[KILL COUNT: 1]
They left the camp before the sky shifted again.
Maren moved fast. Faster than Kyon expected from someone who'd been tied up in the back of a wagon for however long she'd been there. She stripped the dead man of anything useful without flinching. Took his coin pouch, his belt knife, a waterskin that was half full, and a folded piece of leather that turned out to be a crude map. She looked at the axe for a second, then left it. Too heavy for her frame.
Kyon watched her work.
"You done staring?" she said without looking up.
"I'm not staring."
"You've been standing in the same spot for five minutes watching me loot a corpse. That's staring."
"I'm processing."
"Process while you walk. Those two aren't going to stay gone forever."
She stood up, slung a pack over her shoulder that she'd filled from the wagon, and started south along the road without waiting for him. Kyon looked at the dead man one more time. The blood had stopped spreading. It had soaked into the dirt and turned the ground around him dark, almost black, and flies were already finding him. Small ones. Quick. Like they'd been waiting.
Kyon followed Maren.
They walked in silence for the first hour. The road, if you could call it that, wound through the same dead forest Kyon had woken up in. Black trees. Gray light. No birdsong. No insects buzzing. Just their footsteps and the creak of Maren's pack and the distant sound of wind pushing through empty branches.
The clock sat in the corner of Kyon's vision.
70:14:33.
Seventy hours before the system needed another body. He tried not to think about it. Tried to focus on walking. On the feel of the ground under his boots. On the way the air tasted different here, thinner, like it had less of everything in it. Less oxygen. Less moisture. Less life.
"Where are you actually from?" Maren said.
"I told you. Somewhere else."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
She glanced at him over her shoulder. Sizing him up. She'd been doing that since the camp, these quick evaluations that lasted half a second and told her everything she needed to know. Kyon got the sense that Maren had been reading people for a long time and was very good at it.
"You talk strange," she said.
"Strange how?"
"Your accent. It's flat. No region to it. Like someone who learned the language from a book instead of from people."
"Maybe I did."
"And your fighting. You said that was your first time."
"It was."
"Nobody fights like that their first time."
Kyon didn't have an answer for that one. Because she was right. He'd moved like someone with years of training. The footwork, the angles, the way he'd redirected the axe swing, none of that was him. That was whoever had lived in this body before. Ghost reflexes. Muscle memory from a dead man.
"I got lucky," he said.
"You got lucky." She said it flat. No inflection. The verbal equivalent of an eye roll. "You put a sword through Drek's side from a dead sprint, blocked his counter, and finished him in the gut. Drek had been killing since before you were born. That's not luck."
"Drek?"
"The man you killed. His name was Drek."
Something cold moved through Kyon's stomach. He hadn't thought to ask. Hadn't even considered that the man on the ground had a name. He'd been "the scarred man" in Kyon's head. A category. A label. Easier to process that way.
"Did you know him?" Kyon asked.
"He robbed me three days ago. Killed my horse. Tied me up and put me in the wagon to sell in Fellen." She paused. "So yes. I knew him. Not well."
"I'm sorry."
She stopped walking. Turned around fully this time. Looked at him with an expression he couldn't read.
"You're sorry," she repeated.
"For what you went through. Yeah."
"You just killed a man and you're apologizing to me for being inconvenienced."
"Being kidnapped and sold isn't an inconvenience."
"In the Graymark? It is. It happens every day. What doesn't happen every day is someone walking out of nowhere with a sword and dropping a bandit captain in ten seconds." She studied him again. That half second evaluation. "You're strange, Kyon."
"I've been hearing that a lot today."
She turned back around and kept walking.
The road widened after another hour. The trees thinned out, replaced by rocky scrubland dotted with gray bushes that looked half dead and might have been. The sky was still that same sick purple but brighter now, enough to see distance, and the distance was ugly. Flat. Barren. A landscape that looked like it had been beautiful once and then something had drained it.
"The Graymark Expanse," Maren said, like she'd read his thoughts. "Prettiest place on the continent. If you're blind."
