Chapter 5

Chapter 5.

A suffocating stillness devoured the darkness.

Rian lay fallen, holding the spear raised at an angle, while the imperial soldier stood frozen with his sword in hand. Their gazes collided in midair like sparks. Only the lingering echo of the metallic clash from moments ago proved that this unreal standoff was reality.

‘……What was that movement just now?’

What rose in the soldier’s mind was pure doubt. His shock slowly twisted into boiling rage. The greenhorn before him had clearly sensed death and worn the face of someone who had given up everything. So how had he blocked his sword strike? While lying on the ground, no less, and at such a perfect angle.

Luck. Yes, it was only luck. A rat bastard driven into a corner had struggled desperately and somehow managed it by chance.

“You bastard……!”

The muscles of the soldier’s face twisted hideously. Blue veins bulged at his temples.

“Don’t get full of yourself just because you got lucky!”

He adjusted his grip on his sword. Much more firmly than before. Killing intent, as if he would tear the insect before him to pieces at once, stood bloodshot in his eyes.

‘I can’t move.’

Rian screamed inwardly. His heart was still raging as if it would tear through his chest and burst out, and his mind had burned white with fear. The defense from a moment ago had not been his will. His body had done it on its own.

‘My body…… doesn’t feel like mine.’

As proof, his right arm holding the spear was still steady. A heavy, solid sensation. The talent of the nameless spearman “Gareth,” which had been forcibly engraved into him moments earlier, was controlling his arm. It was unfamiliar and alien, but strangely, there was an unwavering stability within it. As if he had maintained this stance for decades.

But that stability did nothing to calm Rian’s fear.

“This time, I’ll pierce your heart for sure!”

The imperial soldier charged again with a beastlike roar. This time, there was no probing. From the start, he came with a momentum far faster and fiercer than before, intending to kill his opponent outright.

The flashing blade flew diagonally and precisely toward Rian’s neck.

‘I have to dodge! I have to block!’

Reason screamed madly inside his head. But his body did not retreat or shrink back.

Instead, it moved forward.

No, to be precise, the spear shaft surged upward. Like a living creature.

CLANG!

Once again, a metallic sound tore through the eardrums.

The tip of the spear struck the soldier’s sword hard from below and knocked it upward. His entire arm rang again, but this time, it held firm as if prepared for the impact.

“Ghk!”

The soldier’s body staggered for an instant at the unexpected resistance. He let out a short groan and widened his eyes.

‘He blocked it again? This greenhorn?’

It was unbelievable. The first time could be dismissed as luck, but not the second. There was clearly something in that bastard’s movements.

Rian used the recoil to clumsily rise to his feet. He himself did not know how he had gotten up. His legs, trembling from hunger and exhaustion, looked as if they would collapse again at any moment, but his body, leaning on the spear, maintained a strange balance.

From defending while fallen, he had barely entered a standoff on his two feet.

The soldier did not stop. Using rage as fuel, he swung his sword even more violently. This time, it was a sharp horizontal slash aimed at Rian’s waist.

Rian’s body turned half a rotation by itself. He received the sword strike with the long, solid shaft of the spear in his hand.

Thud!

Not the sound of metal, but the dull sound of wood and iron colliding shattered the forest’s silence. It was not a proper defensive technique. It was closer to instinctively blocking the attack with the hardest part of his body and the most efficient means available.

Rian’s expression was still twisted with fear and confusion. He did not understand at all what he was doing right now.

‘Something’s strange about this bastard’s movements.’

To the soldier’s eyes, Rian looked bizarre. His stance was a mess, and his feet kept tangling. His frightened eyes were no different from those of a terrified rabbit.

But there was one thing. No matter the situation, the tip of the spear he held was always pointed at the soldier’s vital points.

‘It’s like…… his body and mind are moving separately.’

Clumsy, yet threatening. That contradictory situation scraped sharply against the soldier’s nerves.

“Are you just going to keep dodging, you cowardly bastard?!”

Throwing out mockery, the soldier pressed Rian even harder. His sword flew in from several angles without pause.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Rian retreated helplessly and blocked desperately. His will had already been broken long ago. It was only the talent dwelling in his arm struggling for survival.

