Prove Your Strength

Prove your strength.

There was no simpler, clearer answer than that.

In place of the man who had just been grousing about his rank, Wolfgar stepped forward. His eyes blazed with a fierce light.

"I'd like a rank assessment!"

The road here had been brutal on him — the gap in our weight classes had put ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠him through hell — but Wolfgar had seen every last drill through to the end. Today was the day all that training would finally be put to the test.

"A newcomer, are you?"

"That's right!"

The ink on our hunter licenses hadn't even dried yet. The rank examiner had never seen our faces, and he accepted without a second thought.

"Follow me. That includes you in the back."

He'd clocked me as a newcomer in a single glance. This one was no slouch either.

"Ah, I— I..."

"Come along."

If Seranea stayed behind alone, she might draw the wrong kind of attention. I'd taken some precautions, but there was no telling what might happen. Considering the contract with Sernida, I couldn't leave her by herself. Seranea seemed to understand that well enough — she hurried after us without another word. When it came to looking out for her own skin, the girl was nothing if not desperate.

The man led us to a testing hall built right into the guild. Leave it to the finest guild branch in the Runheim Kingdom. I never would have guessed they had a facility this spacious. Back in Laoren, what they called a testing ground was nothing more than a bare little lot.

"Will Wolfgar be all right?" Seranea asked quietly from behind me.

Compared to me — a mage — Wolfgar apparently didn't inspire much confidence. Fair enough. His simple nature did leave something to be desired on that front. But skill? That much was certain. He'd been out of action for nearly two years, and he'd still kept pace with me through every session of training.

It wasn't as if he'd spent that entire stretch of time simply lying idle, anyway.

Wolfgar's movements had grown far sharper than they used to be. From what I'd gathered, he'd spent those years replaying every fight he'd ever been in, over and over. And through our training, he had finally digested all of it.

Now he was about to face an examiner who ranked active hunters for a living. I was more than a little curious to see what he would show.

"Where are you from?"

"Mount Wolfhal!"

Wolfgar answered the examiner's question without a shred of hesitation. The man didn't seem to recognize the name. He glanced my way.

"Laoren."

"Laoren. Quite a few have been coming from there lately."

As a rank examiner, he would have seen his share of hunters arriving in the capital for the first time. I had a fair idea who he meant. Golden Coral. The Three Ruffians. Golden Coral I could set aside, but I would need to ask about the Three Ruffians when I got the chance.

"Is the rank assessment left entirely to your discretion, Examiner?"

"It is. There's no corruption here, so don't bother trying to spend your way up."

"I have no reason to."

Everything would be proven by skill. The examiner seemed to take my meaning. The corner of his mouth lifted, just briefly. The scars mapped across his face made him look plenty fierce, but there was something solid and forthright about him.

"Good."

He leveled one hand at Wolfgar. A gauntlet encased the fist. So he was a pugilist as well.

"Use whatever weapons you like."

Wolfgar drew his long spear and short spear in the same motion. Fighting spirit burned hot in his eyes. Fortune was on his side today. The only opponent he had faced all this time was me.

"Examiner! What rank do I get if I beat you?!"

"I'm a Silver-rank hunter."

The capital's hunter ranking system ran ten tiers deep.

The examiner standing before us was Silver — right in the middle of the scale.

"Beat me and you'll be Silver. After that, someone qualified to administer the Gold-rank exam will take over."

"Then Firmament's just around the corner!"

"I like the spirit. Try to keep it till the end."

With that, the examiner slammed a foot into the floor and launched himself forward. The moment he seized the initiative, Wolfgar settled into his stance.

A clean, textbook punch — a straight thrust meant to take the measure of his opponent. But Wolfgar had already eaten every kind of fist there was. He crossed the long spear and the short, carving out a razor-thin opening, and caught the incoming punch instead. Then he drove the shaft of the short spear upward, angling to snap the wrist.

The examiner was no ordinary man, though. His muscles swelled in an instant and crushed down on the spear shaft. Wolfgar couldn't win the contest of raw power. He released the spear and gave ground.

"You've fought a lot of pugilists."

"Fought a whole lot of 'em!"

Was he covering for me, keeping quiet about the fact that his sparring partner was a fist-fighter? The examiner's face said he'd already figured it out.

More to the point, Wolfgar was losing on pure strength. That meant he had to take this into a fight of technique and speed. And yet the fighting spirit in his eyes only burned wilder.

"Examiner, your strength's lacking."

He drew both spears in tight and grinned, utterly sure of himself.

"That ain't enough to take me down!"

I had a pretty good idea who he was measuring the examiner against. He was right, too. Wolfgar had already tasted a gulf in power that made this look like nothing.

He exploded off the floor and charged. The examiner answered at once, driving another punch into the oncoming rush.

What the examiner couldn't have known was Wolfgar's innate combat sense — and the flexibility that made it possible. Without breaking the thrust of his spear, Wolfgar kicked off the ground and spun in place. The rotation coiled into the weapon, slipping the blade past the fist by a hair and laying the spearhead flush against the face of the gauntlet.

A shriek of metal on metal. Sparks leapt from the gauntlet and flooded the examiner's vision. In that sliver of blindness, Wolfgar's short spear moved.

The examiner yanked his other arm in toward his body, meaning to catch the short spear on the gauntlet. But Wolfgar hadn't been aiming at the examiner at all. His target was his own long spear.

