Chapter 60: Light

By the fourth morning of Helheim’s entrance examination, the fighting across Grauwald had begun to change.

Ferocious Beasts still prowled the lower slopes, and Common Rank Demonic Beasts remained the greatest prizes, but applicants were increasingly turning their weapons on one another.

Some had exhausted the marked prey in their assigned hunting grounds.

Others had discovered that taking twenty markers from an exhausted competitor was easier than finding twenty marked beasts.

The examination permitted theft, and with three days already behind them, more children were beginning to take that permission seriously.

Sigurd encountered his first attempted robbery of the morning beside a stream cutting through a narrow gorge.

He had stopped to refill his waterskin when a stone struck the bank behind him. It had been thrown deliberately, not to injure him but to make him turn. He continued fastening the waterskin while examining the opposite bank through the corner of his eye.

A boy crouched among the ferns there, crossbow resting across his knees. Two more waited upstream, and another stood concealed behind the rocks near the gorge’s entrance.

Four opponents, perhaps more. Whoever had arranged this had at least considered the terrain.

"Leave the pouch and walk away," the boy behind the rocks called, stepping into view with a broad-bladed saber.

His dark hair was tied behind his head, and a thin scar crossed his chin. "We saw you coming down the ridge. You’ve been collecting cores, haven’t you?"

Sigurd straightened and hung the waterskin at his belt. "You’ve spent all morning watching me, and that’s the best opening you could think of?" he asked, his expression mildly disappointed. "You could have waited until I finished drinking."

The boy’s jaw tightened. "I’m giving you a chance to surrender without getting hurt. Don’t make this difficult."

He raised two fingers, and the crossbowman shifted his aim while the pair upstream began moving closer.

Sigurd rested his hand on his sword hilt. He could dispatch them with ordinary swordsmanship, but the arrangement presented a useful opportunity.

Gravity had proved devastating against opponents who depended on balance and momentum. Light, another authority of his Star Devouring Leviathan, had received far less attention.

He had experimented with gathering a little brightness around his fingertips during the previous evening, enough to understand that the authority answered him.

What interested him now was not its brightness alone, but what an enemy could be made to see.

The crossbow snapped. Sigurd drew his sword and deflected the bolt, sending it into the stream. At the same instant, he released a concentrated flash of white light from his open left hand.

It lasted only a heartbeat, but the gorge amplified its effect: sunlight reflected from wet stone and water, and all four attackers recoiled as their vision filled with brilliance.

Sigurd moved before they recovered, crossing the stream and striking the crossbowman’s wrist with the flat of his blade. The weapon dropped into the ferns, and a sharp kick sent its owner sprawling against the bank.

The other three stumbled backward, blinking furiously. Sigurd could have ended the encounter immediately.

Instead, he retreated to the center of the stream, allowing them time to regain their bearings while he considered the result.

A flash did not need to blind someone permanently.

It only needed to steal the instant in which they decided whether to attack, retreat, or defend. Against a skilled swordsman, that instant could be fatal.

"Close your eyes when he raises his hand!" the saber wielder shouted, rubbing tears from his face. "Don’t look directly at him!"

"That’s not much of a solution," Sigurd observed, shifting his stance as the two upstream applicants spread apart. "You still have to fight me."

The first attacker rushed him with a spear while the second circled toward his back. Sigurd let the spear approach, then bent the light around his shoulder just enough to displace its visible outline.

The effect was imperfect; his figure shimmered against the rocks, and his shadow still betrayed his true position. But the spearman aimed at the shoulder he thought he saw.

His thrust missed by several inches. Sigurd caught the shaft beneath his arm, pulled the boy forward, and struck his stomach with the sword’s pommel.

As the boy doubled over, Sigurd twisted away from the second attacker and cut through the leather strap securing his weapon. The saber fell, followed by its owner’s confidence.

The leader had recovered enough to recognize what was happening.

He watched Sigurd’s wavering silhouette and frowned. "He’s doing something to our sight," he warned, holding his sword between himself and the stream. "Watch his feet. Ignore the rest."

