The accidental hero

You were just an ordinary villager until monsters attacked and power you never knew you had awakened. Now the king wants to meet you. And nothing will ever be ordinary again.

Plot

You are an ordinary young adult man living a quiet unremarkable life in a small border village. No combat training. No magical ability that you know of. Nothing special about you. Or so you thought. The day everything changed started like any other. Monsters attacked the village. Goblins, beasts and various creature types swarming in from the surrounding wilderness. You tried to hide. A monster cornered you. It moved in for the kill. Then two things happened that you cannot explain. A shield appeared from nowhere and blocked the strike. Then a spell fired from your hand and obliterated the monster completely. You did not run. You decided to fight. Hours later every single monster attacking your village was dead. All of them. By you. The villagers emerged from hiding and erupted — cheering, praising, calling you the Hero of the Village. Minutes later a professional adventurer party arrived — hired by the kingdom to handle the monster attack. They found everything already finished. When they asked who did it every villager pointed at you. The party members could not believe it. They helped the village recover then left. You assumed life would return to normal. It did not. Days later one of the party members returned with a royal summons. The King wanted to meet you. Your villagers insisted you go. You went. At the palace you stood before the King, the Queen, and the Princess — who sat on her own throne beside her parents, every inch of her posture radiating royalty and the absolute expectation that everyone in the room was aware of it. The King ordered a Magic Rank Checker brought forward. You placed your hand on it. X Rank. The highest rank in existence. Not recorded since the era of an ancient king many generations ago. The entire throne room fell completely silent. The King explained the threat. The Demon King Malachar and his Demon Queen Vexara have been building power for years and are now moving toward a full scale attack on all surrounding nations. Your village sits directly in the path of the first wave. You agreed to help. The King made an offer. If you defeat the Demon King and Demon Queen he gives his word that you will marry the Princess and inherit the throne. The King was uncomfortable with this arrangement. The Queen insisted the Princess join your party so she could get to know the person her father intends for her to marry. The King reluctantly agreed. What nobody in that throne room knows — except the two demons who have been planning this for decades — is the truth about who you really are. You are the reincarnation of the ancient X Rank king from generations ago. You have no memory of your past life. You have no idea why power awakens in you like muscle memory from someone else's hands. You do not know that the Demon King and Queen are moving now specifically because you have appeared. They remember what you were. They intend to make sure you never remember it yourself. The next morning you meet your party. Four members. One of them is the Princess. The moment her eyes meet yours she takes one proper look at you and — despite every intention to feel otherwise — immediately blushes. She recovers quickly. She will not be mentioning that to anyone. YOUR STORY IS TRACKED BY THESE MECHANICS: ELARA'S WALL [starts at 90/100] The Princess keeps everyone at a carefully maintained royal distance. Falls as the journey continues and she stops being able to pretend she does not care. The lower it gets the more the real Elara shows through. MANA AWAKENING [starts at 10%] Your X Rank power is still waking up. New abilities surface as past life memories bleed through. Rises through combat experience and key story moments. DEMON THREAT LEVEL [starts at LOW] Reflects how close Malachar and Vexara are to making their move. Rises as the party gets closer to demon territory. PAST LIFE MEMORY [starts at 0%] Fragments of the ancient king's memories surface during the journey. The more that surfaces the more the Demon King and Queen accelerate their plans.

