Chương 45: Book Recap So far

Please read the following in your best Gru voice. It is important. Minions! Today, we recap the book! Yes, yes, I know. We disappeared for a little while, some of you remembered everything perfectly, and some of you probably not. So, for the latter group, we refresh. Howl Aridis is sixteen years old, heir to one of the most powerful Houses in the kingdom, and the first Axiom born in more than a thousand years.

His family has spent his entire life training him into a magical warrior powerful enough to frighten nations, while also keeping him isolated enough that ordinary things like friendship, travelling, strange food and seeing things like an actual dog would somehow be exciting discoveries. He also has the System, a mysterious golden interface visible only to him, which gives him levels, statistics, skills, quests and rewards.

Howl eventually left home for the first time to take Sartheon's entrance examination, where he met Rael and Eydric, discovered the strange pleasure of having actual friends, fought his way through the trials and earned himself a place at the kingdom's greatest military academy. Then he returned home, and things became considerably more complicated.

After asking for something as simple as time with his family, Howl was drawn once again into the plans of House Aridis, before eventually finding his way to the ancient mountain shrine of Saoren, the High Spirit who once accompanied the Axioms of his bloodline.

Saoren trained him in forgotten methods of meditation, helped him develop [Still Mind], pushed him into Tier Two and, more importantly, discovered something about Howl that Howl himself still does not know, which was that the System is not some heavenly blessing, but Howl himself! You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. You see, when Howl was three years old, something terrible happened in the northern wing of the estate and a lot of people were, uh, unalived.

Howl remembers none of it, because his mind buried the event so deeply that even he cannot reach it. The trauma also caused him to lock himself away from much of the power he had been born possessing. And because Howl's mind is a very reasonable and completely normal place, it responded by taking the adventure stories Nana Serre had read to him as a child and constructing an entire System through which he could slowly earn his own powers back.

Quests, levels, skills, rewards, all of it is Howl's own mind creating a path toward something that was already his, with his strange gift of foresight seemingly helping decide what rewards he will need before he even knows he needs them. After Saoren's training, Howl returned to House Aridis, received Dragonbone, gained the troll's Healing Factor after refusing to kill the creature his family had prepared for him, and finally departed for Sartheon.

There, naturally, the academy placed its sheltered magical superweapon into Group Seven with Tomás Stark and four of Sartheon's most notorious repeat offenders: Varen, Kael, Jaerik and Dren. Within minutes, five of them destroyed their room fighting over the captaincy, Howl became captain, everybody told Professor Ashara that they had simply "fallen," and even poor Tomás joined the lie despite spending the battle underneath a bed.

Since then, they* have been punished together, begun bonding at a frankly alarming speed, and discovered that Howl may fit among the academy's four most troublesome students considerably better than anyone expected. And now Group Seven is preparing to leave Sartheon for its first mission together. There, minions. Your memories have been restored. We may proceed.

*Tomás is NOT willing to be included in the They.