Chapter 11

Chapter 11.

The forest’s silence dug into their eardrums, sharp as a blade.

The desperate screams and clashes of steel that had been ringing out until moments ago stopped as if they had been a lie. Only the sound of leaves brushing in the wind and the frightened cries of distant birds shook the silence from time to time. The nose-stinging reek of blood, the damp smell of earth, and the chill of death had settled thickly over the place like fog.

In the middle of that silence, Rian stood.

And directly before him, Sergeant Kairon stood his ground.

No emotion surfaced on the old sergeant’s face, etched by decades of battlefields. There was none of his usual cynicism, none of his rebukes toward the soldiers. He simply stared through Rian with eyes that seemed empty, and because of that, even more impossible to fathom.

“......You bastard, what the hell are you?”

A low, hoarse voice. The question was quiet, but the weight inside it pressed down on Rian’s shoulders like a thousand-pound lump of iron.

Every gaze around them turned toward the two men.

The surviving squad members held their breath as they watched this strange confrontation. The fear of battle no longer filled their eyes. Instead, there was awe at the utterly incomprehensible phenomenon that had unfolded before them, and an even greater fear.

Den, in particular, sat blankly on the ground, looking back and forth between Rian’s back and Kairon’s face, his lips trembling. Should he say thank you? No, was that thing even really the Rian he knew? His mind was a complete jumble.

Every muscle in Rian’s body was screaming. It was the price of forcing himself to use Borik’s talent. The exhaustion felt as if his vitality had been wrung out of him by the roots, making his legs tremble, but he could not collapse. At this moment, showing Kairon that he was crumbling right before his eyes would be inviting death.

‘I have to say something. Some...... plausible excuse.’

His heart pounded madly. The moment this ability was discovered, he would be treated as something other than human. A convenient tool, or a dangerous monster. Either way, the ending would be horrific.

‘I have to mix lies into the truth. The easiest lie to believe is one that holds a fragment of truth.’

Rian could not meet Kairon’s relentless gaze head-on. He slowly turned his head and looked down at Borik’s corpse lying at his feet. It was the final sight of the stubborn veteran who had tried to protect the squad members until the last moment.

That was not an act.

The shock and anger Rian had felt the instant he witnessed Borik’s death were real.

Rian slowly opened his mouth. His throat was parched dry, and a cracked voice tinged with a metallic rasp leaked out.

“Uncle...... Borik......”

He could not continue and swallowed a ragged breath. It was an unstable breath, as if anger and grief had mixed together.

“......When I saw him die before my eyes...... at that bastard’s blade......”

Rian’s shoulders trembled faintly. Kairon did not miss that tiny tremor.

“......I think I lost my mind.”

“Lost your mind?”

Kairon asked back. There was not the slightest hint that he believed him.

“Yes. I do not...... I do not remember anything. When I came to...... that bastard was lying at my feet. How I fought...... I am telling the truth. I do not remember anything.”

Rian spoke almost pleadingly. His eyes were filled with fear and confusion. Because half of that performance was sincere, it looked all the more real.

Silence flowed around them again. The squad members held their breath and waited for Kairon’s next words. Would this old, difficult sergeant really believe such an absurd excuse?

Kairon stared fixedly at Rian’s face without a word for a long time. His eyes were still filled with suspicion.

‘You don’t remember? What a joke.’

Kairon snorted inwardly.

‘That movement just now wasn’t something that could be explained by memory. It was the kind of thing that only gets carved into the body after decades of rolling through battlefields.’

Borik. Kairon thought of his fallen old comrade. The spearmanship Rian had just shown looked astonishingly like Borik’s. No, it was not merely similar. It was as if Borik’s soul had entered his body in his place.

It was a chilling thought, but there was no other way to explain the reality before his eyes.

However, there was no evidence, so he had no pretext to question him further. In the end, it was an undeniable fact that Rian’s ‘mad state’ had saved the entire squad.

“Hrm.”

Kairon let out a short, cynical sound. He gave Rian’s shoulder a rough thump with his palm.

“That damned mad state of yours saved all of us.”

As he brushed past Rian, he added in a low voice only Rian could hear.

“For now.”

At those words, a cold chill ran down Rian’s spine.

He had not gotten through the crisis. It had merely been deferred. Kairon’s suspicion had not disappeared; it had only rooted itself deeper.

Kairon did not look back at Rian again. He shouted at the frozen squad members. His voice was rough and vigorous as usual, but the fatigue of battle was steeped deeply inside it.

“Are you just going to stand there like fools and watch?! See to the wounded first! Gather the dead, and tie that imperial bastard up tight! He is still breathing, so if we hand him over to headquarters, he will make a good source of information!”

Only then did the squad members, who had been frozen like ice, begin to move in a flurry.

Amid their bustling movements, only Rian was isolated alone, like an island.

The squad members avoided him as though they had made a promise. Even when they went to support the wounded, they took a wide detour around him, and if their eyes met his, they flinched as if they had seen a ghost and turned their gazes away.

What filled their eyes was not awe. It was unmistakable fear and a sense of otherness. A primal terror toward an incomprehensible being different from themselves.

Den staggered to his feet. He shook off the hand of a comrade who tried to support him. His gaze touched Rian for a moment.

‘I should...... thank him.’

The words that had risen to his throat would not come out. The sight of Rian saving him with overwhelming power just moments ago overlapped with the pathetic image of the fellow recruit who had not even been able to roll properly, tearing through his mind. Before gratitude, an unknown fear came first.