"What happened to it?"
"What always happens. People happened. Vital Force isn't free. You have to take it from something alive to use it. Everything alive in a hundred miles of the Expanse got used up generations ago. Beasts. Plants. Even the soil. This whole region is a corpse. People just keep living on it because they don't have anywhere else to go."
"Vital Force," Kyon said. "That's energy? Power?"
She looked at him sideways. "You really aren't from around here."
"Humor me."
Maren shifted her pack and kept her eyes on the road. "Vital Force is life energy. Everything alive has it. People. Animals. Trees. Even insects, though barely. When something dies, its Vital Force releases. Most of it just dissipates. Goes back into the world. But if you're close enough and you know how, you can absorb some of it. Channel it through your body. Makes you stronger. Faster. Tougher. More alive."
Kyon's jaw tightened.
That was exactly what the system had done. When he killed Drek, the system had siphoned the man's Vital Force and pumped it into Kyon's body like a transfusion. The warmth. The rush. The sharpening of his senses. All of it. The system wasn't inventing some alien power source. It was just automating what this world already did.
"How do people normally absorb it?" he asked.
"Training. Discipline. Years of practice. Some people are born with a stronger pull than others. Hunters spend their whole lives killing beasts and absorbing trace amounts. Takes decades to build real strength. The noble houses in the Sovereignty hoard Vital Force through bloodlines. They've been killing and absorbing for so many generations that their children are born with reserves most common folk will never reach."
"And in the Graymark?"
"In the Graymark, people kill each other and take what they can get."
She said it simply. Like reporting the weather.
Kyon processed that. In this world, killing wasn't just violence. It was economy. Infrastructure. Biology. The entire civilization was built on a foundation of death, and everyone participated whether they admitted it or not. The butcher who killed animals for meat was harvesting Vital Force. The soldier who killed enemies on a battlefield was investing in his own body. The noble who sent armies to war was farming power on an industrial scale.
The system hadn't dropped him into a peaceful world and forced him to corrupt it. It had dropped him into a world that was already running the same program. It just gave him a more efficient version.
That should have made him feel better.
It didn't.
"You said Fellen is three days south," Kyon said.
"At the pace those idiots were moving. You and me? Two days. Maybe less."
"What's in Fellen?"
"A town. Walls. Markets. Work if you know where to look." She glanced at his sword. "You know how to use that thing. Mercenary companies pay decent in Fellen. Caravans need guards. Bounty boards always have work."
"Bounty boards."
"Kill lists, basically. Bandits, beasts, deserters. Someone puts up a name and a price and you go bring back a head or a hand or whatever they want as proof." She said it the way someone from his old world might say "job listings on Indeed." Just another Monday.
Kyon was quiet for a while.
A bounty board. A list of people and things the world had already decided needed to die. Targets with prices on their heads. Kills that would be sanctioned, paid for, and socially acceptable.
Kills that would keep the clock from hitting zero.
He hated how neatly that fit.
They made camp as the sky darkened from purple to black. No stars. Just a flat void above them like the roof of a cave that went on forever. Maren built a fire with dry brush and a flint kit she'd taken from the bandits, and the flames were the only light in any direction.
Kyon sat across from her and tried to eat. She'd found dried meat and hard bread in the wagon, and she split it evenly without being asked. The meat was tough and salty and tasted like nothing he recognized. The bread was worse. He ate it anyway because his body was screaming for fuel and he'd learned in the last twelve hours that ignoring his body was not an option.
"You're quiet," Maren said.
"I killed someone today."
"You did."
"Is that not something people are quiet about here?"
She chewed her bread slowly. Thought about it. "Depends on the person. Depends on the kill. You killed a man who kidnapped me, killed my horse, and was planning to sell me as property. In the Graymark, that makes you practical. Not something to lose sleep over."
"And outside the Graymark?"
"Outside the Graymark, the nobles would call it barbaric and then go home to their estates built on the bones of a thousand wars. The Theocracy would call it a sin and then send their sin eaters to do the same thing behind closed doors. Everyone kills, Kyon. The only thing that changes is how honest people are about it."
