Chương 17: 07-2: Hunt、Raven and Stranger

A blood-slicked arrowhead protruded from the front of his neck with clinical finality. His mouth opened. Nothing came out but a wet gurgle. He toppled from the roof and crashed into the snow with the sound of a sack of wet grain hitting stone. Silence fell like a hammer blow. The kind of silence that follows something irreversible. Even the rabid dog clinging to my arm had gone still, staring with slack-jawed terror at what had just transpired. Then the second arrow arrived.

Fwip— It punched clean through the shoulder of the crossbowman on the left slope—the one frantically trying to reload—and pinned him to the rock face with the casual efficiency of someone hanging laundry. His scream tore through the night before he'd even processed the pain. And from the abyssal darkness beyond our firelight, a voice descended. Low. Rough. Ground down like iron dragged across stone for decades.

"Planning to just stand there and wait for death?" I looked up. On a jagged outcrop at the very edge of our camp—far enough out that the firelight barely reached, which meant he'd been there long enough to choose his position with care—stood a figure that seemed to press against reality itself. Large. Not in the way of good meals and comfortable living, but in the way of someone who had carried weight—physical, spiritual, existential—until it had become part of their fundamental architecture.

He wore a coat that looked like it had been chewed by blizzards, blood, and time until it had stopped being clothing and become a statement about the nature of endurance. His shoulders were broad in the way that spoke of never being allowed to put anything down, ever. The firelight couldn't reach his full face—only glimpses of dark hair that looked like it had been cut with a hunting knife by someone who didn't care about aesthetics, and a beard that had long since stopped asking permission from anyone.

In his left hand: a short recurve bow that looked like it had seen more battlefields than most armies. In his right: a third arrow, already nocked and ready. But what made every muscle in my back lock up in primal recognition was the broken iron shackle clamped around his wrist. Not decorative. Not symbolic. The mangled remnant of a restraint that had been torn off by main force.

He looked like something that had clawed its way out of a place where people were sent to be forgotten—a mine that went too deep, an arena where the fights never ended, a prison that didn't bother with concepts like 'release dates'—and had kept walking until geography ran out of places to put him. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

"... What in the world," Jessi breathed, materializing at my shoulder with her blade still dripping. Her eyes were lit up with the kind of curiosity that usually preceded either disaster or extremely poor life choices.

"Cedric. Your luck with picking up strays lately is getting statistically improbable."

"I'd rather have found a bag of gold," I muttered, not taking my eyes off the stranger.

"I'd rather have that bow."

"Could you want something normal for once in your life?"

"I'm fundamentally not normal, and you've always known this." Incredible. Ambush still technically in progress, and she was already mentally looting the mysterious archer. The man on the outcrop had no apparent interest in our commentary. He swept us with a single, measuring glance—the kind that catalogues threats, assets, and exit routes in the space of a heartbeat—then released his third arrow without ceremony. It went through the shoulder socket of the man attached to my arm.

The howl that followed was answer enough; I finally wrenched my sword free.

"Two more. Left rear." His voice carried the same temperature as the night air and roughly the same amount of sympathy.

"Move now, or the next volley brings fire." I blinked. True to his word, two pinpricks of red bloomed in the darkness a heartbeat later. Not torches. Incendiary bolts. Oil-soaked. Already lit.

"Hell—" I bit off the rest.

"Lucas, pack everything! Erina, in the carriage! Jessi, cut off the left flank!"

"Copy that~" Jessi licked the corner of her mouth, wearing the expression of a cat that had just discovered its toy was still alive and entertaining.

"But if the grumpy mountain man turns out to be hostile, do I get dibs on his equipment?"

"Survive first, negotiate later!"

"Aww, that almost sounded like you care about me."

"This is not the time for—""It really did, though. Very sincere delivery." I am going to die in battle one day because this woman talked me into a stress-induced heart attack first. I am absolutely certain of this. But whatever came out of her mouth, Jessi moved like she'd been fired from a crossbow herself. She was gone into the left rear treeline before my protest had finished forming.

Almost simultaneously, Lucas ground his teeth and forced a compressed concealment formula over the carriage's exterior—rougher than his usual work, but it held. Erina pulled her holy seal close and whispered a second blessing, shorter and more urgent than the first. Pale light sealed the doors and wheels just as the fire arrows descended. The first hit the ground and burst into a column of acrid, oily smoke.

The second was knocked sideways mid-flight by an arrow that seemed to fall from the star-drunk sky itself—struck at an angle that shouldn't have been geometrically possible—and tumbled into the stream, where it died with a sharp hiss. I looked up at the stranger again. He remained on his perch, wind whipping his coat into something that looked less like clothing and more like the wings of some ancient, patient predator.

In that moment, he looked like something that had been standing on high ground for so long it had simply become part of the landscape—a wolf that had learned to wait, and had not yet decided whether to stay or vanish back into the wild places where wolves go to die. The firelight caught his hip. Beside a brutal hunting knife, I could see a row of throwing blades—balanced for use, not display—and something else. A metal identification card, dark with someone else's blood. Not worn. Taken.

Recently, and without ceremony. He caught me staring. Without hesitation, he reached down, pulled the card from his belt, and tossed it toward our fire with casual indifference. Clink. It spun once through the air and landed at my feet. The firelight caught the engraving, and my blood went cold. Matthews Raven. Registered Archer—Northern Free Mercenary Guild. I looked back up at him, questions forming and dying on my lips.

His voice came across the wind without effort, carrying the kind of authority that didn't need volume to be heard.

"Dead men don't need their names." He stepped off the outcrop. The landing was heavy, deliberate—one knee taking the impact, coat settling around him like something that had made this exact journey a thousand times before. When he straightened, the firelight finally reached his full face.