Chapter 2 — Roles and Reasons
The kingdom gave them a week before the real conversations began.
It was a generous week, Raj had to admit. Good food, warm beds, and servants who appeared silently at the door every morning with breakfast trays. For someone who had been surviving on convenience store onigiri and whatever his mother felt like cooking, it was borderline overwhelming.
On the fourth day, Michal knocked on his door.
"Training field. One hour. Everyone's meeting the Summoner."
Raj had heard about the Summoner. The woman responsible for pulling five people from five different dimensions in one catastrophically ambitious ritual. By all accounts she had been unconscious since the summoning and had only just woken up.
He showed up to the training field to find the others already there.
The Summoner was a small woman. That was the first surprise. Raj had imagined someone ancient and imposing. Instead she looked barely thirty, wrapped in a blanket despite the warm morning, sitting in a chair someone had dragged outside for her. She had dark circles under her eyes deep enough to store luggage in.
"So," she said, looking at all five of them. "You're alive. Good."
"You sound surprised," Christine said.
"Inter-dimensional summoning for five simultaneous targets." She paused. "I am a little surprised yes."
Lily looked concerned. "Are you feeling better?"
"I will be. In approximately six months." The Summoner pulled her blanket tighter. "Which brings me to the problem."
She explained it plainly. The ritual had consumed everything she had. Every drop of mana, every reserve, every carefully saved resource the kingdom's magic division had stockpiled for a decade. There was nothing left for a second summoning. No calling back if someone fell. No summoning support characters or additional heroes.
What they had was what they had.
"We're short a scout," Rael said. He had his arms crossed and was looking at the Summoner with the expression of a man doing very serious arithmetic. "Hero, tank, mage, healer. Standard demon-hunting formation needs a scout. Someone who can read terrain, track, and operate independently under pressure."
Everyone looked at Raj.
Raj looked behind himself. There was nothing there.
"Me?" he said.
"All-type affinity," Christine said, not unkindly. "You can access wind magic for detection, earth magic for tracking, fire for offense. Theoretically you could fill any gap." She paused. "You would also make a reasonable secondary mage. Red Mage configuration — offensive and adaptive."
"Scout and Red Mage," Michal said. He was smiling in that easy way of his. "It's a lot to ask. Especially since you didn't sign up for either."
Raj thought about it for exactly four seconds.
The honest truth was he didn't know what he had signed up for. None of them had. They were all pulled from their lives without warning or consent. Michal hadn't signed up to be a hero. Rael hadn't signed up to be a tank. Lily certainly hadn't signed up to drag a blanket-wrapped Summoner outside at nine in the morning.
But here they were.
"Okay," Raj said.
Michal blinked. "Just like that?"
"Did you want me to make a speech?"
Rael made a sound that might have been a laugh. It was hard to tell with him.
Training started the next morning and immediately Raj understood two things.
First — his party members were not normal people.
Michal sparring at thirty percent effort looked like a natural disaster with good posture. Rael took a direct hit from a training golem the size of a carriage and complained that it tickled. Christine fired off a spell chain so fast that the training master stopped the session entirely to sit down and quietly reconsider his life.
Lily, who looked like she would apologize to a door for bumping into it, turned out to have a healing output so powerful she accidentally regrew a training dummy's severed arm. It hadn't had arms before. It did now.
Second thing Raj understood — he was slower than all of them. Not embarrassingly slow. Not helplessly slow. But when he stood next to an SS-rank hero doing warm up drills, the gap was measurable and real and he felt every inch of it.
He didn't say anything about it. He just trained harder.
The scout curriculum was brutal in a quiet way. Early mornings tracking through the surrounding forest. Map reading in the dark. Learning to move without sound across every terrain type. And magic — constant magic. Wind magic for sensing presence at distance. Earth magic for reading ground vibration. Red Mage combat drills that expected him to switch element and stance mid-fight without breaking rhythm.
He fell down a lot. He got lost twice in the training forest. Once he accidentally tracked Rael for three hours thinking he was following a monster only to find the man sitting against a tree eating his lunch.
"You tracked me for three hours," Rael said, looking up.
"You move very quietly for someone your size," Raj said.
Rael handed him half a sandwich. That was probably the beginning of their friendship.
The months moved. Autumn turned cold. Winter arrived and left. Spring came and the training got harder, as if the world knew they were running out of time.
And somewhere in those months — between the exhaustion and the falling down and the getting back up — Raj stopped eating breakfast alone.
It started with Lily saving him a seat. Then Michal started briefing the day's training over the morning meal. Then Christine began annotating Raj's spell theory notes without being asked, her handwriting sharp and precise in the margins. Then Rael started showing up early to sparring so he could give Raj an extra round before the others arrived.
Nobody announced it. Nobody made it a moment.
But somewhere in the middle of that year, Raj stopped feeling like a mistake the summoning had made.
He still thought he was the weakest. That part didn't change.
But for the first time in his life, he didn't mind being exactly where he was.
End of Chapter 2