Chapter 19

Chapter 19.

Rian’s fingertips touched the back of the corpse’s cold hand. It felt like a chilled pebble, with not a trace of living warmth left in it.

That was when it happened.

Crackle!

Like lightning striking from a clear sky, sharp static burst out from his fingertips. An icy chill flowed backward through his veins and instantly paralyzed his entire arm.

“Ggh......!”

With a groan that slipped out before he realized it, his face twisted fiercely. It was not simple cold. It was a chill that seemed to dig all the way into his bones, the sensation of death that felt as if it would freeze every living thing.

The moment his palm fully met the back of the corpse’s hand, a storm of foreign sensations struck his mind.

This was not simple contact. It was absorption, and it was plunder. It was a violent process of forcibly dragging out everything the dead man had built up over his entire life.

The first thing he felt was the sensation in his palm. Calluses hardened like stone from decades spent drawing bowstrings. Tiny scars formed from the constant brush of arrow fletching. The texture of wood engraved into the grip of his hand from gripping and releasing a bowstave tens of thousands of times.

All of it became Rian’s. The skin of his once-soft palm seemed to peel away in an instant, and over it was layered a leather-like sensation in which decades of time had been compressed.

The pain did not stop there. A fierce agony, as though the muscles of his arms, shoulders, back, and waist were screaming as they were reassembled, swept over his entire body. Muscles specialized for drawing a bow forcibly settled into place, tearing through and pushing apart his existing muscle fibers as they mutated into a new form. A horrifying sensation, as though his joints were dislocated and fitted back together, swept through his whole body.

Even in that pain, he did not take his hand away from the corpse. No, he could not. As though an invisible chain had bound their hands together, the terrible absorption did not stop. Rian could only grit his teeth and endure.

At that moment, tens of thousands of repeated images poured into his mind like a waterfall.

Draw the string, aim, release.

Draw the string again, aim, release.

Until the sun rose and set. Until spring became summer, passed through autumn, and winter arrived. Even when his fingers froze until he lost all feeling, even when sweat poured like rain and covered his eyes, the motion did not stop.

The endlessly repeated memories of monotonous training. They were not simple images. They were experience itself.

The direction of the wind brushing his cheek.

The subtle difference in the humidity soaked into the air.

The angle of sunlight pouring through the leaves.

Everything in the world became information for calculating an arrow’s trajectory and was engraved into his senses. His eyes were no longer ordinary eyes. They had transformed into precise surveying tools that read the wind and measured distance.

That was when it happened. The sensation that had firmly supported Rian’s body, Borik’s spearmanship, which had saved him time and again on the battlefield, began crumbling like a sandcastle.

The sensation of [Intermediate Spearmanship] rapidly faded.

The heavy weight once carried on the spearpoint, the flexible movement of the waist that had deflected enemy attacks, even the feeling of his feet firmly planted on the earth. Everything scattered like a mirage.

A dizzying sense of loss, as though he had lost the center of his body, swept over him. It felt as if the solid bedrock beneath his feet had vanished and he was falling into an abyss with no end in sight.

Into that empty space, a piercing sharpness forcibly pushed its way in.

The dead archer Elias’s [Advanced Archery] was engraved into his body by force.

It felt as though every nerve in his body had been pulled taut like a bowstring. Every muscle was adjusted with sharp precision, as though it existed only to pierce a single point.

And finally, Elias’s final obsession just before his death swept over Rian’s mind like a massive wave.

‘One shot...... Just one more shot......!’

The horrific sight of his comrades falling. The screams and shrieks tearing at his ears. Leaving all of it behind him, the desperate will to pierce the enemy commander’s heart and nothing else. The emotions of that moment, when he had squeezed out every last scrap of life force and drawn the bowstring, were conveyed to him in full.

Rian’s eyes flashed open.

As if it had all been a lie, the storm of sensations stopped. The terrible pain, the fragments of memory that had been raking through his mind, everything vanished in an instant.

Rian slowly removed his hand from the corpse.

His palm looked perfectly normal from the outside. Not a single drop of blood had been shed, and there was not a single wound. But Rian could feel it. This hand was no longer his hand. Like the hand of an artisan aged by decades, every sensation felt different.

***

Rian rose silently to his feet.

His sense of balance was completely different from before. The heavy, stable sensation he had felt when gripping a spear was gone without a trace. Instead, a lightness and agility, as though he were riding the wind, ruled his body.