A sharp, ringing crack. The long spear, struck from below, surged upward. The force transferred through the tip of the gauntlet and flung the examiner's arm skyward.

Split-second judgment married to raw combat instinct. The examiner's eyes flew wide at a result he had never seen coming.

A gaping opening. There would never be a better chance. But Wolfgar had just committed both spears — and the examiner would be faster wrapping his free arm around himself than Wolfgar would be recovering his weapons.

Wolfgar was already a step ahead. He let go of the short spear without a flicker of hesitation and drove his elbow into the examiner's exposed ribs.

A wet, grinding crunch rolled out of the ribcage. The examiner's body folded. His build kept him from being driven back, but the hit was clean and deep.

The long spear and the short spear were not his only weapons. Had he learned that in our training? Wolfgar's movement had grown far more varied than it used to be. An ever-shifting style of combat suited him down to the ground — and he did not let the opening go.

A wolf is a creature that latches onto its prey and never lets go. Wolfgar, who carried that nature in his bones, pressed the examiner with a relentless, grinding fury.

"Wolfgar is incredible!"

Seranea hadn't expected him to be capable of this. Neither, if I was honest, had I. I was just as impressed.

But as I'd said — the man across from him was no easy mark. Wolfgar had landed the first blow beautifully. The moment that hit landed, though, the examiner's entire approach to the fight changed.

Wolfgar's instincts were sharp. His offense was excellent. What he lacked was the raw destructive power to punch straight through an opponent. The examiner was the type who built an iron wall out of gifted size and a body like carved oak. His opponents, convinced they were the ones attacking, would pour everything they had into the assault — and only later realize the whole thing had been a trap. Their stamina would be gutted. His would be untouched.

He was a fighter built more for defense than offense, which made him well suited to the role of examiner. He could take a man's full attack and evaluate it properly. And so, once again, he steered the fight onto his own ground. He settled in to absorb the storm and endure.

Wolfgar's insufficient penetrating power against the examiner's unbreakable wall. Looking at those two things alone, the outcome was obvious.

There was just one variable the examiner hadn't accounted for.

Yes, Wolfgar lacked the power to break through. And there was only one way to make up for that kind of deficit: keep attacking, without rest, until the very end.

Wolfgar had always been built differently when it came to stamina. On the road to Grandheim he had trained with me without a single pause. The only time we stopped was when our bodies hit their limit and we collapsed. That process had been, for Wolfgar, the experience of pushing past every line he thought he had — and his body now held a well of stamina that belonged to an entirely different species from everyone else's.

Sweat began to bead on the examiner's brow. By now, any ordinary opponent would have been spent and falling apart. Watching the sheer volume of Wolfgar's assault, you would have bet on it. But the assault had no end. From what hidden reserve that body kept wringing out this much stamina, I couldn't begin to guess. He thrust, and thrust, and thrust again, without a single breath of rest.

Even a master of defense burns stamina to keep a defense standing. And spent stamina leads to mistakes. The exhaustion that should have dropped Wolfgar first began, instead, to show in the examiner. The errors started to come. The injuries accumulated, one after another.

Wolfgar carried a wolf's nature in his blood. Locking on and never letting go was his gift. The instant a gap appeared, he drove into it without a second's pause.

The strongest shield began, slowly, to split beneath the strongest spear.

A rain of blows that would not stop. A baptism of spear-points unlike anything the examiner had ever weathered.

A heavy, final thud. The examiner's body gave out first. As he dropped to his knees, Wolfgar's spear came screaming in. The examiner tried to rise, putting everything he had into his legs, but they would not hold.

And then, a hair's breadth from the examiner's face, the spear stopped dead.

Wolfgar let out a light breath. A bold, easy smile sat on his mouth. That smile said he still had stamina enough to spare — enough to halt a killing thrust on command.

The examiner looked at him and raised both hands, a wry twist to his mouth.

"I lose. Wolfgar — you're a fine warrior."

"Haha! I'm the proud warrior of Wolfhal!"

"That you are. And now you're a Silver-rank hunter as well."

Wolfgar had earned his Silver rank, and earned ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it well. Now it was my turn.

"Can you continue?"

"No. I'm done. And besides—"

The examiner flicked a glance at Wolfgar, who was still riding the high.

"I caught glimpses of someone else's fist work in Wolfgar, more than once. Fist work he himself couldn't overcome. That someone would be you."

So he'd seen it.

"I'm not at a level where I can test you."

"Does that mean — does that mean I get to fight Gold-rank now?!"

Wolfgar shouted it like a man already lining up for the next round. The examiner shook his head.

"No. Wolfgar, you're Silver. The ones at Gold are clearly stronger than you are right now."

"What."

The brightness drained out of him all at once. He looked like a puppy that hadn't been praised.

"So what about me, then?"

Wolfgar aside, I still needed my own rank assessed.

"You—"

"I'll take him."

A voice rang out across the hall. The examiner flinched the instant he heard it and snapped to attention. I turned toward the sound. I hadn't felt a presence there at all.

A young man was standing in the space that should have been empty. Short black hair. An eyepatch over one eye, the other a vivid green. His frame was slim, but the power running through it belonged to an entirely different order of being.

My eyes widened by degrees.

One of Grandheim's flagship hunter teams. Shadow Moon. And this was Ran, its vice leader — a name even I had heard.

A genuine celebrity had just walked into the room.