings to an all-white woman with large, violet eyes, wings, a horse's tail, and horse ears twitching every which way. Why did she get to become a horse girl at level 30, while I had to wait at least one more evolution before becoming a cat girl? Heather reached up and patted her face, looking stunned. "I'm a person?" she murmured. She sounded almost as displeased with it as I was for some reason. Well, I suppose a horse who'd been a horse all their life wouldn't feel the same desire to be human as someone who'd spent almost forty years as one. I missed opposable thumbs.

Alicia approached her nervously with a robe. "Hi Heather. Uh, is that name alright with you still?"

Heather blinked several times before slowly nodding. "Yes, it's fine." She pulled the robe around herself after examining the rest of us. "I'm not sure I wanted to evolve," she said quietly. "I don't feel useful like this."

Nero wrinkled his nose at that. "Why, because we can't ride you anymore?"

"Don't worry about that," Alicia said quickly. "I've looked at common evolutionary paths for Winged Horses, and you usually gain the ability to switch back and forth at your second evolution."

"Ah, that's reassuring," Heather said. She tilted her head to the side. "Which bonus would you like me to acquire, Master?"

"Let's see what you have available," Alicia murmured. "Huh?" She paused. "What's 'enhance Master?'"

The moment she said it, she started to glow, and then, in what felt like the blink of an eye, she was back to normal. "Oh," she said. Her voice was quiet, and though her eyes had shone with excitement just a moment ago, they’d gone dull.

"What happened?" Nero asked.

Alicia’s lower lip trembled, and it took her several moments to reply. "I guess I... evolved? I'm a Hero Candidate now." She smiled hesitantly at us. I didn’t understand why it looked like she was trying not to cry. "I got a lot of basic status up passives with it."

I had a bad feeling about this. Nero seemed to agree, if his strained smile was anything to go by. Neither of us had any idea what to say to Alicia, so we focused on Heather. It isn’t so bad, changing form, I told her. You’ll get used to it.

“Have you done it before?” Heather asked me curiously.

I froze. Ummmmmm….

Heather seemed to understand that it was something I'd rather not mention. She smiled softly. “I’m sure you’re right,” she said, letting me avoid responding.

What kinds of skills did you get when you evolved? I asked, desperately changing the subject.

“I obtained Demihuman, Purity, and Float.”

Nero perked up. “What do those do?”

Alicia was the one to answer. “Status. It looks like Demihuman is a passive skill that summons receive when they get a humanoid form. It gives them the base level of knowledge a human of their apparent age would have. Language, basic mathematics, basic history… Stuff like that. It’s just a practical skill.”

Nero glanced at me curiously. I didn’t have that skill, but would I obtain it upon evolving again? After all, it seemed to exist to compensate for the large gap between an animal and a person, which didn’t quite apply to me.

“Then Purity is… oh! This one’s pretty useful! It’s a passive that protects the user from physical status effects like poison, some forms of paralysis, sickness, and some curses. Float is just like Fly, but it lets Heather make other people fly instead. It looks pricey, though. I don’t think Heather has enough Magic to use it for anything useful yet.”

We kept to lighter topics as we walked, deftly avoiding bothering Alicia about her evolution. She hadn’t questioned Nero about his, either, so it didn’t seem right to pry. Instead, we asked Heather what it was like being a horse, and how that differed from now. Or, rather, I asked her. Nero and Alicia seemed bemused by my interest in the psychological differences between a horse and a horsegirl.

“I remember everything,” Heather explained patiently, “but the information is stored more in pictures and feelings, not words.”

It wasn’t until late evening that Nero suddenly stopped midstep and exclaimed, “The king died!”

We all stopped to stare at him. I caught on next, having been there with him when he’d learned about Hero Candidates. Oh. You might be right.

“What are you talking about?” Alicia asked peevishly.

“One of the guild assistants, Mathew, was talking to us about the Hero Candidate title. He said that there probably wouldn’t be any new Hero Candidates in this country so long as the king was alive!”

It suddenly occurred to me that, if evolution only led to one of two choices, we had effectively just confirmed that Nero was a Demon Lord Candidate. I supposed there wasn’t anything to do about it at this point. It wasn’t like I had a spell to erase people’s memories.

I could give you one, for the right price, Fyth offered.

I ignored him. Erasing memories was morally gray at best. Doing it because 'your friend finding out you were a Demon Lord Candidate when she’s a Hero Candidate might prove troublesome' definitely wasn’t ethical.

I don’t recall raising you to be ethical.

You didn’t raise me at all.

Ah. I suppose that would be why I don’t remember it.

I sighed and ignored him again. He sounded bored, and the best thing I could do for myself was refuse to entertain him.

Alicia had, however, taken the news in an entirely different manner. “Oh no, if that’s true, do you think my evolving killed him?”

“Please do not be silly, Master,” Heather said primly. “Rather than your evolution causing the death, it is far more likely that your evolution became possible because of the death. If there was a death at all, which we have not confirmed.”

We should hurry back and find out, I suggested.

“Let’s,” Alicia agreed. She really seemed bothered by the possibility, even though I agreed with Heather.

We didn’t have to wait to get back to discover the truth of it. Within half a day’s journey from the city, we started coming across adventurers all talking about the king’s death. This did Alicia’s mood no favors, and we spent the rest of that day trying to cheer her up until we reached the Adventurer’s Guild.

Guild Master Straits called Alicia up upon our arrival. Heather and I went with her while Nero turned in our quests. “So, a Hero Candidate,” she said with a booming laugh. She clapped a hand on Alicia’s shoulder. “I just called you here to warn you not to share that information too freely.”

“Um, how did you know?” Alicia asked, reasonably startled.

“Mathew, one of the Guild assistants, has Assess, and he told me when you walked in,” the Guild Master explained cheerily. That didn't explain why he'd be using it on us the second he saw us, but knowing his interest in our party, I could guess that we were just lucky like that. It was also possible, though less likely, that he used it on everyone he saw, like some sort of obsessive, Magic-expending tic.

Alicia blinked several times and nodded slowly. “Oh. Okay. Um, why shouldn’t I tell people?” She glanced at me. “I already told my partner. Should I not have?”

“Nero, right? He’s fine,” the Guild Master said dismissively. “It’s not a rule or anything. It’s simply that people often have notions of what a Hero Candidate should be, and if you attempt to live up to those notions, you’ll only drive yourself crazy. You’re only a Candidate. There’s no obligation for you to be any certain way, and there’s no reason you need to put yourself out over a title that will most likely never lead to anything.”

Alicia bit her lower lip, brows furrowed as she thought. “But… with the king dead… wouldn’t it be reassuring to people to know that there’s a Hero Candidate?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” the Guild Master said. “It’s hard to predict how people will take a thing.”

Alicia glanced at me again. “Alright.”

“Excellent. That was all I wished to tell you, so I’ll let you get back to your partner.”

We excused ourselves and headed back downstairs. “Luna?” Alicia asked me softly as we searched for Nero’s distinctive blond hair amidst the crowds, “Do you think I should keep it secret?”

I had no idea why she was asking me. I think you should live how you want to, I told her. You’re a kid, still, and kids should get to dream.

Alicia remained quiet for a moment, absorbing that. At last, she gave a small laugh and said, “You sound like Nero’s mom. She was always telling us to 'go be kids' and 'leave the worrying to adults.'” 

There was no more said about her title.