The summer he turned fifteen, Adrestus—though the world still called him Ariston—learned that even the best‑laid plans could be derailed by a screaming woman and a very large pig.
He had been tracking a deer through the northern forest, a simple hunting chore to supplement the village's dwindling stores. The deer was a good one, a buck with a twelve‑point rack, and Adrestus had been following its trail for two hours when the forest erupted in sound. Not the rustle of deer. A woman's shout, high and urgent, followed by the guttural roar of something massive.
He ran.
Absolute body control turned the sprint into a fluid motion—roots dodged, branches ducked, rocks leaped. He crashed through the undergrowth and into a clearing where a scene of chaos unfolded. A giant boar, easily three hundred pounds of muscle and bristle and curved tusks, was circling a woman who pressed her back against an oak tree. She had a bow in her hand, but the string was broken, and her quiver was empty. Blood soaked her left sleeve from a gash in her shoulder. The boar lowered its head, tusks gleaming, and charged.
Adrestus did not think. He drew the hunting knife from his belt—a simple iron blade, nothing special—and threw it.
The knife spun end over end and buried itself in the boar's flank, just behind the ribs. The animal squealed, a sound like tearing metal, and veered away from the woman. It turned, mad with pain and rage, and fixed its small red eyes on Adrestus.
Good, he thought. Look at me.
He had no spear. He had no shield. He had only his hands, his body control, and a lifetime of training that had never been tested against a real monster—because the boar, though not mythical, was monstrous enough. Its tusks could disembowel a man in one swipe. Its weight could crush bones. And it was fast, impossibly fast for something so large.
The boar charged.
Adrestus waited until the last possible moment, then sidestepped. His left hand caught one tusk, his right hand grabbed the bristled ear, and he used the animal's own momentum to twist it sideways. The boar crashed into a tree trunk, dazed. Adrestus did not pause. He slammed his knee into its ribs, found the knife still jutting from its flank, and drove it deeper, twisting. The boar thrashed, throwing him off, but the wound was mortal. Blood sprayed the forest floor. Within a minute, the giant animal lay still.
The woman against the oak tree stared at him. She was young, perhaps twenty, with sun‑browned skin and eyes the color of moss. Her clothes were leather and wool, practical for a hunter, and her broken bow was a fine piece of craftsmanship—yew wood, horn‑backed, clearly not a village weapon.
"You killed it," she said. Her voice was hoarse, whether from pain or shock he could not tell.
"It was trying to kill you," Adrestus replied. He knelt beside her and examined her wounded shoulder. The gash was deep but clean. "Can you move your fingers?"
She flexed them. "Yes. I'll live. I just need to bind it."
"My name is Ariston." He tore a strip from his own tunic—it was already ruined with boar blood—and began wrapping her shoulder. His hands were steady, efficient. "You're a huntress?"
"I was." She winced as he tightened the bandage. "The boar surprised me. I've never seen one so large. It must have been blessed by Ares, or cursed by some spiteful nymph." She looked at the carcass. "You killed it with a knife. A throwing knife. I've never seen anyone do that."
"I got lucky."
"No." Her moss‑colored eyes met his. "You didn't."
She introduced herself as Lyra—a different Lyra than the girl he had saved from the well—and told him that she was a freelance huntress, traveling from village to village, selling meat and hides and teaching archery to those who could pay. Her shoulder would take weeks to heal, and she had no way to earn coin in the meantime. Adrestus made her an offer: stay in Odomantike, rest, and in exchange, teach him to use her bow.
"You want me to teach you archery?" She laughed, then winced again. "You just threw a knife through a boar's ribs from twenty paces. What do you need a bow for?"
"Range," he said simply. "I can't throw a knife a hundred paces. I can't kill a harpy on the wing with a spear. A bow gives me options."
She studied him for a long moment. "You're not a normal village boy, are you?"
"No," he admitted. "I'm not."
"Fine. You saved my life. I'll teach you. But I warn you—archery is not like sword work. It takes years to master. Some never do."
Adrestus smiled. "I learn fast."
---
He learned fast.
Lyra's shoulder healed over the next three weeks, and during that time, she taught him everything she knew. The bow she gave him to practice with was a simple wooden recurve, forty pounds draw weight, nothing like her fine yew bow but adequate for a beginner. She started with the fundamentals: stance, grip, draw, anchor point, release. Adrestus absorbed each lesson with his eidetic memory and executed it perfectly with his absolute body control.
By the third day, he was hitting the center of the target at twenty paces.