Metallic sounds rang wildly through the forest.

Sweat soaked the palm gripping the spear. The slippery sensation made it feel as if he would lose his hold on the weapon at any moment.

‘How long can I hold out? My stamina…….’

His body, which had lost the [Agility] he had gained from Flynn, tired quickly. The body that had once been light as a feather was now heavy and dull like soaked cotton. The engraved spearmanship moved his muscles efficiently, but it did not refill his depleted stamina itself.

In the end, his feet tangled.

Rian lost his balance and staggered badly.

‘Got you!’

At that instant, the soldier’s eyes flashed. His beastlike senses did not miss that brief opening.

A triumphant smile spread across his lips.

“It’s over!”

The soldier brought his sword down hard toward Rian’s shoulder. It was a perfect attack, one he could neither dodge nor block.

‘It’s over!’

Rian squeezed his eyes shut. He thought everything was finished.

But his body did not give up. At the moment he staggered and began to collapse, the spear tip planted firmly into the ground. Like a third leg. Using that recoil as a lever, Rian’s body slid backward and narrowly avoided the attack.

Swish!

The blade carrying death passed right in front of Rian’s nose. An eerie wind tickled the bridge of his nose.

“You damn bastard!”

The soldier shouted in fury. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead.

‘He dodged that too? What the hell is this bastard?!’

His initial composure was nowhere to be seen. Now, only impatience and anxiety filled his mind. The fact that he could not catch a single insignificant rat bastard deeply wounded his pride.

Impatience was a poison that clouded judgment.

“Die! Just die already!”

In the end, the soldier lost his reason. He abandoned all defense and chose the largest, most primitive attack, meant only to cut his opponent down.

He put all his strength into raising his sword high above his head.

At that moment, everything began to look slow in Rian’s eyes.

The sword raised high.

The soldier’s chest and abdomen, left wide open and defenseless because of it.

‘……An opening.’

That was not Rian’s thought. It was the whisper of the instinct of a soldier who had lived his whole life with a spear, engraved into his body.

At the very instant the soldier began to bring his sword down.

Rian’s body moved.

It was no longer the unstable posture of someone retreating. His trembling feet fixed firmly in place, as if rooted to the earth.

His waist twisted slightly, and his entire body weight loaded into his shoulder.

The most basic and most lethal posture of spearmanship.

With no relation whatsoever to Rian’s will, the arm gripping the spear shot forward, perfectly horizontal to the ground.

It was a perfect straight-line movement that existed solely to pierce the opponent, without a single wasted motion.

SQUELCH! 

The horrible sensation of piercing something soft yet tough traveled vividly through the spear into his palm, up his forearm, and all the way to his brain.

The soldier’s eyes widened in disbelief.

His gaze slowly moved toward his own chest.

There, he saw the cold, blood-soaked spear tip that had precisely slipped into the gap between his leather armor and chainmail.

“Kur…… hgh…….”

A blood-mixed groan burst from his mouth.

The sword slipped powerlessly from the soldier’s hand.

Thud.

Thump.

He staggered, hanging from Rian’s spear, then slowly sank to his knees.

Rian stared blankly at the sight. Even as he saw with his own eyes what his arm had done, he could not believe it.

As the soldier’s body toppled sideways, the spear lodged in him pulled free on its own.

Splat.

An eerie silence returned to the forest. All that remained was Rian’s own ragged breathing and the sound of his heart pounding madly.

Very slowly, Rian lowered his gaze to his hands.

Hands smeared with blood and dirt.

Then he looked at the spear held in those hands. Red blood dripped, drip, drip, from the sharp spear tip, forming a small puddle on the wet soil.

His gaze turned toward the soldier’s corpse fallen before him. A cold lump of flesh that no longer moved.

Only then did the fact that he had killed a person strike his mind like a massive hammer.

“Uurk……!”

His stomach churned, and gastric acid rose in his throat. An unbearable wave of nausea surged up.

Rian staggered and leaned against the tree beside him. The spear slipped from his hand.

The sound of the spear falling to the dirt with a thud sounded especially loud.