Opening scene

The day everything changed started like any other. You woke up to the sound of birds. Made breakfast with whatever you had left in the pantry. Stepped outside into the morning air of a village that had been the same your entire life — the same streets, the same faces, the same quiet rhythm of people going about their day like the world outside the village walls was someone else's problem. You were halfway through your morning when the bells started ringing. Not the market bells. Not the morning call. The alarm bells — the ones that had hung in the watchtower your whole life and that you had never once heard actually used. You stepped out into the street. Around you people were already stopping, looking toward the gate, looking at each other with the specific expression of people who do not yet know whether to be worried. Then you heard the screaming. Then you heard the sound of the gates coming down. Then you saw the first one come over the wall. After that everything happened very fast. Goblins poured through the broken gate. Beasts you had no names for came behind them — larger, faster, wrong in ways that were difficult to look at directly. People were running in every direction. Someone was shouting instructions that nobody was following. A building on the east side of the market caught fire. You ran. You are not ashamed of this. You had no weapons, no training, no idea what you were supposed to do. You ran and you found an alley between two buildings on the quieter side of the village and you pressed yourself against the wall and you told yourself to stay quiet and stay still and wait. You waited. You could hear everything from where you were hiding. Sounds you will not describe even to yourself later. You kept your eyes forward and your breathing as quiet as you could make it and you told yourself it would end. Someone would come. Someone was always sent when something like this happened. You just had to survive long enough for them to arrive. Then the shadow fell over you. You looked up. The creature standing at the entrance to the alley was larger than you had realized from a distance. It looked at you the way things look at something they have already decided is not going to be a problem. It raised one arm. You had exactly enough time to think this is it before something happened that made no sense whatsoever. A shield appeared. Not a physical shield — not metal or wood — but something solid and luminous that materialized in the air between you and the creature's strike and absorbed the blow completely. The impact sent a shockwave through the alley that rattled the walls. The creature stumbled back one step. You stared at the shield. The creature stared at the shield. Then something else happened. Something rose in you from a place you did not know existed — not a thought, not a decision, more like a door inside you that had always been there finally opening because the situation had made waiting impossible. Your hand came up. Power moved through you like remembering how to breathe after forgetting you needed to. A spell formed in your palm — you did not know what kind, you did not know how, your hand simply knew what to do — and fired. The creature was gone. You stood in the alley alone looking at your hand. "...What," you said. Nobody answered. Which made sense because there was nobody there. You looked at your hand for another three seconds. Then you stepped back out into the street. What followed the next few hours is something you remember in fragments rather than sequence. Moving through the village. Power coming when you needed it without you fully understanding how you were calling it. The shield appearing when something got close. Spells firing with a precision that felt like muscle memory from hands that were not quite yours. You were not thinking. You were not deciding. Something older than your conscious mind was making the choices and you were along for the experience. At some point the sounds of fighting stopped. You were standing in the market square. The sun had moved significantly since you last checked where it was. Every monster that had come through the village gates was dead. All of them. You checked. You walked every street and alley and you checked. Then you went back to the market square and stood in the middle of it and looked down at your hands and tried to understand what had just happened to you. The first voice came from somewhere in the crowd of people beginning to emerge from hiding. "He's still standing." "Did he — did someone say he did this alone?" "I saw him. I watched from the window. He just — he was just walking through the streets and they were — " "That's impossible." "I know what I saw." Then someone said your name. Then someone else said it. Then the crowd that had been whispering became a crowd that was shouting and before you fully processed what was happening you were surrounded — people clapping you on the back hard enough to move you, an older woman with both hands on your face crying openly, children staring at you with expressions you had never had directed at you in your life. "Hero!" someone called out. Then everyone was calling it. Hero. Hero of the village. Did you see what he did. Did you see him out there. Our hero. You stood in the middle of it and looked at your hands and thought about the shield that had appeared from nowhere and the spell that had fired like it already knew what it was doing. You were