Every Inhale brought the biting cold deeper into his lungs. Each exhale was like a thousand needles pressing into his chest and bearing down on his heart. He ignored the pain anyway, focusing only on the light in the distance. Only 300 feet away, he had to make it, without looking back he continued to run as hard as he possibly could, this was it. This was the last stretch he needed.
I just need to push through, if I can keep running until I’m there that’s the last bit I need, I’ll finally make it.
Each stride sent pain through his feet as they pounded the cold ground, with only a few feet left his vision became hazy, the light blurring in and out until he heard one loud shout.

“Axlet!”

Dread replaced his weariness and his fear gave him one last surge of adrenaline clearing those few final feet and managing a final, heavy step onto the winding path.

<Skill: Sprinter Lv. 2 level up to Lv. 3>

“What the hells is the matter with you running around this late! You keep trying to get these damn skills you’re going to end up dead!”
I was hoping to get back before he noticed, worth it to finally level up sprinter though I’ve been running every chance I get maybe if the snowfall isn’t bad this winter I can get to level 4 before the spring planting.

“I know your ears work stop gawking and get inside right now boy!”

“I’m coming dad”

His voice certainly isn’t wearing down in his old age.

As Axlet walked up the path towards his newly visible father in the lantern light the small path up to their doorway seemed to extend as the anger in his father’s face became fully visible and his shaking hand dipped in and out of the lantern light. The creases and wrinkles on his face would make his fellow farmers think that the man they once knew as a joyful and energetic presence was entering into his later years of life. He stopped being able to count his age a few years before Axlet was born, he was a young man by then and had a property and wife for himself, age mattered little at that point. He knew he only had a few years left now but Axlet would be a man by then so it didn’t matter very much.

Well, if Axlet lived that long at least. His escapades certainty added quite a few years to the face of his father and worried him greatly about the future of his farm. This particular time the lecture began even before they could fully enter the house, beginning as they stepped into the doorway.

“You’re a fool, Axlet, how many times must I tell you that it is dangerous out there, the sun has already set and there is a howling wind it would only take a goblin to kill a boy of your size in these conditions”

“I’m 14 dad, I can take a goblin and that’s why I need to keep doing this the more I can train my skills the safer I will be”

“If you keep doing this you’ll be dead is what you’ll be, by god if your mother saw you squandering your life like this she would be heartbroken. I know it’s not a great life I’ve given you-“
“Dad, it’s not-”

“Let me finish. I know I haven’t given you the best life, but it’s a life, all this crap with classes and skills will lose its charm soon enough, just like it does with everyone. Aquine, bless her name, brought it into this world at its very birth, we all have it, its not worth dying over.”

“It can do so much for us though dad, if this is what mages, adventurers, and kings use to do so many great things just think what it could do for us and our town. We’re just some colony, the only one on this island, we can’t rely on the traders for everything.”

“The people who become obsessed with all this aren’t kings and heroes, Axlet, they’re dead. They died fighting some overgrown snake while the mages had their parents paying for them to sit in some academy making their scribbles and the kings were on their throne. I want you to be happy Axlet but you can’t be if you’re dead.”
“I know, sorry”

With an unsatisfied glance his father turned and headed to his room. Axlet stood in the main room for what felt like a lifetime for him. As the dim light from the wood stove shone dimly through the room Axlet pushed his hair from his forehead.

His jet black hair had gotten longer but they had been too busy with preparations for the winter to cut it. His father told him his hair came from his mom and the charming face from his dad. Seeing as his dad looked pretty average to Axlet he wasn’t sure how to feel about the comparison but one of the traders who had come to the farm because of what they called a “discrepancy” with the crop amount had told him his dark hair and strong face complimented his gray eyes well.

Axlet hadn’t liked the traders ever since but he didn’t have much interaction with others so it was his only basis for his appearance. As the fire crackled and gave a short spray of orange light around the room his eyes traveled along the barren walls. They were lucky to have patched the walls so they wouldn’t freeze throughout the winter but even with the king’s traders it took all the money they had to keep themselves from freezing, it would be the second winter of harsh rationing.