He stared at the fire. "That's a bleak way to see the world."
"It's an accurate way to see the world. Bleak and accurate aren't the same thing, but they live close to each other."
She had a point. He didn't want her to have a point, but she did.
"What do you do?" he asked. "For work. Before the bandits."
"Sell sword. Independent contracts. Mostly caravan protection between the Graymark and the Sovereignty border." She flexed her wrists where the rope had been. Red marks circled both of them like bracelets. "I was on a solo run when Drek's crew caught me sleeping. Stupid. Won't happen again."
"You're a mercenary."
"I'm a person who's good at fighting and likes getting paid for it. Mercenary is just the word other people use."
Kyon looked at his own hands. The blood was gone. He'd washed them in a stream they'd passed, scrubbed until the water ran clear, but he could still feel it. Not physically. More like a memory pressed into his skin. A stain that didn't wash off because it wasn't on the surface.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"You've been asking me things for two hours. Why stop now."
"The first time you killed someone. How did you feel?"
Maren stopped chewing. The fire crackled between them. Shadows danced on her face, and for the first time since he'd met her, she didn't look practical or efficient or unreadable. She looked like someone remembering something heavy.
"Sick," she said. "I felt sick. I was fifteen. A man tried to rob my father's stall in the market. I had a knife and I used it. Didn't mean to kill him. Meant to scare him off. But the blade caught his throat and that was that."
"Did it get easier?"
The look she gave him was careful. Measured. Like she was deciding how much truth he could carry.
"Yes," she said. "That's the part they don't tell you. It gets easier. And then it gets easy. And then one day you realize you haven't thought about it in weeks and that's the day you should be scared. Because that's the day it stopped costing you something."
Kyon didn't respond.
The fire burned. The dark pressed in. The clock ticked.
67:22:41.
He didn't sleep.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Drek. Not the moment of the kill. Not the sword going in. The moment before. That half second where the man turned and his eyes went wide and his body knew what was coming even though his brain hadn't caught up. That gap between recognition and response. That's where Drek had lived his last conscious thought, and Kyon kept going back to it like a tongue finding a broken tooth.
What was the thought? Surprise? Fear? Anger? Or something simpler than all of that, some animal part of the brain screaming move, dodge, fight, run, anything, and the body not listening because it was already too late?
Kyon lay on his back and stared at the black sky and listened to Maren breathe. She slept like a machine. Instant shutdown. No tossing. No murmuring. Just steady breathing and total stillness, the sleep of someone who'd trained herself to rest whenever the opportunity came because you never knew when the next one would be.
[QUERY: WOULD HOST LIKE TO VIEW CURRENT STATS?]
Kyon's eyes snapped open.
The text floated in front of him, pale blue against the dark, patient and polite and completely insane.
"What?" he whispered.
[HOST VITAL FORCE: 12 UNITS. PHYSICAL ENHANCEMENT: MINOR. SENSORY IMPROVEMENT: NEGLIGIBLE. SKILL EXTRACTION: UNAVAILABLE (MINIMUM 100 KILLS REQUIRED). CURRENT KILL COUNT: 1.]
Numbers. Stats. Categories. Like a character sheet from a video game printed on the inside of his skull.
"I didn't ask for this."
[THE SYSTEM PROVIDES INFORMATION TO OPTIMIZE HOST PERFORMANCE.]
"I don't want to be optimized."
[HOST PREFERENCES ARE NOTED BUT NOT PRIORITIZED.]
Kyon almost laughed. Almost. There was something so casually dismissive about that sentence, so perfectly indifferent to his feelings, that it circled all the way past disturbing and landed somewhere near funny. The system didn't care what he wanted. It didn't pretend to care. It just told him the truth and moved on.
He stared at the numbers. Twelve units of Vital Force. From one kill. Maren had said it took normal people decades to build strength through killing beasts. One bandit captain had given Kyon twelve units in a single moment. The system wasn't just automating absorption. It was amplifying it. Taking what should have been a trickle and turning it into a flood.
