Chapter 2: Paladin

Victor swooped down on the bandit standing with his back to him and struck him in the back with one swing. The hammer did not stop at the blow and fell together with the bandit, nailing the poor guy to the ground and breaking his spine, flattening his body and hitting the ground.

Taking advantage of the moment, the knight lunged and chopped off the head of the second bandit, and from the turn, he chopped off the head of the third.

Shocked by what they saw, the bandits looked at each other and rushed away. The knight stood with his sword raised, and when the bandits were gone, he fell to his knees. All of his mana had been used up in this battle, and he was holding on by sheer force of will.

Seeing the bandits flee, Victor relaxed and in the same instant, his armor and shield disappeared as if they didn't exist.

Immediately after the weapons disappeared, he felt dizzy and the last thing he saw was Lula running towards him.

When he regained consciousness, he was shivering in the carriage, on the cushions spread out, with the little maid sitting beside him, looking at him anxiously.

"Where are we?" he asked as soon as he woke up.

"You have been unconscious for two days, and we are almost there. I'm so glad you're awake, I was afraid you wouldn't wake up. Woo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo," the girl cried again.

Victor soothed the girl beside him, he was not used to such an attitude after the death of his mother.

On Earth, more and more people were becoming cynical, and the constant information from the Internet and television was making people insensitive. It's hard to have compassion even for a person's death when you're shown deaths from every angle.

But this girl was really worried, and not for herself and her future, but for him, she cried sincerely.

This had a strange effect on him, because it was unusual for him to feel something for someone. It was the first time he felt sorry for another person, because in his past life he had only felt sorry for himself.

Every day he spent lamenting the unfairness of life, although he wasn't envious and didn't look at the expensive cars and rich kids, but he wanted to live a little bit like a human being.

To see what it was like to have money and food for more than a few days, to go to restaurants, to buy nice clothes.

But now there was a girl sitting next to him and he felt sorry for her and really wanted her to calm down and not get upset.

"Lulu, don't cry, I promise I won't fall asleep for a long time" Victor spoke again.

Wiping her tears and trying to smile, she asked the carriage to stop, as they would soon arrive at the Count's estate and she should not be in the gentleman's carriage.

After the girl was transferred to another carriage, the carriage started again and arrived at the mansion after 4 hours.

When he got out of the carriage, the knight Alganis was standing at the exit, all dirty, in bloody clothes, but looking at Victor with admiration.

He didn't understand why the knight was looking at him like that, but he nodded his head and walked towards the mansion.

On both sides, the servants and the butler of the mansion stood.

"Welcome home, young master," the old butler greeted, but unlike Jin, there was no sincerity in his greeting.

On the contrary, it sounded like a sneer, very nicely hidden behind etiquette, like a knife wrapped in a cloth, everyone knows there is a knife, but no one can say they see it.

Victor remembered everything about that butler. From his memories, he learned that this old man Tarosse had always been like this, and according to the assumption of the former owner of the body, he favored Victor's younger brother, Andros, whose mother was the daughter of a marquis and his father married her two years after Victor's mother died.

Victor's mother, on the other hand, was the daughter of a baron from a family that had completely died out, and his father had married her for love, but she had died in childbirth.

It wasn't enough that he was motherless, he was also incapable of magic.

On the contrary, Andros, the son of the Count and the daughter of the Marquis, had a talent on the level of genius. Even Victor himself thought it right to give him the right to inherit the title of Count and never took offense.

In fact, he had always been a modest child; such a character was his inheritance from his mother.

The nanny told Victor that if she had not sometimes laughed at the count's jokes, no one would have known she existed in the house.

And now this butler, who wasn't even allowed to speak without permission, tried to stab Victor, knowing he wouldn't have the heart to answer, but there was just one problem, he wasn't the same.

As he passed the butler, he pretended to stumble and threw his whole body at the old man, knocking him to the ground.

"Thank you for your help, I'm sorry, what's your name, I forgot?" Victor shook himself off as if he had gotten dirty. He walked away without waiting for an answer.

The old butler was afraid to raise his head, otherwise everyone could see the anger in his eyes, and such a thing could quickly lead to death in the house of nobles.

No matter how Victor was treated, he was the Count's son by blood, and if the servants started to get angry with him, it meant that the dog had forgotten his place and would soon be off the leash. And with servants like that, it didn't take long.

Satisfied with this small revenge, he entered the mansion, which was completely reserved for Victor, went to the bedroom and collapsed on a soft bed.

The journey and what had happened had exhausted his body, which had not yet fully recovered from the illness.

He awoke early in the morning and was out of bed when three maids came into the room with laundry.

It was not customary for the nobility to wash in the morning, the servants would bring a basin of water and wipe with a damp cloth, and that was the end of the nobility's hygiene. Commoners could go months without washing.

When he was dressed, which was unusual and embarrassing for him, a servant would come in and bring a letter on a tray, which he unwrapped to find an invitation from his father to come to him after dinner.

It was another cumbersome rule that even such a small thing as setting a time to meet had to be communicated by letter when it could have been communicated verbally through the servants.

Victor put the letter away and went into the dining room, where a seat was already taken at the head of the long table.

Breakfast was very minimal, boiled eggs, oatmeal porridge and a drink that looked more like a decoction of herbs than tea, and rolls.

At first Victor looked for butter, but not finding it, he turned to the memory of the owner of the body and realized that there was no such thing here at all, and in general there were a lot of things here.

After breakfast he went to the library where he spent all his time studying books about magic. They didn't tell him how to use magic, just general ideas about magic and what it was.