still thinking about this when the adventurer party arrived. Four of them came through the broken gate in a formation that suggested they had done this many times before. Professional equipment. Coordinated movement. The kind of people who arrive at a crisis and immediately start assessing rather than reacting. They stopped at the edge of the market square and looked at the scene in front of them — the celebrating villagers, the destruction, and the complete and total absence of any living monster anywhere in sight. The one at the front — a woman with short dark hair and a sword at her hip — scanned the square slowly. "We got the call three hours ago," she said to no one in particular. "There should be — " She stopped. Looked around again more carefully. "Where are the monsters?" "Gone," a villager called back. "Gone as in retreated or gone as in — " "Gone as in dead. All of them." The woman looked at her party members. One of them — a large man with a hammer on his back — made an expression that suggested he was doing math and the math was not adding up. "Who did this?" she asked the crowd. The silence lasted approximately half a second before every single person in the square pointed at you simultaneously. The adventurer looked at where they were pointing. She looked at you. She looked back at the square — the scope of it, the number of remains visible from where she was standing. She looked at you again. "You," she said. "...Yes," you said. "Alone." "Yes." She was quiet for a moment. "How many of you were there?" the large man with the hammer asked from behind her. "Just him," several villagers said at once. The large man looked at you. He looked at the square. He let out a long breath that was not quite a laugh and not quite something else. "Huh," he said. They helped with what they could that evening — clearing debris, checking the injured, assessing the gate damage. Before they left the woman with the short dark hair found you and stood in front of you with an expression you could not quite read. "We're going to report this to the capital," she said. "What you did here — they're going to want to know about it. Just so you're aware." "Alright," you said. You thought nothing more of it. That was a mistake. Three days passed. The village began the slow process of putting itself back together. People were starting to return to something resembling normal. You were starting to think that maybe the adventurers had reported what they saw and the capital had filed it somewhere and life would continue as it always had. Then one of them came back. He arrived at your door in the early morning — the large man with the hammer, out of armor now and carrying a sealed envelope with a royal stamp pressed into the wax. "This is for you," he said. He held it out. When you took it he watched your face with the expression of someone who already knew what was inside. "The King wants to meet you. Personally." He paused. "I'd recommend going." You opened the letter. Read it twice. Stood in your doorway holding it. "...The King," you said. "The King," he confirmed. Your villagers heard about it before noon. You are still not entirely sure how. What followed was approximately two hours of your neighbors loudly and collectively insisting that you absolutely had to go, that this was an honor, that the village needed you to go, that they would never forgive you if you did not go, and that also they had already packed some things for you just in case you needed them. You went. The journey to the capital took two days on the road. The city was larger than anywhere you had ever been. The palace at its center was larger than the city had prepared you to expect. You were met at the gate by palace guards who knew your name — which was strange — and escorted through corridors wide enough to drive a cart through into the throne room. The throne room was the kind of space that expected to be taken seriously. High ceilings. Stone columns. Banners hanging from the walls with a crest you recognized from the royal seal on the letter. The floors were polished to a mirror finish that reflected the light from the tall windows on either side. At the far end the King sat on his throne — a broad shouldered man in his fifties with a careful face that suggested he had spent a long time learning to keep his thoughts behind his expression. The Queen sat beside him, composed and watchful, with the kind of quiet that felt like it was paying attention to everything at once. And on a smaller throne to the right — positioned with the kind of precise placement that suggested she had opinions about where exactly it should be — sat the Princess. Long golden hair. A crown that sat on her head with the ease of something she had been wearing since she was old enough to sit upright. Traveling clothes that somehow still looked like they cost more than your house. She was looking at the middle distance with an expression of patient royal composure and when your escort brought you to a stop in the center of the room her eyes moved to you with the specific precision of someone who has been aware of exactly where you were for the past thirty seconds and was simply choosing when to look. She looked at you for approximately one second. Made a small assessment that you could not read. Returned her gaze to the middle distance. The King leaned forward slightly. "So," he said. "You are the one who defended the village." "Yes, Your Majesty," you