He raised his hand before his eyes and repeatedly opened and closed it. The feeling of strength entering each joint of his fingers and the way his muscles moved were unfamiliar, yet strangely familiar.

‘So this is...... an archer’s body.’

Rian’s gaze turned to Elias’s bow lying on the ground.

An ordinary longbow made from oak. To him from a few days ago, it would have been nothing more than firewood. But to Rian’s eyes now, that bow looked as familiar and intimate as his own limbs. The grain of the wood, the hand-worn grip, even the tautly strung bowstring. Everything came into view at once.

Without hesitation, he bent down and picked up the bow.

The moment he held it, he felt it fit perfectly. The texture of the wood and its center of gravity felt comfortable, as though it had originally been his. Like a tool tamed through tens of thousands of grips and releases, it settled neatly into his hand.

Rian did not think.

There was no need to think.

His body moved first.

Naturally, he spread his legs shoulder-width apart and slightly turned his upper body. His feet were fixed firmly to the ground, and his waist straightened. It was a perfect stance, without the slightest wavering, as though taken straight from a manual.

He picked up an arrow lying beside Elias’s corpse and set it to the string.

The feel of the string catching on the joints of his fingers, even the subtle sensation of the arrow’s tip touching the bowstave, was vivid. It was as though all the nerves in his body had gathered at his fingertips.

As he inhaled, he smoothly drew the string all the way below his ear.

Without a single creak, the bowstave bent fully. The muscles of his back moved organically, perfectly controlling the bow’s powerful tension. It was tension that the previous Rian would have had to forcefully draw by twisting his entire body, but now, it was as natural as breathing.

The world reflected in his eyes had changed.

Everything became clear. The forest was steeped in thick darkness, yet the outlines and colors of objects were sharply distinct.

His gaze fixed far away on a tree branch about thirty meters away. At its tip hung a leaf as small as a fingernail. What once would have looked like nothing more than a faint dot now showed even the veins of the leaf clearly.

At that moment, he felt the subtle flow of wind brushing his left cheek. Air resistance, humidity, everything was calculated.

‘Half a span to the right.’

As soon as the instinctive calculation ended, his aim was corrected with a subtlety invisible to the eye.

Rian held his breath and softly released the fingers holding the string.

***

Ping!

The arrow left the string and vanished into the darkness with a sharp sound cutting through the night air. Like a streak of black lightning, it flew straight toward the target.

THUNK!

After a fleeting instant, what came from the distance was not the sound of a leaf tearing. It was the dull sound of an arrow burying deep into a tree trunk.

The arrow had lodged precisely in the center of the leaf Rian had aimed at. It was a perfect shot that had even calculated the flow of the wind.

Rian slowly lowered the bow.

No emotion such as surprise or joy appeared on his face. There was only an expressionless look, as though he had confirmed an obvious result. It was an extremely businesslike attitude, like an artisan checking whether his tool was functioning properly.

He looked down at Elias’s corpse for a moment. On the bloodless face, the desperation of his final moment remained faintly.

‘I’ll repay this debt...... by carrying on his will.’

Rian moved without delaying any longer.

He removed the leather quiver filled with usable arrows from Elias’s corpse and slung it over his own shoulder. The arrows, with intact fletching and sharp points, felt heavy.

He nudged aside his old bow lying on the ground with his foot. A piece of junk with a warped bowstave and a string on the verge of snapping. It was an unspoken sign that it was no longer of any use.

A moment later, his gaze touched Borik’s spear, which he had placed on the ground. The heavy spear shaft and sharp spearhead. Until not long ago, it had been the only weapon protecting his life.

A faint trace of regret seemed to pass through him, but the emotion soon faded.

‘This suits me better now.’

Rian lightly adjusted his grip on Elias’s bow. The weight of spearmanship had disappeared, but the sharpness that filled the empty space was far more lethal.

He turned away, leaving the spear where it was.

With the new bow in his hand and the quiver on his shoulder, he silently stepped into the forest’s darkness. There was none of his former instability in his steps. His movements, skimming over the ground, did not make even a sound.

His back no longer belonged to an awkward conscript or spearman.

It was the figure of a solitary master archer setting out on a hunt after choosing his prey.

As Rian’s figure was completely swallowed by the darkness, only an eerie silence remained once more in the small clearing where the corpses lay scattered. Only the cawing of crows could be heard from far away.