That is right: Rogue. Not Ninja, though I do help out with their antics from time to time, and trade tips and tricks with the Duitiful Sisters of Edelweiss. While I have been gifted a Ninja job stone, about the only thing I use it for is Mudras, if I really have to. My fighting style with dual knives, how can I say, unique and not adaptable to Ninja styles near as much as a more scrappy Rogue. If I had to come up with a Final Fantasy analogue class, Thief would be the closest, but I dislike the term being applied for Reasons. My background with them is also incredibly out there, but suffice to say it did not start like the Limsan way and sure is not a new skill for me to have. To explain this, I do need to discuss the Relanahs, and how I grew up.
The Relanahs have lived in the Twelveswood since the Fourth Umbral Calamity, reaching the areas we lived in near the start of the Fifth Astral Era. Since those days, we have been joined by other small clans, about our same size, that would come and go as the years went on. There is a continued history of us, the Rhel, and the Epocan of the sourthern reaches of the Twelveswood banding together, yet the others fade in and out of record. Note I say that we did not live in Amdapor, or Gelmorra, but the Twelveswood. We had been there for just as long as any other forest inhabitants, and made our own covenants and oaths to the forest in exchange for shelter under its boughs. We were as much poachers in our eyes as the Gridanians were in their's. Unfortunately, our histories do not go back that far very clearly, beyond how we lived through the flood and the rules expected of us. That was our home, too. Though I know not how closely intertwined we ended up being with all of the War of the Magi stuff, I doubt it was very much at all, from the fact that we yet remained. When eventually, Gridania's forebearers returned from Gelmorra and made their own pacts, things got complicated.
On account of us naturally having settled outside of The Hedge, as that was part of our own agreements, those of Gridania believed our existence to be an existential threat to their own. No matter the attempts to parley in the past, they failed, repeatedly, and we stopped going and ceased to asssume good faith in their offers. This ended up in a very bitter and brutal fight for survival against their wood wailers as soon as they had the martial art to do so. Our own style, meanwhile, was developed from different roots. The Relanah traditional hunting style was either with shortbows, or with dual knives to take down larger prey that had difficulty hitting us (such as super large hogs, antelope, large mobile mushrooms) or defend against animals that may as well have been monsters. When faced with archers as well, the main difference was between technique and our frontline fighters. Coupled with a far larger number of fighters who could be trained faster with just as much effieciency, we adapted to match.
Instead of the skulking in shadows and climbing the rigging styles of Limsan rogues, or the social camaflouge favoured by Ninjas, we struck fast and hard from the treelines. Any encounter we were trained for had to have us ready to take out at least three lancers before they could register our presence, from either being on high or knowing the wood better than they did. It is a style that requires extreme precision and a lack of hesitation, as well as knowing exactly how your enemy is trained to fight and react, learned through centuries of conflict. It is, maybe, a little fucked up in hindsight. Still, it served us well for years and years, further honing itself through practise and generations upon generations of improvement. Then, we reach my grandmother's time.
The Autumn War did not exactly escape our notice. The Ala Mhigan army was not discriminatory in who they encountered, and we were not willing to cecede any of our own territory to them as they kept pushing towards us. We technically took Gridania's side, but by necessity alone. It was always done under the cover of shade and darkness, and specifically avoiding areas in which Gridania's army was stationed. If some of them caught sight of some of us, apparently they would also attempt to fight us, which was remarkably unhelpful. We had long had reason to distrust any overtures of cooperation from Gridania's leaders at the time, and never formally approached hem about it. Still, it was rather cruel to lose any of our accomplished clan members to what was technically friendly fire. My grandmother, when she was young, had four sisters. By the time the Autumn War was over, she had two. One fell during a hunt, the other to Wailers. By the time she reached adulthood, her mother, sisters, and aunts had all been killed defending the clan from the Wailers attempting to wipe us out, or the stronger animals that were crawling out of the depth of Gelmorra. At one point, I would have had an aunt and a cousin. I never got to meet either. Grandmother looked at this situation, and how many of us, how much of our lives and history were lost to simply not being prepared to survive, and decided something had to change, and change now. Under her guidance as one of the older members of the camp remining, her and the other adults at the time decided to begin our knife training and self defence training early. Really, really early. My mother, Meya, started when she was six summers old. That generation did not adjust as well, even if my mother has managed to remain resilient and kind: The teachers were not used to working with children that young, and all of them had massive mental scars from everything before and that they experienced. The other adults I grew up around tried, but obviously had a snappishness and twitchyness to them that was best to not agitate. It did not make it right, but I can see why it happened.
As for me and my siblings, and other children in those family groups, we started learning when we were fairly young. We had lectures on why we used knives, our techniques, what we would be learning in the future, and why, but I got my first pair of knives at eight. My older siblings and my younger brother instead got their's at ten, with two years more of prep. They were wooden, and not meant to be overly dangerous but... It was not the healthiest thing for a child to learn. I was quite good at it! I learned fast, grandmother always thought I was ahead of the curve even when I messed up and made her mad. I was learning things that most of the others had to wait until they were fourteen for when I was ten! And I was good at it! Sure, I had difficulty actually attacking a person when confronted with any mannequins about it, but hunting seemed easy enough. I originally wanted to be the best hunter the Relanahs had ever seen, and... I guess I am, in a fashion.
The Relanah fighting style focuses on one thing: Limiting the amount of time your enemy has a chance to kill you by killing them first, if they even can spot you. I was trained from a very young age to locate any potential weakpoints in armour that someone wore (trained extensively on standard issue Wood Wailer gear), and the safest way to close the distance to said weakpoints and eliminate them, by hearing accounts and seeing recreations of how a lancer tended to fight. Other tactics included identifying the ones with canes (Conjurers) because they would prevent you from taking out the Lances and the Bows, target priority (Cane>Archer>Lancer, run from axe if it appeared or sword), and how to move between targets when outnumbered and smaller than they were. I was also trained on which wounds were less likely to be immediately deadly, either on myself (for knowing what hits I could take and live afterward) or on other people (for what would need a follow up even if it incapciated). I am quite good at stealth in forested and plant heavy areas in general, dodging, agile movement, and most of all, precision. In practise, I still use a lot of those old removed cross role skills, and can still cast magic to a limited extent with my knives as a focus, primarily for defensive reasons. It is a skill I have honed, and trained, and will use without hesitation if my life is threatened. I've grown well-informed on pretty much all modern styles of Ilsabard's and Othard's armour, have developed better, know about armour styles of the First, and know how to take apart more combat techniques and dodge them than most people know exist. To put not too fine a point on it, I am trained in a style that tries to get its time-to-kill down to less than two seconds, and I am in a position of knowledge and skill enough to achieve that, consistently. It just is a little, dark to do so for me, and puts my mind in a weird place. I try not to. I have done the Ninja job quests, but still. Always feels too strange to pull them out deliberately.
Just, pro tip. I always have at least two knives on me. Do not attempt to attack your local White Mage. It will not end well for you, promise.