Chapter 6

Chapter 6.

The musty smell of sweat, the bitter scent of medicinal herbs, and a faintly lingering reek of blood stabbed his nose. The dizzying mixture of foul odors pressed down on his lungs like heavy air.

Rian’s consciousness struggled to surface, as if crawling out of a sticky swamp.

His whole body ached as if he had been beaten black and blue. Every strand of muscle seemed to be screaming, and his joints creaked on their own. When he struggled to lift his eyelids, which felt as heavy as lead, what entered his vision was the ceiling of an old, stained tent. The dim lamplight turned the stains into grotesque shadows.

‘This is…… the infirmary tent.’

The moment his thoughts reached that point, fragments of his last memories surged over him like waves. The pitch-black forest, the flashing blade, and…… the horrifying sensation that had been transmitted through his own hand.

Rian tried to sit up without realizing it. But a sharp pain spreading from his abdomen made him let out a short groan.

“Ghk……!”

It felt as if he had not a single handful of strength left in his body. This was not simple fatigue. It was a fundamental emptiness, as if his life force had been pulled out by the roots.

Creak!

That was when it happened. From an old makeshift chair placed in the darkness at the corner of the tent came the sound of someone rising. The movement was too quiet and cautious to be called noise.

Rian reflexively turned his head toward the sound. His stiff neck screamed.

A figure slowly walked out of the shadows. Thick forearms, sturdy shoulders, and an emotionless expression that only someone who had gone through every hardship imaginable could possess.

It was Sergeant Kairon.

Rian’s heart thudded and sank to the cold floor. A chilling cold crept up his spine.

‘Since when…… has he been here?’

Kairon stood with his arms crossed, looking down at Rian with emotionless eyes. His gaze was indifferent yet persistent, like a butcher grading meat.

“Are you awake?”

A voice without any intonation, like dry bark being scraped, split the silence.

Instead of answering, Rian wet his parched lips with his tongue. His mouth felt rough, as if it were full of sand.

Kairon stopped beside the cot where Rian lay. His shadow swallowed Rian’s entire upper body.

“You were lying there for a full day. The army surgeon says it’s just exhaustion.”

‘There’s no way it’s just exhaustion.’

Rian thought. Kairon’s eyes were saying exactly that. His gaze was not that of a superior simply asking after a subordinate’s condition. It was the gaze of an interrogator clinging tenaciously to an unsolved problem.

“Explain.”

The order was quiet, but within it hid a sharpness like a cold blade.

“……Explain what, sir?”

Rian made his voice as slow and weak as he could. Right now, it was the best defense he could manage.

Kairon’s eyebrow twitched faintly.

“Don’t play dumb, brat. I’m talking about how you crawled out of that hell alive. Explain the whole process. Don’t leave out a single thing.”

His voice was still low, but the pressure within it tightened around Rian’s throat like a chain.

Avoiding Kairon’s persistent gaze, Rian lowered his head slightly. The rough texture of the old, worn blanket was the only thing that felt real.

‘I can’t tell him the truth. Absolutely not.’

If he said he had touched a corpse and that person’s talent had entered him, he would either be treated like a madman, or be accused of being an imperial spy and have his head cut off on the spot. Or something even more terrible might happen. If someone recognized the value of this power, he would be reduced to nothing more than a convenient tool.

Either way, the ending would be miserable.

“……I was inside a pile of corpses.”

The voice that came out of his mouth was cracked and trembling. It was not all an act. The terror of that moment was still vivid.

“A pile of corpses?”

Kairon asked back.

“Yes. The imperial soldiers…… killed all my comrades. I was…… too scared, so I hid and pretended to be dead.”

Rian continued as if he might choke on his breath.

“Until I could barely breathe…… inside the smell of blood and intestines…… I stayed like that.”

Kairon stared at Rian without saying a word. That silence pressed down on Rian more heavily than tens of thousands of words of reproach. A streak of cold sweat ran down his spine. This old sergeant was not such a simple man that he would be easily fooled.

“When I came to…… everything around me was quiet. So…… I just ran.”

“You just ran.”

Kairon parroted Rian’s words. His disbelief was obvious.

“Yes. Without thinking, in the direction where I thought the camp would be…… I wanted to live, so I just…… kept running.”

Rian’s voice sounded as if it were trembling violently in fear. That much was sincere. The desire to live, at least, was not a lie.

In that instant, Kairon bent at the waist and thrust his face close to Rian’s.

At the sudden smell of strong alcohol and sweat, Rian flinched without realizing it and shivered.

“You didn’t run into an imperial patrol?”

Kairon’s eyes dug into Rian’s pupils like a hawk’s.

‘I did. And…… I killed him.’

His heart pounded fiercely again, painfully so. Sweat soaked his palms.

“I was…… lucky.”

“Lucky.”

Kairon snorted. His mockery was obvious.

