The only thing Ren had kept from Solenne was the sword.
He'd had it in his hand when he jumped. Somewhere in the rapids, his fingers had locked around the grip so hard that he'd had to pry them open on the mudbank one at a time. Now it lay across his knees while he sat under the willow and waited for the sun to dry him out.
It was a good sword. Plain steel, a little worn at the edge, with the sunburst of the Radiant Order stamped into the crossguard. He scraped the sunburst off with a rock. It took an hour. He didn't have anything else to do.
Then he stood up and started walking south.
***
By the second afternoon, he'd learned three things about the Holy Kingdom of Varenhal.
The first was that it was beautiful. He hadn't expected that. In Solenne, everything had been white stone and gold and incense, and he'd assumed the rest of the kingdom would look the same. It didn't. The river road wound through rolling green hills and orchards gone wild, with old stone walls running everywhere like stitches. The sky was huge. The air smelled like grass.
The second was that it was empty. The orchards had no one picking them. The farmhouses he passed had their shutters nailed closed. Twice he walked past a whole village with no smoke in the chimneys and no dogs barking, and once he passed a church with its doors hanging open and birds nesting in the bell tower.
The third thing was that he was starving.
He hadn't eaten since the bread in the Church cells. He'd tried eating berries off a bush the first day, and then spent an hour throwing them back up behind a wall. Sovereign's Instinct apparently didn't cover plants.
So when he saw smoke rising from a farmhouse at the edge of a field, he stopped and thought about it for a long minute. Then he walked up the lane.
An old woman was throwing grain to chickens in the yard. She was small and bent, with arms like knotted rope and a gray scarf tied over her hair. She saw him coming and didn't run. She just straightened up slowly, put a hand on the pitchfork leaning against the fence, and waited.
Ren stopped at the gate. He knew what he looked like. Wet, torn dress shirt. Suit pants ripped at both knees. A cut on his cheek. A sword on his hip with a scraped up crossguard.
"You a deserter?" the woman asked.
"No."
"You look like one."
"I'm not a soldier."
She looked him up and down. "Then what are you?"
He thought about how to answer that. He'd spent a year telling the truth to people who didn't want it. He'd decided, somewhere in that year, that he was never going to stop.
"Hungry," he said. "I'll work for food, if you have any."
She snorted. But her hand came off the pitchfork.
Her name was Marta. She had a woodpile the size of a car and nobody to split it. Ren split it. He'd never swung an axe before in his life, and the first one felt clumsy, and the second one felt fine, and by the tenth he could put the blade exactly where he wanted, every time, with half the effort. Marta watched from the porch with her arms folded.
"You're good at that," she said, after an hour.
"I'm learning."
"Didn't look like learning."
She fed him barley soup with onions in it and a heel of dark bread so hard he had to dunk it. It was the best thing he'd eaten in a year. She sat across from him at a scarred kitchen table and watched him eat it, and didn't ask any questions until he was done.
"What's your name?"
"Kuroda Ren."
She frowned. "That's not a Varenhal name."
"No."
She waited. When he didn't add anything, she just nodded, like that was an answer too. Then she got up and went into the back room and came out with a wool coat and a pair of boots.
"My son's," she said. "They'll be big on you."
Ren looked at them. Good boots. Hardly worn.
"Where is he?"
"Westmarch." She set them on the table. "The Empire took it in the spring. They sent back his boots and a letter with the king's seal. Said he died for the light." Her mouth went thin. "The war takes boys and sends back boots. Take them. They're no use to me."
He took them.
At the door, she grabbed his sleeve. Her grip was strong.
"Stay on the road," she said. "Don't cut through the Thornwood. Since the soldiers went north, things have been coming out of it. The Kessler boy went in after a lost goat last month. They found the goat."
"Thank you, Marta."
She let go of his sleeve. "Don't thank me. Just don't die in my boots."
***
He cut through the Thornwood.
It wasn't stupidity. He'd looked at Ferren's map again, and the river road bent far to the east around the forest before it turned south. Cutting through would save two days, maybe three. And there were no patrols in the Thornwood, because no one in their right mind went in.
He went in at noon. By dusk, he understood why no one did.
The trees grew close and black, with thorns as long as his fingers running up every trunk. The light came down green and thin. There were no birds. It was so quiet he could hear his own heartbeat, and the System pulsing slow underneath it.
The wolves found him at sunset.