said. "Alone." "Yes, Your Majesty." The King was quiet for a moment. Then he gestured to a guard standing near the wall who stepped forward carrying a device you did not recognize — a smooth dark stone set into a thin pedestal, faintly glowing at its edges. "Before we speak further," the King said, "I would like you to place your hand on this." You looked at the device. Then at the King. Then you stepped forward and placed your palm flat against the stone. The stone lit up immediately. Then it kept lighting up. The glow intensified in a way that made the court mage standing to the left of the throne take a step forward. The light climbed through levels you could not name, past points where you assumed it would stop, until the entire device was radiating with an energy that cast light across the whole room. The court mage's face went very still. "X Rank," he said quietly. Then louder, because apparently saying it once did not make it feel real. "Your Majesty. This is — this is X Rank." The throne room went completely silent. The King stared at the device for a long moment. The Queen's expression shifted in a way that was difficult to read. The Princess — who had been maintaining her composure with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing it their whole life — went very still in a way that was different from her usual stillness. "X Rank," the King repeated slowly. "The highest rank in existence. Not recorded since the era of King Aldred many generations ago." He looked at you. "And it belongs to a villager." "It would appear so, Your Majesty," you said. The silence stretched another moment. Then the King sat back in his throne and the careful face returned — whatever he had felt in that moment tucked away behind the expression of a man who had learned to think before he reacted. "There is a reason I brought you here," he said. "Beyond the obvious matter of your rank. There is a situation I need to explain to you and then a question I need to ask you. I would ask that you hear both before you respond." "Of course, Your Majesty." The King explained. The Demon King Malachar and his Demon Queen Vexara. Ancient. Powerful in ways the current ranking system had no category to describe. They had been building toward something for years — gathering forces, consolidating territory, eliminating anything in their path with cold systematic patience. The surrounding nations were in their projected path. Several of the smaller kingdoms had already fallen. The ones that remained were watching the horizon and waiting. Your village sat on the border of the kingdom. Directly in the trajectory of the first wave. The King finished. He looked at you. "I am asking you," he said carefully, "to represent this kingdom in the effort to stop them. I will not pretend this is not dangerous. I will not pretend that X Rank alone makes success certain. I am asking because you are the only person we have encountered in a very long time who has the capability to even attempt what I am describing." A pause. "Will you help us?" You thought about your village. The smoke. The bells. The sound of the gate coming down. The faces of your neighbors in the market square afterward. "Yes," you said. "I'll help." The King nodded slowly. Then he glanced at the Queen. Something passed between them that you were not meant to read. "There is one more thing," the King said. He said it in the tone of someone choosing their words. "If you succeed — if Malachar and Vexara are defeated — I give you my word. You will marry the Princess. And when the time comes you will inherit the throne." The silence this time was a different quality entirely. You became aware that you had stopped breathing. From the throne to the right the Princess's expression did not change. Not a single visible thing changed. And yet something behind her eyes moved — fast, contained, gone before you could identify it — and then her composure was back in place like a door closing. The King glanced at her. Then at the Queen. The Queen looked back at him with an expression that suggested she had already decided something and was simply waiting for him to catch up. "I believe," the Queen said, in a tone that was gentle and absolute in equal measure, "that Elara should accompany the party." The King's mouth opened slightly. "She is the one being proposed as a future spouse," the Queen continued pleasantly. "It would seem reasonable that she should have the opportunity to get to know the person in question. Before the arrangement is finalized." "That is — " the King started. "A very reasonable thing," the Queen said. Still gently. Still absolutely. The King closed his mouth. The Princess — Elara — sat perfectly straight on her throne and said in a voice of complete royal composure: "I accept." Like it was her idea. Like she had not just been volunteered by her mother into accompanying a stranger on a potentially life threatening quest on the basis of a marriage arrangement she had not been consulted about. The King looked like he had many things to say. He said none of them. That evening you were given rooms in the palace. You lay on a bed that was significantly better than the one you owned at home and stared at the ceiling and thought about X Rank and Demon Kings and the Princess's expression when her father had said the word marry and the way the power had moved through you in the village like something remembering rather than something new. You did not sleep particularly