“Right. You must have been very lucky. In a forest swept through by that madman Wolfgang’s unit, no less.”

He slowly straightened and paced anxiously inside the tent. The sound of his old military boots stepping on the dirt floor overlapped with the sound of Rian’s heart.

“The forest I know wasn’t such a safe place that a green conscript like you could take a stroll alone through it all night.”

Kairon continued.

“And yet, aside from scratches, your body doesn’t have any serious external wounds. If you ran into an imperial patrol, did they politely step aside and let you pass?”

His gaze paused for a moment on Rian’s hands and arms. There were no visible signs of battle, only the appearance of a boy who had collapsed from exhaustion.

“What miraculous luck. Don’t you think?”

His sarcastic tone flew in and stabbed like a blade.

Rian kept his mouth shut and said nothing. Saying more would only deepen the suspicion. Rather than adding a clumsy lie, remaining silent in fear was the better choice.

After a long silence, Kairon let out a deep sigh. He walked toward the entrance of the tent. Rian could not tell whether he had given up the interrogation, or whether he was thinking of something else.

He stopped for a moment and spoke without turning back.

“Get some rest.”

His voice had become somewhat softer, but the chill within it remained.

“No one knows whether that damned luck of yours will follow you again in the next battle.”

Flutter.

Kairon lifted the tent flap and went outside. His final words lingered in Rian’s ears like an ominous prophecy.

***

A heavy silence flowed through the tent again.

Even after Kairon disappeared, Rian stared at the spot for a long while. Once the tension that had been squeezing his whole body loosened, he exhaled all the breath he had been holding at once.

“Hoooo…….”

With every breath he let out, he felt an extreme fatigue pressing down on his entire body. Every joint seemed to scream. But clearer than the pain of his flesh was a different sensation.

He slowly raised his right hand and spread it open before his eyes.

It was the unsightly hand of a boy, scratched here and there, with calluses in places. Due to malnutrition, the bones of his joints stood out.

But this was not that hand.

The hard, cool feel of the spear shaft was still vivid inside his palm. The heavy impact from receiving the enemy’s sword strike, and in the final moment, the sensation of that horrible yet perfect instant when he pierced the enemy’s heart.

‘This…… wasn’t mine.’

Rian slowly closed his eyes.

Behind his eyelids, the dying face of the imperial soldier did not appear. Instead, another afterimage flickered.

The back of a man tempered by harsh training that must have lasted decades. A man who rose every day before dawn, gripped his spear, and repeated thrusting, blocking, and swinging until the sun went down. His sweat and his obsession.

His name was Gareth.

When the ability had been absorbed, faint fragments of memory had flowed in like mist. A name, and pride in the thing he had devoted his whole life to.

‘Gareth…… the spearmanship that held that man’s entire life.’

Guilt rose to his throat like cold river water. This was an issue on a completely different level from rummaging through corpses simply to survive. This time, he had clearly used that strength to take another person’s life.

‘Did I…… steal his life?’

Relief that he had survived through that strength and guilt that he had committed murder using that strength collided violently inside his head.

Rian shook his head. He forcibly pieced together the scattered fragments of his chaotic thoughts.

‘No. I didn’t steal it. I inherited it.’

If he did not think that way, he felt as if he would go insane.

Without that strength, he would already be one of the corpses rolling on the cold soil of the forest. The death of a nameless soldier called Gareth and Rian’s survival had been exchanged.

This was not a curse or a nightmare. It was something far heavier, an inescapable “debt.”

‘I can’t let his life…… his spear…… rot away like this.’

It was an emotion on a different level from simple survival instinct. Above the desperation to survive, a new feeling was beginning to sprout.

‘I won’t let his death be in vain.’

That strange sense of responsibility began pressing down on his black fear.

Fragments of emotion flowing in during the final moments of the dead. That was not a curse. Rather, it was closer to a shackle that forced him to shoulder their lives.

Using this power properly.

Making this spearmanship completely his own and proving its value on the battlefield.

That was the only way to repay Gareth, the nameless soldier.

And it was also the only way to survive on this hellish battlefield.

Rian’s gaze changed.

They were no longer the eyes of a boy constantly shaken by fear and anxiety. Deep within them, the ember of fear still had not gone out, but a cold, quiet resolve covered it. Like a winter river covered with thin ice.

‘I have to become stronger.’

That thought was no longer a vague hope or wish. It was an absolute task he had to accomplish, and an order he had given himself.

Slowly, and with strength, Rian clenched his right fist.

Enough strength entered it that his knuckles stood out white. It was a fist filled with firm resolve, no longer trembling uselessly because of fear.

As Rian looked down at that fist, the image of the weak boy he had once been was faintly disappearing from his face. In its place stood a soldier who had resolved to embrace a will like steel, to survive in the middle of hell and to shoulder the weight of the lives he had taken.