Starting With an SSS-Rank Swordsmanship Talent

The arrow comes from nowhere.

One heartbeat, Alaric is shouting orders over the clash of steel, boots sinking into blood‑slick mud as his hundred men buckle under the weight of a civil war he never chose. The next, there’s only sky, cold and white, tilting above him as an iron point punches through his helm and everything he fought for ends in the dirt—no last words, no grave, just the carrion birds of the Astanian Empire’s succession struggle.

The emperor is dead. Two princes tear the realm apart in their scramble for the throne, and conscripts like Alaric are fed into the meat grinder. He claws his way up to command, dreams that if he can just hold one more line, win one more skirmish, something might change.

It doesn’t. He’s too ordinary to matter.

Then he wakes up.

The cot is narrower. His hands are smaller. The barracks stinks of sweat and cheap stew, and outside, the Empire hasn’t started burning yet. Alaric is back at the beginning—before conscription, before the crown prince’s banner, before that nameless field—but his memories are sharp as the arrow that killed him.

This time, there is something else inside him: a strange, cold "system" whispering hidden paths, dragging buried talent for the sword to the surface and sharpening it past anything human. With a future full of corpses laid out in his mind and a power that could carve him a new fate, Alaric steps once more toward the coming war, knowing exactly where his road ends if he falters—a forgotten body on an unmarked field, and an empire that never even learns his name.