"How much Vital Force does a normal person have?" he asked.
[AVERAGE HUMAN IN ASHENMERE: 5 TO 8 UNITS. TRAINED COMBATANT: 15 TO 40 UNITS. ELITE WARRIOR: 80 TO 200 UNITS. NOBLE HOUSE SCION: 150 TO 500 UNITS.]
Kyon sat with that.
He'd absorbed twelve units from a single kill. If the system maintained that rate, ten kills would put him at the level of a trained combatant. Thirty would make him elite. Fifty and he'd be rivaling nobles who'd had entire bloodlines feeding their power for generations.
The math was obscene.
And the worst part was that his brain was already doing it. Already running the calculations. Already mapping out how many kills it would take to reach each tier like he was planning a build in an RPG. Like the dead man on the road was just experience points and the next kill would be the same and the one after that and the one after that.
"Stop," he told himself.
But the numbers stayed.
[SYSTEM RECOMMENDATION: THE GRAYMARK EXPANSE CONTAINS MULTIPLE HOSTILES OF CATEGORY E AND D. CURRENT HOST CAPABILITIES ARE SUFFICIENT FOR CATEGORY E TARGETS. RECOMMEND ENGAGEMENT TO BUILD VITAL FORCE RESERVE BEFORE ENTERING POPULATED TERRITORY.]
"You want me to go hunting."
[THE SYSTEM PROVIDES RECOMMENDATIONS. THE HOST DECIDES.]
"And if I don't decide the way you want?"
[THE KILL THRESHOLD WILL ACTIVATE IN 67:04:11. THE SYSTEM DOES NOT REQUIRE HOST AGREEMENT. ONLY COMPLIANCE.]
Kyon turned on his side, away from the fire, and closed his eyes. The numbers faded but didn't disappear. They sat in his peripheral vision like a watermark on a document, always there, always readable, a permanent reminder that he was not a person anymore.
He was a host.
And the thing inside him was hungry.
Morning was just the sky getting lighter. No sunrise. No warmth. Just purple fading to gray like the world was waking up reluctantly, the same way Kyon used to on workdays. Dragging itself out of the dark because it had to, not because it wanted to.
Maren was already up. Already packed. Already standing at the edge of their dead campfire with her arms crossed and her eyes on the road south.
"There are tracks," she said when Kyon got to his feet.
"Tracks?"
"Paw prints. Big ones. In the dirt about forty yards east." She nodded toward the scrubland. "Ashwolves. Pack of at least four. They crossed our path sometime in the night."
"Wolves."
"Ashwolves. Bigger. Meaner. They hunt by heat signature, not scent. Which means they know we're here. They just decided we weren't worth it last night."
"And now?"
"Now we're moving. And moving things are more interesting than sleeping things."
Kyon grabbed his sword and his waterskin and fell into step beside her. The road south was wider now but no better maintained. Rocks and ruts and the occasional collapsed section where rain or something worse had eaten the ground away. The scrubland stretched flat on either side, gray and empty, no cover, no trees, just low bushes and bare dirt all the way to the horizon.
He felt exposed.
"How big are ashwolves?" he asked.
"Shoulder height on the big ones. Hundred fifty, two hundred pounds. Gray fur. Red eyes. Not natural red. Vital Force red. They've been killing and absorbing from prey for generations, same as the noble houses. Just less pretentious about it."
"And a pack of four?"
"Enough to take down a lone traveler. Two of us with weapons, they'll probably keep their distance." She paused. "Probably."
They walked for three hours before the ashwolves showed themselves.
Kyon saw the first one on a ridge to the east. Just a shape. Still as stone. Watching. Gray fur that blended with the gray ground so well that if it hadn't turned its head he would have missed it entirely. But it did turn its head, and its eyes caught the light, and they were red. Not brown or amber or any natural shade. Red like the system's countdown clock. Red like blood in firelight. Red like something that had eaten so much death it glowed with it.