By the end of the first week, he was shooting from thirty paces, then forty, then fifty. His groupings were tighter than Lyra's own. She stopped correcting him and started watching him with a mixture of awe and something like fear.
"You're not learning," she said on the tenth day. "You're remembering. Like you already knew how, and you just needed to wake up the memory."
"Something like that," he said, and did not explain.
By the end of the second week, he had surpassed her. His arrows flew straight, true, and with a speed that came from perfect biomechanics. He could shoot from a crouch, from a run, from behind cover. He could fire two arrows before the first hit the ground. Lyra threw her hands in the air and declared him a freak of nature.
"Freak of nature or not," he said, "I need to practice on a moving target."
He got his chance on the eighteenth day.
A harpy had been spotted circling the village, drawn by the smell of livestock. The creature was a small one—perhaps four feet tall, with leathery wings, a woman's face twisted into a perpetual snarl, and talons that could shred a goat in seconds. It had already killed three sheep and wounded a dog. The villagers were afraid to go outside after dusk.
Adrestus waited on the roof of the elder's house, Lyra's fine yew bow in his hands. She had insisted he take it. "You shoot better than I ever did. It's wasted on me."
The harpy came at twilight, a dark shape against the orange sky. It circled once, twice, then folded its wings and dove toward the sheep pen.
Adrestus drew. The bow was sixty pounds, heavy for a fifteen‑year‑old, but his body control distributed the weight perfectly. He tracked the harpy's descent, leading the target by instinct. He had never shot at a living creature before—only straw targets and leather sacks—but his past‑life memories of hunting shows and cinematic archery fed into his calculations.
He released.
The arrow flew true. It took the harpy through the chest, just below the throat, and the creature shrieked—a sound like a broken flute—before tumbling into the sheep pen in a tangle of wings and blood. It twitched once, twice, then lay still.
The villagers cheered. Adrestus climbed down from the roof, retrieved his arrow, and walked back to Lyra, who stood at the edge of the pen with her mouth slightly open.
"You killed it," she said. "One shot. From a hundred and twenty paces."
"It was a clean shot," he said. "But I need more practice. I pulled it a finger's width to the left. Next time, I'll correct."
She shook her head slowly. "You're not human."
"Half‑human," he corrected, and left her standing there.
That night, alone in his room, he summoned the system. The golden screen materialized, and he read the updates.
```
[SYSTEM UPDATE – Age 15]
Public feat detected: Killed a giant boar (saving a huntress).
Public feat detected: Killed a harpy (defending the village).
Witnesses: 1 (Lyra) for the boar; 43 (villagers) for the harpy.
Fame increase calculated.
Popularity: Beginner Hero → Local Hero
Fame Coins Earned: +1
Total Fame Coins: 2
Title: "Village Guardian" remains active.
NEW STATS:
- Strength: 10 → 12
- Speed: 12 → 15
- Agility: 14 → 19 (+5% Agility from harpy kill)
- Magic: 0 (unchanged)
SKILL LEVELS (raw proficiency):
- Spearmanship: Journeyman (Level 12)
- Swordsmanship: Journeyman (Level 10)
- Hand‑to‑Hand Combat: Journeyman (Level 15)
- Marksmanship (Bow): Untrained (Level 0) → Apprentice (Level 5)
BATTLE EXPERIENCE (separate from skill level):
- Combat encounters survived: 4 (wolves age 12, training spars, boar, harpy)
- Significant battles: 0
- Monster kills: 2 (boar, harpy)
- Human opponents defeated: 0 (training only)
- Near‑death experiences: 0
System note: Skill level represents technical proficiency. Battle experience represents practical application under lethal conditions. High skill with low experience can lead to mistakes under pressure. Seek more combat.
```
He stared at the last line. Seek more combat. The system was right. He could shoot a target perfectly, but shooting a harpy—a living, moving, dying creature—had felt different. His heart had pounded. His draw had been a hair too fast. The arrow had pulled left, just as he'd thought. If the harpy had been faster, if it had zigged instead of zagged, he might have missed.
Skill was not experience. He understood that now.
He dismissed the screen and lay back on his mat. Lyra would leave in the morning, her shoulder fully healed, her bow now his. He would miss her—not romantically, but as a teacher. She had given him a new weapon, literally and figuratively.
Outside, the stars turned slowly over Odomantike. Somewhere to the south, a Spartan boy named Kratos was learning to kill. Somewhere on Olympus, Zeus was watching. And Adrestus—still called Ariston, still hiding in the shadows—had just taken his first step toward becoming a true archer.
Apprentice Level 5, he thought. Not enough. None of it is enough yet.
But it was a start.
---
End of Chapter 4