Seneca had established their colony to be the new breadbasket that would support the righteous war against Seabel. After 500 years of battling over chunks of the Taxium archipelago Seneca had decided to end the war once and for all, by annihilating their age old rivals. The king’s righteous war against the evil plague of Seabelians lacked food though and Axlet’s colony existed for just that.
Aldren’s bounty, named for the courageous king who would open up a new era of prosperity for Seneca and bring them to the table of world powers. Axlet could remember the whole memorandum by heart, it was the motto of the “traders” who came every year for their crops. The main island where Seneca and Seabel clashed, named Talt after the man who discovered it, was rocky and its poor soil lead to few crops. Instead the nations used the surrounding islands to provide food for the more industrial and concentrated populations of their cities.

Each year numerous “traders” came from Talt to collect food and provide farm tools and some meager amount of coins as a way to keep the town working. Being the first colony established on the island meant many rough winters while sea travel was halted due to the massive ice sheets and horrible storms. The traders had come last month and took as much as possible to keep the army going through winter. At most the colony had two months of food to last them the whole winter, even worse than last year. As Axlet lamented the many days of mush and soup ahead of him he went to lay down and check on his progress. Winter was the hardest part of his life here, and he cherished it as his greatest source of progress, during winter he wouldn’t have to worry about any crops and could train to his heart’s content.

Name: Axlet

Level: 1

Class: None (Tier 1)

Stats:

Intelligence: 15 Willpower: 10 Vitality: 13
Strength: 11 Dexterity: 11 Agility: 13

HP: 14/14 MP: 35/35

Active Skills:
Stealth Lv. 2
Farming Lv. 4
Throwing Lv. 2
Climbing Lv. 3
Appraisal: Lv. 2

Passive Skills:
Starvation Resistance: Lv. 1
Cold Resistance Lv. 1
Sprinter: Lv. 3

Titles: None

Axlet’s training schedule was as eccentric as it was brutal. When he first began working the fields with his father at 8 years old and he received his first skill, farming, he was amazed by the voice seeping into his head as if it had been there all along. His amazement was interrupted by his father’s laugh and all-knowing tone as he told Axlet he had received his first skill from Aquine. Aquine was the mother of humanity and the creator of the system, she delivered it unto the humans of the world in order to provide them with hope and order amidst the chaotic and vastly more powerful monsters of the world. It was through this system that humans could elevate themselves to fight off all the monsters of the world and create their own place within it.

Axlet had been chasing after that hope and order ever since, doing everything he could to progress and make himself stronger. Every morning he began by sneaking around the house, rolling past his father’s doorway again and again without waking him, sneaking into his room and searching all throughout the house in order to level up his stealth skill, once his father awoke, he would be forced into the fields where he would till for most of the day, during which Axlet would pick up and throw as many rocks as he could at various targets, anything from trees to his own house, though the second was stopped with a number of particularly loud beatings.

After work was done for the day Axlet would spend the rest of the daylight running along the tree line, climbing a tree every time he felt he needed a break. While on his runs he would appraise every item he saw. His progress had been extremely speedy up until level 2 where most of his skills stalled and he had been unable to progress more with his usual methods.

This winter though Axlet planned to train even harder and get at least one skill, other than farming, to Lv. 4. He tried to keep his mind from wandering to his resistances, he had a feeling they would be going up this winter as well. When his father Found Axlet laying in the snow last winter, unconscious, behind the house he made him swear on his mother’s grave not to train those skills.

He had never met his mother but his father seemed to have loved her a great deal so she meant a lot to Axlet too. She died giving birth to Axlet but his father had never spoken about it, all Axlet knew was that his father loved her and she was a great woman. They didn’t have any other family and being a new colony they didn’t have much community. The farm was about a mile from the nearest neighbor and most people kept to themselves except for visits to the town, a 2 mile walk itself, for supplies and tools. His father took care of this usually while Axlet spent that time trying out new training methods such as jumping off the house or “swordplay” usually involving his father’s scythe. Axlet didn’t know much of anything about the world outside of his colony, but he was far too busy devising new training methods and ways to unlock skills to think much about it.