After a long day of hunting and dismantling monsters, Fran fell asleep in the carriage.
Somewhere else that night, a goblin ran back into its lair and, in the dark of it, swelled and changed into something giant.
The carriage reached the city of Alessa, and Randall offered to pay Fran's entrance fee at the gate. The catgirl walked in through the streets looking for the adventurers' guild, and the sword on her back looked at the weapons hanging at every second stall and could not help himself: he used appraisal.
Most of them had better stats than he did.
He took this badly. Fran told him it did not matter — he was unique, she said. He was the only sword in the world that could use all those skills.
At the Alessa adventurers' guild, the receptionist was in the middle of dealing with a group of mercenaries when a small black catgirl came up to the desk and said she wanted to become an adventurer. The woman warned her honestly that the work was difficult and dangerous, and that she was a child. There would be an exam first. And the guild would not be held responsible if anything happened to her.
Fran agreed, and was taken through to the exam room.
The examiner introduced himself and let his aura out to intimidate her. Fran stood in it without moving. Teacher, looking at the man's strength, told her not to hold anything back.
Donadron came at her the moment it began. She stepped out of the way. He came again, and she slipped that too, and she kept dodging until at last he caught her.
The sword took the blow for her.
She refused to keep running after that. Teacher reinforced her strength and her agility with magic, and she went forward and landed several slashes in a row. A cut opened along Donadron's arm — and closed again, healing over in front of her.
He acknowledged her skill. Then he told her she still had a very long way to go, and swung his battle axe at her.
Fran answered with earth magic, binding him where he stood, and fire magic on top of it. The explosion hit him full on, and she followed it up with a strike that sent him through the wall.
The receptionist stared. Fran had passed.
Afterward she was brought before the guild leader. Clint was impressed by her swordsmanship, and puzzled by the way she cast magic with no incantation at all. Fran refused to explain it. He tried appraisal on her, and she blocked it.
He sensed no ill intent in her, though, so he passed her as an adventurer.
She was given her guild card after laying her hand on a crystal that measured her mana. When she was asked to choose a class, it turned out she was compatible with a great many of them; she chose sword mage.
With the card in hand, Fran went to sell what she had. Teacher told her to take the items out of dimensional storage but to make it look as though everything came out of her pouch. A mountain of monster parts came up onto the counter, and she walked away with nearly two hundred thousand gold.
On her way out, the mercenaries stopped her.
She had cheated, they said. And she was a black cat, and they had a great deal to say about that too. Listening, the sword understood that she had been hearing this her whole life.
The mercenaries claimed she must have had an arrangement with the receptionist. Then Nell stepped in, slapped one of them across the face, and told them plainly why their own payment had been so low: their dismantling was sloppy and their goods were in poor condition. They should improve their skills instead of blaming other people for their money.
That offended them enough to turn on Nell. Fran got in the way and blocked the blow.
She started to hit back, and the sword stopped her — drawing a weapon inside the guild hall was not done. So she left him where he was. The insults kept coming, and Fran answered them anyway. An aura attack put the first mercenary on the floor. The second came at her and went down to a vibration blast. The third tried, and she put him down as well.
The hall cheered her.
Nell did not punish her. Nell backed her, and ordered the mercenaries to pay for the damage.
With that settled, Fran and her sword went out to look for a tavern — and behind them an old man got up and followed, because he had recognised the thing on her back for what it was.
Fran walked through the city to buy armour, staring at a hundred things she had never seen before, and then a hand caught her from behind and an old man offered to sell her some.
Teacher ran appraisal on him at once, and found that he was the honorary blacksmith of Granzel.
The man asked her to come and see his store, and Teacher told her to go, but to keep her guard up.
The adventurers loitering around the shop thought it was a waste of the old man's time to sell anything to a little beastkin girl. He told them why he did not sell to them: because they turned around and resold his work. He wanted to sell to Fran because he had seen what she could do at the guild.
Fran put the armour on and fell in love with it on the spot — everything, from the mithril earrings down to the wyvern boots. He offered her the whole set for a hundred and fifty thousand gold. She hesitated at the price, and Garus explained that the man who had commissioned it never came back out of the dungeon.
The sword, surrounded by all that gear, felt low again; everything in the shop was more powerful than he was. Fran told him it was not so.
He asked her to have Garus bring out some swords, for research.
That was when the old man turned suspicious and asked her outright about the intelligent sword she was carrying. Both of them were caught completely off guard. Teacher had blocked appraisal. How had the man seen through it?
Garus explained that he had a special skill called Godsight, which let him see weapons for what they were. He assured Fran that hers was a good one. His own swords, he said, were mostly high attack and little else.
Then he explained mana conductivity, and demonstrated. He drew one of his own blades, handed it over, and told Fran to pour a hundred mana into her weapon and strike.
She did. The blacksmith's sword broke instantly.
Her sword, Garus told them, had a conductivity of two hundred percent. Her attack power doubled with the mana she put into him.
The sword was stunned. Garus assured him that he would only grow stronger as more mana went through him — and then wondered aloud who could possibly have made him. Looking at that intelligence and that power, the old man's guess was a divine blacksmith, one of the few capable of forging weapons that could destroy whole countries.
For one glorious moment the sword allowed himself to think that he might be legendary. Garus took the moment away from him: he had seen a legendary sword once, Ignis, and this was not one.