Chapter 12

Chapter 12.

The evening camp was sunk in a heavy silence.

Only the sparks crackling from the bonfires seemed alive. The exhausted soldiers, weighed down by battle fatigue and the grief of losing their comrades, silently licked at their own shadows. In the air, the damp smell of earth, the reek of blood, and the faint warmth rising from watery stew mingled into a strange disharmony.

In the middle of that scene, Rian floated like a foreign substance.

When he stood in the serving line with his tray, he felt the flow of the air shift subtly. The whispers stopped, but far more blatant gazes came and lodged in his back.

The old soldier standing in front of Rian, Bram, glanced over his shoulder to check him. The moment their eyes met, Bram recoiled in horror and turned his head away. As soon as he received his food, he fled the spot almost at a run. As if a plague were clinging to his back.

Next was Rian’s turn.

“......”

The cook serving the food would not even meet his eyes. He stirred the ladle all the way to the bottom of the pot and scooped up thin broth with not a single solid piece in it.

Clatter.

Most of the broth, tossed carelessly onto his tray, splashed onto the ground. A piece of bread hardened like stone was set beside it. It was the usual poor treatment he would have suffered on any other day, but today, its meaning was different. Before, it had been contempt toward a dropout. Now, it was an unmistakable rejection toward an incomprehensible being.

Rian turned away with his tray without saying a word.

His steps were slow as he looked for a place to sit. No one offered him a seat. Rather, when he approached, the conversation among the squad members sitting huddled together stopped at once. As if they had agreed beforehand, they shut their mouths and silently kept spooning food into their mouths.

One soldier cleared his throat and subtly shifted aside. The narrow gap where Rian might have sat disappeared. It was a clear refusal.

Over there, Den was sitting in the best spot by the bonfire. With his back turned to Rian, he was talking about something with another soldier. No, he was pretending to talk. His shoulders were unnaturally stiff, and the fingers gripping his tray had gone white. His entire body was rejecting Rian’s existence.

In the end, Rian’s steps headed to the outer edge, the most secluded place where the bonfire’s light did not reach, where darkness and cold lay in wait. He sat on a wooden crate lying there at random and placed the tray on his lap.

‘......’

Once he settled down, the suppressed whispers raised their heads again. Their voices were lowered, but the contents within them were sharp as blades and lodged in Rian’s ears.

“Look over there...... It’s him.”

“He’s definitely possessed by a ghost. You saw him during the day. That wasn't a movement a person could make.”

“The imperial noncommissioned officer...... that cunning bastard got taken down without even reacting.”

“Shh, keep it down! He’ll hear you.”

“Unlucky bastard...... Uncle Borik died right next to him, but that bastard’s perfectly fine. Better not go near him.”

Pretending not to hear them, Rian put the dry, stone-hard bread into his mouth. He tasted nothing. It was nothing more than a mechanical act of stuffing something into his stomach for survival.

He was used to mockery and contempt. Those were preferable, if anything. What surrounded him now was something more fundamental and colder than that. Fear, awe, and a sense of otherness.

In their eyes, he was no longer “Rian, the clumsy fellow recruit.” He was something unknown and ominous.

Isolation.

It dug into his bones with a chill sharper than the flesh-cutting winter winds of the north.

***

After finishing his meal, Rian returned to the barracks.

There were still a few soldiers inside who had not fallen asleep, but the moment he stepped in, they all turned over and pretended to sleep. Only the creaking of the old wooden bunks rang out especially loudly.

Rian lay down on his bunk and closed his eyes.

The hard feel of the wood cutting into his back, the smell of sweat and leather filling the barracks, and the sounds of his comrades tossing and turning here and there. Everything was the same as usual, but Rian’s inner self, which took all of it in, had changed completely.

The feel of gripping the spear shaft in his palm and the sensation of slippery blood came vividly back to him. So did the horrifying impact from the moment he pierced the imperial noncommissioned officer’s body.

But no nightmare came.

Before, he would have been terrified and groaning all night, but now his mind was strangely cold and clear. Like a calm sea after a storm had swept through, every wave of emotion had settled.

On that still surface, one scene rose.

Borik’s final gaze.

It was not fear of death or despair. Even as he watched the blade rushing toward him, his eyes had been on the fallen Den and the terrified greenhorns.

‘I have to protect them......’

It was not a simple fragment of memory. It was the dead man’s strongest final will, which had flowed into him together with his talent. Now it had taken deep root in Rian’s mind like a curse, or perhaps like a mission.

‘This power isn’t free.’

Rian quietly repeated the thought in the darkness.

‘Gareth’s spearmanship, Flynn’s agility, and this spearmanship filled with Uncle Borik’s decades...... All of them were their lives themselves.’

Touching a corpse was not simply the act of stealing talent. It was the act of shouldering everything a person had built over a lifetime, even the full weight of his life and death.

‘The only way to keep their deaths from being in vain is to use this power properly.’

Yes. What they had tried to protect, he now had to protect.

That was the price of this horrific ability, and the only courtesy he could offer the dead.

