Extra's Survival: Raising SSS-Rank Characters Is My Only Option

’I think I understand the situation I’m in.’

Jin waited patiently in the room.

It had been more than half an hour since he sent Gus to fetch the head steward, and there was still no sign of him. The candle on the desk had burned down a quarter of an inch in the interim.

Either Gus hadn’t delivered the message, or the man was taking his sweet time.

’Well. I am the famous degenerate son, after all.’

With nothing else to do, he looked at the letters stacked at the corner of the desk. He picked up the topmost one and read the name written in the corner.

From your dearest sister, Zuri.

He checked the next - it was the same.

He rifled through the rest - all of them had the same name.

Looking at the date stamped into the wax seals, they had been delivered weekly without exception.

Some had been opened. Most hadn’t.

’Who is Zuri?’

Jin searched through everything he could recall about the novel and came up with nothing. He wasn’t even sure if the name appeared anywhere in the text.

In the first place, the novel mentioned that Duke Aegis had only 4 children. Encrid - his two step-brothers and the oldest daughter of the family.

He was very sure none of their name was Zuri.

A sister who wrote weekly letters to a brother who didn’t even bother to open them - that was either a minor background detail the novel had never mentioned or something that existed outside the story he knew.

He turned one of the unopened letters over in his hands, considering.

He was about to break the seal when the door swung open.

There was no knock. The door was just pulled open, and an old man walked through as if the room belonged to him.

Jin set the letter down.

”You called, young master?”

Jin was momentarily taken aback.

Head Steward Corvan was a tall, iron-haired man with the lean precision of someone who had spent decades running a large household. He wore a neatly pressed black coat, a crisp white shirt, and a cravat. His shoes were polished to a mirror shine. He looked to be in his late forties.

But what struck Jin was the man’s arrogance.

’I had considered my unfortunate position, but this is... something else.’

No matter how thoroughly Encird had destroyed his own reputation, he was still a Gannon. He was the fourth son of a ducal house, one of the four in the entire Astralis empire. For a household steward to enter his room without so much as a knock - it was brazen.

Jin looked at the man and considered how to handle it.

”Corvan,” he said. ”Who am I?”

The steward’s expression shifted slightly. ”Pardon, young master?”

”I asked who I am,” Jin repeated.

Corvan’s expression cycled through several things in quick succession - confusion, amusement, then blankness.

”You are the fourth son of Duke Aegis Von Gannon,” he said, politely and precisely calibrated to the very edge of respectful without crossing it.

”The fourth son of Duke Aegis Von Gannon,” Jin repeated.

”Yes, young master.”

”Of one of the four ducal households of the Astralis Empire.”

A pause, brief enough to be deniable. ”...Yes, young master.”

Jin let the silence sit for one more breath.

”Then I would like you to go back through that door,” he said, ”knock on it, and come in again when you are told to.”

The room went very still.

✧ ✧ ✧

Corvan looked at him with the expression of a man who had walked in expecting a particular kind of encounter and found himself in an entirely different one.

For a moment, neither of them moved. The candle flame was the only thing in the room with anything to say, and it just flickered quietly and kept its opinions to itself.

The two of them stared at each other - Jin with cold eyes, the steward with blank ones. The silence stretched long enough to become uncomfortable.

Then, without a word, the head steward turned, walked back through the door, and closed it behind him.

A pause.

Then a knock. It was two measured raps against the wood.

Gus watched the head steward with confused eyes as he waited.

”Come in,” Jin said.

Corvan entered, and Gus kept staring at both Encrid and the head steward until the door closed again on his face.

Whatever recalibration Corvan had performed in the hallway, he had done it quickly. His expression was unreadable.

”You called for me, young master?”

”I did.”

Jin understood the situation clearly. Corvan had spent years managing a household in which Encrid Gannon was a resident embarrassment, nothing more than a problem to be managed and minimized, someone the staff feared not out of respect but for the trouble he brought.

Whatever authority came with being the duke’s son, Encrid had eroded it through consistent effort.

Jin understood all of that.

But he still wasn’t going to take it, he wouldn’t let anyone take him lightly.

He made that point already, now there was work to do.

”I’m leaving for the Wall in the morning,” he said. ”I need provisions arranged for the journey. I’m going to give you a list, and I need everything on it ready before dawn. Can you manage that?”

Corvan’s expression shifted again.

”...Yes, young master. I can manage that.”

”Good”

Jin handed him that list.

Corvan received it with both hands and read through it once. Then he read it again. When he looked up, something behind his eyes had changed.

’He expected Encrid to ask for wine,’ Jin thought. ’Maybe a carriage. Maybe nothing at all.’

But what Jin had just handed him contained everything that he would need to make the journey to the Wall and survive whatever came after it.

’A full set of cold-weather gear to survive the northern winters,’ Corvan read through. That wasn’t hard to prepare -The Gannon’s house had plenty.

’Rations for fourteen days of travel.’

Dried meat, hard cheese, preserved vegetables, grains- the kitchen kept a standing stock throughout the year, so that wasn’t even a concern.

’Two horses. One for riding, one as a pack animal.’

That was where Corvan paused for the first time.

✦ ✦ ✦