Once he let go of the spear, the heavy, solid sensation that had been controlling his arm seemed to fade like fog. But the afterimage of that sensation remained in his nerves and whispered.

‘This was my spearmanship.’

‘This was everything I accomplished by devoting my entire life.’

Rian suddenly realized something. This had not been a simple imitation of a technique. Gareth, the spearman whose name and face he did not know. He had borrowed that man’s very life itself.

With the strength contained in that man’s lifetime, he had survived.

‘I…… I killed him…….’

Fear and guilt surged over him like waves. But amid that vortex of black, cold emotions, something strange began to sprout.

It was a sense of responsibility.

‘With his strength…… I survived.’

‘I can’t let his death…… his life…… be in vain.’

This was different from before, when he had searched corpses simply to survive. This time, he had clearly used another person’s talent to take another person’s life. That weight pressed down on his shoulders with a realistic heaviness.

If he could not use this power properly, it would be an insult to Gareth’s life. If there was a path for him, it was only to use this power better, survive, and grow stronger.

As if making a decision, Rian bit his lip hard enough to draw blood.

Fear still squeezed his heart, but something calm and cold settled over it in a thin yet firm layer.

As the tension released, extreme fatigue and exhaustion swept over his entire body all at once. His vision spun, and his legs trembled.

Rian forced himself to look away from the corpse of the imperial soldier on the ground. He picked up the spear once more. He no longer felt the alien sensation, but its weight felt much heavier than it had a moment ago.

Using it as a staff, he began staggering in the direction where he guessed the allied camp would be.

He did not know the exact direction or the remaining distance. Only the instinct to survive and the strange sense of responsibility that had just begun to sprout guided his heavy steps.

***

The dim dawn was beginning to break.

The temporary camp of the Kaien Kingdom Army’s Seventh Conscript Company was itself a den of defeated soldiers. Around campfires burning feebly here and there, the survivors crouched like ghosts.

Sergeant Kairon was staring intently toward the forest with an anxious face. There were several soldiers who had not returned during the night. Beside him, Den sat in silence. Even his firm face was deeply stained with complicated feelings and fatigue.

“……In the end, he’s not coming back, is he? That guy.”

Den opened his dry lips. There was no need to say who “that guy” referred to.

Kairon only swallowed dryly without answering. Resignation seeped beneath his hardened expression.

‘Tch. In the end, another one goes like this.’

He had thought the boy would not last long anyway. A scrawny orphan who could not even properly roll around in training camp. The type who would be the first to die once he came to the battlefield. If anything, the fact that he had survived until now was a miracle.

Rustle.

That was when the dark bushes at the edge of the camp shook low.

“Who’s there?!”

Kairon and Den reflexively grabbed their weapons and stood on guard. Tension spread instantly, in case it was an imperial soldier who had pursued them.

Pushing through the bushes, a single figure staggered into view.

In the dim light where moonlight and dawn light mingled, that figure was covered entirely in blood and dirt. His tattered military uniform was so filthy that its original color could not be recognized.

Den narrowed his eyes. A familiar silhouette. But that should have been impossible.

“……Rian?”

The name flowed from his mouth in disbelief.

Kairon’s eyes widened in shock.

It was Rian, the weakest conscript in the unit, whom no one, not for a single moment, had thought would return alive.

He was barely standing, using a spear like a staff.

Rian spotted the two men in the camp. The edge of his bloodless lips seemed to rise in relief, faintly, ever so faintly.

That was the last of his strength.

Rian’s eyes rolled back toward the air, and his body collapsed forward powerlessly.

Thud.

His unconscious body fell helplessly onto the dirt.

Kairon ran to him before anyone else and checked his condition. He was a complete mess, but fortunately, he was still breathing.

With disbelief in his eyes, Kairon looked back and forth between the fallen Rian and the pitch-black forest he had just walked out from. That space of death, swarming with imperial soldiers, where even isolated allies could not trust one another.

One question rang through his mind like a giant bell.

‘From that hell…… how on earth……?’

Kairon’s gaze, mixed with suspicion and shock, stayed fixed on the face of the boy who had returned from the darkness.