Chapter 23

Chapter 23.

It was dawn, before daybreak had fully arrived, when the whole world was submerged in blue light. Kairon and Rian were walking toward the base without a word. The fishy smell of grass soaked by the night’s dew and the smell of damp soil mingled in the cold air.

Crunch. Crunch.

The only thing breaking the stillness was the sound of the two men’s footsteps. The sound of dry branches being stepped on and pebbles rolling seemed unusually loud.

Kairon, walking ahead, glanced over his shoulder at Rian. Even in the pitch-black darkness, his outline was clear.

Rian was simply following behind him in silence. He showed no sign of exhaustion, nor any hint of tension. No emotion appeared on his seemingly empty face. Only a cold, inorganic air hovered around him, like a well-honed blade.

‘He isn’t a greenhorn conscript.’

In Kairon’s mind, the existence called Rian was being redefined. The image of the boy who had been trembling in terror at death until just yesterday could no longer be found, not even as a trace.

‘This is...... a weapon.’

A very dangerous, unpredictable weapon, and therefore all the more useful. How it had been made, what principle lay behind it—none of that mattered anymore. What mattered was how this weapon would be used.

Kairon no longer looked back at Rian. His steps moved straight toward his own barracks without hesitation.

Before long, the familiar barracks of Squad Three came into view. The drowsy signs of soldiers not yet fully awake could be faintly felt beyond the wooden walls.

Kairon stopped in front of the barracks.

When his shadow stopped, Rian’s shadow, which had been following two steps behind, also came to a silent halt. It was a natural movement, as though they were one body.

Still not turning to look at Rian, Kairon spoke in a voice that had sunk coldly.

“Stand by here.”

His voice was as cold as the dawn air.

“Do not go anywhere until I give you instructions.”

The order was short and firm. Its tone allowed no further explanation or questions.

Rian answered briefly. His voice, too, carried no emotion.

“Understood.”

After confirming that answer, Kairon disappeared in the direction of his own barracks without saying anything more. His back quickly melted into the deepening blue light of dawn.

Left alone in front of the barracks, Rian stared for a moment in the direction Kairon had vanished. His eyes seemed as though they were thinking about something, and yet also as though they were merely taking in the scenery. Soon, he slowly turned his head and shifted his gaze to the old wooden door of the Squad Three barracks he belonged to.

With the creak of hinges, Rian pushed the door open and stepped inside.

***

Creeeak!

The moment the old wooden door opened, the air inside the barracks froze.

The soldiers sitting in a daze, exhausted from standing guard all night; the soldier fiddling with a worn leather strap on the verge of snapping; even the soldiers gathered in the corner, whispering in low voices. The movements and sounds of everyone inside the barracks stopped as if they had been a lie.

Every gaze flew toward Rian standing at the door and pinned itself to him.

What filled their eyes was not simple curiosity or doubt. It was the instinctive wariness and primal fear of an incomprehensible being, like herbivores facing a beast whose identity they could not determine.

The Rian they had known until yesterday was not there. The small, weak conscript who had been frightened by a comrade’s death, who had always gasped for breath during training, the kind who could be found anywhere, was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, an alien existence like a sharpened blade stood there. He was still, but that very silence gave off a strange pressure, as though it were swallowing every sound around him.

Den’s hand, which had been oiling a spear shaft in the corner, stopped. His brow furrowed deeply as if he had bitten into a bug.

‘That bastard...... What the hell is he? His whole atmosphere has changed.’

It was different even from when he had been dragged out by Kairon last night. Back then, he had only looked like a terrified sacrifice. But not now. As if he had seen the very bottom of hell and come back, a cold air that could not be felt from a living human being wrapped around his entire body.

Rian seemed completely unaware of the many gazes pouring onto him. He simply swept his empty eyes once over the inside of the barracks, then moved toward the corner where his bed was.

Step. Step.

His footsteps were strangely light. Yet every time those light footsteps rang against the old wooden floor, the soldiers inside the barracks hunched their shoulders without realizing it.

One squad member standing in Rian’s path flinched in surprise and moved aside. As if something terrible would happen if he so much as brushed against Rian’s sleeve.

Seeing that, Den sprang up from his seat.

Thud!

The sound of the wooden crate he had been sitting on toppling backward rang noisily through the barracks. Every gaze turned toward Den, but he paid them no mind. His eyes were fixed only on Rian.

Den strode over and blocked Rian’s path.

“Where were you all night?”

His voice was heavily suppressed. A voice mixed with anger, suspicion, and the faint fear lying beneath them.

Rian stopped walking and looked at Den.

There was no emotion in his eyes. No anger, no confusion, no wariness. It was an indifferent gaze, as if looking at a stone rolling by the roadside, or as if recognizing the scenery before him.

At that indifferent gaze, something surged up inside Den. It was the humiliation of feeling that he was being completely ignored.

“I saw you with Sergeant Kairon. What the hell are you plotting? What are you trying to do by clinging to the sergeant, you traitorous bastard!”