‘I can’t...... face him.’

In the end, Den did not say a single word to him. He approached another wounded soldier and supported his shoulder. It was clear avoidance, an obvious attempt to ignore Rian’s existence.

Bitterness spread through Rian’s mouth like ash.

He had saved everyone, but he could stand with no one. He had become a hero, yet he was more deeply isolated than anyone else.

Rian turned without a word. Together with the other soldiers, he lifted Borik’s body onto a stretcher. The limp weight of his body pressed heavily on Rian’s shoulders. It was not simply the physical weight of one person’s flesh. It felt as though the weight of his decades, his life and death, had been laid upon him as well.

***

The sun was slowly sinking, staining the whole forest red.

The line of the squad returning to camp was sunk in a silence as heavy as a funeral procession. Rather than relief at having survived the battle, grief over losing comrades and the unsettled atmosphere after witnessing an inexplicable incident weighed them down.

No one spoke to Rian.

In the marching column, only the space around him lay empty, as if an invisible wall stood there. The soldiers consciously kept their distance from him, like people who believed misfortune would spread to them if they so much as touched him.

‘Is this...... the price of the power I gained?’

Rian murmured inwardly. More than mockery or contempt, this soundless rejection chilled him to the bone.

But he no longer remained only in despair over his situation.

What ruled his mind was not loneliness. It was Borik’s final will, which had flowed into him through his palm.

‘I have to protect them...... those clumsy greenhorns...... I can’t let them die here......!’

It would not vanish from his mind, like a curse. No, it was not a curse. It was a last testament, and a noble sense of responsibility.

Just as he had shouldered Gareth’s spearmanship, now he had to shoulder Borik’s will. If he did not want to let their deaths be in vain, he had to use this power better. What they had tried to protect, he now had to protect in their stead.

This was the duty of one who bore the lives of the dead, and the only way to repay their deaths.

Rian’s eyes changed.

Instead of looking resentfully at the squad members who avoided him, he began to observe each of them coldly.

The comrades reflected in his eyes looked completely different from before.

A soldier whose tension had gone slack even during the march, leaving his flank wide open because he was not holding his shield properly.

A recruit so terrified that he kept looking back, failing to watch the most dangerous direction: the front.

They were full of openings.

Borik would surely have clicked his tongue while thinking exactly that.

‘To protect them, I have to grasp their weaknesses first.’

Before he knew it, Rian was looking at his comrades through ‘Borik’s eyes.’ That gaze, steeped in decades of experience, found the greenhorns’ clumsy movements and gaps with ghostlike accuracy.

His gaze reached Den, who was walking alone up ahead, staggering. The shock from earlier had left the strength drained from his legs.

‘He is...... reckless. He can’t tell courage apart from foolhardiness. If he can’t control his anger, he’s the type who will die first.’

Bitterness swirled together with a strange sense of responsibility that, even so, recognized him as someone he had to protect.

This was his new role.

***

The camp was deep in the evening dusk.

Bonfires rising here and there flickered over the faces of the exhausted soldiers. The shout of a sentry who had spotted the returning reconnaissance squad broke the silence of the camp.

“Reconnaissance squad returning!”

The camp, which had briefly grown lively at the news of the scouts’ return, turned strange in an instant once they saw their state.

The bodies of the fallen carried on stretchers. The wounded, wrapped in bandages all over, supported by others. And...... behind them, an imperial noncommissioned officer being dragged along, tightly bound with rope.

Surprise and doubt spread at the same time across the faces of the soldiers who had come out to watch.

Murmurs spread like a wave.

“Good heavens, they captured an imperial officer?”

“But look at the state of them. Seems like they were on the brink of annihilation...... How?”

“Shh, did you hear? They say the one who captured him was...... Rian...... Rian, the sole survivor.”

“That makes no sense! That bastard who couldn’t even roll? Something must be wrong.”

“No, the squad members all saw it. Alone, in just two exchanges, he subdued him. But they say he looked...... exactly like he was possessed by a ghost......”

The rumors spread in an instant, as if they had sprouted wings. But their contents were not heroic tales. They were closer to eerie, chilling ghost stories that common sense could not explain.

Kairon dragged the prisoner to the command tent and gave a short report to the company commander waiting there. Just before entering the tent, he looked back at Rian, who stood among the crowd like an island. His eyes no longer held simple suspicion. They were cold and sharp, as if he were calculating something.

As soon as Den set down the soldier he had been supporting in the medical tent, he disappeared into his own barracks. To the end, he did not meet Rian’s eyes.

The bodies of the fallen were laid neatly in an open area to one side, and the wounded were taken away by the medics. Everyone moved busily.

In the middle of that commotion, only Rian stood alone.

Countless gazes came and lodged in him. Curiosity, disbelief, wariness, and fear. Those gazes became invisible thorns, pricking his entire body.

But Rian no longer avoided those gazes.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

He had been alone from the beginning anyway. Nothing had changed.

He silently turned. Then he headed toward the place where the fallen had been temporarily laid.

He stood beside Borik’s body. He looked down at his face, now cold.

More than grief, the heavy responsibility he had to shoulder as the survivor pressed down on him. Borik’s death was not the end. Now, inside Rian’s body, his will would meet a new beginning.

‘From now on...... this is where it truly begins.’

Behind Rian as he stood alone, the murmurs of soldiers who regarded him as a monster rather than a human being came surging in like the waves of night.