Another two weeks of grinding, five man party dynamics and one very embarrassing incident where Tommy pulled 3 enemy packs at once before the flickering icon finally stopped flickering and just... stayed.
It was in the middle of a fight when it happened. Nothing special. A pack of Marsh Hounds, middle level. The sort of fight my party could handle half-asleep by now. That hit I shouldn't have taken had dropped me low on HP, and instead of falling back like a sane level thirty-eight warrior I'd done the thing I apparently always did, the thing that got me here in the first place.
I held my ground and swung anyway.
**[Critical Strike!]**
[Condition Met: Survive lethal-threshold combat while below 15% HP, 10 times cumulative]
**[Unlocked Hidden Evolution Path: Vanguard]**
The world literally stopped. Not just laggy-paused, but system level paused, like it had only ever done once before, on the very first character creation screen.
**Warrior — Evolution Paths Available:**
**1. Berserker (Uncommon)**
**2. Guardian (Regular)
**3. Vanguard (Rare) — AVAILABLE NOW"**"Guys," I said, my voice doing something embarrassing and cracking. "And guys, it's here.
In hindsight, having the party actually stop fighting when we were still surrounded by hounds was a terrible tactical mistake, but nobody cared. Dario pushed past a hound in the middle of a swing just to get a look at my screen, which obviously he couldn't see, but that didn't stop him from trying. "What's the condition? What'd you do?" "Apparently it unlocks after surviving ten separate near death combats. There was no power involved. It was about..." I stopped reading the flavor text at the bottom of the class description.
**Vanguard: People who will not fall even when it makes sense to fall. Grants: Last Stand (3 seconds of immunity to death below 5% HP, 1x per battle), Rally (damage boost for the party when Vanguard is below 30% HP), and a unique title: "The One Who Doesn't Know When to Quit."**
Sana must have somehow read that last bit over my shoulder, or maybe I'd said it aloud without meaning to, because she started laughing so hard she nearly got bitten by the hound she was supposed to be fighting. "That ain't class," she panted. That's a diagnosis.It's true," Dario muttered. "You threw a weapon at a pig."I've never been allowed to live that down and I never will be, will I.""No."
I chose Vanguard. The ensuing animation was somehow both ridiculous and one of the coolest things I'd seen the game do – armor plating in dark gray and gold materializing piece by piece, my HP bar physically expanding on the HUD, a small crest appearing next to my name that hadn't been there before.
**Rare Vanguard**
Level: 38
**Title: The One Who Doesn't Know When to Give Up**
We handled the hounds pretty easily after that, the Rally passive alone making the fight seem near unfair in our favor when I dropped low enough to trigger it, something I was going to have very mixed feelings about doing intentionally in future fights.
But under the excitement, something small and strange was niggling at me. There were twenty-seven rare classes in the game, according to the tutorial info I'd half-remembered since day one. Vanguard wasn't a name I recalled seeing on any list, guide or forum thread Dario had ever shown me."Hey," I said when the adrenaline was past. Does anyone else have Vanguard? "Like, ever?"
Dario pulled something up on his end, scrolling longer than he normally would."Ken," he said slowly. It does not have a class database entry.What do you mean, it hasn't got an entry."I mean, I'm looking at the full rare class list right now, all twenty-seven of them, and Vanguard's not on it. It's not unusual. Based on this it does not exist."
For a time there was no comment. Somewhere below us the last of the Marsh Hound corpses dissolved in a light, and the flickering icon that had haunted the corner of my HUD for weeks was finally, utterly gone – replaced with the small grey-and-gold crest that apparently belonged to a class the game itself claimed didn't exist.
*Continued...*