Three strangers stood around his camp with their weapons out, one of them had already put a hand toward his crystals, and Hajin had no interest in whatever explanation came after that.
'Running is still available,' he thought, keeping the sword up while his eyes moved between the three of them.
The obvious plan felt wrong, because the path change had put his ribs, his ears and the dead arm back together overnight, while his body had gone light with it, so he stayed where he was.
He could see the fingers moving on her staff, the shoulder twitching before its owner decided anything, the dust under three pairs of feet, all of it arriving with a sharpness that pressed on the back of his eyes.
'Something has changed in me,' he thought while his grip shifted on the hilt, 'and I would like to know what before anybody swings.'
The man with the axe came first, closing the gap faster than expected, the blade arriving flat from the side.
'Look at this one,' he thought, and the decision was made before he had asked for it, 'so we do this the direct way.'
He stepped inside the swing instead of away from it, which worked, and the surprise had barely reached the man's eyes before Hajin put a fist through it.
The sound of it put birds out of the canopy.
The head snapped sideways, the body followed, the axe stroke came apart in the middle while Hajin planted his foot and held his balance.
'Since when,' he thought, staring at his own arm for a moment, 'do I move like that?'
The man staggered back, spat into the leaves, then looked up with something closer to insult than pain on his face.
'Get up,' Hajin thought, dropping his stance a little, 'because I would like to know whether that was luck.'
Testing a new body against an angry stranger counted as a poor idea for a man who had nearly died the previous day, though the opportunity had walked in on its own two feet and was currently spitting.
"Stay right there," the man said with the axe already coming back around, "and keep that face where it is."
Hajin met him straight on for the second time, knocked the axe wide with the sword, then drove a shoulder into his chest.
The balance went out of him for half a second, which was all the pommel needed to reach his mouth, and the knee folded when Hajin kicked it.
Another grunt came out of him, wet this time.
Hajin hit the stomach before the man had finished folding, then put an elbow into the side of his head, which dropped him onto one knee.
'This is absurd,' he thought while his breathing ran rough, 'I should not be twice the speed of a man with two Shards to my one.'
The man pushed himself up with blood on his lips, and the humiliation on his face had begun to outweigh the pain.
"You little shit," he said with his voice coming apart at the edges, "I was going easy on you."
'Naturally,' he thought with the sword still up, 'please keep telling yourself that and swing again.'
The air over the camp changed before the man had finished standing, mana rolling off him while the two Shards at his arm burned brighter than before, and the pressure reached Hajin across the clearing.
'There it is,' he thought, and whatever had been enjoyable about the morning went out of him.
Hajin did not know what was coming, though the man had stopped looking angry, which was worse than the anger had been.
Before he could decide whether to close or back off, Cassie crossed the ground between them.
"Are you trying to die?" she asked, moving so fast that Hajin lost track of her feet.
Her hand came down on the back of the man's neck, and he went out on the spot, then folded into the ground face first.
The clearing went quiet, then she turned toward Hajin and bowed at a speed that suggested practice.
"I am sorry," she said with her head still down, "he was out of line."
He stared at her with the sword still up and his breathing not yet under control.
'That is a shame,' he thought while the tip stayed where it was, 'I had two or three more questions for him.'
The disappointment sat on top of a plainer fact, because whatever that skill had been about to do would have turned the next minute into a different kind of event.
'I am faster now,' he thought, looking at the Shards fading around the unconscious arm, 'but I still do not have a single ability to my name.'
"It's okay," he said, dropping the sword point and rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand, "I was kind of out of line too."
Cassie kept her eyes on him while she straightened up, and none of what crossed her face was relief.
'Perhaps I overreacted,' she thought, 'his mana is wrong and that ring is worse, though he does not feel strong.'
She looked at the man in the dirt, then back at the one who had put him there.
'Yeah, no,' she thought, 'I am not about to poke that and learn what happens.'
"Sorry again," she said with a second bow that came out smaller than the first, "we'll leave now."
The third one had stayed out of the whole thing from start to finish, which made him the only member of the group who had made a sensible decision all morning.
"Help me carry him," she said without turning her head all the way around, "we're going."
He came over without arguing, got the unconscious man under one arm while Cassie took the other, then the two of them started for the path.
They managed four steps before she looked back.
"Wait," she said, shifting her grip on the dead weight between them, "what guild are you with?"
"None," he said, tilting his head at the question.
That answer landed somewhere she had not prepared for, and it showed on her face before she could do anything about it.
'No guild,' she thought with her eyes back on the wrist where the ring had appeared, 'a man carrying that walks around attached to nobody?'
"Then..." she said, taking longer over the word than she needed to, "do you want to join ours?"
"No," he said with a shake of his head, "there are some things I need to work out first."
Cassie studied him a moment longer than the answer required, then gave up on whatever she had been weighing.
"I see," she said with a slow tilt of her chin, "then good luck."
"Yeah," the third man muttered from under his half of the load, "try not to kick anyone else in the chest."
"Tell him to keep his hands off dead people's things," Hajin said with the first amusement he had felt in two days, "and he will be fine."
Cassie appeared to have a response ready, then decided against spending it.
"Goodbye," Cassie said, bending one last time at the neck rather than the waist.
"Goodbye," he said, watching the three of them work their way down the path.
The trees took them a piece at a time.
Hajin stood where he was until the sound of dragged boot heels had gone out of hearing, and the camp went back to being a patch of trampled ground with a dead fire in the middle of it.
He let the breath out of himself, put the sword away, then turned to the panel that had been sitting off to one side through all of it.
A second tab had opened along the edge of his status display at some point, unasked for, the way everything from this system seemed to arrive.
[ Stream ]
[ Status: Active ]
[ Viewers: 1 ]
[ Comments: 1 ]
"What?" he asked the empty clearing, reading the third line twice in case it corrected itself.
One viewer meant somebody had been watching him, which opened a long line of questions about who and from where.
'Yesterday I had no system at all,' he thought, pressing the comment line with one finger, 'and today I have an audience.'
[ CringeSlayer91: ] what is this cringe bs
He read it, then read it again, since neither of the two useful words in it belonged to any language he had been taught.
"You watched a man get his teeth rearranged for free," he said to the panel, waiting through a silence that produced no second line, "so I would call that a fair morning."
He sat down beside the dead fire, collected the two crystals that had caused all of this, and left the panel open where he could see it.