Sigurd’s eyes narrowed with interest. That was a sensible response.

Light could distort appearances, but careless deception would fail against someone who paid attention to footprints, shadows, sound, and disturbed air.

His former life had taught him that the best ambushes rarely depended on a single trick. They succeeded because several small distractions arrived together, leaving the target no reliable moment to understand the danger.

He stepped toward the leader, letting the sunlight catch his blade.

A narrow band of light shifted along the steel, drawing the boy’s gaze toward a high strike. At the same time, Sigurd refracted the light around his torso, making his body appear a fraction farther left than it truly stood.

The leader raised his guard toward the apparent attack. Sigurd slipped past the defense and tapped the man’s throat with the blunt edge of his sword.

The touch was light, but its meaning was unmistakable.

The boy froze. Sigurd withdrew his weapon and regarded him without hostility.

"You watched my sword and my shoulders," he said. "But you forgot that I could change what you were watching."

For a moment, the leader looked ready to protest. Then his gaze shifted toward the three companions struggling to their feet, and the fight went out of his expression.

"Fine," he muttered, lowering his saber. "Take the markers. Just don’t break anything else."

Sigurd collected the unregistered markers from their pouches and counted eleven.

He left their weapons beside the stream rather than carrying them, then continued along the gorge while the defeated applicants argued about which of them had ruined the ambush.

Their voices faded behind him, replaced by running water and the occasional cry of a beast somewhere above the cliffs.

He had barely traveled another half mile when he noticed two figures moving along the ridge ahead.

They were not pursuing him, but the sight confirmed what the morning’s encounter had suggested: applicants were scouting paths, watching one another, and choosing targets.

A boy with an overflowing pouch could now attract as much attention as a Demonic Beast. Sigurd adjusted the strap at his waist and entered a stretch of forest where tall pines cast overlapping shadows across the ground.

Here he tried something subtler. Rather than producing a flash, he gathered light from the bright gaps in the canopy and bent its passage around his upper body. His outline blurred against the trunks.

When he moved slowly, the distortion could conceal the precise position of his arms and shoulders, though sudden movement broke the effect into ripples.

He stopped beside a tree and watched a beetle crawl across the bark, measuring how much concentration the technique demanded.

It was manageable for a short exchange, but maintaining it while fighting at full strength would require practice.

He remembered the Silvervein Direwolf and the way he had once studied every twitch of its muscles before committing to a strike. Back then, survival had depended on reading the enemy correctly.

Gravity had since allowed him to interfere with those movements. Light offered something different: the ability to interfere with the enemy’s reading of him.

A skilled opponent might withstand a heavy blow or resist a gravitational pull, but a mistaken judgment could still open the smallest gap in a defense.

Sigurd tested the effect again, this time creating a faint false glimmer near a fallen branch several paces away.

The glimmer was not a second body or a convincing illusion. It was merely a misplaced reflection, the sort of movement a nervous sentry might notice from the corner of an eye.

He imagined combining it with a silent approach, a change in footing, and a blade arriving from the direction nobody expected. The thought brought a slow smile to his face.

His old profession had relied on darkness, patience, and misdirection. He had spent years learning how to disappear from attention without possessing anything supernatural.

Now he could make a target look in the wrong direction with a flicker of light, or hide the beginning of a sword stroke behind a distorted outline.

None of it required enormous displays of power. Against someone close to his own level, the consequences could be monstrous.

Sigurd released the authority and let the forest return to its ordinary colors.

His experiments had consumed time and Vis, but the eleven stolen markers made the detour worthwhile. More importantly, he understood the first practical uses of Light.

He would still need to refine them against opponents who could think under pressure, and stronger enemies would not be fooled so easily. For now, however, he had acquired another way to control a fight before his sword ever touched its target.

He resumed walking toward the higher hunting grounds, his expression calm.

The next applicant who tried to rob him might never understand which movement had betrayed them, or why the blade was already waiting when they turned to defend.

He had no intention of explaining it.