"I see them," Maren said. She hadn't looked east. She was watching the west side. "Two more on the left. Moving parallel."
"And the fourth?"
"Behind us. Been there for about ten minutes."
Kyon's grip tightened on the sword. "You could have mentioned that."
"I'm mentioning it now."
[HOSTILE DETECTED. CATEGORY F. ASHWOLF. VITAL FORCE: 4 UNITS. THREAT LEVEL: LOW. QUANTITY: 4.]
The system text popped up without being asked. And underneath it, a new line.
[OPTIONAL QUEST: ELIMINATE ASHWOLF PACK (4/4). REWARD: 20 BONUS VITAL FORCE UNITS. ACCEPT?]
Kyon read it twice.
Twenty bonus units. On top of whatever he'd absorb from the kills themselves. Four wolves at four units each meant sixteen from absorption plus twenty from the quest. Thirty six total. That would almost triple his current reserves. Push him past what most trained fighters in this world carried.
For four wolves.
"They're closing in," Maren said. She'd drawn the belt knife from Drek's supplies. It was short but she held it like she knew exactly what to do with it. "If they commit, I'll take the two on the left. You handle whatever comes from the right and behind."
"Maren."
"What."
"How much Vital Force does an ashwolf give when you kill one?"
She shot him a look. "Why?"
"Just answer."
"Trace amounts. Maybe a fraction of a unit if you're lucky. Ashwolves are low tier. Nobody hunts them for Force. You hunt them because they're trying to eat you."
A fraction of a unit. That's what a normal person would get. Kyon's system was offering him four units per wolf. Sixteen times more than natural absorption. Plus the quest bonus. The system wasn't just efficient. It was broken. A cheat code wrapped in a death sentence.
[ACCEPT QUEST? Y/N]
Kyon exhaled through his nose.
"Yeah," he said. Not to Maren. "I accept."
[QUEST ACCEPTED: ELIMINATE ASHWOLF PACK. 0/4 COMPLETED.]
The first wolf came from behind.
Kyon heard it before he saw it. The scuff of paws on hard dirt. Fast. Accelerating. He turned and the thing was already in the air, a hundred and eighty pounds of gray muscle and open jaws launching itself at him from fifteen feet away.
The body moved.
Kyon dropped low. The wolf sailed over him close enough that its belly fur brushed his scalp. He swung the sword upward as it passed, a blind, instinctive slash that caught the animal across the ribs. Not deep. Not killing. But enough to send it tumbling when it landed, yelping, rolling in the dirt, blood spraying from a gash in its side.
It scrambled to its feet. Snarled. Those red eyes locked on him with a hate that felt personal, like he'd insulted it by not dying.
The second wolf came from the ridge.
Faster than the first. Silent. It covered the distance in three bounds and went for his sword arm, jaws clamping down on his forearm with a pressure that sent white light through his vision. Kyon felt the teeth punch through the sleeve and sink into muscle and his hand opened reflexively and the sword dropped.
He punched the wolf in the eye with his free hand.
Not a technique. Not a strategy. Just a fist driven by pain and adrenaline slamming into the side of the animal's skull. It yelped and loosened its grip and Kyon wrenched his arm free, grabbed the wolf by the scruff with his good hand, and slammed it into the ground.
The injured one lunged.
Kyon kicked it in the jaw. His boot connected with a crack that he felt in his hip. The wolf's head snapped sideways and it staggered, and Kyon grabbed his sword off the ground with his bleeding hand and drove it into the pinned wolf's neck.
The blade went through.
The animal spasmed once. Twice. Then went still.
[KILL CONFIRMED. ASHWOLF. VITAL FORCE ABSORBED: 4 UNITS. QUEST PROGRESS: 1/4.]
The rush hit. Smaller this time. Less overwhelming. But still there. A warm pulse that spread through his bleeding arm and dulled the pain and tightened his focus and made the world sharper. Clearer. More immediate.