Rian did not answer. He only looked at Den quietly. That silence gouged Den’s pride more sharply than any threat.

‘This bastard...... is he ignoring me?’

Den felt the disgrace of that silence treating him as something less than human.

“Answer me, you cowardly bastard! Are you trying to pull another dirty trick this time, just like when you abandoned your comrades in the first battle and ran away by yourself?”

As Den’s voice rose, the other squad members slowly backed away and widened the distance between the two of them. None of them wanted to get tangled up in this ominous tension.

Rian’s gaze was still calm. His eyes moved ever so slightly past Den’s shoulder, toward the place where his bed was. From the beginning, he seemed to recognize Den himself as nothing more than an obstacle blocking the path to his destination.

At that moment, Den’s face flushed bright red with rage. His reason had already snapped long ago.

“You bastard, are you ignoring me?!”

Den shouted and reached out to grab Rian by the collar. His rough hand was just about to touch Rian’s worn military uniform.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

Suddenly, a sharp metal bell rang out from outside the barracks, as if it would swallow every sound.

It was the alarm from the watchtower. The prelude of death that announced an enemy surprise attack.

Den’s hand, which had been reaching into the air, froze as it was. The boiling rage vanished from his face in an instant, and bewilderment and cold tension appeared in its place.

Waaaaaah!

Before the bell had even finished ringing, the savage shouts of the imperial army surged in from the distance like a wave. At the same time, the urgent cries of kingdom army soldiers mixed in from all over the base.

“Enemy attack! It’s an imperial army scout unit!”

“Damn it, they’re already at the wall! Everyone, grab your weapons! To the wall!”

The frozen air inside the barracks turned into chaos in an instant.

The squad members spat every curse they knew and scrambled toward their weapons.

Clank! Thud! Clatter!

The sound of spears being grabbed, the sound of worn armor being thrown on, and the sound of urgent footsteps filled the barracks.

Den glared at Rian resentfully for a moment, then bit his lip and spat out a curse. Then he ran to his bed and roughly grabbed the spear leaning against the wall.

‘Damn it, surviving comes first!’

Right now, preserving his life came before his personal feelings toward Rian.

Soon, Den and the other squad members raced out of the barracks one after another. Fear of the battlefield and the desire to survive were tangled together on their faces.

In an instant, Rian alone was left inside the barracks that had been so noisy.

Even at the center of all that confusion, he had not moved once from the moment he entered the barracks until now. Like the eye of a storm, he stood at the center of stillness.

Rian looked once around the empty barracks. Scattered equipment and the traces of those who had rushed out remained in disarray.

Then, as if nothing had happened, he walked toward his bed again.

Next, he picked up the old longbow standing by the head of the bed. The feel of the worm-eaten wood, scratched here and there, settled familiarly into his palm. At that instant, as if it had been part of his own body, Elias’s senses flowed along every nerve in his body.

Rian slung the worn leather quiver over his shoulder.

Instead of reaching into the quiver, he gauged the exact number of arrows left by nothing more than the weight and sway of the quiver on his shoulder. The sensation at his fingertips told him everything.

There was not a single wasted movement in anything he did. Like a seasoned hunter who had prepared for the hunt every morning for decades, his body knew exactly what it had to do.

Then, outside the barracks, Kairon’s thunderous roar burst out.

“Squad Three! What are you dawdling for! The western wall is about to fall! Get over there and support them now!”

Rian listened to that sound and slowly walked toward the barracks door.

The chaotic dawn light seeping through the crack of the door stretched his shadow long behind him.

Outside, the sharp sound of metal striking metal, screams of flesh being torn, and the cries of those facing death mingled together, playing a horrific symphony.

But there was no fear on Rian’s face, no tension, not even the excitement of facing battle.

Only the calm, cold focus of a predator with its prey before its eyes hovered around him.

When he opened the door and stepped outside—

The scene of the base turned into a living hell spread before his eyes. Black smoke rising from burning barracks, wounded men fallen on the ground and groaning, soldiers fighting desperately atop the wall—all of it entered his vision at once.

Whoosh!

It was then. Along with a sharp sound cutting through the air, an arrow brushed past his cheek and buried itself deep in the barracks wall behind him.

Thunk!

For an ordinary person, it would have been a situation where they screamed, or at the very least flinched.

But Rian did not even blink.

As if what had brushed past his cheek had been nothing more than an annoying flying insect, he indifferently turned his gaze toward the direction the arrow had come from.

His gaze headed toward the highest watchtower in the base. Elias’s eyes showed him the scenery hundreds of meters away with such clarity that it seemed close enough to grasp.

At the top of the watchtower, crouched behind a broken railing, an enemy archer was drawing his bowstring again and again toward the allies. That figure was pinned into Rian’s vision like the tip of a needle.

At that moment, a very faint line seemed to draw itself at Rian’s emotionless mouth, then vanished.

New prey had entered his sight.