Rian slowly opened his eyes. In his eyes, now accustomed to the darkness, there was no longer any light of confusion or fear. Instead, an icy resolve had settled there.

Holding his breath in the darkness, he began to observe the sleeping squad members.

The soldier snoring on the bunk over there was Cale. He always had a habit of tying his bootlaces loosely. He had sprained his ankle during the last march because of that, too. If that happened in the middle of a battlefield, the result was obvious.

Beside him, the young recruit calling for his mother in his sleep was Finn. When he was frightened, he raised his shield all the way up to his chin and blocked his own field of vision. He would fail to see even a spear right in front of him and have his heart pierced.

‘All of them...... are full of openings.’

His gaze, steeped in Borik’s experience, was pinpointing the small weaknesses that threatened their survival with ghostlike precision. Their inexperience, which had once simply made him feel pity, now looked like “tactical flaws” that had to be filled.

Rian silently sat up.

‘To protect them, I have to know them first.’

Their habits, weaknesses, fears. All of it.

In the darkness, without making even a sound of breath, he etched each surviving squad member into his eyes.

At the same time, Den was going through a hellish hour.

When he closed his eyes, the scene from the day seared his retinas like a branding iron heated in flame.

The imperial soldier’s blade flashing as it flew toward him. The moment of death he could not avoid. And Rian’s back, which had stepped in front of it.

It was not the back of the Rian he knew. It was entirely different from that pathetic, small back that had rolled across the dirt because he could not even roll properly. At that moment, Rian’s back had felt like a huge rock face that had endured decades of time.

‘That guy who couldn’t even roll...... How the hell did he......?’

It was infuriating and unfair. And above all...... it was frightening.

The fact that he owed him his life did not feel like something to be grateful for. It felt like an indelible humiliation. Born as the son of a blacksmith, Den had trained by swinging a hammer even before being conscripted, and he felt as if all his effort had been denied wholesale before that unidentifiable miracle.

Despair gnawed at his heart.

In the end, Den could not bear it any longer and roughly kicked off his blanket.

Careful not to wake the other soldiers, yet with anger in every step, he left the barracks. The cold night air cooled his hot head, but the fire boiling inside his chest did not go out.

The training ground, faintly lit only by moonlight.

Den picked up a wooden practice spear and stood before a man-shaped scarecrow. He overlaid the scarecrow with Rian’s face, and with the face of the imperial noncommissioned officer who had mocked him.

“Hup......!”

With a short shout, he thrust the wooden spear into the scarecrow’s chest.

THWACK!

The dull sound of a straw bundle bursting rang out.

‘I have to get stronger!’

He swung the spear without stopping. He thrust, slashed, and struck. But his movements were filled with impatience and rage, so his strength did not land properly. Several attacks missed and cut through empty air, and Den lost his balance and staggered.

“Damn it! Damn it all!”

He cursed, breathing roughly.

Blood seeped from his palms. His skin had been scraped raw and tattered by the rough wooden spear shaft, but he paid it no mind. The mental pain of confirming his own powerlessness was far greater than the pain of his body.

His rage-filled cry echoed hollowly through the empty training ground.

***

At Den’s rough shout, Rian, who had fallen into a shallow sleep, opened his eyes.

He instinctively checked beside him. Den’s bunk was empty. Sounds were coming from the training ground. Rian silently climbed down from his bunk and peered outside through a gap in the barracks.

Under the moonlight, he saw Den madly swinging his spear at a scarecrow.

Rian hesitated for a moment. But soon, he slipped quietly out of the barracks like a shadow. He hid in the shadow of a barracks a short distance away from the training ground and watched Den’s desperate struggle.

‘......’

In Rian’s eyes, Den’s movements were analyzed as if they were a slow drawing.

Borik’s decades of experience dissected every one of Den’s flaws.

‘There’s too much strength in his shoulders. In that state, the impact will just travel straight to his elbows and shoulders, and he won’t be able to put power into the spear tip. Linking into the next movement is impossible, too.’

‘His feet are fixed to the ground, and he isn’t using his waist at all. He’s swinging purely with arm strength. At that rate, he’ll be exhausted before he swings ten times.’

‘Rage is leading the spear. Every attack is far too large. That isn’t training. It’s flailing.’

As if a veteran instructor were evaluating an immature recruit, Rian coldly pointed out Den’s flaws.

There was no sympathy or pity in his gaze. There was certainly no sense of superiority. There was only cold, heavy responsibility.

‘In that state, he’ll die first in the next battle.’

Rian’s analysis was not a simple assessment. It was almost a prophecy.

At last, Den, who had exhausted his strength, dropped to his knees. He threw the wooden spear in his hand onto the ground, struck the dirt with his fist, and screamed. A suppressed, beastlike cry burst from his mouth.

Rian did not reveal himself until the end.

He could have approached and offered words of comfort. He could have offered awkward advice, at least.

But he knew. The current him was not a comrade who could give Den comfort or advice. He was merely an object of incomprehensible fear. His goodwill would be misunderstood, and it would only leave a deeper wound on Den’s pride.

Rian quietly turned his back.

Leaving Den’s desperate sobs behind him, he moved his feet back toward his own barracks.