The injured wolf was circling. Favoring its right side. The gash on its ribs was deep enough that Kyon could see the white of bone underneath the fur. It was hurt but it wasn't done. It snarled at him, low and continuous, and its red eyes flicked to the dead wolf on the ground and then back to Kyon.
To his left, he heard Maren fighting. Fast footwork on gravel. A snarl cut short. A sound that could have been a knife entering flesh. He didn't look. Couldn't afford to.
The injured wolf lunged.
Kyon sidestepped. The wolf's teeth caught air where his thigh had been. He brought the sword down on the back of its neck in a two handed chop that used every pound of force this body could generate.
The wolf hit the ground and didn't get up.
[KILL CONFIRMED. ASHWOLF. VITAL FORCE ABSORBED: 4 UNITS. QUEST PROGRESS: 2/4.]
Another pulse. The pain in his arm faded further. He could feel the Vital Force moving through him, stitching something back together in his forearm that shouldn't have been repairable this fast. Not healing. Not exactly. More like reinforcing. Thickening the walls so the damage mattered less.
He turned to Maren.
She had one wolf dead at her feet. The belt knife was buried to the handle in its throat. The fourth wolf was five feet away from her, crouched low, growling, trying to decide if the woman who'd just killed its packmate was worth the risk.
Maren was bleeding from a cut above her left eye. She didn't seem to notice. She stood with her weight balanced and her empty hands out and she stared the wolf down with an expression that said very clearly, in a language older than words, that she was not afraid and it should be.
The wolf looked at her. Looked at the dead one. Looked at Kyon, standing over two more corpses with a bloody sword and a body that was practically vibrating with stolen energy.
It ran.
[QUEST UPDATE: TARGET FLEEING. 2/4 REMAINING KILLS REQUIRED FOR QUEST COMPLETION.]
Kyon watched the wolf sprint across the scrubland. Watched it get smaller and smaller against the gray horizon. Watched it run from the only smart decision any living thing in this clearing had made today.
He could chase it. The body wanted to. His legs were already tensing, already shifting forward, the stolen Vital Force humming through his muscles like a battery that had just been plugged in. Twenty bonus units. All he had to do was run it down and finish it.
He didn't.
"Let it go," he said. Mostly to himself.
[QUEST INCOMPLETE. 2/4 KILLS. PARTIAL REWARD UNAVAILABLE. QUEST WILL EXPIRE IN 48:00:00.]
Kyon ignored it.
Maren pulled her knife out of the dead wolf and wiped it on her pant leg. She looked at the two corpses at Kyon's feet, then at the bite wound on his arm. The sleeve was torn and bloody but the bleeding had already slowed. Dramatically.
"That should be worse than it looks," she said.
"I heal fast."
"Nobody heals that fast."
Kyon didn't respond.
She walked over to him. Took his arm without asking. Turned it over. Examined the bite marks. Her fingers were surprisingly gentle for someone who'd just put a knife through a wolf's windpipe.
"These are already closing," she said. The careful voice again. The one she used when she was deciding how much truth to ask for. "This isn't normal healing. This is Vital Force repair. Active repair. The kind you only see in people with reserves of two hundred plus."
"I told you. I heal fast."
"You told me you've never fought before yesterday."
"Both things are true."
She let go of his arm. Stepped back. Looked at him with those evaluating eyes.
"You're not just strange, are you, Kyon?"
"Probably not."
"Are you dangerous?"
He thought about lying. Thought about smiling and shrugging and making some deflecting joke. But she deserved better than that. She'd watched him kill three things in two days and instead of running she was still here, still walking beside him, still splitting her food and sharing her knowledge and not asking for anything except answers.
"Yeah," he said. "I think I am."
She held his gaze for a long moment. That evaluation running behind her eyes, weighing something he couldn't see, measuring him against some internal scale that she'd built over years of reading people who could kill her.
"Good," she said finally. "Dangerous is useful. Just don't point it at me."
She turned and started walking south.
Kyon stood in the clearing for another thirty seconds. Three dead wolves. One fleeing. A quest flashing in his peripheral vision, taunting him with the bonus he'd left on the table. And his arm, knitting itself back together with energy he'd stolen from animals he'd killed less than three minutes ago.