He heard them first. Not howling. Something worse, a low clicking like teeth tapping together, moving through the undergrowth on both sides of him at once. He stopped walking. He drew the sword. Read the latest chapters at novelping.com.
Then he opened Read the Field.
Greyback Wolf · Level 7Greyback Wolf · Level 6Greyback Wolf · Level 9Greyback Wolf · Level 6Greyback Wolf · Level 8
Five of them. He was Level 6.
This reproduced chapter came from the author's story page without permission; the official posting supports the author.
They came out of the thorns together. They were bigger than any wolf he'd seen on TV, gray along the spine with bristling ridges of hair, and their eyes caught the last of the light and threw it back yellow. The biggest one, the Level 9, came straight down the trail at him. The others fanned out.
Ren didn't wait for them to finish surrounding him. He went at the big one.
He'd never fought an animal. It didn't matter. Sovereign's Instinct read the wolf the same way it had read Takeru and the knights. The shift of its weight before it jumped. The way its head dipped. He stepped left as it leaped and cut up under its jaw, and the wolf went past him and hit the ground and didn't get up.
The other four hit him all at once.
Teeth closed on his left forearm. He felt the coat tear, felt the fangs go in. He turned with it, dragging the wolf off balance, and drove the pommel down on its skull. Something else hit the back of his legs. He went down on one knee. A third wolf went for his throat.
"Kneel," he said.
He didn't know if it would work. Kneel was Authority against Will. He didn't know if animals had Will.
They did. Just not very much.
The wolf at his throat dropped flat in midair like someone had cut its strings. It hit the dirt, belly down, legs splayed, trembling. The one on his arm let go. The other two scrambled back, whining, their ears pressed flat.
Ren stood up.
It took less than a minute after that.
When it was done, he stood in the middle of the trail with five gray bodies around him, breathing hard, blood running down his arm. The light was nearly gone. The forest was quiet again.
The System chimed.
Level up. Level 7.Level up. Level 8.
He looked at the numbers. Then he looked at the wolves. He'd known, in a vague way, that killing things made him stronger. He'd felt it after Takeru. He'd felt it after the knights at the river gate. But he hadn't really understood it until now. Those had been people. He hadn't wanted to think about it.
These were wolves. He could think about it all he wanted.
Kneel worked on monsters. Monsters gave experience. The Thornwood was full of monsters.
He wiped the sword on the grass and kept walking. Slower now. Listening.
***
The boar found him the next morning.
It was the size of a small car. That wasn't an exaggeration. It came crashing out of a thicket by a stream where he'd stopped to wash his arm, and it was easily as tall as his chest at the shoulder, with a ridge of thorns down its back like the trees had grown out of it. Its tusks were longer than his sword.
Thornback Boar · Level 14
Ren looked at it. It looked at him.
He thought about running. The boar pawed the ground and snorted, and two jets of steam came out of its nostrils.
"Kneel," Ren said.
It worked for two seconds. The boar's front legs folded. Its massive head hit the stream bank so hard the ground shook. Then it surged back up with a scream like tearing metal, shaking its head, furious, and came at him.
Two seconds wasn't enough. Its Will was higher than the wolves'.
But two seconds was something.
He spent the next ten minutes learning exactly what two seconds was worth. He used them to get out of the way. To get behind it. To cut at the backs of its legs where the thorns didn't grow. Kneel had a cooldown, he discovered, about thirty seconds before he could use it again, and he spent those thirty seconds running, ducking behind trees, letting the boar tear through trunks trying to get to him.
The fourth Kneel, he was ready. The boar dropped. He was already on its back, between the thorns, and he drove the sword down behind its skull with both hands.
It took a long time to stop moving.
Level up. Level 9.
Ren slid off and sat down on the bank. His arms were shaking. His shirt was soaked with sweat and blood and stream water. There was a long scrape down his ribs from a tusk he hadn't quite dodged.
He looked at the boar. It was enormous. It was also, he realized, about four hundred pounds of meat.
He started laughing.
He didn't know why. It just came up out of him and wouldn't stop, and he sat there on the bank of the stream in the middle of a monster forest in another world, laughing at a dead pig, until his ribs hurt. He couldn't remember the last time he'd laughed. Not like this. Not since before the party.
When it finally ran out, he wiped his eyes and got up and figured out how to build a fire.
The meat was tough and gamy and tasted like smoke. He ate until he couldn't move.