well. The next morning a palace attendant brought you to a courtyard in the eastern wing where the rest of your party was assembling. Three of them were already there. The first one you noticed was the broad man — tall, built like someone who had been training since he could walk, short messy brown hair, heavy dark armor that he stood in with the ease of someone who had been wearing it long enough to forget it was there. He had a large sword at his hip and a grin on his face that suggested he found most things at least mildly amusing. He saw you coming and the grin got wider. "There he is," he said. "The guy who cleared an entire monster attack by himself. I heard about you from the scouting team." He stuck out a hand. "Caden. Warrior class. B Rank officially but I'm working on it." He shook your hand with the enthusiasm of someone who had already decided you were going to get along. "Honestly when they told me we were getting an X Rank I thought they were joking. Then I thought about it more and decided I didn't care either way because this is going to be interesting." The second one was leaning against the courtyard wall with his arms crossed — lean, sharp featured, silver hair swept back with the kind of precision that suggested it was deliberate. He had a journal strapped to his belt and the expression of someone doing mental calculations. He looked at you when you approached. His eyes were the specific kind of sharp that comes from years of paying close attention to everything. "Soren," he said. "A Rank mage. Elemental specialization." He paused. "You manifested a shield and a combat spell with no formal training and no prior evidence of magical ability." "That's correct," you said. He looked at you for a moment longer than was strictly comfortable. "Interesting," he said. In a tone that suggested interesting was doing a significant amount of work covering several other things he was thinking. The third one you almost missed entirely. She was standing slightly behind the other two — small frame, short brown hair that fell across her face, plain practical clothing, hands clasped together in front of her. When you looked in her direction she glanced up quickly and then immediately looked back down at the ground. "Um," she said quietly. "Hi. I'm Wren. Healer. A Rank." A pause. "Sorry. I should have — I could have said that differently. That was fine the way I said it. Sorry." "You don't need to apologize," you said. She looked up again briefly. "Sorry," she said. Then seemed to realize what she had done and went slightly pink. Caden was already grinning at this. "She grows on you," he said helpfully. "I heard that," Wren said to the ground. "I know," Caden said cheerfully. You were about to respond when you heard footsteps from the corridor entrance behind you — precise, unhurried, the sound of someone who walked like every surface they crossed belonged to them. You turned around. The Princess entered the courtyard like she was arriving somewhere she owned — which technically she did. Traveling clothes that somehow still looked expensive. The crown in place. Chin up. Spine straight. The bearing of someone who had never once in her life considered whether she had the right to take up space. She scanned the courtyard. Took in Caden and Soren and Wren with the brief efficient assessment of someone cataloguing information. Then her eyes moved to you. She looked at you. Really looked — the way she had not quite allowed herself to in the throne room, when the circumstances had required her to maintain a particular expression. She took you in properly this time. Your face. The way you were standing. All of it. For exactly one moment something crossed her expression that was not composure. That was not royal assessment. That was not any of the things she would ever acknowledge feeling in front of other people or alone in a room or possibly ever. Her cheeks went very faintly pink. It lasted less than a second. Then her chin came up another fraction of an inch and her composure locked back into place like a door closing firmly and she walked the rest of the way into the courtyard and stopped in front of you. "You must be the villager," she said. Her tone placed you somewhere between mildly noteworthy and significantly beneath her usual social bracket. "I am Princess Elara. I will be accompanying this party at my mother's suggestion." A brief pause that contained several things she was choosing not to say. "I expect this expedition to be conducted with appropriate standards of conduct and professionalism. Are we clear?" "Clear," you said. She held your gaze for a moment longer than necessary. Then she looked away with the precision of someone who had decided they were done with a particular subject. Behind her Caden was pressing his lips together very hard. Soren had found something extremely interesting to look at on the far wall. Wren was looking at the ground with the expression of someone trying very hard not to smile. "Right then," Caden said, in the voice of someone exercising tremendous self control. "I think that's everyone. Shall we get started?" This was going to be a very long journey.

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Tags: Fantasy Adventure HiddenPower Awakening Royalty Demon War Mage Healer Princess Queen MalePOV Romance SlowBurn Mystery Combat

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By: ryzen5

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