He spent the rest of the afternoon there, and after a hearty meal, he went to his father's house.

The whole area of the Shermanin estate was the size of a small village, the distance from the villa where Victor was staying to the main building was 3 kilometers.

The carriage took him there, and when Victor got out of it, the butler Tarosse and two maids stood before him.

The building was a three-story mansion, or should I say palace, in the shape of the letter "P", there was a fountain in front of the exit and a road around the fountain where the carriages could pass and stop in front of the entrance to the building.

The whole mansion was full of windows, as if the places for their installation had been made after the building had been built, for although they were all on the same level, there was no order in them.

Victor was led through a huge oak door and up a wide staircase in the hall to the second floor.

The study was to the right of the stairs at the far end of the hall.

When they reached the door where the two knights were standing, the butler asked him to wait and went to report.

After a moment, he was invited inside and saw his father for the first time.

A man of about 40 years was sitting at the table, they were very similar, in fact they were almost an exact copy of each other, except that the man looked older.

Victor was 190 cm tall, thin, with black hair and brown eyes, beautiful facial features with prominent cheekbones, straight nose, thick eyebrows and slicked back hair.

Perhaps the only difference between them was the gray in his father's hair.

Count Alexander sat at the table and, without raising his head, pointed to the chair in front of the table with his quill.

Victor sat down in the chair and waited in silence for the man before him to deign to pay attention to him.

Another ten minutes passed before the Count placed the paper in front of him and threw the quill on the table.

"I heard you fell ill and fainted, but it looks like you're all right now," was the first thing the count said.

"Thank you for your concern father, I am in good health" Victor replied, choosing his words carefully.

"That is good, because we are going to Duke Alestor Leomville's reception, where your engagement to his daughter will be announced," Alexander looked at his son's reaction, but seeing nothing, he continued, "she turned out to be almost as mediocre as you, which is why we made such a decision."

It was a common practice of the nobility to hide such children who had no prospects, they found spouses who could hide their worthlessness.

Unlike Victor, the Duke's daughter had mana and was indeed a mage, but her mana level was lower than that of an average commoner, and trying to find a husband for her among the highest level nobles was simply useless.

And to find a partner of the count's level was a kind of miracle, but it didn't matter to Victor, he couldn't decide anything, and why should he?

Whatever she was, it didn't matter, the relationships of the nobility were very free and limited only by their desires. Women had lovers, men married two or three wives and had a number of mistresses.

"Whatever you say, father," was all he could say.

Then he left the study and was about to return to his mansion when he met his stepmother and younger brother.

"Dear Victor, you are so seldom with us and do not visit your mother at all" said the woman, who looked no more than 25 years old, leading the young man under her arm.

Andros was like his mother, a little shorter than Victor, blond, with blue eyes, he was very handsome and girls ran after him in droves. Combined with his talent, he could choose from a large number of the best noblewomen.

"Forgive me, Mother, because of my poor health, I was not able to show you the proper respect" Victor replied.

Of course, she wasn't sorry that he didn't show up, on the contrary, it was a shot to remind him that he wasn't welcome here and that, unlike her, he couldn't appear in the main building very often.

And if it had been the old Victor, he would have been worried about that, but the current one didn't care about all the petty intrigues and even less about his father, who wasn't his father.

Since he had no father in his previous life either, the word itself meant nothing to him.

"Hello, dear brother, since you are in such poor health, you should not leave the house unnecessarily and expose yourself to danger," Andros said with a voice that was clearly not his own.

"Thank you brother for your concern, that's why I want to go back to my mansion," Victor said, apologizing, bowing and leaving the company.

It was unbearably disgusting to be with them and he would have wanted to rip the masks off their faces and punch them both in the face. But a brother with magic and a stepmother with the status of mistress of the house was not something he could handle at the moment.

Back at the mansion, he went straight to the library, where he had spent the whole day searching for what was bothering him and what had happened to him on the journey.

Where the shield, the hammer, the armor came from and how to summon them again. After searching the entire library, he sat down on a chair in despair. The library was a huge hall of about 200 square meters, filled with books from floor to ceiling.

But the books themselves were huge, stapled, specially treated animal skins. Each of these pages contained no more than 10-20 words, so there were no more than 300-400 words in a book.

They were difficult to read, considering that the writing of this world consisted of letters made up of a few connected lines.

Sitting in the chair, he went through the information that the previous Victor knew and what he could learn from the books, and none of them explained what had happened to him.

"Since it wasn't in this world, could it be that I brought it with me from my world?" he thought as he sat with his eyes closed.

As he thought about it, he tried to call up a system or one of the other fantastic things that were standard for a trapped person, but there was no system.

Then he jumped up, stood in the middle of the room, and closed his eyes, trying to remember what had happened to him in the fight with the bandits.

Trying to remember every detail, he concentrated on what was and what he felt, and when he opened his eyes again, he was holding the familiar shield and hammer.

Dressed in his armor, he walked over to the brass mirror in the corner and looked at himself.

It was a heroic visage, all in armor and a huge shield in his hands.

"Young paladin, this is your path now, and only you can decide how you want to walk it. I hope you have a happy life," came a voice in Victor's head.

He tried to speak, but no one else answered or spoke to him.

But something had changed, now the armor felt like something native, something he had used for years.

When he thought it would be a good idea to take it off, all the armor disappeared in an instant. He started putting the armor on and taking it off until it became automatic, now the armor would equip itself as soon as he said it out loud.

After calming down a bit, he sat back in his chair and wondered what this voice was and who paladins were, there are no paladins in this world or no one has heard of them!

"Am I a Paladin now?" Victor said aloud.