[KILL COUNT: 3]
Three.
Yesterday it was zero. Today it was three. And in sixty something hours the system would demand more and the clock would start counting and the math would close in again and he'd have to decide all over.
Except next time the decision would be faster.
He knew that.
He knew it the way you know the weather is changing. Not because anyone told you. Because you feel it in your body. In the air pressure. In the way the wind shifts. Something inside him was moving. Settling into a new position. The guilt was still there but it was quieter now. Farther away. And the rush was closer. Always closer.
Kyon cleaned his sword on the dead wolf's fur.
Sheathed it.
And followed Maren south.
They walked until the sky went black again. Maren said they'd reach Fellen by tomorrow afternoon if they kept pace. She pointed out landmarks as they went. A collapsed stone tower from a war nobody remembered. A dry riverbed that used to be a trade route. A circle of scorched earth where someone had detonated enough Vital Force to leave a scar on the land itself.
"Graymark history is mostly a list of things that used to exist," she said. "Towns. Rivers. Forests. Armies. Everything gets used up eventually."
"Cheerful."
"I'm not here to cheer you up."
They made camp behind a rock formation that blocked the wind. Maren built the fire again and they ate the last of the dried meat and Kyon tried not to think about the fact that his arm was already almost healed. The bite marks were pink and closed. No stitches. No bandages. Just Vital Force doing what Vital Force did, except faster and better than it should.
"Tell me about Fellen," he said.
"Fifteen hundred people, give or take. Wooden walls. Dirt streets. Three taverns, two brothels, a mercenary guild, and a bounty board that gets refreshed every week." She poked the fire with a stick. "It's not pretty but it's functional. Best place to find work in the southern Graymark without having to sell your morals along with your sword."
"Mercenary guild."
"Don't get excited. They'll test you before they let you register. Combat evaluation. Nothing lethal, but they want to see what you can do."
"And if I pass?"
"Then you get contracts. Steady work. Caravan escort, bounty hunting, beast extermination. Pay depends on the job. More dangerous jobs pay more." She looked at him. "You'd pass. With what I've seen, you'd pass easily."
"You barely saw anything."
"I saw enough. You dropped Drek in two moves and killed two ashwolves without flinching. You're fast, you have instincts that don't match someone who claims to be new to fighting, and you heal like a monster." She paused. "I've been doing this for eight years. I've worked with a lot of swords. You're better than most of them and you don't even know it yet."
Kyon was quiet.
Better than most. After one human kill and two wolf kills. Three bodies in his wake and the system promising that every kill would make him stronger. Faster. More. The math again. Always the math. How many kills to match a veteran mercenary. How many to rival a knight. How many to surpass anything this world had seen.
[SYSTEM NOTE: FELLEN BOUNTY BOARD PRESENTS MULTIPLE OPPORTUNITIES FOR KILL THRESHOLD MAINTENANCE AND VITAL FORCE ACCUMULATION. RECOMMEND REGISTRATION WITH MERCENARY GUILD UPON ARRIVAL.]
The system agreed with Maren.
He hated that.
"I'll think about it," he said.
Maren shrugged. "Think fast. World doesn't wait for thinkers."
She lay down, closed her eyes, and was asleep in under a minute. That machine shutdown. Immediate and absolute. Kyon envied it.
He stayed up. Watched the fire. Watched the dark beyond the fire, where the light gave out and the nothing began. Somewhere out there, the fourth wolf was running. Alive because Kyon had let it live. Because he'd chosen not to chase it. Because he'd refused the quest and left twenty units on the ground.
And the entire time it was running, a part of him wished he hadn't.
That part was getting louder.
[KILL COUNT: 3]
[NEXT THRESHOLD: 63:17:02]
[QUEST: ELIMINATE ASHWOLF PACK — 2/4 — EXPIRES IN 44:31:18]
[STATUS: ALIVE]
End of Chapter 2