Chapter 147: Cinder Grasp

Rael had two Stars.

In Astralis, a person with one awakened Star was already uncommon.

Even at the Wall, there were only eight hundred cultivators among eleven thousand people before Encrid started the school, which was just over seven percent of the population.

And the overwhelming majority of them had exactly one Star.

In such a world - a person with two Stars was something else entirely.

Two Stars at the Apex realm could buy a man land in the south, a command, a house name if he wanted one, and the right to walk into most noble halls without anyone asking where he came from. Any of the four ducal houses would have taken such a man without hesitation.

Rael had been born on the Wall.

He had never once left it.

For six years, he had continuously taken the most dangerous requests available on the Wall. He went beyond the stakes alone, ventured deeper into the Great Green Forest each time, and always pushed farther than he had gone on his previous journey. He hunted Roamers, gathered their cores, and took on places where even experienced hunters were reluctant to go.

Every journey was more dangerous than the last.

Every journey also took him farther.

He learned which paths were safe, which Roamers hunted alone, which ones moved in packs, and which sounds meant that something dangerous was nearby. He learned how long he could remain in one place before his presence was noticed, how to move through the forest without leaving an obvious trail, and, more importantly, when he needed to run.

Most people who tried to make a living that way died within two years.

Rael had been doing it for years.

He was twenty-two now.

But his age did not define his strength.

Years of repeatedly walking into the Great Green Forest and coming back alive had given him an experience that could not be gained through ordinary training. His knowledge of the Roamers and the forest itself was on par with many of the Watch commanders.

He was a genius, but more importantly, he was a genius who worked harder than most people could imagine.

He had trained and cultivated both his Stars to a degree that made him difficult to match among anyone his age and Realm.

The Golden Star gave him strength. That was what Golden did, and there was nothing complicated about it.

But the Vermilion Star gave him something else.

Most people who awakened Vermilion used it the way Gus did. They pushed the heat through their own body and burned it out through the arms and shoulders, and hit things harder than their muscles allowed. This was the standard method. Every cultivation text in the Empire described it.

Nobody had ever taught Rael the standard method.

Nobody had taught him anything. He had worked out what his Stars did on his own, in the dark, four hundred paces past the last stake line, usually while bleeding.

What he had worked out was this.

[ Star Ability: Cinder Grasp ]

[ The Vermilion Star’s heat may be pushed out of the body and left inside an object the user is holding. It remains in the object after the user releases it. ]

It was not an impressive ability.

But he had continuously utilized the ability and pushed it to its limits.

The result of that was what Encrid was betting on.

Rael took the arrow out of the quiver at his hip.

It was not an ordinary arrow. The head had been wrapped in a strip of the same fabric the sheets were made from, soaked in the same oil, and prepared that morning by a man from the Works who had asked no questions about what it was for.

Rael closed his hand around the shaft.

-Kuweeeng

The air around his fist went strange.

It was not bright and it was not loud. It simply developed a shimmer, the way air does above a flat stone that has been sitting in the sun all afternoon, and everybody standing within two paces took a step back without deciding to.

Red light ran up through his fingers.

It went into the cloth and stayed there.

A soldier standing four paces away turned round to look, because he had felt the temperature change on the side of his face and had assumed something behind him was on fire.

There was nothing behind him.

He looked at the young man with the bow, then at the Strategist standing beside him, then decided that whatever was happening was not his business and went back to watching the field.

The strip did not catch fire.

That was the whole of the ability and the reason it had never been worth anything to him. Cinder Grasp did not create fire. It created something that was about to be fire and was waiting for a reason.

He nocked the arrow and drew.

’Fifty paces short of the front rank. Crosswind out of the northeast. Aim into it.’

As a mercenary - Rael was used to using many kind of weapons and bow was merely one of them.

-Tang.

The arrow climbed.

Two hundred men on the Fifth Bastion watched it go. On the Fourth Mile, four hundred paces west, Garrick Dane followed it with his eyes and could make no sense of it whatsoever.

’One arrow.’

In twenty-six years of service, Dane had seen a great many pointless things done on that Wall. He had seen a captain order a cavalry charge across a stake mat. He had watched the Works build a watchtower on ground that could not hold it.

One arrow fired into a wedge of two hundred Gorehorns was the most pointless of all of them.

The arrow reached the top of its arc.

It came down.

It struck the shoulder of a Gorehorn roughly forty paces inside the wedge, punched through six inches of oil-soaked canvas, and stopped in the matted hair beneath.

For half a heartbeat nothing happened at all.

Then the oil found the heat.

Whooomf.

The sound was small.

That was what every man who was there remembered afterward, and it was the part they could never get across to anybody who had not been standing on that Wall. They expected to be asked about a roar. There was no roar. There was a soft noise, like a large breath going out, and then two hundred paces of the northern killing ground turned white and gold.

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