***
He came out of the Thornwood on the fifth day, at a crossroads town called Hadley's Rest.
He almost walked straight through. He had Marta's coat on, and a hood he'd made from a strip of it, and he looked like any other ragged traveler on the road south. Nobody looked at him twice.
Then he saw the poster.
It was nailed to the wall of the inn, right next to the door. Fresh paper, the ink still dark. A crude drawing of a young man with black hair and a long sword, glaring out of the page. Someone had given him horns. Underneath, in big block letters: Follow the newest chapters on novelping dot com.
THE DEMON HEROMurderer of the Sword Saint. Slayer of the Radiant Order.Marked by the Black Crown.500 GOLD CROWNS. DEAD.
Ren stood in front of it for a long moment.
The horns were a little much. The nose was wrong. But the eyes were close. Someone had described him well.
"Terrible business," said a man beside him. A merchant, by the look of him, fat and red faced, leaning on a walking stick. "They say he killed thirty knights getting out of the city. Thirty! With his bare hands."
"Two," said Ren.
The merchant blinked at him. "What?"
"It was two. And he had a sword."
The merchant stared. Ren pulled his hood lower and walked away before the man could get a good look at his face.
He didn't stop for food. He didn't stop to rest. He walked straight through Hadley's Rest and out the south road and kept walking until the town was a smudge behind him.
Five hundred gold crowns. He didn't know what that was worth here. Enough that people would look.
He'd have to be careful now.
***
He made camp that night on a rocky ridge above the road, with no fire. From up here, he could see a long way. The road ran south in a pale line between the hills, toward a dark smear on the horizon that might have been mountains. The border was somewhere past that. Nine or ten days, maybe, on foot.
He was almost asleep when he saw the fires.
They were behind him. North. On the road he'd just walked. Five or six small points of light, close together, about two miles back.
A camp.
Ren lay still on the rocks and looked at them for a long time. Travelers, maybe. Merchants. A caravan stopped for the night. Plenty of people used the south road.
But he hadn't seen any caravans all day.
He slid off the ridge and went down through the dark.
It took him almost an hour to get close. He went slow, the way Sovereign's Instinct told him to, keeping to the shadows of the stone walls, placing every step. The last hundred yards, he crawled. Then he lay flat behind a broken wall at the edge of a field and looked over it.
Horses. Eight of them, picketed in a line. White tabards. Silver mail catching the firelight. Radiant Knights, sitting around three fires, eating and talking low.
And at the biggest fire, two people who weren't knights.
One of them was huge, bigger than the knights, with a shaved head and a massive axe leaning against the log beside him. He was laughing at something, loud and harsh. Ren knew that laugh. He'd heard it at every party Takeru ever threw.
Fujii Kenta.
The other one sat apart, at the very edge of the light, with his back very straight. He wore a black coat with a sunburst sewn over the heart. His eyes were closed. He looked like he was praying.
Kanzaki Shuhei.
Ren opened Read the Field.
Fujii Kenta · Berserker · Level 11Kanzaki Shuhei · Inquisitor · Level 10
Ren went cold.
Level 11. Level 10. Five days ago, they'd both been Level 1. He'd been fighting monsters for days and he was only Level 9. They had to have been killing nonstop since he escaped. The Church had to have been feeding them kills.
They'd sent the heroes after him.
Kenta was still talking. Ren could just make out the words. "...told you he'd go through the forest. Nobody's that stupid unless they're trying to lose somebody. Should've cut through after him."
"We'd have lost the horses," one of the knights said.
"So what? I'd rather lose horses than lose him." Kenta spat into the fire. "I'm taking his head back. I promised Yui."
Ren stayed perfectly still. They didn't know he was here. They were guessing. He could slip back up the ridge, move tonight, and be ten miles south by morning.
Then Kanzaki opened his eyes.
He didn't look at the fire. He didn't look at Kenta. He turned his head slowly, the way a man turns toward a sound only he can hear, and looked out into the dark.
Straight at the broken wall. Straight at Ren.
"Good evening, Kuroda," he said.
His voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. Every knight around every fire went silent at once.
Ren's status screen opened in front of him without being asked. A new line glowed red at the bottom, one he'd never seen before.
Status effect: Writ of Pursuit.Source: Kanzaki Shuhei.
Kanzaki stood up and brushed off his black coat.
"I know exactly where you are," he said. "I always will."